You are never forgotten..my thoughts are with you. Today the Court of State Security will state its verdict on Tariq.

This is something that will not be mentioned in the media of March 14 or in the media of the opposition because both could care less about the plight of Syrian workers in Lebanon. Today, Hariri militia men in the North stopped a bus carrying Syrian workers and shot at them.

‘Jumblatt: “It APPEARS that the ‘landline telecom network’ pertains to the security of the Resistance…”

No kidding? Couldn’t you have like ‘double checked’ before you plunged the country in strife, and given the Opposition this swift victory?’

Let me come out clean from the start, those men who flushed out the Future movement and surrounded Jumblatt are clean men, strong men and, I feel, the most honourable men in the region. Within 24 hours the Nissan Pathfinders had scoured Beirut clean, clipped Jumblatt’s wings and left the “Quartet” nations, Israel and most of the ‘civilised’ world outraged - again. Good, let them be livid. It was not outrageous for them to fund and arm these thugs they called moderates, certainly not outrageous for them to fuel sectarian violence throughout the Middle East to facilitate their occupation, but it is outrageous for them that their puppets should be so effectively stamped out. This doesn’t mean it’s all over though, far from it.

Qunfuz comments:

And look how they did it - a minimum of violence. No executions on the streets, handing positions over to the Lebanese army. That’s the ‘terrorists.’ And the response of the ‘moderate democrats’? Today they’ve murdered Syrian workers for being Syriam. Junblatt’s people have kidnapped and executed Hizbullah men ‘with knives’. Hooray for pro-Western moderation.

Most truthful quote of the day comes from the former head of Mossad: 3 years work by Western and Arab intelligence services in Beirut has been wiped out in one night.

Links of interesting Lebanese bloggers:

1-“friday-lunch-club”.

2-Marxist From Lebanon .

3-In the Middle of the East.

4-Land and People.

5-Lebanon …again.

6-Nostalgic Story Teller.

7-Sursock.

more links later..

Check out these awesome links on the currents in Beirut:

1-you cannot miss The Angry Arab News Service.

2- Sect or Sense?

3-The Free Men We Are shares with us his thoughts on the situation in Beirut from Damascus.

On the assassination of top resistance commander martyr Imad Moghnieh, Zeevi revealed that a “Lebanese side had provided ‘Israel’ with the picture of Moghnieh showing his real face. Only one person knew who (Hajj Radwan) was. He is a Lebanese leader whose security body was trained by Moghnieh.”
When the reporter asked: Is he Jumblatt?
Zeevi said: No comment.”

Israel and the U.S. first wanted to disarm Hezbollah through U.N. Resolution 1559 politically, with support from western-backed forces in Lebanon. Once this strategy failed the U.S. and Israel tried to disarm Hezbollah by force in 2006 through an invasion. In a sense it was the U.S. that invaded Lebanon in 2006. This attempt to disarm Hezbollah failed due to the Lebanese resistance. Now again the same forces are attempting to disarm Hezbollah, however through a different strategy, using different titles, this time the focus is on the telecommunications network of Hezbollah in Lebanon a critical element to Hezbollah’s arms.

The army command has just announced it is reinstating Wafiq Shuqair as the head of airport security and will investigate Hizbullah’s communications network ‘without harming the resistance’, asking for the withdrawal of all armed men and the reopening of the streets. So some serious negotiating has been going on behind the scenes today, and it looks like Hizbullah’s two main demands have been met. The militias have aleady left Hamra and presumably more if not all of the Hizbullah-occupied areas. Siniora, in his speech, had announced (like Hariri before him on thursday) that the contagious government decisions would be placed in the hands of the army command. After a bout of macho drivel about how they were not impressed by Hizbullah’s arms and would never give in to their demands, he did just that, proposing a five-point reconciliation plan which called for the immediate election of a consensus president (which would be Suleiman), the formation of a national unity government in which ‘the opposition can not block decisions and the majority can not impose them’ (I’m still trying to work out how exactly that differs from a blocking veto for the opposition), the referral of the above-mentioned decisions to the army command and the immediate withdrawal of all militias from the streets. All this may sound to good to be true, as it resolves a lot of the contentious issues of the last year and a half in one fell swoop. But seeing as the armed men have already been evacuating their positions, we ccan only assume that the opposition has agreed to the proposals, which pretty much give them everything they want anyway.

To all those who lost their lives during the clashes: to the civilian, 14th. March and to 8th. March deaths.

Me and my friend who is a palestinian refugee in Shatila camp were chatting last night about what’s happening in Beirut and this is what he said:

X: ya alla shu mabsout ya razan..

Me: offf, lesh ba2a?

X: 3am yesir fihom zai ma sar bi nahr el bared.

(my comment on this is this: bombing buildings on people’s heads and fully and literally destroying the camp is never like whats happening here in Beirut. yet, people go and call it “occupation”).

i say in “a street” and not in “the street” because there is no such thing as “one word” in the street(s).

I live in a building in Hamra where all my neighbors are HezbAlla supporters. and some of my roommates are also HezbAlla supporters. so one of my roommates is a reporter, he is an American and he works for a pro-Palestinian site, he was covering the clashes in Kurnish el Mazra’a. Today he comes and this is the first thing he said as he opened the door:

الله ونصر الله والحمرا كلّا

last night one of our friends came to check on us, she is a foreigner pro-Palestinian activist. everybody knows her here. she is always there for the palestinians, in palestine and in lebanon. and of course, she is there for resistance. also, the first thing she said was this:

الله ونصر الله والحمرا كلّا

she said that things will get calm soon, according to her resources.

i realize these two are not lebanese, but let me say something here..

on the 7th. i was the only person who was worried that things will get worse, my lebanese roommates and friends werent as worried, why? they said that these things always happen and soon things will get back to normal. that’s the problem, memory sometimes messes with our readings to situations and hence with our judgments. and it is happening again now when people call what is happening as “civil war” or “occupation”. why? it is so easy to go back to history and project terminologies that were founded then on every single situation where we have two parties fighting on the streets in lebanon. Nassralla was clear, this is not a civil war, this is an armed political pressure on a party that is trying to control resistance’s abilities to protect itself. if resistance is truly protected as Junblat was saying on TV the other day, why did he along with the U.S.-backed government initiated attacks on a very essential factor that protects the resistance (land lines)? why did he initiated the airport issue? there is a U.S.-backed strategical attack launched by the government on resistance now, and HezbAlla wont go this far if things wont get worse in the future. Nassralla was shockingly clear in his speech, they have two demands and nothing more. The government should start to think locally and stop taking orders from Welsh every now and then.

The government should rethink its resources.

I just came back from the funeral wake of my neighbor’s son. He was 16 and he and his friend were shot this morning in my street. His family owns a bakery and a cafe in my neighborhood. They are also very involved in the local mosque. He and a bunch of other kids always hang out between the bakery and the cafe. They are Hariri supporters by default, like many other Beirut Sunnis. At around 10:30, when the fighting intensity was beginning to decrease, they went out to have a look. The sniper caught them both.

Junblat, who asked for full protection from Berri in exchange of giving up all his positions to the Lebanese army, declares on New TV that he is not going to war.

via friday-lunch-club.

update: via Press TV.

i have just laughed. there are heavy gun-shots going on near us, and my roommate made me laugh amongst the shootings:

these are crazy mother-fuckers, i am happy to be as normal in comparison.

From Dr. Rami Zuraiq:

My children and their cousin hiding after coming under fire in our house this morning.

i realize that i might have a different selfish outlook to all this since I am from syria, i dont have children to worry about, i dont have a family here, it is me, my laptop and my believes. i thought it is only fair to link to Lebanese outlook as well:

from KerbBlog

I just want to give you an idea about those reporters who keep calling the take over of Amal in Beirut as “occupation”. There is an Italian journalist here with us in Hamra who is “reporting” what’s happening in Beirut to her agency in Italy and she is saying that although she hates Future guys and Ja’ja’ yet she is sympathizing with them against “HezbAlla’s occupation”. So I asked her what “occupation” is to her and this is her answer:

This is a Sunni area [Hamra] and when Shiaa take over Sunni area or any other non Sunni area it means they are occupying them. But when Shiaa take over Shiaa area it isn’t occupation anymore.

This is the logic that produces the news spread all over the media.

Al Jazeera says that 8 are killed and 15 are wounded in Beirut.

NTV: Ras el Nabe’ is completely under the Lebanese army’s control.

i always wake up at 6 :30 and sleep at 10, this is the first time in four weeks that i am up till 12:44 and i am not even sleepy.

it is not like every now and then i hear explosions and shootings, it is like every now and then i hear nothing- there are always shootings and explosions. me and my roommates are on the floor each with our laptops, with the light turned off. we are all in the corridor away from the windows.

i live with two reporters, so the 14th march leaders aren’t going to take pity on us.

there is no one outside walking, no one.

so if someone is burning tires that makes him an “occupier”?

the world is so simple to 14th march leaders.

photos are courtesy of Carol Kerbage.

this is the third big explosion i’ve heard in Hamra. some of the shootings are getting closer to Sanaye’. i have moved to another room because there was a big explosion near my place.