A source on politics, war, the Middle East, Arabic poetry, and art.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
I watched LBC-TV on Sunday. It is the Lebanese Forces militia, as you know. In fact, Samir Ja`ja` told an interviewer yesterday than he now coordinates with the newsroom of LBC-TV on daily basis. And it shows. The station is as racistly anti-Syrian, anti-Palestinians as it has been, and more, living up to the long record of the right-wing death squads of Lebanon. Now that the King of Warlords of Lebanon, Samir Ja`ja`, not to be confused with the King of Potatoes on Hamra Street, is back in Lebanon, and given his established perfected record of sending car bombs all around Lebanon, we may have clues to the "new Lebanon". A Lebanon that is leaving Bush and Rice giddy on a daily basis. So I saw the Syrian ambassador going against the Hariri tool, Ahmad Fatfat (Minister of Youth and Ping Pong in the new Lebanese cabinet). Now Fatfat, as you know, competes for the title of The Most Buffoonish Hariri tool with Walid `Idu and Muhammad Qabbani. The Syrian ambassador (a British trained scientist) was much more forceful and logical; he is an ambassador that his lousy government does not deserve. But I was disappointed with him when he praised Martin Indyk, who also was invited to say nothing and to add nothing to the program. Martin Indyk, for potatoes sake. Did you really have to praise him as a "friend"? Friend of whom? Of Zionist militancy, no more. And did you really have to say that he worked for "peace." Peace"? Or did you mean that he worked for the addition of "pieces" of land to Israel? How far will the Syrian government go to appease the US? Will the Syrian government now praise Bush as a founder of the Movement of Arab Nationalists? But LBC-TV was stunned. They invited a Lebanese (Christian in LBC's strictly sectarian standards) American professor at Georgetown University Law Center, Dawud Khayralllah. Khayrallah, a fine progressive and secularist, so disappointed LBC-TV, and they did not know what to do with him. He undermined the credibility of the Mehlis Report, and that bothered LBC-TV. They must still be in tears. As for fatfat: he continued to have a silly smile on his face throughout the program. Today, in As-Safir, columnist Husam `Itani revealed that previous public spectacles of the Ahbash Movement in Lebanon, which is now being suspected of Hariri's assassination, were attended by Hariri tools. This is the true Lebanon.