Posts Tagged ‘Annia Ciezadlo’
A trip back in time on Lebanon’s disappearing railway
Lebanon’s 408km of railway once connected the country to its neighbours, but today the train stations stand abandoned.
In August 1895, the first steam train departed from Beirut and passed across the Bekaa Valley towards Rayak station, near the border with modern-day Syria. It was the golden age of rail transport in Lebanon.
Lebanon’s 408km of railway once connected Beirut to Damascus, Syria, and Haifa, a coastal city in present-day Israel. Today, there is nothing left but dilapidated station buildings and rusted locomotives. The Lebanese civil war, which ran from 1975 to 1990, effectively put an end to rail transport in the country.
Some train stations were demolished by warring factions during the civil war; others were later bulldozed for highway projects; still others have simply been left abandoned. Historic locomotives rust at Rayak and Tripoli stations, while in Europe, the same engines are preserved in museums.
Annia Ciezadlo shared this link. photoessay by Changiz M. Varzi!
Karim A. Badra shared AL RIFAI.
We may not be able to turn back the clock, but we can surely enjoy taking the road back in time!
In which Stronghold the attacks took place in Paris? Cut out the craps belittling terror victims in Middle-East
Posted on: November 15, 2015
In which Stronghold the attacks took place in Paris?
Cut out the craps belittling terror victims in Middle-East, North Africa, Afghanistan, Iran, any non-western countries
Many smart-ass media wanted to show-off their rudiment knowledge of Lebanon and labelled the terror attacks on Burj Barajneh as occurring in a Hezbollah Stronghold.
Is that a way of sending the message that these attacks were legitimate and acceptable? Because the USA Black-listed Hezbollah as a terrorist organization?
Are the point blank killing of Palestinian stone throwers a civilized order in an Israeli State that proclaim to be a democratic system?
Are the civilians bombed every day by terror attacks in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt… less of valuable victims who need protection and security and safety?
Habib Battah shared this post of
Annia Ciezadlo posted on FBYesterday my feed was full of articles describing the 45 civilian people killed as taking place in a a “Hezbollah stronghold.”
Today everyone is posting an article describing the civilian Paris neighborhoods where ISIS killed 128 people as the city’s “young, progressive core.”
And another one talking about how this was an attack on “liberal, multicultural Europe.”
And everyone is exhorting everyone else to recognize our common humanity, to answer the attacks with compassion rather than hate, and sharing inspiring memes and tweets.
Lina Mounzer makes an important point:
When Paris or New York or Madrid are attacked, we don’t refer to them as “strongholds” of American militarism, or Western imperialism, or neo-colonialism.
We talk about how diverse and tolerant they are.
Nobody is talking, today, about how Paris police ban pro-Palestinian demonstrations on principle, or how liberal and multicultural that is.
We don’t talk about the cops and security cameras everywhere, or how certain kinds of people get harassed or killed in the streets.
We don’t discuss the experience of moving around a Western city without the protections of whiteness, or maleness, or money.
We don’t talk about Muslim women being stabbed, beaten, or arrested in Paris and the UK, bastions of “multicultural Europe,” or in the United States. (Google it.)
We bring a different standard to the discussion.
When the city attacked is a Western one, we don’t criticize the cultural values or the security measures of the place that has just been targeted.
We see the city’s security measures as vindicated by the killings—not as subtle justifications for them.
We do not cite them as evidence that the victims were living in a “stronghold” of militarism.
We focus on the victims, not on the security regimes of their rulers.
We don’t assume that if they live there, that means they have chosen to support and be complicit in those security regimes.
And if you think that by “we,” I mean white people, or Westerners, or that meaningless abstraction “the media,” think again. I mean us. All of us.
Think carefully about language, and abstractions.
Don’t participate in dehumanizing people who have just been bombed.
Think about why we discuss some people and places in terms of security and checkpoints, and others in terms of human lives.
Look up definitions in the dictionary. Don’t think you won’t make these mistakes yourself, just because you’re the right kind of person with the right kind of politics. You will. I will. We all will.
Note: The terror attacks in Beirut was planned on a larger scale: 8 suicide bombers were to blow a large hospital and a Mosque. The security dissuaded the attackers and two of them waited for the adjoining street to get crowded and blew themselves.
Apparently, Lebanon with its modicum of budget for its security services is highly more professional in taking seriously the frequent planning and execution of terror attacks. (Funded and planned by the USA and Israel, as everyone in Lebanon know)
In Lebanon, 41 foreign States have their own intelligence gathering agencies. Most probably, they gather their pieces of intelligence from Lebanon’s security services and lax communication control.
