News Bits

March/April 2004

The ongoing violence in the Middle East region, at its peak especially in Iraq and Palestine, reached Lebanon with Lebanese security forces clashing with supporters of the Free Patriotic Movement protesting youth emigration and the Syrian influence in Lebanon.

Tension was also evident on the Lebanese southern borders with the exchange of a spree of shelling between Hezbollah and the Israelis in the aftermath of the Israeli assassination of Palestinian Hamas leader Ahmad Yassin.

Violence replaced dialogue even at university campuses when student supporters of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party physically assaulted a student affiliated with the Free Patriotic Movement.

Debate and dialogue are apparently not in fashion. In the Middle East, they have been replaced by an endless wave of fist talk.

This is not to say that the alarmingly increasing culture of “an eye for an eye” has deterred the people of this region from living their “normal” lives especially the youth.

While the volatile region seems to have gone off limits, the youth were mostly preoccupied with the imported, now very popular, Star Academy show, a television real TV show in which a dozen of young people are, ironically, isolated in a compound, and asked to display all what they know of shallowness and meaningless talking, acting and singing.