Category: The Middle East

My mother’s kid brother

 From Ray Close: Eddy and the Mideast Joseph C. Goulden  OP-ED:  Middle East veterans of a certain era – the World War II era into the 1950s – speak with respectful awe of William A. Eddy. Soldier, scholar, statesman, spy, Arabist – of him a colleague said, “Bill Eddy was probably the nearest thing that …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/10/28/my-mothers-kid-brother/

Layers (part 2)

 For me, this is probably the work that got the Israeli PR thinkers to seeing the possibilities for a beautiful friendship between Zionism and fundamentalism:  Hal Lindsey’s 1970 “The Late, Great Planet Earth.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Great_Planet_Earth I remember hearing about this while we were still in high school, and wondering what in the hell kind of foolishness …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/08/24/layers-part-2/

Layers

 There is another, deeper, emotional/spiritual layer to this entire problem.  I used to try to explain it but it falls on secular ears, and is largely ignored as insignificant.  It is anything but, and anyone who cares about justice and dignity in the Middle East would do well to try to understand it better.  Back in …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/08/24/layers/

If Americans only knew

 What do we really cherish?  America absolves itself the same way a smoker convinces himself he’ll never get cancer.  In both cases, there is plenty of available information from which the truth of the matter can be gleaned, but that requires more introspection than most of us are willing to endure.  Less than a minute …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/08/20/if-americans-only-knew/

Mahmoud Darwish – dead at 67

 http://mahmouddarwish.com/english/introduction.htm  A woman asked the cloud: please enfold my loved one My clothes are soaked with his blood If you shall not be rain, my love Be trees Saturated with fertility, be trees And if you shall not be trees, my love Be a stone Saturated with humidity, be a stone And if you shall …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/08/09/mahmoud-darwish-dead-at-67/

Rabbi Fox

Ms. Gassaway, I had hoped the rabbi’s recent rant would be disregarded by your readers as the specious partisan pandering it obviously is to anyone who understands even the smallest bits of Middle Eastern history and contemporary realities “over there.”  However, given that more than a week has passed, and now today’s follow-on huzzahs by …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/07/10/rabbi-fox/

Lebanon falls

 Sent: Wed 6/11/2008 8:15 PM To: [deleted] Subject: RE: Lebanon Falls. Dear [deleted] and friends, Normally I wouldn’t respond to something like this, but when you wrote that this was “the clearest picture of the situation in Lebanon and the Middle East” that you have seen, I felt it deserved a closer look.  Because it is …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/06/11/lebanon-falls/