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Posted by finkployd in
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Monday, April 4. 2005
The US forces, like the Crusaders before them, are prisoners in their own fortresses: Sitting in Saddam Hussein's palace they can stare over the parapets but that is as much as most will ever see of Iraq
By Robert Fisk 02 April 2005
I drove Pat and Alice Carey up the coast of Lebanon this week to look at some castles. Pat is a builder from County Wicklow, brave enough to take a holiday with his wife in Beirut when all others are thinking of running away. But I wanted to know what he thought of 12th-century construction work.
How did he rate a Crusader keep? The most beautiful of Lebanon's castles is the smallest, a dinky-toy palisade on an outcrop of rock near the village of Batroun. You have to climb a set of well-polished steps - no hand-rails, for this is Lebanon - up the sheer side of Mseilha castle and then clamber over doorsills into the dark, damp interior.
So we padded around the battlements for half an hour. "Strongly made or they wouldn't be still here," Pat remarked. "But you wouldn't find any company ready to put up the insurance. And in winter, it must have been very, very cold."
And after some minutes, he looked at me with some intensity. "It's like being in a prison," he said.
And he was right. The only view of the outside world was through the archers' loopholes in the walls. Inside was darkness. The bright world outside was cut off by the castle defences. I could just see the splashing river to the south of the castle and, on the distant horizon, a mountainside. That was all the defenders - Crusaders or Mamlukes - would have seen. It was the only contact they had with the land they were occupying.
Up at Tripoli is Lebanon's biggest keep, the massive Castle of St Gilles that still towers ominously over the port city with its delicate minarets and mass of concrete hovels. Two shell holes - remnants of Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war - have been smashed into the walls, but the interior of the castle is a world of its own; a world, that is, of stables and eating halls and dungeons. It was empty - the tourists have almost all fled Lebanon - and we felt the oppressive isolation of this terrible place.
Pat knew his Crusader castles. "When you besieged them, the only way to get inside was by pushing timber under the foundations and setting fire to the wood. When they turned to ash, the walls came tumbling down. The defenders didn't throw boiling oil from the ramparts. They threw sand on to the attackers. The sand would get inside their armour and start to burn them until they were in too much pain to fight. But it's the same thing here in Tripoli as in the little castle. You can hardly see the city through the arrow slits. It's another - bigger - prison."
And so I sat on the cold stone floor and stared through a loophole and, sure enough, I could see only a single minaret and a few square metres of roadway. I was in darkness. Just as the Crusaders who built this fortress must have been in darkness.
Indeed, Raymond de Saint-Gilles spent years besieging the city, looking down in anger from his great fortress, built on the "Pilgrim's Mountain", at the stout burghers of Tripoli who were constantly re-supplied by boat from Egypt. Raymond himself died in the castle, facing the city he dreamed of capturing but could not live to enter.
And of course, far to the east, in the ancient land of Mesopotamia, there stand today equally stout if less aesthetic barricades around another great occupying army. The castles of the Americans are made of pre-stressed concrete and steel but they serve the same purpose and doom those who built them to live in prisons.
From the "Green Zone" in the centre of Baghdad, the US authorities and their Iraqi satellites can see little of the city and country they claim to govern. Sleeping around the gloomy republican palace of Saddam Hussein, they can stare over the parapets or peek through the machine-gun embrasures on the perimeter wall - but that is as much as most will ever see of Iraq.
The Tigris river is almost as invisible as that stream sloshing past the castle of Mseilha. The British embassy inside the "Green Zone" flies its diplomats into Baghdad airport, airlifts them by helicopter into the fortress - and there they sit until recalled to London.
Indeed, the Crusaders in Lebanon - men with thunderous names like Tancred and Bohemond and Baldwin - used a system of control remarkably similar to the US Marines and the 82nd Airborne. They positioned their castles at a day's ride - or a day's sailing down the coast in the case of Lebanon - from each other, venturing forth only to travel between their keeps.
And then out of the east, from Syria and also from the Caliphate of Baghdad and from Persia came the "hashashin", the "Assassins" - the Crusaders brought the word back to Europe - who turned the Shia faith into an extremist doctrine, regarding assassination of their enemies as a religious duty.
Anyone who doubts the relevance of these "foreign fighters" to present-day Iraq should read the history of ancient Tripoli by that redoubtable Lebanese-Armenian historian Nina Jidejian, which covers the period of the Assassins and was published at the height of the Lebanese civil war.
"It was believed that the terrorists partook of hashish to induce ecstatic visions of paradise before setting out to perform their sacred duty and to face martyrdom..." she writes. "The arrival of the Crusaders had added to ... latent discontent and created a favourable terrain for their activities." Ouch.
One of the Assassins' first victims was the Count of Montferrat, leader of the Third Crusade who had besieged Acre in 1191 - "Saint Jean d'Acre" to the Christians - and who met his death at the hands of men sent by the Persian "terrorist" leader, Hassan-i Sabbah. The Assassins treated Saladin's Muslim army with equal scorn - they made two attempts to murder him - and within 100 years had set up their own castles around Tripoli. They established a "mother fortress" from which - and here I quote a 13th-century Arab geographer - "the Assassins chosen are sent out thence to all countries and lands to slay kings and great men".
And so it is not so hard, in the dank hallways of the Castle of St Gilles to see the folly of America's occupation of Iraq. Cut off from the people they rule, squeezed into their fortresses, under constant attack from "foreign fighters", the Crusaders' dreams were destroyed.
Sitting behind that loophole in the castle at Tripoli, I could even see new meaning in Osama bin Laden's constant reference to the Americans as "the Crusader armies". The Crusades, too, were founded on a neo-conservative theology. The knights were going to protect the Christians of the Holy Land; they were going to "liberate" Jerusalem - "Mission Accomplished" - and ended up taking the spoils of the Levant, creating petty kingdoms which they claimed to control, living fearfully behind their stone defences. Their Arab opponents of the time did indeed possess a weapon of mass destruction for the Crusaders. It was called Islam.
"You can see why the Crusaders couldn't last here," Pat said as we walked out of the huge gateway of the Castle of Saint Gilles. "I wonder if they even knew who they were fighting."
I just resisted asking him if he'd come along on my next trip to Baghdad, so I could hear part two of the builder's wisdom. - Robert Fisk
Posted by finkployd in
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Friday, April 1. 2005
"Btifrok 3ala Sania" (A Second Changes Everything)
"MashHad min al-Masrah" (A Scene from the Stage)
Director: Sharif Abdel-Nour
Actors: Johnny al-Haje, Yasmina Hatem, Raouf Farhat Khalifeh, Achraf Mtaweh and Cynthia Salameh.
nightly @ Monot Theater till April 10
for Info: +961 1 202422
synopsis:
"Btifrok" is a 50-minute-long side-splitting comedy that takes place in a cafe in Beirut and revolves around an intellectual, snobbish female and a young street-smart gentleman who tries to seduce her ... a procedure that is frequently interrupted by the lovable and annoying waiter. -dailystar
"Machhad" is a mime largely based on audience participation.
The play has one performer - Abdel-Nour himself - who builds the stage from scratch by removing objects from his coat and silently uses body language to introduce the play topic. He then selects volunteers from the audience to act out the different parts. Five audience members, completely untrained, get on-stage for the first time and act the whole play, in mime of course. -dailystar
reviews:
"They are bringing back hope to this country," one critic said, "at a time when everyone thought Lebanese theater was dead or forgotten." -dailystar
"There is something very fascinating about this show," says veteran Lebanese actor Joseph Bou Nassar on his way out of Monnot Theater on Tuesday. "When I first arrived [in the theater], I was tormented by the country's critical situation and now I can't seem to remember the very first thing about it. My heart is light and I can't stop smiling," he said. -dailystar
Posted by finkployd in
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Friday, April 1. 2005
by Nada Bakri
Thursday, March 31, 2005
BEIRUT: Arab and Mediterranean environmentalists met Wednesday to issue the "Environmental Citizenship Declaration," a regional environmental education program directed toward public management and protection of the environment.
The environmentalists met during a conference entitled "the Arabic Mediterranean Conference for the Environmental Citizenship" organized by Amwaj (or Waves), a non-governmental environmental organization, in collaboration with the Arab NGO Network for the Environment and Development (RAED) and the Lebanese Environment Format (LEF).
The conference was sponsored by the Arab League and funded by the German Frederich Ebbert Stiftung Institute.
"The objective of this conference is to issue an environmental citizenship declaration to help the Arabic and Mediterranean public to manage and protect their environment," said Malek Ghandour, secretary general of Amwaj.
"The idea behind environmental citizenship is to encourage the sense that each of us is an integral part of a larger ecosystem and that our future depends on embracing a common challenge and acting responsibly and positively toward our environment," he added.
General Coordinator of RAED, Imad Adly said: "It is now imperative to reach beyond the traditional environmental constituencies and find ways of engaging other sectors of society so that they too can exercise their environmental responsibilities."
He said: "environmental citizenship is about asserting the ethical responsibilities of individuals, organizations, countries and corporations to create new forms of solidarity that will protect all life on earth."
He added environmental concerns can empower citizens to influence governments and the private sector toward attaining more environmentally sound and equitable patterns of production and consumption.
He also said the objective of environmental education is to generate "awareness and knowledge to help individuals and social groups acquire a basic understanding of the total environment, its associated problems and the critical role humanity plays in its survival."
Environmental education, he added, also aims to help the public acquire social values, strong feelings of concern for the environment and the motivation to actively participate in its protection and improvement. It also aims to help people acquire those skills needed to solve environmental problems.
"We also aim to aid people in their development of a sense of responsibility and urgency regarding environmental problems. This is the best way of ensuring people take appropriate action to solve those problems as well as an evaluation ability to assess environmental measures and education programs in terms of ecological, political, economic, social, aesthetical and educational factors," he said.
The NGOs participating in the conference will raise public awareness through an array of publications, accords, guidelines, program, data bases, and other products. - dailystar
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Friday, April 1. 2005
Some 20 public libraries from all governorates of Lebanon recently received copies of the UNESCO’s WINISIS software and their staff was trained in its use during a two-day workshop at the UNESCO Office in Beirut.
This project comes as part of UNESCO’s initiatives to provide communities with access to information, knowledge and ICT through enhancing the capabilities of public libraries.
WINISIS is the Windows version of CDS/ISIS, a software that provides facilities for storing documents electronically and for advanced information retrieval. CDS/ISIS is used worldwide for managing databases in libraries and information centres. - noticias.info
Posted by finkployd in
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Friday, April 1. 2005
Iberia launches direct flight to Beirut
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Iberia has launched its new Madrid-Beirut flight, using a twin-engine Airbus A319 with 120 seats . Departing from Madrid on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays at 23.45 h., the flight will reach Beirut at 5:15 h. the following morning. The return flight leaves Beirut at 6.45 h., and lands in Madrid at 11.00 h. on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays.
Iberia continues to open new markets with this flight, which represents a substantial improvement in connections with the Lebanon. It will be especially useful for the large Lebanese communities resident in Latin America. - traveldailynews
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