I heart Lebanon

This breaks my heart. Akh.

2006-08-08T12:50:00.000-07:00

http://beirutlive.blogspot.com/

2006-08-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

http://mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/

2006-08-08T12:42:00.000-07:00

http://laureghorayeb.blogspot.com/

2006-08-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

http://thelebanonchronicle.blogspot.com/

2006-08-08T12:38:00.000-07:00

Links

2006-07-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

http://blissstreetjournal.blogspot.com/

http://beirutspring.blogspot.com

http://www.back-to-iraq.com/

http://beirutnotes.blogspot.com/

www.relieflebanon.org

2006-07-21T20:55:00.000-07:00

Associated Press
Israel to Let Food, Medicine Into Lebanon
By EDITH M. LEDERER , 07.21.2006, 02:41 PM

Aid supplies will be allowed into Lebanon amid the fighting, an Israeli envoy said Friday, a day after the United Nations warned of a growing humanitarian crisis in the war-ravaged country.

Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman said he expected a humanitarian corridor for food, medicine and other supplies to be opened later Friday or Saturday.

As part of its 10-day bombardment of Lebanon, Israel has imposed an air and sea blockade that has cut off transport links, and the government has come under international pressure to get food, medicine and humanitarian aid to the Lebanese people.

Gillerman first told reporters that Israel had agreed to open a humanitarian corridor and then announced it to the U.N. Security Council.

"In spite of the very difficult situation on the ground," Gillerman said in his speech, "Israel is acutely aware of the humanitarian situation and I wish to inform the council that I have just received official confirmation from Israel that further to the corridor allowing evacuation from Lebanon, a two-way, in-and-out humanitarian corridor to meet the needs of those affected on the Lebanese side has been established."

Lebanon's special envoy Nouhad Mahmoud, who listened to Gillerman's speech, accused Israel of destroying his country and demanded that Israel pay to rebuild it.

"We just heard the distinguished representative of Israel informing us that they have accepted a safe corridor for the humanitarian assistance to the victims of the aggression carried out by his country - as if we supposed to salute and pay tribute to the compassionate feelings they have," Mahmoud told the council.

"But the whole world has witnessed how the Israeli military machine has turned Lebanon into ruins," he said.

U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland, dispatched to Lebanon by Secretary-General Kofi Annan later Friday, said more than 500,000 Lebanese are believed to be affected by the conflict.

"In Lebanon, there is widespread destruction of public infrastructure including residential housing, health facilities, schools, roads, bridges, fuel storage, airports and seaports," he said.

"It is estimated that Beirut only has days of fuel supplies remaining. Access problems are severely hampering humanitarian action. It is either too unsafe or physically impossible due to destruction to move relief supplies into or around large parts of the country," Egeland told the council.

Annan appealed for humanitarian help Thursday and for supplies to be allowed in to help millions of Lebanese stranded by the conflict.

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said his country was sending urgent aid by air and sea.

The first international Red Cross relief convoy to reach the besieged southern Lebanese city of Tyre arrived Friday after a six-hour journey over damaged roads from Beirut, a spokesman said.

The convoy's arrival indicated a new Israeli willingness to allow the international community to respond to the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Lebanon, said Vincent Lusser, spokesman of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"It's the first response we've had to our request for better humanitarian access," he said.

Two trucks brought 24 tons of food, medical supplies and other aid to the port city in the relief effort coordinated with Israeli authorities, Lusser said.

UNICEF said a third of people killed and an estimated half of those displaced were children. It will be delivering water kits, purification tablets, water containers and essential drugs this weekend.

The World Health Organization said it was concerned about the lack of electricity in hospitals, safe passage of ambulances and access to people in southern Lebanon.

The initial convoy has enough supplies to care for 4,000 people, said Lusser, adding that the agency hopes to provide more.

Ron Redmond, chief spokesman of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said an emergency team was assembling in Damascus, Syria, preparing to head to Beirut to reinforce the agency's staff and check on the needs of "tens of thousands of displaced people who have fled to mountain valleys outside Beirut for safety."

"The needs of these people, particularly those living in communal buildings such as schools, will become critical if they don't get assistance," he added.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which cares for Palestinians in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, said its main concern was the food supply for nearly 3,000 displaced people in 40 shelters set up in clinics and schools.

"The economic situation is worsening day by day," said UNWRA spokesman Matthias Burchard. "Provisions are running out."

He said the price of vegetables had gone up 400 percent in east Beirut.

UNICEF was to fly tons of health kits, sanitation supplies and toys from Copenhagen, Denmark, this weekend to Damascus for shipment to Lebanon.

Associated Press reporters Alexander G. Higgins and Sam Cage in Geneva contributed to this report.

Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

This can't be real.

2006-07-20T18:03:00.000-07:00

Robert Fisk Article

2006-07-20T14:37:00.000-07:00

What I am watching in Lebanon each day is an outrage
By Robert Fisk in Mdeirej, Central Lebanon
Published: 15 July 2006

The beautiful viaduct that soars over the mountainside here has become
a " terrorist" target. The Israelis attacked the international highway
from Beirut to Damascus just after dawn yesterday and dropped a bomb
clean through the central span of the Italian-built bridge - a symbol
of Lebanon's co-operation with the European Union - sending concrete
crashing hundreds of feet down into the valley beneath. It was the
pride of the murdered ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri, the face of a
new, emergent Lebanon. And now it is a " terrorist" target.

So I drove gingerly along the old mountain road towards the Bekaa
yesterday - the Israeli jets were hissing through the sky above me -
turned the corner once I rejoined the highway, and found a 50ft crater
with an old woman climbing wearily down the side on her hands and
knees, trying to reach her home in the valley that glimmered to the
east. This too had become a " terrorist" target.

It is now the same all over Lebanon. In the southern suburbs - where
the Hizbollah, captors of the two missing Israeli soldiers, have their
headquarters - a massive bomb had blasted off the sides of apartment
blocks next to a church, splintering windows and crashing balconies
down on to parked cars. This too had become a "terrorist" target.

One man was brought out shrieking with pain, covered in blood. Another
" terrorist" target. All the way to the airport were broken bridges,
holed roads. All these were "terrorist" targets. At the airport,
tongues of fire blossomed into the sky from aircraft fuel storage
tanks, darkening west Beirut. These too were now "terrorist" targets.
At Jiyeh, the Israelis attacked the power station. This too was a "
terrorist" target.

Yet when I drove to the actual headquarters of the Hizbollah, a tall
building in Haret Hreik, it was totally undamaged. Only last night did
the Israelis manage to hit it.

So can the Lebanese be forgiven - can anyone here be forgiven - for
believing that the Israelis have a greater interest in destroying
Lebanon than they do in their two soldiers?

No wonder Middle East Airlines, the national Lebanese airline, put
crews into its four stranded Airbuses at Beirut airport early
yesterday and sneaked them out of the country for Amman before the
Israelis realised they were under power and leaving.

European politicians have talked about Israel's "disproportionate"
response to Wednesday's capture of its soldiers. They are wrong. What
I am now watching in Lebanon each day is an outrage. How can there be
any excuse - any - for the 73 dead Lebanese civilians blown apart
these past three days?

The same applies, of course, to the four Israeli civilians killed by
Hizbollah rockets. But - please note - the exchange rate of Israeli
civilian lives to Lebanese civilian lives now stands at one to more
than 15. This does not include two children atomised in their home in
Dweir on Thursday whose bodies cannot be found. Their six brothers and
sisters were buried yesterday, with their mother and father. Another
"terrorist" target. So was a neighbouring family with five children
who were also buried yesterday. Another "terrorist" target.

Terrorist, terrorist, terrorist. There is something perverse about all
this, the slaughter and the massive destruction and the
self-righteous, constant, cancerous use of the word "terrorist". No,
let us not forget that the Hizbollah broke international law, crossed
the Israeli border, killed three Israeli soldiers, captured two others
and dragged them back through the border fence. It was an act of
calculated ruthlessness that should never allow Hizbollah's leader,
Hassan Nasrallah, to grin so broadly at his press conference. It has
brought unparalleled tragedy to countless innocents in Lebanon. And of
course, it has led Hizbollah to fire at least 170 Katyusha rockets
into Israel.

But what would happen if the powerless Lebanese government had
unleashed air attacks across Israel the last time Israel's troops
crossed into Lebanon? What if the Lebanese air force then killed 73
Israeli civilians in bombing raids in Ashkelon, Tel Aviv and Israeli
West Jerusalem? What if a Lebanese fighter aircraft bombed Ben Gurion
airport? What if a Lebanese plane destroyed 26 road bridges across
Israel? Would it not be called " terrorism"? I rather think it would.
But if Israel was the victim, it would probably also be World War Three.

Of course, Lebanon cannot attack Tel Aviv. Its air force comprises
three ancient Hawker Hunters and an equally ancient fleet of
Vietnam-era Huey helicopters. Syria, however, has missiles that can
reach Tel Aviv. So Syria - which Israel rightly believes to be behind
Wednesday's Hizbollah attack - is not going to be bombed. It is
Lebanon which must be punished.

The Israeli leadership intends to "break" the Hizbollah and destroy
its "terrorist cancer". Really? Do the Israelis really believe they
can "break" one of the toughest guerrilla armies in the world? And how?

There are real issues here. Under UN Security Council Resolution 1559
- the same resolution that got the Syrian army out of Lebanon - the
Shia Muslim Hizbollah should have been disarmed. They were not
because, if the Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, had tried to
do so, the Lebanese army would have had to fight them and the army
would almost certainly have broken apart because most Lebanese
soldiers are Shia Muslims. We could see the restarting of the civil
war in Lebanon - a fact which Nasrallah is cynically aware of - but
attempts by Siniora and his cabinet colleagues to find a new role for
Hizbollah, which has a minister in the government (he is Minister of
Labour) foundered. And the greatest danger now is that the Lebanese
government will collapse and be replaced by a pro-Syrian government
which could reinvite the Syrians back into the country.

So there's a real conundrum to be solved. But it's not going to
succeed with the mass bombing of the country by Israel. Nor the
obsession with terrorists, terrorists, terrorists.

Good news sources.

2006-07-20T14:27:00.000-07:00

http://www.haaretz.com/

http://web.naharnet.com/

Petition

2006-07-20T14:24:00.000-07:00

http://epetition.net/julywar/index.php

Here is all the info I've received about where to donate.

2006-07-20T14:13:00.000-07:00

There are currently 26 schools in Beirut with refugees. These schools are in need of food, water, milk, diapers, etc. Supplies are available in stores in Beirut however they need the funds to purchase them. An Emergency Center for Relief Efforts is handling these needs.
---------------------------------

Dear Compatriots and Friends of Lebanon,

Neither Barbarity nor the indifference of the world toward our
situation will get us down.We must turn our rage and our anger
into positive actions in order to ease the suffering of the
Lebanese people. Thank you to inform us of any action, whatever
its importance, in order to enable www.lebanese-abroard.com to
spread the information on our web site shortly.

You could already send your donations to the following bank
accounts and transmit this message to all your friends around
the world.

Samir Kassir Foundationi - LIBAN:
---------------------------------
Byblos Bank - Tabaris Branch -Swift: BYBALBBX
Compte USD: 380.3652902.001
Compte LB: 380.3652902.002

Society Saint Vincent de Paul - LIBAN:
--------------------------------------
Banque Audi - Beirut - SWIFT BABELBBE
Compte USD: 088587/461/002/009/39
Compte LB: 088587/461/001/009/25

Ministère des Finances - LIBAN :
--------------------------------
Compte de solidarité aux sinistrés Libanais
Banque du Liban
Compte USD: 02 700 362 123
Compte LB: 01 700 362 123

Ambassade du Liban - France :
-----------------------------
Solidarité LIBAN - 42 rue Copernic 75116 PARIS
Banque AUDI SARADAR France - Swift : AUDIFRPP
Compte Euros : 00208240004 Cle RIB 22

Bank of New York
-----------------------------
Account Name: Bank of Kuwait and the Arab World
Account No. 6189003
Beneficiary: Green Line
Swift: BKAWLBBE

Lebanese Red Cross
-----------------------------
Audi Bank
Bab Idriss
Account No.: 841500
Swift: AUDBLBBX
In Lebanon (05) 924017 / 8 / 20 or redcross@dm.net.lb

The Hariri Foundation-USA
-----------------------------
It has established an emergency relief fund to aid the victims. Donations to the Lebanon Relief Fund will be used for emergency medical services, food, water, shelter, clothing, and refugee relocation. Questions regarding the Lebanon Relief Fund may be directed to the Hariri Foundation by phone at 301-656-1666 or e-mail at Haririmail@aol.com or at mailbox@haririfoundationusa.org. Donations may be made as follows:

By checks:
Payable to the “Hariri Foundation - Lebanon Relief Fund”
Mailed to:
Hariri Foundation-USA
7501 Wisconsin Ave., Suite 715
Bethesda, MD 20814-3602

By wire transfers:
Beneficiary: Hariri Foundation Lebanon Relief Fund
Bank Name: Citibank
8001 Wisconsin Avenue
Bethesda, MD 20814
Account No.: 240 70249
ABA No: 254070116

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)
-----------------------------
It is accepting donations by checks (preferred) or wire transfer. The contact person is Elisabeth Ritola (212-338-0161, ext. 105 or Elisabeth.ritola@ifrc.org). Please make sure your checks or wire transfers are properly labeled as donations to Lebanon.

By checks:
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies at the United Nations, Inc. (IFRC-NY)
800 Second Avenue, Suite 355
New York, NY 10017

By wire transfers:
Chase Bank
Account name: IFRC
Account No.: 292502528765
IBP No.: 021000021

The Lebanese community in the Greater Boston area is in the process of creating a web page (www.relieflebanon.com) with information about different organizations that need assistance.

We will recover, we will rebuild despite all opposition.

Paradise Lost: Robert Fisk's elegy for Beirut-Published: 19 July 2006

2006-07-20T13:40:00.000-07:00

Elegant buildings lie in ruins. The heady scent of gardenias gives way to the acrid stench of bombed-out oil installations. And everywhere terrified people are scrambling to get out of a city that seems tragically doomed to chaos and destruction. As Beirut - 'the Paris of the East' - is defiled yet again, Robert Fisk, a resident for 30 years, asks: how much more punishment can it take?

In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus - headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman fleet - was struck by a massive earthquake. In its aftermath, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors - ancestors of the present-day Lebanese - walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed in front of them.

That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople as compensation to every family left alive.

Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city. In the First World War, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine; the Turkish army had commandeered all the grain and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of stick-like children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.

An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she "passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found. Everywhere women could be seen seeking eatable weeds among the grass along the roads..."

How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I've watched this place die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked like Irish lace, its people massacring each other.

I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.

They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside - tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are the same.

And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah.

I walked through the deserted city centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the city - once a Dresden of ruins - was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on 14 February last year.

The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination - an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus.

At the empty Etoile restaurant - best snails and cappuccino in Beirut, where Hariri once dined Jacques Chirac - I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the façade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon's democracy. So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French mandate and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock Arabian doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few metres away.

Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. "Ah Robert, come over here," he roared and then turned to Chirac like a cat that was about to eat a canary. "I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn't rebuild Beirut!"

And now it is being un-built. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its glistening halls and shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri's wonderful transnational highway viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this small jewel of a restaurant in the centre of Beirut has been spared. So far.

It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been levelled and "rubble-ised" and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hizbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" which the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man; and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics; and many of Hizbollah's top military planners - including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.

But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pin-point accuracy - a doubtful notion in any case, but that's not the issue - what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?

In a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well known and prominent Hizbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes. "We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or..." And he counts these awful statistics off on the fingers of his left hand. "Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis - much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions."

I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillaea and white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, their colour and scent, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.

As for the huddled masses from the powder of the bombed-out southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated to the city of Beirut by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. How empires fall.

Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards the US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.

And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake in the morning. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.

The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:

My people died of hunger, and he who

Did not perish from starvation was

Butchered with the sword;

They perished from hunger

In a land rich with milk and honey.

They died because the vipers and

Sons of vipers spat out poison into

The space where the Holy Cedars and

The roses and the jasmine breathe

Their fragrance.

And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an aircraft - perhaps the wing-tip of an F-16 hit by a missile, although the Israelis deny this - came streaking out of the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the army's logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar Chim, who have been mending power and water lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.

I knew one of them. "Hello Robert, be quick because I think the Israelis will bomb again but we'll show you everything we can." And they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the wreckage, standing around me to protect me.

And a few hours later, the Israelis did come back, as the men of the small logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked after me amid the fires of Kfar Chim.

And why? Be sure - the Israelis know what they are hitting. That's why they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend electricity lines? And then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those poor men had to be liquidated.

Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pyjamas, her eyes - beneath long, soft hair - closed, turned away from the camera. She had been another "terrorist" target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.

I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. "Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut", says one headline. "Israelis Retaliate". "Lebanon At War". "Beirut Under Siege". "Massacre at Sabra and Chatila".

Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1,700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel's proxy Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops - as they later testified to Israel's own court of inquiry - watched the killings. I was there. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.

Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver Abed last week, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive here for 30 years.

I am back on the sea coast when my mobile phone rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine novel about the Palestinians. "Robert, please take care," she says. "I am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis." I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.

Then, on my balcony - a glance to check the location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the sea-smog - I find older clippings. This is from an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was a great Ottoman city. "Beyrouth" was the dateline. "Anarchy is now the order of the day, our properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to find protection in more peaceable countries."

On my dining-room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Christian Maronites from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for their evacuation. And outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 20 miles out to sea.

Fairouz, the most popular of Lebanese singers, was to have performed at this year's Baalbek festival, cancelled now like all Lebanon's festivals of music, dance, theatre and painting. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:

To Beirut - peace to Beirut with all my heart

And kisses - to the sea and clouds,

To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor's face.

From the soul of her people she makes wine,

From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.

So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?

A conversation about the war.

2006-07-20T13:25:00.000-07:00

To all our friends,

Whether you are in Lebanon or just have some kind of attachment to Lebanon, we've created a blog to share thoughts, articles, images or anything else you want the world to know. We are not sure yet if you can post video but if you can't then you can go to youtube.com and upload it and then post a link on the blog.