About your Lebanese Family, Anne…

Comment  on my post dated 9/12/2011,  from David Anthony in America:

To Anne Frandi-Coory: – What a touching note.   [from post: My Father, Joseph Jacob Habib Eleishah Coory]. You mention Aramaic: I have a little story for you:

About 30 years ago, about 1978-1980, my jidoo [grandfather] was visiting my house when a distant cousin from Lebanon visited.  My jidoo’s parents came to America in 1892. He was raised speaking what he and we thought were Arabic. He spoke it fluently- after all, it was what was spoken in his household growing up.

Well, when my cousin, who recently came from Lebanon fleeing the civil war, visited, they (my cousin and my grandfather) both spoke to each other in [what they thought was] Arabic. They couldn’t understand one another. My cousin said my grandfather wasn’t speaking Arabic, but a language much older. He said it was like an Italian listening to Latin.

Come to find out that my jidoo didn’t really speak Arabic. The language he spoke so fluently was Syriac- as you know, a version of Aramaic. The “Arabic” words I picked up as a youth tended much more towards Aramaic. In fact, many years after my jidoo passed away, a very good friend of mine from Zahle told me that the few Lebanese words my dad and I spoke had a strong northern (Ehden) accent.

Just one other note: Anxiety runs rampant in the Lebanese side of the family. For some, the levels of anxiety run so high that it’s disabling. I’m wondering if there’s a similar issue in your family.

Too, as you mention above, [in 'My Father...'] my dad was beaten by the Catholic nuns at his school growing up. Two reasons; 1) Lebanese boys were forced to sit in the back of all classes. Italian and Irish boys sat in front. 2) As my dad had terrible nearsightedness, and he wasn’t allowed to sit in the front of the class because of his skin color, he could never see the blackboard. In order to take any notes, he’d copy notes from the student sitting next to him. When he got caught by a nun, which was often, he’d get sent to the principle for copying notes. The principle would tell him to put out his hand, which would then get beaten pretty badly.

Finally,one day, when he was in 8th or 9th grade or so, he came home with such a beaten hand that my sitoo [grandmother] noticed. After she insisted he tell her what happened, my dad then explained what happened. Right away they went and bought him his first pair of glasses. After that, he could see the blackboard better- and his grades went sky high.

But the damage was done. By tenth grade, he left school to work in a factory, partly driven, I’m sure, but the beatings.- David Anthony.

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A very old photo of my grandmother, Eva Coory's mother and brother, taken in Bcharre, Lebanon.

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Dear David

How wonderful to hear your story. Yes, Aramaic is derived from an ancient form of Syriac and is now spoken only by small pockets of Syrian peasants. It was also the language that Jesus spoke. I did much research into my grandparents’ history and the history of Lebanon in general. My grandfather’s ancestors moved to the hills of Lebanon (Bcharre) around the 14th Century, from Iraq.

You may be interested in my book ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar?’ A personal story, but which also delves deeply into the ancient history of my ancestors and the Aramaic language, which was eventually swamped by the advance of Islam and Arabic, which became the lingua franca of Arabia. BTW, Zahle is a name that pops up in my grandfather, Jacob Habib Fahkrey’s family history.

Anxiety runs deep in my family tree as well.  In both the Lebanese and Italian sides of my family, volatile personalities reign.  My children have inherited the tendency to anxiety, although nowhere near as intense as preceding generations. Of course, both Lebanese and Italian peoples express the whole range of emotions vividly, which can sometimes be quite intimidating to others.

I agree with you about the blatant racism that thrived in those times. Once again, both my Lebanese and Italian ancestors experienced this.

I would love to hear more of your story.

Best wishes,
Anne

Phoenician Footprints All Over Beirut

Article by Robert Frisk in The Independent 3 December 2011

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On a clear day in Beirut, you can see back into its Phoenician past

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I walked down a Phoenician street the other day, built under Persian rule.

A bit bumpy and uneven underfoot – like many a street in modern day Iranian and Lebanese cities – but this one happened to be about 2,600 years old. It ran down to a small harbour, lined by covered stone sewers and drainage ditches on each side, massive door lintels before private homes and a row of shops and warehouses and possibly a temple, five streets and 18 buildings over an area of 3000sq m.

I should say at once that this street constructed under Persian occupation is scarcely two miles from my home on the Beirut seafront, one of the great excavations which the rebuilding of the post-civil war city opened up for future generations, layer after layer of Paleolithic, Phoenician, Greek, Roman and Ottoman Beirut. The place was originally known as “byrt” – which possibly means cistern or well, according to researcher Josette Elayi – then it became Berytos in Greek, Berytus in Latin and now, of course, Beirut. The names are sandwiched together like the layers of streets. This street even yielded up terracotta figures of a woman with outstretched arms, probably the deity Ashtart.

And, true to so much of Lebanese history, Beirut was, in effect, under occupation. In the first millennium BC (875-332BC), all the cities of Phoenicia were under first Assyrian and then Babylonian and then Persian control. Beirut belonged to Sidon – it always seems to belong to someone else – which is now a scruffy Crusader seaside port 30 miles to the south of the modern Lebanese capital. So the coins found in Beirut are Sidonian; the local military power was Sidonian; it was Sidon which dealt directly with the Persians. Beirut was a fishing and trading port, its wooden vessels with their high prows sliding out to Greece, Italy and distant Carthage.

Archaeologists have found sycamore wood here, Egyptian blue pigment, marble, silver, iron, jars for carrying Phoenician olives, olive oil, wheat, walnuts, grapes and wine across the Mediterranean. There’s even a stone with a carved graffito of a Phoenician merchant ship, mast fixed with ropes to the sides, two oars tied together as a rudder. It reminds me of the fishing boats carved into the Tudor wood of the old port of Rye, still visible today on the south side of the Sussex churchyard long after the sea has withdrawn from this cinque port.

Today, the Persian-ruled city in Lebanon is exposed beneath the new souks of Beirut. It is part of the city’s “Heritage Trail” – in Lebanon, the word heritage means what it says and does not carry the grotty reputation of Britain’s tawdry historical re-creations – so that future generations can walk around the old/new city and “watch” its creation over the centuries in Roman streets and Crusader walls, a project overseen by Amira Solh, the young Cornell-trained urban planner who works for Solidere, the company that rebuilt Beirut. She has dreams of an interactive film display behind the underground Persian streets – and promises me there will be no English-style guides flouncing around in Persian costumes. This is serious history for serious people.

Nothing, of course, could be more serious than finding yourself under Persian rule. Roula el-Zein, an archaeologist and consultant for Solidere, described Beirut at the time as “just a small city belonging to Sidon, the city which had all the power”. The Phoenicians, she says, “accepted Persian rule after the Babylonians left, and without any problem in assisting the Persian wars against Egypt. Sidon and Tyre were with the Persian kings” – King Baalshillem the Second and King Abdashart, for those who want to know. But when the Persians decided to attack Phoenician Carthage, things quickly went wrong.

“According to Herodotus,” el-Zein says, “the Phoenicians of Sidon refused to build ships for the Persians and help them. And because of this, the Persians never finished their north African project.” It makes sense. Why should the Phoenicians of Sidon and Beirut help their masters attack the Phoenicians of Carthage? It would be left to the Romans (“Carthaga delenda est”) to destroy the city whose remains lie in modern-day Tunisia and whose land was sown with salt so that it could never be reinhabited.

It’s always the same when you think you’ve got the Lebanese on your side. First they are your friends – the French thought that after the 1914-18 war – and then they become subversive and upset all your military plans, the amiable historical mosquito that bites you when you least expect it and then poisons you. It doesn’t hurt until you realise what has happened. Message: leave the Phoenicians/ Lebanese alone. Ask the Israelis.

And so the Persians should have left the Beirutis to their dyeing trade – there are murex shells and wood charcoal aplenty to prove it – and their fishing boats. In the old Roman cities of Europe – in Rome or at Corbridge on Hadrian’s Wall – I like to run my hand along the rutted highways of antiquity, where the barrows and horse-drawn carts and chariot wheels of history slowly carved their passage into the great stone Roman roads. Humans didn’t just build this; they lived here and travelled here. Those double ruts in the road are fingerprints.

And old Phoenico-Persian Beirut has some “fingerprints” of its own. In the old port, now under rue Allenby – another imperial name, victor of Gaza and humble conqueror of Jerusalem – there is an ancient stone bollard, and cut into it are two natural slits, created during the decades of Persian power. They are the marks worn down by the ropes tying Phoenician ships to the quayside, the stone gradually worn away as the hawsers cut into it, pulled back and forth by the same Mediterranean tide which sloshes away outside my home.

Thank you Robert Fisk- A great article about a great civilisation

Kahlil Gibran – Lebanon’s Poet

Poetry is not an opinion expressed. It is a song that rises from a bleeding wound or a smiling mouth. – Kahlil Gibran

Dedicated to all the poets and writers in the Middle East who have been murdered in their peaceful pursuit of freedom for their country.

Lebanese Settlers Reunion – Dunedin NZ 2011

Lebanese expats in New Zealand mark their reunion in October 2011:

Descendents of 19th Century Lebanese settlers in Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island, have unveiled a Cedars of Lebanon Grove at the city’s botanical garden:

…about 250 people gathered on the edge of the Botanic Garden’s Mediterranean Garden to witness the ceremonial opening of a new grove dedicated to the community’s history in Dunedin.

The grove’s centrepiece was a large bronze sculpture of the cone of a cedar, the national tree of Lebanon, as well as two cedar trees and a wooden park bench on which to sit and contemplate the area.

Dunedin also has its own ‘Lebanon-town’:

The gathering also included exhibitions of family history, a reception and black tie ball in the Dunedin Town Hall, as well as a tour of the “Lebanese precinct” between Carroll, Maitland, Stafford and Hope Sts in Dunedin.

As Reported by LebTweets

Jacob & Eva Coory c.1897

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Anne Frandi-Coory’s grandparents Eva and Jacob Coory (Fahkrey) and their extended family lived in Carroll Street for over 100 years, following their emigration from Bcharre, Lebanon. Kahlil Gibran came from the same village as Eva and Jacob, and were related by marriage.

Anne would have liked to have gone to the reunion, but too many past ghosts are forever  haunting her.

Note from Anne Frandi-Coory: Thank you Wendy Joseph, for attending the Lebanese Reunion,  I know how hard that must have been for you; We never would have found each other again if you hadn’t been so brave.

Both our mothers abandoned us, we paid a heavy price, but survived. Sadly, with no help from the wider Lebanese community.  That’s not to say that I am not proud to be Lebanese, but I cannot speak for Wendy.

The question I ask of the Lebanese community, which endlessly heralds its “sense of family”, is this: Why was there not enough love and compassion from aunts to close in around me and Wendy? True, our mothers were ‘outsiders’ and found life difficult (to put it mildly) among so many ethnocentric Lebanese immigrants, with their different style of living and eating. I remember the ‘racism’ well. Everyone was well aware within the community at the time,  that preference for marriage partners was for those from within the Lebanese community itself or from those families back in Lebanon.  But the truth was, many did marry “unglese” and life could be very difficult for them unless they were strong and independently minded, which my mother certainly wasn’t.

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More….photos, stories

Catholic schools, churches and orphanages

Whatever Happened To Ishtar?;  A Passionate Quest To Find Answers For Generations of Defeated Mothers – throughout Anne’s family tree; both Lebanese and Italian

Beautiful Photos of Bcharre, Lebanon

Ibrahim Qashoush; Another Poet Silenced

From Lebanon’s poet & writer, Kahlil Gibran:

Poetry is not an opinion expressed. It is a song that rises from a bleeding wound or a smiling mouth.

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In memory of all the poets and writers who have died in the Middle East peacefully pursuing freedom for their country.

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Sketch by Kahlil Gibran who understood deeply the pain of his people

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Ibrahim Qashoush, whose lyrics moved thousands of protesters in Syria, and who sang his jaunty verses at rallies, has been found dumped in the Orontes river with his voice box cut out.  A symbolic message from Bashar’s brutal regime. Qashoush had been forced into a car while on his way to work in central Hama.

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Ibrahim Qashoush in peaceful repose

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The father of three boys, Ibrahim Qashoush, was a fireman in the central Syrian city of Hama who wrote poetry in his spare time.Before the uprising in Syria began in March, he’d write about love or the struggling  times.  His friends say all his poems and songs were  instinctual. He’d sit with his friends and suddenly begin reciting a poem from memory.  Ibrahim’s star rose with protests in the city. At nearly every protest, the crowds were singing his most popular lyric, “Come on, Bashar, time to leave.” His poems and songs rang with a down-to-earth, jokey, rhythm.

Obviously, Bashar and his government fear the pen or the poet more than the sword!  It is the same with other current dictatorships around the world; they will kill anyone who dares to write the truth about their corrupt and murderous practises.  Human Rights are a poet’s dream. Journalists, poets, writers,  all fair and easy game.  But despots can’t unwrite was has been written nor tear out what is in people’s hearts.

Bashar quote: ”If you say ‘God, Syria and Bashar’, I say ‘God, Syria and My People’. I, Bashar Al-Assad, will remain dutiful and faithful to my people…”  Hollow words from a man who will not relinquish power. Another Arab leader who must be terrified in their thinking about  where  and when the Arab Spring will end.

As a child, I often heard my Lebanese grandmother, Eva Arida Fahkrey, rail against “Syria” and what it had done to her Lebanon.  I didn’t understand then, but I now know Syria never let Lebanon forget that she had been carved out of Syria’s land mass by the West.   My hope is that a new Syria will cease to interfere in Lebanon’s self-rule;she has enough problems with Iran, but that is another story.

RIP Ibrahim Qashoush.

Understanding the Arab Mind

The price you pay for a book bears no relation at all to the value of the stories and lessons held within!  I found The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai, [a prolific cultural anthropologist] marked down at a sale in a favourite NZ book shop.  I believe that, like cats, books find you, you don’t find them.  In all my travels I have never seen this book anywhere else.  And I found it while writing the final manuscript for Ishtar?

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One of the most enlightening books (for me) I have ever bought

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I grew up without knowing my Italian mother as a person.  She suffered from severe bipolar disorder with psychotic episodes. So, at ten months old, I was placed in a Catholic  Orphanage for the poor, and was visited only by my devoted Lebanese father.  His extended family could not find any room in their hearts to love me.

My father often took me to visit his extended family, in the futile hope that  their frozen hearts might thaw, but the quiet, prayerful ways of a nun-studded convent does not prepare a young girl well for the noisy and multi-generational home of  Middle Eastern immigrants.  In their view I was “of another breed”.  I escaped Catholicism and “Little Lebanon” as a teenager and never returned.  However, you can take the girl out of her Lebanese extended family but you can’t take the Lebanese influence out of the girl, as the familiar cliché goes.  I picked up the Aramaic language they spoke and many positive aspects of their lives; great cooks, devotion to family (if you didn’t have a foreign mother that is) but those positives  were buried deep in my soul for many years, under all the negatives.

From The Arab Mind by Albert H. Hourani: To be a  Levantine is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it. It is no longer to have a standard of values of one’s own, not to be able to create but only able to imitate; and not even to imitate correctly, since that also needs a certain originality. It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one’s own. It reveals itself in lostness, pretentiousness, cynicism and despair.

Arab Mind was such a help in the final stages of writing   Whatever Happened To Ishtar? A Passionate Quest to Find Answers for Generations of Defeated Mothers.  Many of my Lebanese family’s behaviours suddenly took on new meaning; the hatred they exhibited toward my mother and by association, to me, was the result of thousands of years of cultural prejudice.  Necessary in desert and mountain life in sectarian communities where brutal invasion and massacre were a common way of life.

To the Arab, saving face and honour are everything and when your beloved eldest son marries a sharmuta (Aramaic for prostitute-every woman who did not live up to the family’s cultural values was labelled sharmuta) then what can you do but exile from the family the issue of that union!  Being the only girl child made it easy for them to make me the scapegoat of all the family’s ills in a foreign country.

In this current era of the ‘Arab Spring’, I recommend you find a copy and read Arab Mind to gain an understanding of how differently we westerners from such very young countries, like Australia and New Zealand, view everyday life.  I think the half of my book that dealt with my father’s family was a much kinder book in the end because I read Arab Mind before I sent my re-written manuscript off to the publishers.  So many of the events that played out in my childhood took on very different meanings, while suppressed memories re-surfaced.  I understood better, what it must have been like for my naive, fifteen year old Lebanese grandmother, from the hills of Bcharre in Lebanon, to marry and follow my grandfather to the other side of the world.

How relevant to the lives of my Lebanese extended family, and by the same token, to the current Arab Spring,  are the following quotes in the book:

From author Hisham Sharabi: …There is no turning away from Europe. This generation’s psychological duality, its bilingual, bicultural character are clear manifestations of this fact. It has to judge itself, to choose, and to act in terms of concepts and values rooted not in its own tradition but in a tradition that it has still not fully appropriated.

From Author Halim Barakėt:…We are a people who have lost their identity and their sense of  manhood. Each of us is suffering from a split personality, especially in Lebanon. We are Arab and yet our education is in some cases French [my grandfather's second language was French], in some cases Anglo-Saxon and in others Eastern Mystic. A very strange mixture. We need to go back and search out our roots. We’re all schizophrenic…

I have lived a life in two halves, so I know what Barakėt means about being schizophrenic. Writing Ishtar? helped me to become one person and to discover the wonderful Italian and Lebanese genetic talents buried within me. The young Arabs of today have so many tools to use in ther search for who they are; Facebook, Google, Twitter, blogging, mobile pnones, etc etc.  Let’s hope their search for an identity wont take as long as it did my generation.

Photos of Bcharre  -breathtaking!

Lebanon = Islamic Factions

Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran wrote of Lebanon  - ‘Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation’.

(Garden of the Prophet 1934)  (see my post: Lebanon – Pity The nation)

Nothing has changed, it seems. Lebanon is being fought over by Sunnis, Shia,  and Hezbollah.  Some Christian groups are aligned to Hezbollah.   Saudi Arabia jointly with Syria is involved in trying to find a ‘peaceful’ solution.   Iran is “vitally supporting Hezbollah”.   One has to question these three countries’ motives.  Druze is  another group putting in its two cents’ worth.   The Druze carried out massacres of Christian Maronites because of their increasing power, during the times my grandparents lived in Bcharre.  Even Turkey still appears to have a stake in Lebanon.

Jim Muir BBC News, Beirut:

Tensions are rising sharply in Lebanon, amid indications that the international Special Tribunal set up to prosecute the killers of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri may soon issue indictments of members of the militant Shia movement Hezbollah in connection with the case.

Despite the dense dust-clouds already stirred in Lebanon by the tribunal and reactions to it, there are fears that the indictments, if and when they come, could still cause real trouble.  “Nobody knows what is going to happen, but the Shia in general, and Hezbollah in particular, can’t risk being accused, and it is bound to cause tension with the Sunnis,” said the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, who recently detached himself from alliance with [current Prime Minister],  Saad Hariri, improved relations with Hezbollah and is trying to stay neutral. “If Hezbollah is indicted, that will affect its image in the Muslim world as the heroic resistance against Israel,” he told the BBC. Mr Jumblatt accused the US and other Western powers of cynically using the tribunal to put pressure on Syria, Iran and others, and of trying to head off a compromise understanding among the Lebanese leaders.

“Whoever technically killed Rafik Hariri, those really responsible were [French President Jacques] Chirac and [US President George [W] Bush, who forced him to accept 1559,” he said, referring to the UN resolution passed in late 2004, just a few months before Mr Hariri’s murder. “It had three clauses in it which amounted to death sentences – the demand for Syrian troops to leave Lebanon, and for Hezbollah and the Palestinians to be disarmed,” Mr Jumblatt said.  “More important than finding out who killed Hariri, the most important thing now is to get out of this vicious circle which brings more tension every day, how to break this crisis between Sunnis and Shia.”

While the Saudis and Syrians are looked to as the most influential outside powers potentially able to foster an understanding and prevent the Lebanese factions taking to the streets again, others are also in a position to try to help. The Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had a hand in the Saudi-Syrian rapprochement, is currently on a two-day visit to Lebanon. And on Saturday, Prime Minister Hariri visits Tehran, his first such trip to the country that helped establish and still vitally supports Hezbollah.

Tensions have been steadily mounting over recent months as the expected indictments grew imminent, but the situation has been contained by an entente between Saudi Arabia and Syria, who exercise great influence respectively among Lebanon’s Sunnis and Shia.  The Iranian ambassador in Beirut has also been co-ordinating with his Saudi and Syrian counterparts to help keep the peace.

[Trying to keep the peace?  I would love to be a fly on the wall at these meetings].

Lebanese politicians had been hoping that Saudi-Syrian mediation at top level would very soon produce a formula that could be agreed on by the cabinet in Beirut to deal with the repercussions of the expected indictments.  But now there are fears that the Saudi role may fall victim to developments inside the kingdom. The monarch, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, was flown to the US on Tuesday for medical treatment. He was personally overseeing his country’s rapprochement with Damascus and their joint sponsorship of peace efforts in Lebanon. The king has temporarily assigned his powers to his half-brother, Crown Prince Sultan, who is himself ailing.

Lebanese politicians believe that Prince Sultan and other prominent members of his Sudeiri wing of the ruling family are much less keen on cultivating good relations with Syria.  CBC said its months-long investigation was based on interviews with sources inside the UN inquiry and on documents leaked from the tribunal.

It said that evidence gathered by the Lebanese police and the UN “points overwhelmingly to the fact that the assassins were from Hezbollah”. To back that allegation, it contained detailed diagrams showing how investigators traced interlinking networks of mobile phones which they believed led from the vicinity of the massive explosion which killed Rafik Hariri and 22 others, ultimately to Hezbollah’s communications centre under a hospital in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

The CBC film had a bombshell effect in Lebanon, where it dominated news bulletins and front pages. It also prompted comments from key players, including Prime Minister Hariri and the international tribunal prosecutor.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even held a meeting of his inner cabinet to discuss the possibility that Hezbollah might stage a coup in Lebanon should some of its adherents be indicted.

On Tuesday, shortly after the CBC documentary was aired, the Lebanese communications minister Sherbel Nahhas (a Christian allied to Hezbollah) gave a three-hour news conference at which he and other officials and experts showed detailed technical evidence which they said indicated Israel had complete penetration of Lebanese communications, to the extent of being able to plant parasite lines within existing lines.

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The country’s telecommunications minister said Israel had penetrated Lebanese telephone lines.

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Hassan Fadlallah, a Hezbollah MP who heads parliament’s communications committee, said three Hezbollah operatives had been detained as suspected Israeli spies until it was realised their mobile phones had been infiltrated. All of this may make it easier for Hezbollah to shrug off possible indictments as Israeli-manipulated falsehoods.

The allegation that Col Wissam al-Hassan fell under suspicion has further muddied the waters. As Rafik Hariri’s chief of protocol, Col Hassan would normally have been in the convoy that was hit by the blast that killed Mr Hariri and his entourage. But he had taken the day off to sit a university exam – an alibi that CBC’s sources said was doubtful, and did not stand up under scrutiny.  But Saad Hariri, questioned by journalists about the allegations, said he had always had full confidence in Col Hassan, and still did.

One of the prime minister’s senior aides went as far as to suggest that both Hezbollah and Col Hassan should sue CBC for libel. Another prominent Hariri supporter, MP Iqab Saqr, said the CBC report should be ignored because it contained “poisoned information, aimed at disturbing the desired settlement”. He said everybody was concerned “not to target Hezbollah politically, while Hezbollah should stop the political assassination of Lebanese”.

With both sides apparently impugning the integrity of the court – or at least the CBC leaks – it almost looked as though there were some common ground between them.

The tribunal itself – or its prosecutor, Canadian judge Daniel Bellemare – took the unusual step of responding to the CBC documentary, saying he was “extremely disappointed” by it and was assessing its impact on the investigation. This was widely seen in Beirut as implicit confirmation that the CBC had indeed sourced its report on genuine tribunal documents and information.

The decision on whether and when to issue draft indictments lies in the hands of prosecutor Bellemare, and it is not clear whether the first step – referring them to the pre-trial judge for confirmation – would be made public.

What a mess!  All I can say is POOR LEBANON, what will become of you. Kahlil Gibran must be turning in his grave.

Lebanon: “Pity The Nation”

Lebanon is dying

‘Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming  itself a nation’ - Khalil Gibran.

The above picture illustrates what can happen in a Lebanese street when a fight breaks out over parking space; a four-hour street war leaving three people dead.  Members of  small, well armed private armies roam the streets of Beirut.

Photo from article written by:  Associated Press Writer Elizabeth A. Kennedy

Not only are Lebanese separating themselves from the Arab world, but when asked who we are, we answer with “ana Shia” or “ana Sunni” or “ana Maruni” (meaning I am Shia, I am Sunni, I am Maronite). Within the small country of Lebanon there are around 16 major religions. As if  we could make ourselves any more complex, we specify not only if we are Arab or Phoenician, but what kind of Lebanese we are. This demonstrates how complex it is for some people to just say “Ana Libnani” (meaning I am Lebanese).

The separation within the nation has caused many disputes and countless deaths. Is it really that hard to just say you are Lebanese? – contribution from another blog

See  Understanding the Arab Mind