What people don't know about Amin Malouf is that 1) he was a far left activist in college at the St. Joseph University in Beirut in late 1960s; 2) that he has excellent command of Arabic and started his career in Arabic journalism with the lousy An-Nahar (but it was not as bad and sinister and sectarian and right-wing as it is now); 3) his father was a well-known writer of Arabic.