So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?

Avari-Nameh's Haroon Moghul once again takes an insightful, critical and refreshing look at the situation in Lebanon.

The same site links to Paradise Lost: Robert Fisk's elegy for Beirut.

The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:

My people died of hunger, and he who

Did not perish from starvation was

Butchered with the sword;

They perished from hunger

In a land rich with milk and honey.

They died because the vipers and

Sons of vipers spat out poison into

The space where the Holy Cedars and

The roses and the jasmine breathe

Their fragrance.

Juan Cole, at Informed Comment, lets the facts do the talking.

Someone pointed out the Independent's front page to me. Says it all really.


Meanwhile, the picture in Iraq looks bleaker than ever.