the human province

In the last week or two, I've seen talks given by Juan Cole and Bernard Rougier. I wasn't sure what to expect from either, because of the sometimes shrill tone of the former and the sensationalist title of the latter's book. (I've got an aversion to books with the word "Jihad" in them.)

In both instances, I was pleasantly surprised. Cole was well spoken and interesting. And although the first part of his talk, which was just a recapping of the last 6 years, was pretty dry and unnecessary for a Middle Eastern audience, his comments during the Q&A were worth listening to the first part of the lecture. One point kind of bugged me, though. He made a point of pointing out Egypt's success in combating Islamist terrorist groups, even going so far as to imply that authoritarian governments might be as good as democratic ones at fighting terrorism. I'm not sure how I feel about that idea, except that my gut instinct is that while authoritarian governments might have more success at crushing these groups due to their freedom of action (not being tied down by human rights concerns, for example), I'm convinced that authoritarian rule is one of the causes of terrorism in the first place. So Egypt's "success" might be only short-term and might end up biting Cairo in the ass later.

As for Rougier, I found his participation on a panel about Palestinian identity and citizenship very interesting. He was accused of being an orientalist and of ignoring who was obviously to blame in the Nahr el-Bared conflict. (It's hard to know what to say when someone tells you that neither Fatah al-Islam nor the Lebanese Army were to blame for Nahr el-Bared, but that rather it was the Americans' fault. Incidentally, this was a comment made by a participant in the talk, not a random crank who'd wandered in because he heard there'd be food.) In any case, Rougier convinced me to go out and buy his book, despite the horrible weakness of the dollar and thus the Lebanese pound compared to the mighty euro. I'll be reading it as soon as I finish the books that are currently on my plate. 

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

Last night, a Dutch friend of mine received a text message that informed us that UNIFIL troops had been attacked in Khiam. So far, three Columbians and two Spaniards are dead.

There have been reports that members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to plots to attack UNIFIL, but I can't help think that whoever did this must be pretty professional to have gotten past UNIFIL and Hezbollah. This attack follows a rocket attack on Israel in the south that also went unclaimed.

If there's one thing that recent history has taught us, it's that it's never a good thing when UN peacekeepers start getting targeted.

Ha'aretz has a piece analyzing the roots of Hersh's allegations that the US was funding money to the Hariri clan that ended up financing groups like Jund al-Sham and Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon:

Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent's Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to build a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world. Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it "from all kinds of people."

This is, of course, ironically pretty vague. Which Lebanese journalists? (And since when was Fisk involved?) In any case, the piece by Hersh and the ramblings by a certain Franklin Lamb have spurred the rumor mill here in Lebanon. The allegations are getting more and more ridiculous. There are, apparently, some people now claiming that Fatah al-Islam has a ...wait for it.... submarine. No kidding. People actually believe this sort of thing. 

Le Monde has an informative background piece about Shaker al-Abssi, the leader of Fatah al-Islam, who is currently fighting the Lebanese Army in Nahr el-Bared. It follows him from Palestine to the camps in Lebanon, via Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, North Yemen and even Nicaragua.

Things have been odd since I got back to Beirut last week. During the month I was gone, all hell seems to have broken loose. There has been the steady fighting in Nahr el-Bared, the sporadic bombings in Ashrafieh, Verdun and Aley, and finally fighting that broke out Sunday night between Jund al-Sham and the Lebanese Army in Ein el-Helweh, a Palestinian camp in Saida.

I had decided to spend the day in Tyre on Sunday to enjoy the beach, go to the Souk, see a friend and have some dinner with a port view at Abu Robert's. Before heading back up to Beirut, we kept getting calls from colleagues and the security guy at a friend's NGO telling us that things were getting worse in Saida and that we shouldn't go back to Beirut. (Saidi is on the road between Tyre and Beirut.) My roommate had a meeting early the next morning with a Western embassy, so we decided that we had to get back, and that we'd either take the sea road or take a detour through Nabatiyeh instead of taking the highway that passes by Ein el-Helweh.

We found a bus heading to Beirut, and the driver assured us that we'd be taking the sea road instead of going through Saida, so we got in and joined the mix of Lebanese and Palestinian passengers. Of course that wasn't the case. As our bus was approaching the hot area of Saida, which had apparently been alive with bullets and RPGs earlier in the evening, we crawled toward the turnabout as everyone was straining to look ahead and see if there was still any fighting.

"Ma fi shi, ma fi shi" (there's nothing, there's nothing), we heard before a Palestinian woman got out of the bus cautiously and started walking home, wherever that may have been. We passed through the city without incident, and made it back to the Cola bridge in Beirut.

On the way from Cola to Gemayzeh, we went through no fewer than six checkpoints. Twice we had to get out and let the Army (and in one case a rude plain-clothes guy, hopefully mukhabarat instead of militia) check our bags and ID. Well, they checked the three men in the car, the woman among us, of course, was never searched, and her bags went unopened. (Chivalry definitely has its place and time, but I'm afraid that it's not so welcome when when bombs have been popping up in public places on a weekly basis.)

People are fed up. There's more and more talk of leaving, and those who had planned to come back from abroad for the summer are reconsidering. A friend of mine who is graduating from the business school at the Lebanese American University told me that at the end of each class, her professor is swamped with Lebanese students pleading him to find them jobs in the Gulf so they can get out of Lebanon as soon as possible.

"The situation," as we've come to call it, is not boding well for the economy. Tourism looks like it will be dead if things don't straighten out soon, and you can look at the Gemayzeh and see how the street is practically empty compared to what it should look like on any given summer evening. Paranoia has been ever-present, with people franticly spreading the word that "Hamra is next," or "I heard Monot is going to get hit."

But in the Lebanese way, this fear has also turned into humor, giving birth to things like a Facebook group that's started a competition to see who can guess where the next bomb will be. I think you win an extra special prize if you guess two bomb locations in a row...

I don't know what to think about what's currently happening in Lebanon. I have a lot more questions than answers about the whole mess. I posted a few links to articles that were on or mentioned Fatah al-Islam, and it's no clearer to me who is financing these guys now. Everyone seems to be against these guys, from the PLO and Hamas to March 8 and 14, and Abssi is wanted on terrorism charges in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The opposition, backed up by Sy Hersh, seem to think that these guys have been supported by Saad Hariri, whereas the pro-government forces are blaming Syria.

A few things don't make sense, though. If these guys were really pro-Syrian, why would they have splintered off from the very pro-Syrian Fatah al-Intifada? And if they were really a tool of Hariri, why would they be fighting the ISF? Of course both of these questions assume that whoever financed these guys is still in control -- which may not be the case at all.

In any case, there are a lot of unanswered questions for me. Like why the ISF was even involved in the first place in a bank robbery investigation, and why then, the affair was handed over to the Army. Another question is what it would take to get permission to enter the Palestinian camps. Yet another is whether these fighters are Palestinian or rather foreigners (I've been seeing accounts that some are Yemeni, Bangladeshi and Saudi).

In any and all cases, the LAF is in a tough situation. If they back off, they look incompetent, which is already kind of the case since the militants seem to have given better than they have gotten in the exchange with the army so far. But since they cannot enter the camps, they're shelling them, which no matter what the case, cannot be a very precise way of retaliation. The shelling of Palestinian camps in Lebanon has historically been a bad idea, and I imagine that this time is no exception. The problem is that it is hard to see a solution to the problem short of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and the refugee problem it created.

And now the bombs. Both Verdun and ABC have been hit with what seem to be warning shots. This is disconcerting to say the least. (I live about ten minutes by foot from the first bomb site.) Are the bombings related to the fighting in Tripoli? If so, why would a salafi group attack a Sunni neighborhood? Was Fatah al-Islam responsible for the bus bombings last February? If they have been responsible, why haven't they claimed credit for either?

A friend of mine may be going up to Tripoli to see what's happening for herself, and I've asked another friend at UNRWA if she has seen any echoes of what's happening in the other Palestinian camps. I'll post more as soon as I know more.

In the meantime, I'm way past deadline on a manuscript and sick as a dog, so that's all for now...

Following Sy Hersh's write-up including Alastair Horne's comments that Fatah al-Islam is being funded indirectly through Saad Hariri by the US, there has been more interest in the new group in the American media.

The NY Times has an interview with the group's leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and the LA Times has an article on accusations by the Lebanese government that Fatah al-Islam was involved in the bus bombings last month.

Neither article mentions Hersh's article or Crooke's comments, although both mention the claim that the group is sponsored by Damascus to start trouble in Lebanon.

In the last week or two, I've seen talks given by Juan Cole and Bernard Rougier. I wasn't sure what to expect from either, because of the sometimes shrill tone of the former and the sensationalist title of the latter's book. (I've got an aversion to books with the word "Jihad" in them.)

In both instances, I was pleasantly surprised. Cole was well spoken and interesting. And although the first part of his talk, which was just a recapping of the last 6 years, was pretty dry and unnecessary for a Middle Eastern audience, his comments during the Q&A were worth listening to the first part of the lecture. One point kind of bugged me, though. He made a point of pointing out Egypt's success in combating Islamist terrorist groups, even going so far as to imply that authoritarian governments might be as good as democratic ones at fighting terrorism. I'm not sure how I feel about that idea, except that my gut instinct is that while authoritarian governments might have more success at crushing these groups due to their freedom of action (not being tied down by human rights concerns, for example), I'm convinced that authoritarian rule is one of the causes of terrorism in the first place. So Egypt's "success" might be only short-term and might end up biting Cairo in the ass later.

As for Rougier, I found his participation on a panel about Palestinian identity and citizenship very interesting. He was accused of being an orientalist and of ignoring who was obviously to blame in the Nahr el-Bared conflict. (It's hard to know what to say when someone tells you that neither Fatah al-Islam nor the Lebanese Army were to blame for Nahr el-Bared, but that rather it was the Americans' fault. Incidentally, this was a comment made by a participant in the talk, not a random crank who'd wandered in because he heard there'd be food.) In any case, Rougier convinced me to go out and buy his book, despite the horrible weakness of the dollar and thus the Lebanese pound compared to the mighty euro. I'll be reading it as soon as I finish the books that are currently on my plate. 

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

Last night, a Dutch friend of mine received a text message that informed us that UNIFIL troops had been attacked in Khiam. So far, three Columbians and two Spaniards are dead.

There have been reports that members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to plots to attack UNIFIL, but I can't help think that whoever did this must be pretty professional to have gotten past UNIFIL and Hezbollah. This attack follows a rocket attack on Israel in the south that also went unclaimed.

If there's one thing that recent history has taught us, it's that it's never a good thing when UN peacekeepers start getting targeted.

Ha'aretz has a piece analyzing the roots of Hersh's allegations that the US was funding money to the Hariri clan that ended up financing groups like Jund al-Sham and Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon:

Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent's Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to build a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world. Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it "from all kinds of people."

This is, of course, ironically pretty vague. Which Lebanese journalists? (And since when was Fisk involved?) In any case, the piece by Hersh and the ramblings by a certain Franklin Lamb have spurred the rumor mill here in Lebanon. The allegations are getting more and more ridiculous. There are, apparently, some people now claiming that Fatah al-Islam has a ...wait for it.... submarine. No kidding. People actually believe this sort of thing. 

Le Monde has an informative background piece about Shaker al-Abssi, the leader of Fatah al-Islam, who is currently fighting the Lebanese Army in Nahr el-Bared. It follows him from Palestine to the camps in Lebanon, via Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, North Yemen and even Nicaragua.

Things have been odd since I got back to Beirut last week. During the month I was gone, all hell seems to have broken loose. There has been the steady fighting in Nahr el-Bared, the sporadic bombings in Ashrafieh, Verdun and Aley, and finally fighting that broke out Sunday night between Jund al-Sham and the Lebanese Army in Ein el-Helweh, a Palestinian camp in Saida.

I had decided to spend the day in Tyre on Sunday to enjoy the beach, go to the Souk, see a friend and have some dinner with a port view at Abu Robert's. Before heading back up to Beirut, we kept getting calls from colleagues and the security guy at a friend's NGO telling us that things were getting worse in Saida and that we shouldn't go back to Beirut. (Saidi is on the road between Tyre and Beirut.) My roommate had a meeting early the next morning with a Western embassy, so we decided that we had to get back, and that we'd either take the sea road or take a detour through Nabatiyeh instead of taking the highway that passes by Ein el-Helweh.

We found a bus heading to Beirut, and the driver assured us that we'd be taking the sea road instead of going through Saida, so we got in and joined the mix of Lebanese and Palestinian passengers. Of course that wasn't the case. As our bus was approaching the hot area of Saida, which had apparently been alive with bullets and RPGs earlier in the evening, we crawled toward the turnabout as everyone was straining to look ahead and see if there was still any fighting.

"Ma fi shi, ma fi shi" (there's nothing, there's nothing), we heard before a Palestinian woman got out of the bus cautiously and started walking home, wherever that may have been. We passed through the city without incident, and made it back to the Cola bridge in Beirut.

On the way from Cola to Gemayzeh, we went through no fewer than six checkpoints. Twice we had to get out and let the Army (and in one case a rude plain-clothes guy, hopefully mukhabarat instead of militia) check our bags and ID. Well, they checked the three men in the car, the woman among us, of course, was never searched, and her bags went unopened. (Chivalry definitely has its place and time, but I'm afraid that it's not so welcome when when bombs have been popping up in public places on a weekly basis.)

People are fed up. There's more and more talk of leaving, and those who had planned to come back from abroad for the summer are reconsidering. A friend of mine who is graduating from the business school at the Lebanese American University told me that at the end of each class, her professor is swamped with Lebanese students pleading him to find them jobs in the Gulf so they can get out of Lebanon as soon as possible.

"The situation," as we've come to call it, is not boding well for the economy. Tourism looks like it will be dead if things don't straighten out soon, and you can look at the Gemayzeh and see how the street is practically empty compared to what it should look like on any given summer evening. Paranoia has been ever-present, with people franticly spreading the word that "Hamra is next," or "I heard Monot is going to get hit."

But in the Lebanese way, this fear has also turned into humor, giving birth to things like a Facebook group that's started a competition to see who can guess where the next bomb will be. I think you win an extra special prize if you guess two bomb locations in a row...

I don't know what to think about what's currently happening in Lebanon. I have a lot more questions than answers about the whole mess. I posted a few links to articles that were on or mentioned Fatah al-Islam, and it's no clearer to me who is financing these guys now. Everyone seems to be against these guys, from the PLO and Hamas to March 8 and 14, and Abssi is wanted on terrorism charges in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The opposition, backed up by Sy Hersh, seem to think that these guys have been supported by Saad Hariri, whereas the pro-government forces are blaming Syria.

A few things don't make sense, though. If these guys were really pro-Syrian, why would they have splintered off from the very pro-Syrian Fatah al-Intifada? And if they were really a tool of Hariri, why would they be fighting the ISF? Of course both of these questions assume that whoever financed these guys is still in control -- which may not be the case at all.

In any case, there are a lot of unanswered questions for me. Like why the ISF was even involved in the first place in a bank robbery investigation, and why then, the affair was handed over to the Army. Another question is what it would take to get permission to enter the Palestinian camps. Yet another is whether these fighters are Palestinian or rather foreigners (I've been seeing accounts that some are Yemeni, Bangladeshi and Saudi).

In any and all cases, the LAF is in a tough situation. If they back off, they look incompetent, which is already kind of the case since the militants seem to have given better than they have gotten in the exchange with the army so far. But since they cannot enter the camps, they're shelling them, which no matter what the case, cannot be a very precise way of retaliation. The shelling of Palestinian camps in Lebanon has historically been a bad idea, and I imagine that this time is no exception. The problem is that it is hard to see a solution to the problem short of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and the refugee problem it created.

And now the bombs. Both Verdun and ABC have been hit with what seem to be warning shots. This is disconcerting to say the least. (I live about ten minutes by foot from the first bomb site.) Are the bombings related to the fighting in Tripoli? If so, why would a salafi group attack a Sunni neighborhood? Was Fatah al-Islam responsible for the bus bombings last February? If they have been responsible, why haven't they claimed credit for either?

A friend of mine may be going up to Tripoli to see what's happening for herself, and I've asked another friend at UNRWA if she has seen any echoes of what's happening in the other Palestinian camps. I'll post more as soon as I know more.

In the meantime, I'm way past deadline on a manuscript and sick as a dog, so that's all for now...

Following Sy Hersh's write-up including Alastair Horne's comments that Fatah al-Islam is being funded indirectly through Saad Hariri by the US, there has been more interest in the new group in the American media.

The NY Times has an interview with the group's leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and the LA Times has an article on accusations by the Lebanese government that Fatah al-Islam was involved in the bus bombings last month.

Neither article mentions Hersh's article or Crooke's comments, although both mention the claim that the group is sponsored by Damascus to start trouble in Lebanon.

In the last week or two, I've seen talks given by Juan Cole and Bernard Rougier. I wasn't sure what to expect from either, because of the sometimes shrill tone of the former and the sensationalist title of the latter's book. (I've got an aversion to books with the word "Jihad" in them.)

In both instances, I was pleasantly surprised. Cole was well spoken and interesting. And although the first part of his talk, which was just a recapping of the last 6 years, was pretty dry and unnecessary for a Middle Eastern audience, his comments during the Q&A were worth listening to the first part of the lecture. One point kind of bugged me, though. He made a point of pointing out Egypt's success in combating Islamist terrorist groups, even going so far as to imply that authoritarian governments might be as good as democratic ones at fighting terrorism. I'm not sure how I feel about that idea, except that my gut instinct is that while authoritarian governments might have more success at crushing these groups due to their freedom of action (not being tied down by human rights concerns, for example), I'm convinced that authoritarian rule is one of the causes of terrorism in the first place. So Egypt's "success" might be only short-term and might end up biting Cairo in the ass later.

As for Rougier, I found his participation on a panel about Palestinian identity and citizenship very interesting. He was accused of being an orientalist and of ignoring who was obviously to blame in the Nahr el-Bared conflict. (It's hard to know what to say when someone tells you that neither Fatah al-Islam nor the Lebanese Army were to blame for Nahr el-Bared, but that rather it was the Americans' fault. Incidentally, this was a comment made by a participant in the talk, not a random crank who'd wandered in because he heard there'd be food.) In any case, Rougier convinced me to go out and buy his book, despite the horrible weakness of the dollar and thus the Lebanese pound compared to the mighty euro. I'll be reading it as soon as I finish the books that are currently on my plate. 

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

Last night, a Dutch friend of mine received a text message that informed us that UNIFIL troops had been attacked in Khiam. So far, three Columbians and two Spaniards are dead.

There have been reports that members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to plots to attack UNIFIL, but I can't help think that whoever did this must be pretty professional to have gotten past UNIFIL and Hezbollah. This attack follows a rocket attack on Israel in the south that also went unclaimed.

If there's one thing that recent history has taught us, it's that it's never a good thing when UN peacekeepers start getting targeted.

Ha'aretz has a piece analyzing the roots of Hersh's allegations that the US was funding money to the Hariri clan that ended up financing groups like Jund al-Sham and Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon:

Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent's Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to build a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world. Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it "from all kinds of people."

This is, of course, ironically pretty vague. Which Lebanese journalists? (And since when was Fisk involved?) In any case, the piece by Hersh and the ramblings by a certain Franklin Lamb have spurred the rumor mill here in Lebanon. The allegations are getting more and more ridiculous. There are, apparently, some people now claiming that Fatah al-Islam has a ...wait for it.... submarine. No kidding. People actually believe this sort of thing. 

Le Monde has an informative background piece about Shaker al-Abssi, the leader of Fatah al-Islam, who is currently fighting the Lebanese Army in Nahr el-Bared. It follows him from Palestine to the camps in Lebanon, via Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, North Yemen and even Nicaragua.

Things have been odd since I got back to Beirut last week. During the month I was gone, all hell seems to have broken loose. There has been the steady fighting in Nahr el-Bared, the sporadic bombings in Ashrafieh, Verdun and Aley, and finally fighting that broke out Sunday night between Jund al-Sham and the Lebanese Army in Ein el-Helweh, a Palestinian camp in Saida.

I had decided to spend the day in Tyre on Sunday to enjoy the beach, go to the Souk, see a friend and have some dinner with a port view at Abu Robert's. Before heading back up to Beirut, we kept getting calls from colleagues and the security guy at a friend's NGO telling us that things were getting worse in Saida and that we shouldn't go back to Beirut. (Saidi is on the road between Tyre and Beirut.) My roommate had a meeting early the next morning with a Western embassy, so we decided that we had to get back, and that we'd either take the sea road or take a detour through Nabatiyeh instead of taking the highway that passes by Ein el-Helweh.

We found a bus heading to Beirut, and the driver assured us that we'd be taking the sea road instead of going through Saida, so we got in and joined the mix of Lebanese and Palestinian passengers. Of course that wasn't the case. As our bus was approaching the hot area of Saida, which had apparently been alive with bullets and RPGs earlier in the evening, we crawled toward the turnabout as everyone was straining to look ahead and see if there was still any fighting.

"Ma fi shi, ma fi shi" (there's nothing, there's nothing), we heard before a Palestinian woman got out of the bus cautiously and started walking home, wherever that may have been. We passed through the city without incident, and made it back to the Cola bridge in Beirut.

On the way from Cola to Gemayzeh, we went through no fewer than six checkpoints. Twice we had to get out and let the Army (and in one case a rude plain-clothes guy, hopefully mukhabarat instead of militia) check our bags and ID. Well, they checked the three men in the car, the woman among us, of course, was never searched, and her bags went unopened. (Chivalry definitely has its place and time, but I'm afraid that it's not so welcome when when bombs have been popping up in public places on a weekly basis.)

People are fed up. There's more and more talk of leaving, and those who had planned to come back from abroad for the summer are reconsidering. A friend of mine who is graduating from the business school at the Lebanese American University told me that at the end of each class, her professor is swamped with Lebanese students pleading him to find them jobs in the Gulf so they can get out of Lebanon as soon as possible.

"The situation," as we've come to call it, is not boding well for the economy. Tourism looks like it will be dead if things don't straighten out soon, and you can look at the Gemayzeh and see how the street is practically empty compared to what it should look like on any given summer evening. Paranoia has been ever-present, with people franticly spreading the word that "Hamra is next," or "I heard Monot is going to get hit."

But in the Lebanese way, this fear has also turned into humor, giving birth to things like a Facebook group that's started a competition to see who can guess where the next bomb will be. I think you win an extra special prize if you guess two bomb locations in a row...

I don't know what to think about what's currently happening in Lebanon. I have a lot more questions than answers about the whole mess. I posted a few links to articles that were on or mentioned Fatah al-Islam, and it's no clearer to me who is financing these guys now. Everyone seems to be against these guys, from the PLO and Hamas to March 8 and 14, and Abssi is wanted on terrorism charges in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The opposition, backed up by Sy Hersh, seem to think that these guys have been supported by Saad Hariri, whereas the pro-government forces are blaming Syria.

A few things don't make sense, though. If these guys were really pro-Syrian, why would they have splintered off from the very pro-Syrian Fatah al-Intifada? And if they were really a tool of Hariri, why would they be fighting the ISF? Of course both of these questions assume that whoever financed these guys is still in control -- which may not be the case at all.

In any case, there are a lot of unanswered questions for me. Like why the ISF was even involved in the first place in a bank robbery investigation, and why then, the affair was handed over to the Army. Another question is what it would take to get permission to enter the Palestinian camps. Yet another is whether these fighters are Palestinian or rather foreigners (I've been seeing accounts that some are Yemeni, Bangladeshi and Saudi).

In any and all cases, the LAF is in a tough situation. If they back off, they look incompetent, which is already kind of the case since the militants seem to have given better than they have gotten in the exchange with the army so far. But since they cannot enter the camps, they're shelling them, which no matter what the case, cannot be a very precise way of retaliation. The shelling of Palestinian camps in Lebanon has historically been a bad idea, and I imagine that this time is no exception. The problem is that it is hard to see a solution to the problem short of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and the refugee problem it created.

And now the bombs. Both Verdun and ABC have been hit with what seem to be warning shots. This is disconcerting to say the least. (I live about ten minutes by foot from the first bomb site.) Are the bombings related to the fighting in Tripoli? If so, why would a salafi group attack a Sunni neighborhood? Was Fatah al-Islam responsible for the bus bombings last February? If they have been responsible, why haven't they claimed credit for either?

A friend of mine may be going up to Tripoli to see what's happening for herself, and I've asked another friend at UNRWA if she has seen any echoes of what's happening in the other Palestinian camps. I'll post more as soon as I know more.

In the meantime, I'm way past deadline on a manuscript and sick as a dog, so that's all for now...

Following Sy Hersh's write-up including Alastair Horne's comments that Fatah al-Islam is being funded indirectly through Saad Hariri by the US, there has been more interest in the new group in the American media.

The NY Times has an interview with the group's leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and the LA Times has an article on accusations by the Lebanese government that Fatah al-Islam was involved in the bus bombings last month.

Neither article mentions Hersh's article or Crooke's comments, although both mention the claim that the group is sponsored by Damascus to start trouble in Lebanon.

In the last week or two, I've seen talks given by Juan Cole and Bernard Rougier. I wasn't sure what to expect from either, because of the sometimes shrill tone of the former and the sensationalist title of the latter's book. (I've got an aversion to books with the word "Jihad" in them.)

In both instances, I was pleasantly surprised. Cole was well spoken and interesting. And although the first part of his talk, which was just a recapping of the last 6 years, was pretty dry and unnecessary for a Middle Eastern audience, his comments during the Q&A were worth listening to the first part of the lecture. One point kind of bugged me, though. He made a point of pointing out Egypt's success in combating Islamist terrorist groups, even going so far as to imply that authoritarian governments might be as good as democratic ones at fighting terrorism. I'm not sure how I feel about that idea, except that my gut instinct is that while authoritarian governments might have more success at crushing these groups due to their freedom of action (not being tied down by human rights concerns, for example), I'm convinced that authoritarian rule is one of the causes of terrorism in the first place. So Egypt's "success" might be only short-term and might end up biting Cairo in the ass later.

As for Rougier, I found his participation on a panel about Palestinian identity and citizenship very interesting. He was accused of being an orientalist and of ignoring who was obviously to blame in the Nahr el-Bared conflict. (It's hard to know what to say when someone tells you that neither Fatah al-Islam nor the Lebanese Army were to blame for Nahr el-Bared, but that rather it was the Americans' fault. Incidentally, this was a comment made by a participant in the talk, not a random crank who'd wandered in because he heard there'd be food.) In any case, Rougier convinced me to go out and buy his book, despite the horrible weakness of the dollar and thus the Lebanese pound compared to the mighty euro. I'll be reading it as soon as I finish the books that are currently on my plate. 

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

Last night, a Dutch friend of mine received a text message that informed us that UNIFIL troops had been attacked in Khiam. So far, three Columbians and two Spaniards are dead.

There have been reports that members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to plots to attack UNIFIL, but I can't help think that whoever did this must be pretty professional to have gotten past UNIFIL and Hezbollah. This attack follows a rocket attack on Israel in the south that also went unclaimed.

If there's one thing that recent history has taught us, it's that it's never a good thing when UN peacekeepers start getting targeted.

Ha'aretz has a piece analyzing the roots of Hersh's allegations that the US was funding money to the Hariri clan that ended up financing groups like Jund al-Sham and Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon:

Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent's Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to build a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world. Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it "from all kinds of people."

This is, of course, ironically pretty vague. Which Lebanese journalists? (And since when was Fisk involved?) In any case, the piece by Hersh and the ramblings by a certain Franklin Lamb have spurred the rumor mill here in Lebanon. The allegations are getting more and more ridiculous. There are, apparently, some people now claiming that Fatah al-Islam has a ...wait for it.... submarine. No kidding. People actually believe this sort of thing. 

Le Monde has an informative background piece about Shaker al-Abssi, the leader of Fatah al-Islam, who is currently fighting the Lebanese Army in Nahr el-Bared. It follows him from Palestine to the camps in Lebanon, via Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, North Yemen and even Nicaragua.

Things have been odd since I got back to Beirut last week. During the month I was gone, all hell seems to have broken loose. There has been the steady fighting in Nahr el-Bared, the sporadic bombings in Ashrafieh, Verdun and Aley, and finally fighting that broke out Sunday night between Jund al-Sham and the Lebanese Army in Ein el-Helweh, a Palestinian camp in Saida.

I had decided to spend the day in Tyre on Sunday to enjoy the beach, go to the Souk, see a friend and have some dinner with a port view at Abu Robert's. Before heading back up to Beirut, we kept getting calls from colleagues and the security guy at a friend's NGO telling us that things were getting worse in Saida and that we shouldn't go back to Beirut. (Saidi is on the road between Tyre and Beirut.) My roommate had a meeting early the next morning with a Western embassy, so we decided that we had to get back, and that we'd either take the sea road or take a detour through Nabatiyeh instead of taking the highway that passes by Ein el-Helweh.

We found a bus heading to Beirut, and the driver assured us that we'd be taking the sea road instead of going through Saida, so we got in and joined the mix of Lebanese and Palestinian passengers. Of course that wasn't the case. As our bus was approaching the hot area of Saida, which had apparently been alive with bullets and RPGs earlier in the evening, we crawled toward the turnabout as everyone was straining to look ahead and see if there was still any fighting.

"Ma fi shi, ma fi shi" (there's nothing, there's nothing), we heard before a Palestinian woman got out of the bus cautiously and started walking home, wherever that may have been. We passed through the city without incident, and made it back to the Cola bridge in Beirut.

On the way from Cola to Gemayzeh, we went through no fewer than six checkpoints. Twice we had to get out and let the Army (and in one case a rude plain-clothes guy, hopefully mukhabarat instead of militia) check our bags and ID. Well, they checked the three men in the car, the woman among us, of course, was never searched, and her bags went unopened. (Chivalry definitely has its place and time, but I'm afraid that it's not so welcome when when bombs have been popping up in public places on a weekly basis.)

People are fed up. There's more and more talk of leaving, and those who had planned to come back from abroad for the summer are reconsidering. A friend of mine who is graduating from the business school at the Lebanese American University told me that at the end of each class, her professor is swamped with Lebanese students pleading him to find them jobs in the Gulf so they can get out of Lebanon as soon as possible.

"The situation," as we've come to call it, is not boding well for the economy. Tourism looks like it will be dead if things don't straighten out soon, and you can look at the Gemayzeh and see how the street is practically empty compared to what it should look like on any given summer evening. Paranoia has been ever-present, with people franticly spreading the word that "Hamra is next," or "I heard Monot is going to get hit."

But in the Lebanese way, this fear has also turned into humor, giving birth to things like a Facebook group that's started a competition to see who can guess where the next bomb will be. I think you win an extra special prize if you guess two bomb locations in a row...

I don't know what to think about what's currently happening in Lebanon. I have a lot more questions than answers about the whole mess. I posted a few links to articles that were on or mentioned Fatah al-Islam, and it's no clearer to me who is financing these guys now. Everyone seems to be against these guys, from the PLO and Hamas to March 8 and 14, and Abssi is wanted on terrorism charges in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The opposition, backed up by Sy Hersh, seem to think that these guys have been supported by Saad Hariri, whereas the pro-government forces are blaming Syria.

A few things don't make sense, though. If these guys were really pro-Syrian, why would they have splintered off from the very pro-Syrian Fatah al-Intifada? And if they were really a tool of Hariri, why would they be fighting the ISF? Of course both of these questions assume that whoever financed these guys is still in control -- which may not be the case at all.

In any case, there are a lot of unanswered questions for me. Like why the ISF was even involved in the first place in a bank robbery investigation, and why then, the affair was handed over to the Army. Another question is what it would take to get permission to enter the Palestinian camps. Yet another is whether these fighters are Palestinian or rather foreigners (I've been seeing accounts that some are Yemeni, Bangladeshi and Saudi).

In any and all cases, the LAF is in a tough situation. If they back off, they look incompetent, which is already kind of the case since the militants seem to have given better than they have gotten in the exchange with the army so far. But since they cannot enter the camps, they're shelling them, which no matter what the case, cannot be a very precise way of retaliation. The shelling of Palestinian camps in Lebanon has historically been a bad idea, and I imagine that this time is no exception. The problem is that it is hard to see a solution to the problem short of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and the refugee problem it created.

And now the bombs. Both Verdun and ABC have been hit with what seem to be warning shots. This is disconcerting to say the least. (I live about ten minutes by foot from the first bomb site.) Are the bombings related to the fighting in Tripoli? If so, why would a salafi group attack a Sunni neighborhood? Was Fatah al-Islam responsible for the bus bombings last February? If they have been responsible, why haven't they claimed credit for either?

A friend of mine may be going up to Tripoli to see what's happening for herself, and I've asked another friend at UNRWA if she has seen any echoes of what's happening in the other Palestinian camps. I'll post more as soon as I know more.

In the meantime, I'm way past deadline on a manuscript and sick as a dog, so that's all for now...

Following Sy Hersh's write-up including Alastair Horne's comments that Fatah al-Islam is being funded indirectly through Saad Hariri by the US, there has been more interest in the new group in the American media.

The NY Times has an interview with the group's leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and the LA Times has an article on accusations by the Lebanese government that Fatah al-Islam was involved in the bus bombings last month.

Neither article mentions Hersh's article or Crooke's comments, although both mention the claim that the group is sponsored by Damascus to start trouble in Lebanon.

In the last week or two, I've seen talks given by Juan Cole and Bernard Rougier. I wasn't sure what to expect from either, because of the sometimes shrill tone of the former and the sensationalist title of the latter's book. (I've got an aversion to books with the word "Jihad" in them.)

In both instances, I was pleasantly surprised. Cole was well spoken and interesting. And although the first part of his talk, which was just a recapping of the last 6 years, was pretty dry and unnecessary for a Middle Eastern audience, his comments during the Q&A were worth listening to the first part of the lecture. One point kind of bugged me, though. He made a point of pointing out Egypt's success in combating Islamist terrorist groups, even going so far as to imply that authoritarian governments might be as good as democratic ones at fighting terrorism. I'm not sure how I feel about that idea, except that my gut instinct is that while authoritarian governments might have more success at crushing these groups due to their freedom of action (not being tied down by human rights concerns, for example), I'm convinced that authoritarian rule is one of the causes of terrorism in the first place. So Egypt's "success" might be only short-term and might end up biting Cairo in the ass later.

As for Rougier, I found his participation on a panel about Palestinian identity and citizenship very interesting. He was accused of being an orientalist and of ignoring who was obviously to blame in the Nahr el-Bared conflict. (It's hard to know what to say when someone tells you that neither Fatah al-Islam nor the Lebanese Army were to blame for Nahr el-Bared, but that rather it was the Americans' fault. Incidentally, this was a comment made by a participant in the talk, not a random crank who'd wandered in because he heard there'd be food.) In any case, Rougier convinced me to go out and buy his book, despite the horrible weakness of the dollar and thus the Lebanese pound compared to the mighty euro. I'll be reading it as soon as I finish the books that are currently on my plate. 

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

Last night, a Dutch friend of mine received a text message that informed us that UNIFIL troops had been attacked in Khiam. So far, three Columbians and two Spaniards are dead.

There have been reports that members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to plots to attack UNIFIL, but I can't help think that whoever did this must be pretty professional to have gotten past UNIFIL and Hezbollah. This attack follows a rocket attack on Israel in the south that also went unclaimed.

If there's one thing that recent history has taught us, it's that it's never a good thing when UN peacekeepers start getting targeted.

Ha'aretz has a piece analyzing the roots of Hersh's allegations that the US was funding money to the Hariri clan that ended up financing groups like Jund al-Sham and Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon:

Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent's Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to build a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world. Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it "from all kinds of people."

This is, of course, ironically pretty vague. Which Lebanese journalists? (And since when was Fisk involved?) In any case, the piece by Hersh and the ramblings by a certain Franklin Lamb have spurred the rumor mill here in Lebanon. The allegations are getting more and more ridiculous. There are, apparently, some people now claiming that Fatah al-Islam has a ...wait for it.... submarine. No kidding. People actually believe this sort of thing. 

Le Monde has an informative background piece about Shaker al-Abssi, the leader of Fatah al-Islam, who is currently fighting the Lebanese Army in Nahr el-Bared. It follows him from Palestine to the camps in Lebanon, via Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, North Yemen and even Nicaragua.

Things have been odd since I got back to Beirut last week. During the month I was gone, all hell seems to have broken loose. There has been the steady fighting in Nahr el-Bared, the sporadic bombings in Ashrafieh, Verdun and Aley, and finally fighting that broke out Sunday night between Jund al-Sham and the Lebanese Army in Ein el-Helweh, a Palestinian camp in Saida.

I had decided to spend the day in Tyre on Sunday to enjoy the beach, go to the Souk, see a friend and have some dinner with a port view at Abu Robert's. Before heading back up to Beirut, we kept getting calls from colleagues and the security guy at a friend's NGO telling us that things were getting worse in Saida and that we shouldn't go back to Beirut. (Saidi is on the road between Tyre and Beirut.) My roommate had a meeting early the next morning with a Western embassy, so we decided that we had to get back, and that we'd either take the sea road or take a detour through Nabatiyeh instead of taking the highway that passes by Ein el-Helweh.

We found a bus heading to Beirut, and the driver assured us that we'd be taking the sea road instead of going through Saida, so we got in and joined the mix of Lebanese and Palestinian passengers. Of course that wasn't the case. As our bus was approaching the hot area of Saida, which had apparently been alive with bullets and RPGs earlier in the evening, we crawled toward the turnabout as everyone was straining to look ahead and see if there was still any fighting.

"Ma fi shi, ma fi shi" (there's nothing, there's nothing), we heard before a Palestinian woman got out of the bus cautiously and started walking home, wherever that may have been. We passed through the city without incident, and made it back to the Cola bridge in Beirut.

On the way from Cola to Gemayzeh, we went through no fewer than six checkpoints. Twice we had to get out and let the Army (and in one case a rude plain-clothes guy, hopefully mukhabarat instead of militia) check our bags and ID. Well, they checked the three men in the car, the woman among us, of course, was never searched, and her bags went unopened. (Chivalry definitely has its place and time, but I'm afraid that it's not so welcome when when bombs have been popping up in public places on a weekly basis.)

People are fed up. There's more and more talk of leaving, and those who had planned to come back from abroad for the summer are reconsidering. A friend of mine who is graduating from the business school at the Lebanese American University told me that at the end of each class, her professor is swamped with Lebanese students pleading him to find them jobs in the Gulf so they can get out of Lebanon as soon as possible.

"The situation," as we've come to call it, is not boding well for the economy. Tourism looks like it will be dead if things don't straighten out soon, and you can look at the Gemayzeh and see how the street is practically empty compared to what it should look like on any given summer evening. Paranoia has been ever-present, with people franticly spreading the word that "Hamra is next," or "I heard Monot is going to get hit."

But in the Lebanese way, this fear has also turned into humor, giving birth to things like a Facebook group that's started a competition to see who can guess where the next bomb will be. I think you win an extra special prize if you guess two bomb locations in a row...

I don't know what to think about what's currently happening in Lebanon. I have a lot more questions than answers about the whole mess. I posted a few links to articles that were on or mentioned Fatah al-Islam, and it's no clearer to me who is financing these guys now. Everyone seems to be against these guys, from the PLO and Hamas to March 8 and 14, and Abssi is wanted on terrorism charges in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The opposition, backed up by Sy Hersh, seem to think that these guys have been supported by Saad Hariri, whereas the pro-government forces are blaming Syria.

A few things don't make sense, though. If these guys were really pro-Syrian, why would they have splintered off from the very pro-Syrian Fatah al-Intifada? And if they were really a tool of Hariri, why would they be fighting the ISF? Of course both of these questions assume that whoever financed these guys is still in control -- which may not be the case at all.

In any case, there are a lot of unanswered questions for me. Like why the ISF was even involved in the first place in a bank robbery investigation, and why then, the affair was handed over to the Army. Another question is what it would take to get permission to enter the Palestinian camps. Yet another is whether these fighters are Palestinian or rather foreigners (I've been seeing accounts that some are Yemeni, Bangladeshi and Saudi).

In any and all cases, the LAF is in a tough situation. If they back off, they look incompetent, which is already kind of the case since the militants seem to have given better than they have gotten in the exchange with the army so far. But since they cannot enter the camps, they're shelling them, which no matter what the case, cannot be a very precise way of retaliation. The shelling of Palestinian camps in Lebanon has historically been a bad idea, and I imagine that this time is no exception. The problem is that it is hard to see a solution to the problem short of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and the refugee problem it created.

And now the bombs. Both Verdun and ABC have been hit with what seem to be warning shots. This is disconcerting to say the least. (I live about ten minutes by foot from the first bomb site.) Are the bombings related to the fighting in Tripoli? If so, why would a salafi group attack a Sunni neighborhood? Was Fatah al-Islam responsible for the bus bombings last February? If they have been responsible, why haven't they claimed credit for either?

A friend of mine may be going up to Tripoli to see what's happening for herself, and I've asked another friend at UNRWA if she has seen any echoes of what's happening in the other Palestinian camps. I'll post more as soon as I know more.

In the meantime, I'm way past deadline on a manuscript and sick as a dog, so that's all for now...

Following Sy Hersh's write-up including Alastair Horne's comments that Fatah al-Islam is being funded indirectly through Saad Hariri by the US, there has been more interest in the new group in the American media.

The NY Times has an interview with the group's leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and the LA Times has an article on accusations by the Lebanese government that Fatah al-Islam was involved in the bus bombings last month.

Neither article mentions Hersh's article or Crooke's comments, although both mention the claim that the group is sponsored by Damascus to start trouble in Lebanon.

In the last week or two, I've seen talks given by Juan Cole and Bernard Rougier. I wasn't sure what to expect from either, because of the sometimes shrill tone of the former and the sensationalist title of the latter's book. (I've got an aversion to books with the word "Jihad" in them.)

In both instances, I was pleasantly surprised. Cole was well spoken and interesting. And although the first part of his talk, which was just a recapping of the last 6 years, was pretty dry and unnecessary for a Middle Eastern audience, his comments during the Q&A were worth listening to the first part of the lecture. One point kind of bugged me, though. He made a point of pointing out Egypt's success in combating Islamist terrorist groups, even going so far as to imply that authoritarian governments might be as good as democratic ones at fighting terrorism. I'm not sure how I feel about that idea, except that my gut instinct is that while authoritarian governments might have more success at crushing these groups due to their freedom of action (not being tied down by human rights concerns, for example), I'm convinced that authoritarian rule is one of the causes of terrorism in the first place. So Egypt's "success" might be only short-term and might end up biting Cairo in the ass later.

As for Rougier, I found his participation on a panel about Palestinian identity and citizenship very interesting. He was accused of being an orientalist and of ignoring who was obviously to blame in the Nahr el-Bared conflict. (It's hard to know what to say when someone tells you that neither Fatah al-Islam nor the Lebanese Army were to blame for Nahr el-Bared, but that rather it was the Americans' fault. Incidentally, this was a comment made by a participant in the talk, not a random crank who'd wandered in because he heard there'd be food.) In any case, Rougier convinced me to go out and buy his book, despite the horrible weakness of the dollar and thus the Lebanese pound compared to the mighty euro. I'll be reading it as soon as I finish the books that are currently on my plate. 

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

Last night, a Dutch friend of mine received a text message that informed us that UNIFIL troops had been attacked in Khiam. So far, three Columbians and two Spaniards are dead.

There have been reports that members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to plots to attack UNIFIL, but I can't help think that whoever did this must be pretty professional to have gotten past UNIFIL and Hezbollah. This attack follows a rocket attack on Israel in the south that also went unclaimed.

If there's one thing that recent history has taught us, it's that it's never a good thing when UN peacekeepers start getting targeted.

Ha'aretz has a piece analyzing the roots of Hersh's allegations that the US was funding money to the Hariri clan that ended up financing groups like Jund al-Sham and Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon:

Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent's Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to build a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world. Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it "from all kinds of people."

This is, of course, ironically pretty vague. Which Lebanese journalists? (And since when was Fisk involved?) In any case, the piece by Hersh and the ramblings by a certain Franklin Lamb have spurred the rumor mill here in Lebanon. The allegations are getting more and more ridiculous. There are, apparently, some people now claiming that Fatah al-Islam has a ...wait for it.... submarine. No kidding. People actually believe this sort of thing. 

Le Monde has an informative background piece about Shaker al-Abssi, the leader of Fatah al-Islam, who is currently fighting the Lebanese Army in Nahr el-Bared. It follows him from Palestine to the camps in Lebanon, via Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, North Yemen and even Nicaragua.

Things have been odd since I got back to Beirut last week. During the month I was gone, all hell seems to have broken loose. There has been the steady fighting in Nahr el-Bared, the sporadic bombings in Ashrafieh, Verdun and Aley, and finally fighting that broke out Sunday night between Jund al-Sham and the Lebanese Army in Ein el-Helweh, a Palestinian camp in Saida.

I had decided to spend the day in Tyre on Sunday to enjoy the beach, go to the Souk, see a friend and have some dinner with a port view at Abu Robert's. Before heading back up to Beirut, we kept getting calls from colleagues and the security guy at a friend's NGO telling us that things were getting worse in Saida and that we shouldn't go back to Beirut. (Saidi is on the road between Tyre and Beirut.) My roommate had a meeting early the next morning with a Western embassy, so we decided that we had to get back, and that we'd either take the sea road or take a detour through Nabatiyeh instead of taking the highway that passes by Ein el-Helweh.

We found a bus heading to Beirut, and the driver assured us that we'd be taking the sea road instead of going through Saida, so we got in and joined the mix of Lebanese and Palestinian passengers. Of course that wasn't the case. As our bus was approaching the hot area of Saida, which had apparently been alive with bullets and RPGs earlier in the evening, we crawled toward the turnabout as everyone was straining to look ahead and see if there was still any fighting.

"Ma fi shi, ma fi shi" (there's nothing, there's nothing), we heard before a Palestinian woman got out of the bus cautiously and started walking home, wherever that may have been. We passed through the city without incident, and made it back to the Cola bridge in Beirut.

On the way from Cola to Gemayzeh, we went through no fewer than six checkpoints. Twice we had to get out and let the Army (and in one case a rude plain-clothes guy, hopefully mukhabarat instead of militia) check our bags and ID. Well, they checked the three men in the car, the woman among us, of course, was never searched, and her bags went unopened. (Chivalry definitely has its place and time, but I'm afraid that it's not so welcome when when bombs have been popping up in public places on a weekly basis.)

People are fed up. There's more and more talk of leaving, and those who had planned to come back from abroad for the summer are reconsidering. A friend of mine who is graduating from the business school at the Lebanese American University told me that at the end of each class, her professor is swamped with Lebanese students pleading him to find them jobs in the Gulf so they can get out of Lebanon as soon as possible.

"The situation," as we've come to call it, is not boding well for the economy. Tourism looks like it will be dead if things don't straighten out soon, and you can look at the Gemayzeh and see how the street is practically empty compared to what it should look like on any given summer evening. Paranoia has been ever-present, with people franticly spreading the word that "Hamra is next," or "I heard Monot is going to get hit."

But in the Lebanese way, this fear has also turned into humor, giving birth to things like a Facebook group that's started a competition to see who can guess where the next bomb will be. I think you win an extra special prize if you guess two bomb locations in a row...

I don't know what to think about what's currently happening in Lebanon. I have a lot more questions than answers about the whole mess. I posted a few links to articles that were on or mentioned Fatah al-Islam, and it's no clearer to me who is financing these guys now. Everyone seems to be against these guys, from the PLO and Hamas to March 8 and 14, and Abssi is wanted on terrorism charges in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The opposition, backed up by Sy Hersh, seem to think that these guys have been supported by Saad Hariri, whereas the pro-government forces are blaming Syria.

A few things don't make sense, though. If these guys were really pro-Syrian, why would they have splintered off from the very pro-Syrian Fatah al-Intifada? And if they were really a tool of Hariri, why would they be fighting the ISF? Of course both of these questions assume that whoever financed these guys is still in control -- which may not be the case at all.

In any case, there are a lot of unanswered questions for me. Like why the ISF was even involved in the first place in a bank robbery investigation, and why then, the affair was handed over to the Army. Another question is what it would take to get permission to enter the Palestinian camps. Yet another is whether these fighters are Palestinian or rather foreigners (I've been seeing accounts that some are Yemeni, Bangladeshi and Saudi).

In any and all cases, the LAF is in a tough situation. If they back off, they look incompetent, which is already kind of the case since the militants seem to have given better than they have gotten in the exchange with the army so far. But since they cannot enter the camps, they're shelling them, which no matter what the case, cannot be a very precise way of retaliation. The shelling of Palestinian camps in Lebanon has historically been a bad idea, and I imagine that this time is no exception. The problem is that it is hard to see a solution to the problem short of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and the refugee problem it created.

And now the bombs. Both Verdun and ABC have been hit with what seem to be warning shots. This is disconcerting to say the least. (I live about ten minutes by foot from the first bomb site.) Are the bombings related to the fighting in Tripoli? If so, why would a salafi group attack a Sunni neighborhood? Was Fatah al-Islam responsible for the bus bombings last February? If they have been responsible, why haven't they claimed credit for either?

A friend of mine may be going up to Tripoli to see what's happening for herself, and I've asked another friend at UNRWA if she has seen any echoes of what's happening in the other Palestinian camps. I'll post more as soon as I know more.

In the meantime, I'm way past deadline on a manuscript and sick as a dog, so that's all for now...

Following Sy Hersh's write-up including Alastair Horne's comments that Fatah al-Islam is being funded indirectly through Saad Hariri by the US, there has been more interest in the new group in the American media.

The NY Times has an interview with the group's leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and the LA Times has an article on accusations by the Lebanese government that Fatah al-Islam was involved in the bus bombings last month.

Neither article mentions Hersh's article or Crooke's comments, although both mention the claim that the group is sponsored by Damascus to start trouble in Lebanon.