A Blog by the Editor of The Middle East Journal

Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Some Doings at Other Blogs

  • The indispensable Qifa Nabki has a post he calls "Matters of the Heart." The basic story and his comments thereon:

    “A member from the Zoaiter family fired two RPGs in the air in Baalbek’s Sharawneh neighborhood after he failed to kidnap a girl.”

    I love these guys. Anybody else would just shrug his shoulders if he failed to kidnap a girl. But not the Zoaiter boys. They don’t repress their rage; they express it in a healthy cathartic exercise involving shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons.

    And “kidnap”? Really? I think that’s a little bit much. What it sounds like to me is that this guy asked a girl out on a date, and she told him to get lost. So he put a bag over her head and tried to stuff her in the trunk of his car, but she kneed him in the groin and fled. I’d hardly call that attempted kidnapping. As a friend wrote to me this morning, “In my day, we called it ‘a-courting’…”

    I’m waiting for some enterprising graduate student to write a dissertation on the place of RPGs in the tribal customs of the Bekaa valley. Getting married? Graduating from high school? Celebrating a golden anniversary? An RPG makes everything just a little bit more meaningful.

  • From a poster known as Alex at Syria Comment, a lengthy, closely argued post on "The Case or Syria." Is it pro-Syrian? Yes. Will everyone agree? Of course not. But it's detailed and worthy of your attention.

2 comments:

Martin Kramer said...

And I respond to Walt's post on Blair's testimony, here.

It's all about chronology (something the Middle East Journal has always prioritized, and for good reason).

Michael Collins Dunn said...

Thanks Martin, both for the link, which helps the dialogue, (though I don't know if Walt reads my blog) and the kind words for MEJ. The Chronology section has been there since the first issue in January 1947, though it was first called "Events of the Quarter." Though we've dropped some of our early departments ("Documents" because everything is online; the "Bibliography of Periodical Literature because a) online and other digital bibliographies are preferred by librarians and b) we didn't have the resources to keep up with burgeoning media) we still try with the Chronology. Glad you appreciate that.