Genetic Superiority of the Lebanese People Update. This is almost a daily feature in An-Nahar newspaper (the right-wing, sectarian Christian, anti-Syrian (people), anti-Palestinian (people) publication). There is a daily news item about some Lebanese genius somewhere: often times it is about a Lebanese who "invented" either a cure for AIDS or cancer, or both. Here, it is about Samir Khalaf (I wrote about him before--he has recently been writing "sociological" tributes to Rafiq Hariri and to Fu'ad Sanyurah--that is when he is not being nostalgic to the sectarian and class inequality of pre-war Beirut. An-Nahar carries this headline: "One of the Most Notable Contemporary Sociologists: Honoring Samir Khalaf at Harvard University." Clearly, it was a news item supplied by Khalaf to his friend, Ghassan Tuwayni, publisher of the newspaper. So you read the item and you realize it was basically the text of the remarks that introduced Khalaf to a talk he gave at Harvard.