As expected, the summit between the Lebanese and Syrian presidents, Michel Sleiman and Bashar Assad, yielded statements redolent with platitudes…
Author: Michael Young
By this time, you will have heard what happened to former White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who resigned this week…
As Israel stumbles to limit the fallout from its foolish, violent handling of the Gaza flotilla incident, a larger question…
Washington seems listless these days when it comes to the Middle East. The Obama administration is in power but doesn’t…
In his book “What’s Left,” the British author Nick Cohen quotes a onetime Foreign Office official as saying, “All isms…
No one could fail to notice that it was a Syrian spokesperson, Wi’am Wahhab, who spilled the beans recently about…
Some will argue that the United Kingdom’s expulsion this week of an Israeli diplomat, by most accounts a Mossad agent,…
There was a revealing moment last Saturday in the interview conducted by Al-Jazeera’s Ghassan bin Jiddu with Walid Jumblatt, which…
Why is it that only days before Iraq’s parliamentary elections, we’re getting no sense of what they mean for the…
An interesting news item has appeared lately in several Arabic newspapers, including the local Al-Liwaa. Reports, citing Lebanese judicial sources,…
The Lebanese government, cobbled together from disparate elements, has had a predictably fitful start. However, one headache may be looming…
The debate over whether to attend the commemoration this weekend of Rafik Hariri’s assassination has divided the March 14 faithful.…
When a mass murderer dies, it is usually an anticlimax. At his hanging this week, Ali Hassan al-Majid, the cousin…
There was something vaguely surrealistic in the Lebanese government’s response on Tuesday to the reservations expressed last weekend by Abou…
Only days after it was announced that the chief investigator, Neguib “Nick” Kaldas, would soon leave the Special Tribunal for…
The statement released Thursday by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon announcing that its chief investigator, Naguib “Nick” Kaldas, would be…
In his Ashoura speech this past weekend, Hizbullah’s secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, irritated many Christians. He recommended that they…
Below the Future Television offices in Kantari, there is a digital counter to record the number of days that have…
In the shambles that is the Maronite leadership, Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir has over the years been a beacon on the…
Next week, US President Barack Obama will announce his new strategy for Afghanistan. After a long delay, it’s about time.…
The death of the Independence Intifada of 2005 has been prematurely announced many times. However, today we have in front…
As the permanent members of the UN Security Council, along with Germany, prepare for a dialogue with Iran in October…
So it’s as clear as a bomb explosion on St. Valentine’s Day: Lebanon’s government crisis is and always was about…
We’ve reached the point where we can assume that virtually everything currently being said about the Special Tribunal for Lebanon…
There is great discomfort these days among those who backed Barack Obama’s “new” approach to the Middle East when he…
Allow me, despairing reader, to cite from Bashar Assad’s speech of March 5, 2005, before the Syrian Parliament. You may…
Did Walid Jumblatt really need to drop his political bomb last Sunday at the Beau Rivage Hotel, Rustom Ghazaleh’s former…
The news on Wednesday from Nabih Berri was that we are closer to a new government than anyone thought. If…
As prospects increase for a conflict over Iran’s nuclear program, Hizbullah and Israel are clearing the way for a possible…
When Walid Jumblatt visited Hassan Nasrallah recently in a catacomb of Beirut’s southern suburbs, he took with him two books,…
Michael Young Last Updated: July 08. 2009 8:44PM UAE / July 8. 2009 4:44PM GMT A friend once pithily summed…
It’s the kind of person that Amine Gemayel is that he had two sons, one who channeled his father, the…
Much indignation has been voiced in recent days against the actions of the Al-Manar website and television station that pushed…
The barrage of verbal attacks organized by the opposition against Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir is worrisome. Sfeir’s partisans are unlikely…
Michel Aoun’s yawning emptiness was on display a few weeks before the parliamentary elections, when he was asked why he…
With three days left until Lebanon’s parliamentary elections, it’s difficult not to get caught up in the predictions game, even…
The article published in Der Spiegel accusing Hizbullah of being behind the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik…
Last Saturday, Audette Salem was hit by a car, and died soon afterward in hospital. By then she had become…
It is a sign of the confusion in Lebanon’s Christian community today, particularly the Maronite community, that the outcome of…
The release of four Lebanese generals by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon considering the murder of Rafik Hariri has shocked…
Walid Jumblatt is rapidly becoming a star of the portable telephone screen. After being filmed tongue-lashing his Druze brethren last…
The killing of four Lebanese soldiers on Monday reawakens some old thoughts about a phenomenon I’ve watched over the years,…
Two months away from Lebanon’s elections, we can begin to discern clarity amid the vapors of boiling ambition. Over 700…
I first met Kamal Medhat, whom I always knew as Kamal Naji, in early 2007, when I was looking for…
In 2007, Marcel Ghanem hosted a program commemorating the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, the late Lebanese…
You can say many disparaging things about the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, but he did manage, until his dying…
Much attention was paid last week to the run-in the British-American author and journalist Christopher Hitchens had with followers of…
We were delighted to realize last week that Daniel Bellemare, the head of the United Nations commission investigating the killing…
Leave it to the Israelis and Palestinians to extinguish the heavenly light that accompanied Barack Obama into the White House.…
Daily Star staff In his book “The Arabists”, Robert D. Kaplan describes an episode after the American pastor, Benjamin Weir,…