Regarding the post about the fabrication of MEMRI. Here, Gen. Michel `Awn talks about tas`id (escalation) by the opposition in Lebanon but insists that it will remain in the "peaceful framework." That will not be translated by MEMRI. You see why academics, journalists, and diplomats have to learn languages; if you don't, you will be like Thomas Friedman (at least Friedman took a few courses in Arabic but did not do well, I am told) and Judith Miller who rely obsessively on MEMRI's reports. Zalmay Khalildzad, by the way, studied Arabic while at the University of Chicago; his adviser (Prof. Leonard Binder, now at UCLA) told me that he did take Arabic seriously, and was a regular on the Arabic table. He wrote his PhD dissertation on the Pakistani nuclear option. I today watched an ad for foreign language CDs: and the narrator said that the "technology" of the CD has been long in use by US diplomats. Now, I know why the Russian, Chines, and British ambassadors in Lebanon speak fluent Arabic (the Chinese ambassador has a PhD in Arabic literature and she never uses a translator), while the US ambassador has been practicing the word fa-la-fil for the last two years. Keep trying.