photo américain

alternatives to disaster photographs

Wandering around the web this morning I spent some time reading a call for papers for a conference at Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies called "Humanising Photography". (Proposals by photographers, scholars and humanitarian workers due Dec 19th.) The associate director of the center (at Durham University in the UK) is the geographer David Campbell, who has written quite a bit on the representation of war, famine and disaster. Two projects he was involved in are on the web: Imaging Famine and The Visual Economy of HIV/AIDS.

While I appreciate analysis of images of famine and disaster and how they shape the way the public understands the world (Africa in these cases), I am usually more interested in exploring the alternatives to these depictions. It seems to me that contemporary photojournalism is gradually expanding its visual language to incorporate new visions and ways of seeing that go beyond the simplistic, decontextualized, isolated close up image of an emaciated or suffering individual. (See some of the newer members of Magnum Photos like Jonas Bendiksen for example.) However, the most interesting photographs for complicating our perceptions of a place or a people or a situation seem to be those embraced by the art world.

In that spirit, here are a few artists I stumbled across this morning who create representations of places that go beyond the stereotypes and cliches of the mainstream media.

The curator/photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi addresses this issue directly in a short, interesting interview about the Bamako 2007 photography biennial (in Mali). He put together a smaller exhibit of photography, "Spot On: Bamako 2007," from the biennial at the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) in Berlin. (If you're in Berlin the exhibit is on now until January 11, 2009.)

Check out work by artists from all over Africa (including North Africa and Egypt) by going to the Berlin exhibit website.

Here's a taste.

Sammy Baloji

Baloji makes collages of colonial era photographs incorporated into present-day landscapes. As the exhibit explains: "...in order to understand the present, he reads the traces of the past. He finds such traces and signs in the architecture of Congo’s state mining company. Once the Gécamines stood for the richness of the Belgian colony and the extraction of copper and cobalt was the backbone of the Congoles economy. Under Mobuto’s regime, however, this sector of industry was run down because of the lack of investments and the dictator claimed the profits."

Mouna Karray

"The industrial and harbour city of Sfax, Tunisia, is the home town of the artist Mouna Karray. Since four decades, a series of political decisions has led to the point that public places in Sfax have gradually become non-accessible areas without any function. The remains of these places, redefining the image of the urban landscape, are shown by Mouna Karray in her series Murmurer."

Another artist I found this morning is Ahmed Mater Al-Ziad Aseeri, from Saudi Arabia. He is also a doctor and has incorporated x-rays into his work.

Mixed media on paper, 152 x 102 cm

He explains: "It is designed to be like the opening pages to a religious text. But much larger. Originally the craftsmen would always spend a great deal of time on these pages. They’re the first thing you see. Instead of a traditional geometry I have printed two facing X-ray images of human torsos. I prepared the paper using tea, pomegranate, coffee and other materials traditionally used on these pages. By using them you ensure that when you come to paint onto the paper it will have an extraordinary luminous quality – the paint will truly shine. And that’s what I want to do with this piece, to illuminate. I am giving light. It’s about two humans in conversation. Us and Them. Dar a luz. So many religions around the world share this concept of giving light, not darkness. It is one religious idea that has reached mankind through many different windows."

60 years of the Universal Human Rights Declaration - photo slide show

Oeil Public, a French photo agency that I like to use for excellent photos of the Middle East, has a poignant and compelling slide show commemorating 60 years of the UN's Universal Human Rights Declaration. As you might imagine, from a photojournalistic/documentary agency, the photos almost all show violations of (not respect for) human rights. It's powerfully done. I rarely sit through online slide shows, but this one was riveting (the music adds a sense of urgency). Just click on the link above and it will start up.

One of the photographers whose work appears in the slide show is Karim Ben Khelifa, whose photos I use occasionally for Middle East Report, and who focuses on Islam and the Arab world.

Starting Again

This blog is changing from one focused on my year in Beirut to one that will still be about photography, but will revolve around my life in Baltimore. It will continue to feature my photography and my writings about photography (with occasional diversions).

So, rather than starting a whole new blog, I am going to continue posting in this particular bit of cyberspace, but the blog's name will change (once I think up a new one). You'll always be able to find it at this web address, regardless of its name.

Thanks for visiting!

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I saw the movie "4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days" the other night. It's by a Romanian director, Cristian Mungiu, and depicts a few days in the life of a woman helping her friend get an illegal abortion in 1987. It is unrelentingly bleak, but mostly well-crafted and compelling. [Nicolae Ceaucescu, Romania's ruler from 1965 until his overthrow in 1989, had outlawed birth-control and abortion in 1966 in an attempt to increase the population.]

Although I enjoyed the storyline, I also found the little details of life under that authoritarian regime very interesting and familiar. In 1990 I took a trip to Turkey and Bulgaria with some friends from Cairo, where we were living. Bulgaria's communist leader had only very recently been removed by opposition forces and later in 1990 the Communist Party gave up the reins of power and free elections were held for the first time since 1931.

But when we were visiting there was still a shortage of food in shops, we could get very little at the few restaurants, pro-democracy protests were still being held and the general look and feel of most places we visited was institutional and bare. It wasn't all desolate, though. In Sophia we randomly met a man who spoke English and we went to visit his mother and sister's young daughter at their flat in an area of colorless high-rise apartment buildings. Inside the flat was a whole different world. It was warm and vibrant, they offered us what must have been precious fresh oranges, chocolates and some homemade fruit liqueur. For a glimpse at what we saw, here are a few photos from that trip.

US in the Middle East

The longer I live in Beirut the harder it is to see the place as a visitor from the US would see it. But the other day, while attending some panels at the Beirut Media Forum, I heard a talk by the smart and informed journalist and press critic, Michael Massing who was visiting for just a few days. [He often writes for the New York Review of Books, which is where I have read his critiques of US press coverage of the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and later of coverage of the war itself.] He has spent time in Iraq but had not been to Beirut before. His talk explained the various impediments to reporting from Iraq –- non-Arabic speaking journalists, violence restricting their movements and interactions with Iraqis, the embed system of tagging along with American military units leading to isolation from other points of view, and lack of trust in Iraqi sources. I appreciated the talk, even though most was nothing particularly new especially if you've read his work, because I like straightforward analysis of how journalism works and what that means for readers’ understanding of the world.

Massing’s concluding point was also interesting. He explained that in order for a story to be told it has to be recognized as a story by the journalist, then the editor, and lastly it must fit within the bounds of what the public is willing to hear and tolerate. The location of these boundaries is something he has been noticing more lately. All societies have boundaries of what’s acceptable or not, but this part is distressing to me as he described the US public as still largely affected by an atmosphere of “fear, distrust, and xenophobia” since September 11, 2001.

Massing mentioned that the US is still very isolated from Arab views. For example, US cable companies don’t carry the new Al Jazeera International, which is in English. At the beginning of the talk he had admitted that seeing Beirut made him realize how misinformed he was on the situation and the city itself. I later asked him what surprised him. He had a couple of examples. He explained how he had taken a walk around the neighborhood of Hamra and from its appearance had assumed it was the Christian part of town, which he had been led to believe was more Western than the Muslim areas of Beirut. He was surprised to learn later that Hamra is not the Christian area but a mostly Muslim neighborhood. And when he was given a tour of the southern suburbs (Dahiyya) where Hizballah is the most popular party and has its various offices, he noticed that not all the women are swathed in black and there aren’t mullahs on every corner (he was poking fun at the stereotype too, I doubt he really expected that...did he?).

Also surprising to him was the effect of US support for the current majority (called the March 14th forces) in the Lebanese government. He seemed surprised to learn from people here how the US does not support compromise with the opposition (which is led by Hizballah). He said that the US stance of no compromise seems to stem from its “with us or against us” mindset and black and white definition of allies and enemies in the Middle East.

I too find this very frustrating. The more the US marginalizes, undermines and refuses to deal in any way with forces such as Hizballah and Hamas or countries like Iran and Syria the more their supporters and others will resist anything to do with the US. Any US support of democracy, human rights, NGOs, arts and education in the region, for example, then becomes tainted by this one-sided position and renders everything the US does here suspect and partisan in many people’s eyes.

One way for the US to do things differently is to interfere less directly (especially in the use of military force) and reduce the sense of threat that those not supported by the US in the region feel. By allowing the broadest range of voices and giving the region as a whole a sense of security and autonomy, internal forces can more freely work out new social and political relations on their own terms.

Now for something entirely different -- a new graffiti image on Jeanne D'Arc street of the French character from the book The Little Prince.

The words say "come to my heart."

[Here's the original Petit Prince, drawn by the author of the book, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in 1943.]  

Lebanese politics

One reason I find Lebanese politics difficult to follow is that it seems obvious no one is telling the truth. Besides verbally attacking each other, politicians here talk often about finding a compromise between the main factions or they say things aren't as bad as they seem. The news constantly reports that various leaders are planning to meet and talk things out. And yet, none of that ever makes the slightest difference, the crisis continues or worsens. In the Middle East Report Online article titled "Rallying Around the Renegade," Heiko Wimmen describes the system as a "Byzantine political game, whereby decisions and distributions of spoils are supposed to be worked out behind impenetrable smokescreens of lofty principles and diplomatic cant." This is definitely how it appears to me.

As the article points out, the traditional leaders (and a few newcomers) don't want this system of back room dealing to change. However, those in the opposition do. Their motives might be just as self-serving, but they talk about increasing transparency in the system and combating corruption and nepotism. I can see the appeal. This situation also reminds me that I read recently that much of the civil war (1975-1990) was a battle between those who were defending the status quo and those who wanted reforms and a non-sectarian system. Much is different now, and perhaps that sort of dynamic is usually present in civil conflicts, but still it strikes me as eerie.

Wimmen's excellent article is primarily about Michel Aoun and his Free Patriotic Movement. He describes Aoun's history, appeal and popularity and discusses why he is now aligned with the Hizballah-led opposition and despised by people in the ruling March 14th coalition. Along the way he illuminates how Lebanese politics works (or rather, doesn't) and why the country is in such a stalemate now. Very worthwhile reading.

Anyhow, I'm not a political expert of any kind, so my comments are necessarily simplistic. Read the article.

Politics and photography

I just read a great interview with Simon Norfolk from last year, which includes photos. Norfolk is a photographer whose work I've included in Middle East Report a couple of times (and once on my blog) and who uses a large format camera to capture how landscape is shaped by war (broadly defined). The interview is by Geoff Manaugh, who writes a fascinating blog called BLDGBLOG, about architecture (also broadly defined). Both interview and blog are also quite funny at moments.

Here are some excerpts:

Norfolk: So I started off in Afghanistan photographing literal battlefields – but I'm trying to stretch that idea of what a battlefield is. Because all the interesting money now – the new money, the exciting stuff – is about entirely new realms of warfare: inside cyberspace, inside parts of the electromagnetic spectrum: eavesdropping, intelligence, satellite warfare, imaging. This is where all the exciting stuff is going to happen in twenty years' time. So I wanted to stretch that idea of what a battleground could be. What is a landscape – a surface, an environment, a space – created by warfare?

BLDGBLOG: And that's how you started taking pictures of supercomputers?

Norfolk: Those supercomputers – big BlueGene, in particular – those are battlegrounds. BlueGene is designing and thinking about a space that is only about 30cm across and exists for about a billionth of a second, and that’s an exploding nuclear warhead. BlueGene is thinking about and modeling that space very intensely, because what happens there is very complicated.

That computer is as much a battlefield as a place in Afghanistan is, full of bullet holes.

...

All of the work I'm doing, I might even call it: "Toward a Military Sublime." Because these objects are beyond: they’re inscrutable, uncontrollable, beyond democracy.

On why there are rarely people in his photos:

I think people kind of gobble up the photograph. They become what the photograph is. For me, people just aren't that important; it's about this panoptic process, it's about this kind of eavesdropping, it's about this ability to look into every aspect of our lives. And I think if you put people into these pictures, I don't know – it would draw viewers away. It would draw viewers into the story of the people. It's not about, you know, Bob who runs the radar dome; it's about this thing that looks inside your email program, and listens to this phone call, and listens to every phone call in the world in every language, and washes it through computer programs. And if you say plutonium nerve gas bomb to me over the telephone, in an instant this computer is looking at what web pages you've been to recently, it's looking at my credit card bills, it's looking at your health records, it's looking at the books I check out of the library. That's what frightens me – it's not about: here's Dave, he works on the computer systems for Raytheon...

So I've always tried to pull people out of the pictures – and, if they're in my pictures, it's usually because they represent an idea, really. I think if you're going to talk about Dave, or Bob, or Wendy, you have to do it properly. You either do it properly or you don't do it at all.

...

BLDGBLOG: It often seems like the most interesting thing about these places is what cannot be photographed.

Norfolk: Absolutely – absolutely. That's why, whenever you see warfare now, it's photographed in that same dreary, clichéd way: it's metal boxes rolling across the desert. Every time you switch on CNN, or buy a newspaper, you see guys in metal boxes – because that looks good. These photojournalists, and these TV crews, they don’t explain the process: they show things that look good on TV. A satellite orbiting in space doesn't look good. A submarine – you know, the greatest platform we've ever built for launching nuclear weapons and for surveillance – that has no presence whatsoever in how most people understand what the military does today.

The same is true of electromagnetic stuff – information warfare, cyber-warfare – and I wonder what photojournalists of the future are going to photograph? Are they still going to photograph guys with guns, shooting at each other? Because quite soon there aren't going to be guys with guns shooting at each other. We're quite soon getting to the era of UAVs and stuff. People aren't even going to know what shot them – and there will be nothing to photograph.

...

I mean, I didn't get fed up with the subjects of photojournalism – I got fed up with the clichés of photojournalism, with its inability to talk about anything complicated. Photojournalism is a great tool for telling very simple stories: Here's a good guy. Here's a bad guy. It's awful. But the stuff I was dealing with was getting more and more complicated – it felt like I was trying to play Rachmaninoff in boxing gloves. Incidentally, it's also a tool that was invented in the 1940s – black and white film, the Leica, the 35mm lens, with a 1940s narrative. So, if I'm trying to do photojournalism, I'm meant to use a tool that was invented by Robert Capa ?

I needed to find a more complicated way to draw people in. I'm not down on photojournalism – it does what it does very well – but its job is to offer all its information instantly and immediately. I thought the fact that this place in Afghanistan – this ruin – actually looks a little like Stonehenge: that interested me. I wanted to highlight that. I want you to be drawn to that. I want you to stay in my sphere of influence for slightly longer, so that you can think about these things. And taking pictures in 35mm doesn't do it.

So the content of photojournalism interests me enormously, it's just the tools that I had to work with I thought were terrible. I had to find a different syntax to negotiate those things.

...

The thing that pisses me off about so much modern art is that it carries no politics – it has nothing that it wants to say about the world. Without that passion, that political drive, to a piece of work – and I mean politics here very broadly – how can you ever really evaluate it? At the end of the day, I don't think my politics are very popular right now, but what I would like to hear is what are your politics? Because if you're not going to tell me, how can we ever possibly have an argument about whether you're a clever person, your work is great, your work is crap, your art is profound, your art is trivial...?

For instance, I'm doing a lot of work these days on Paul Strand – and Paul Strand is a much more interesting photographer than most people think he is. The keepers of the flame, the big organizations that hold the platinum-plating prints and his photogravures, or whatever – these big museums, particularly in America, that have large collections – they don't want the world to know that Strand was a major Marxist, his entire life. He was a massive Stalinist. That just dirties the waters in terms of knowing who Strand was. So Strand has become this rather meaningless pictorialist now. You look at any description of Strand's work, and he was just a guy who photographed fence posts and little wooden huts in rural parts of the world. If you don't understand his politics, how can you make any sense of what he was trying to do, or what he photographed? These people have completely laundered his reputation – completely deracinated the man.

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What I like about his comments is the way he describes trying to photograph large political processes  that are usually invisible to us but are evident as traces in the landscape. His explanation of why, in order to do this, he needed to shift to using different tools from what photojournalists use resonates with my interest in the structures of photojournalism, how news photographs are constructed and why they look the way they do at different times in history. 

I also appreciate his thought that to evaluate and understand what a photographer is doing you have to understand their politics or views on the world. The example of Strand made me wonder, then what did he see in the fence posts? What was he trying to convey? Did it really relate to his politics or did he also have aesthetic interests that were to him separate from his politics? My hesitation with this idea is that one's political beliefs don't determine how you photograph something, but can inform it. Too many people are skeptical of, for example, Palestinian photographers covering Israel/Palestine because they assume their politics (which critics presume to understand) influence their reporting. But in reality there are many more factors than personal beliefs that influence a photojournalist's way of telling a story. [I have an essay on this subject coming out in the Jerusalem Quarterly in mid-October or so.]

You can see Simon's photos on his website and in his books. And read the rest of the interview at the BLDGBLOG site.

last sunday's trip to the south plus a few more photos

Last Sunday I went with some friends to a village in the south of Lebanon. I was tagging along with two photographers doing a project about cluster bomb victims and a writer whose mutual friend had asked them to visit a small village to see what had changed since she had done some academic research there in the 1960s. My writer friend and I took a shared taxi to Sour (Tyre) on the coast where we marveled at the gorgeous blue sea and met our friends. I haven't been to the south before, the other times I was in Lebanon it was still under Israeli occupation.

The village was way up on a hill somewhat close to the various borders -- Syrian and Israeli. A huge, bare mountain range separates this part of Lebanon from Syria and it made an imposing backdrop to the changing scenery. Along the way we stopped at numerous Lebanese army checkpoints to show passports or just be waved through, bought fruit from a farm stand, and wound along through valleys and over hills. Olive groves and grape vines were plentiful and the air was much drier and cooler than by the sea.

Here's a general view towards the border with Syria.

The landscape is open and scrubby. Being the summer, grass and flowers had already dried up and gone to seed, there were purple thistles in bloom, eucalyptus and cyprus trees. But it took so much time to get where we were going and so many checkpoints that we barely stopped to take photos.

Once in the village we found the municipal head quite by accident and told him our story. My friends had a list of people that the researcher had known in the 1960s and he proceeded to tell what happened to each. Most left during the Israeli occupation for other countries, one family collaborated with the Israelis  so they left when the Israelis did in 2000, and others died. Part way through the interview another man joined us. He wore a beard very neatly trimmed, a baseball cap and did not shake hands with me or my woman friend. We are certain he was a Hizballah representative. He served us coffee and very politely asked for and wrote down all our names and nationalities, what we were doing there and at the end asked to take a photo of us with his phone. It was all done as if he was just curious. But clearly they were nervous about us and what we were doing gathering information in this small hilltop village near the borders. I really wanted to take photos, but as I pulled my camera up to capture a nice view behind a laundry line with a few clothes pins on it and a fig tree on the edge, he put up his hands saying I couldn't take the shot. The view was similar to the photo above, showing the mountains to Syria.

They said he would show us the scenic way out of the village and we followed his motorcycle in our car until we were down the mountain among the olive groves. I was disappointed that we weren't allowed to explore the village, which on the way in we noticed has nice narrow streets, old stone houses and lovely little family gardens. But there was no reason for us to push the matter and the whole thing was quite interesting anyway. It was definitely a relief to get out of the heat and humidity, traffic and noise of Beirut for the day.

We went directly back to Sour and finally had lunch at about 5 at a little fish restaurant in the harbor.

Taking the shared taxi back I watched the various billboards along the way. Between ads for KFC, the new McDonalds in Sour, Swiss watches, and a cartoon telling kids to watch out for cluster bombs in the ground, were about five different posters lauding the Lebanese army. It was recently Army Day but also they have been battling Fatah el-Islam militants and dying in the (certainly now demolished) Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in the north for almost 3 months. One billboard shows a hand grasping a bunch of wheat stalks with a slogan that says something like "gathers" and which to Lebanese implies a sense of pulling together for unity. There is a notion here that the army is the one institution that unites Lebanese of all different political and religious persuasions. (Not everyone believes this, of course.) Another poster shows soldiers in a fighting position and proclaims that the army can be a "lion" when necessary. One shows a white dove perched on the end of a gun, but I don't remember what the slogan says.

The public sphere is never neutral here.

In a related note, here are a few more photos of posters and graffiti around Hamra.

Local politician defaced while Nasser is left alone.

Some posters don't last long.

Graffiti of birds and a little person.

There are a lot of aesthetically interesting shop signs here, like the one below with the telephone handsets mounted on top. I'm thinking of making a project of photographing them...

Bomb blast in Ras Beirut

First of all -- we are fine, we're safe at home.

However, we were very very close to the bomb that just went off in Beirut late this afternoon, which killed the MP Walid Eido (a member of Hariri's coalition) and his son and two body guards as well as at least 6 others. Waleed and I were walking into the outdoor al-Rawda cafe on the seafront with some friends and were approaching a table next to the water when the massive explosion happened.

The oddest part is how disorienting an experience it was. As Waleed noted, it's like blacking out for a moment. The first thing that happened was a physical effect, the sound of the explosion created a kind of concussion that went right through me. We all reflexively ducked and reached out for each other. A moment later I looked back to where the blast happened to see a column of white smoke and bits of debris like metal and pieces of paper flying up into the air, just beyond the ferris wheel. Another moment later the smoke turned black and billowed even larger. I only vaguely remember looking around at all the other people and families around us who had come to relax by the sea. They were holding crying children and were leaving quickly. We stayed a bit, feeling it might be safer than going towards the site, towards the road.

I went to the roof of the cafe and saw that the explosion was closer than we thought, less than 100 meters. I saw the flames coming from an alleyway just outside the cafe and saw the first cameraman arrive. There were numerous popping sounds like small explosions from within the blaze. Some people and waiters were wandering around aimlessly like us, I think there's a feeling of shock afterwards that is hard to shake. We decided we should go ahead and leave the area. Ambulances, Internal Security and army guys were racing to the scene.

Outside the cafe, where we had been only minutes before, some parked cars had broken windshields from falling debris or maybe from the sound wave. Across the main street the windows were blown out of a restaurant, waiters were pulling out the pieces of glass left hanging. Quite a few people were going towards the site of the explosion but we continued over the Corniche road up the hill towards Hamra.

I was sorry I wasn't carrying my camera as I sometimes do. But then again perhaps it's better since I would have been tempted to hang around and get closer. And soon enough there were TV crews and photographers rushing in.

Even now, hours later, I am hearing ambulances with sirens blaring speed past here in Hamra.

All in all a strange experience. It's hard to grasp. It comes so much out of nowhere that it's hard to process what I saw and heard. My mind keeps going back to the moment of the blast, trying to recall it better or recapture the experience. I was also shocked by the awareness at the time how there might be people dying so close. As it turns out at least 10 died. This was different from the other recent bombings here in that it was an assassination, happened in the daytime and killed quite a few people. The other recent bombs were all late at night and felt more like warnings meant to unsettle but not to kill.

I actually don't feel like I was scared, more stunned and shocked in a way that is hard to describe and that I've not felt from just watching the news.

Two photos our friend Najib Hourani took with his computer's camera, from outside the al-Rawda cafe.

A map that speaks louder than words (or photographs)

This new map by the UN of the West Bank captures more  effectively than any photograph how Palestinian land has been expropriated and movement confined, INSIDE the West Bank. These restricted zones are ostensibly to keep Israeli settlers in the WB safe (settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law) and for Israeli military installations and Israeli-defined "nature preserves".

The orange are areas that are inaccessible to Palestinians or subject to restrictions. You'll notice that many roads are also orange. Those are for the sole use of settlers. Now imagine that you are a Palestinian who needs to travel to another city for school, the markets, health care, work or to visit family. Or that you are a farmer who lives near a big orange area and an orange road is between you and your farmland.

The West Bank is very small. As the Financial Times notes (which is where I got this map): "The impact of Israeli civilian and military infrastructure is to render 40 per cent of the territory, which is roughly the size of the US state of Delaware or the English county of Norfolk, off-limits to Palestinians."

The FT goes on to note that, "The rest of the territory, including main centres such as Nablus and Jericho, is split into isolated spots. Movement between them is restricted by 450 roadblocks and 70 manned checkpoints."

the "situation" in Lebanon

I started a response to comments to my last post and then decided to make it a post of its own, here it is:

Hi Jim and Jeannie,

Thanks for your comments. We're fine here. Daily life during the day is pretty normal here in Beirut. It just gets unusually quiet at night. (Except for the stray kitten meowing out on the street. The milk I gave it didn't seem to help). Today as we waited with Waleed's parents for their taxi to the airport at the end of their visit we saw security forces doing a serious, careful walk-through of the neighborhood looking for anything suspicious. This was far different from the usual posture of the many security guys who hang around on corners looking bored, chatting to other shebab (young guys).

In response to Jim's comment...no one seems to really know what Fatah al-Islam represents. In Lebanon it is generally assumed that it has been created or funded by those that are trying to gain the upper hand in local political struggles: some think it's to undermine or counter Hizballah, others say it's to scuttle the establishment of the UN tribunal to try suspects in Rafiq Hariri's murder. I've heard various speculation that Saudi Arabia, Saad Hariri or Syria are using the group for their own, different, purposes. People are also referring to Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article from March, but I haven't read it yet. What seems clear is that the group is not Palestinian and has nothing to do with the Palestinian struggle for sovereignty even if a few members are Palestinian (and even though it claims to be a splinter group from a fringe Syrian-backed, anti-Arafat group). Reports have said that the fighters in the group are from various places -- Yemen, Bangladesh, Syria, etc -- not many Palestinians.

The majority of Palestinians in the refugee camp, Nahr al-Bared, did not support the group and are now the primary victims in this fight as their homes and community are destroyed, some are killed, and they become refugees once again. [To see photos go to this Reuters album.] Anti-Palestinian sentiment is not uncommon here due to a variety of historical factors. I read today that some Lebanese showed up with guns to support the army by shooting at Palestinians in the camp -- very frightening. Lebanese support for the army in this fight is not the good sign of unity in the face of terrorism that it might be, but rather slips into a pattern of blaming the presence of stateless Palestinians for Lebanese problems.

The Bush administration's disinterest in the plight of 10s of thousands of Palestinian civilians, and its speedy delivery of weapons (I think we heard the supply planes overhead this morning) to assist the Lebanese army's attacks on the camp just makes it all worse and is certainly not helping its image in the Middle East (besides in certain groups in Lebanon). It sounds from your comments that the US media is presenting only the Bush administration's line, where this is another fight in the "war on terrorism". While I agree Fatah al-Islam is a group of terrorists, treating this situation in such simple terms without understanding the local political scene and humanitarian repercussions is exceedingly dangerous.

I do think it's more than just a band of Islamic militants, criminals or terrorists. I think it is somehow connected to Lebanese and regional politics -- but I don't know how exactly. It's also unclear who is behind the recent bombings in Beirut and Aley -- Fatah al-Islam or some other group. Rumors are swirling here. Having pastry and coffee with my mother-in-law and her cousin yesterday, the cousin's 15-year-old son called a number of times with rumors. He was scared because his mom was out and about in Beirut.