Syria’s Kids: Children of the Rubble
December 13 I have been very neglectful of the blog the past few weeks and so am updating with four recent articles from Newsweek/Daily Beast. The first is below and was filed from the Lebanon city of...
View ArticleLebanon Peeps Into The Abyss
And this filed on December 7 and examining the dangers to Lebanon of a spillover from the Syrian civil war. “No one is suggesting that the clashes have yet reached a tipping point. The government in...
View ArticleAnsar Al-Sharia Is Back
My latest piece in Newsweek/Daily Beast explores how Libya has tapped local militias including the one blamed for the attack on the U.S. consulate—to patrol Tripoli and Benghazi amidst a spiraling...
View ArticleAnger At Libyan Court Ruling On Multiple Wives
Tripoli Human rights campaigner Farida Allaghi tells me for a VOA radio piece that Islam is being hijacked. That’s her reaction to a Libyan Supreme Court ruling overturning a marriage law that required...
View ArticleNo Cover-Up, Just Confusion: Thoughts on Benghazi and Stevens
According to U.S. lawmaker Frank Wolf the Obama administration has handed the FBI an impossible task in investigating the assault last September on the American consulate in Benghazi that led to the...
View ArticleTripoli Isn’t Cairo.
Tripoli, May 4. To provide some perspective: some wire agencies and newspapers today have talked about hundreds of protesters rallying to the Libyan government’s side in a standoff with militias over a...
View ArticleWhen a Jihadist Bomber Bungled
Earlier this week I cast more light on the April 23 bombing of the French embassy in Tripoli. In a piece for the Daily Beast I added to a previous report of mine where I revealed that there was more …...
View ArticleOn Benghazi Confusions and Partisanship
Washington DC I am back in Washington DC for a few days and am observing with disbelief some of the partisan dictated nonsense about last September’s assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi....
View ArticleLebanon Mirrors Syria
Tripoli, Lebanon First come the pop of fireworks set off by ultraconservative Sunni Muslims here in Tripoli celebrating news of a bombing in Beirut of a suburb controlled by the militant Shia movement...
View ArticleWaiting For The Revolution
TRIPOLI, Lebanon — He is a revolutionary man, this 46-year-old Sunni, Salafist sheik and father of six with the graying beard, twinkling dark eyes, immaculately ironed thawb and manicured fingernails....
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