Qifa Nabki
Free Patriotic Movement
Aoun and the Future
A couple of years ago, shortly before the end of President Michel Sleiman’s term in office, I wrote an essay asking why Lebanon needed a President, given the relative powerlessness of the position. Here’s the payoff paragraph: Twenty-five years after Ta’if inaugurated Lebanon’s Second Republic and nearly nine years after the Syrian departure gave us a new, mysterious set … Continue reading
Some of my best friends are Shiites…
Mitch Prothero has an interesting piece about the FPM-Hizbullah relationship in The National, in which he recounts a scene at a campaign rally where the Hizbullah partisans bussed in from al-Dahiya to provide a little multi-confessional je ne sais quoi got a little too Shiite for the taste of the Aounist crowd control officials. Here’s … Continue reading
Nasrallah Overreaches?
Two nights ago, Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah gave a speech in which he, for reasons I can’t quite comprehend, re-opened the file on the events of May 7th 2008. It seems that the Future Movement’s latest round of campaign billboards — which feature slogans like “We won’t forget,” “They won’t return,” and “We won’t leave you,” … Continue reading
Lessons in Medieval Campaign Finance Law
Conspiracy Chronicles series, no. 5 We are frequently told that these elections are the most expensive, per capita, in the history of the universe. Recently, I asked an opposition MP running for re-election how much he was spending on billboards and TV appearances. “Well, I just can’t afford to spend the kind of money that … Continue reading
Showdown in Jezzine
I’ve got to hand it to General Aoun. He’s made one district in southern Lebanon worth watching… By now, most will have heard about the unusual arrangement arrived at by Amal and the Free Patriotic Movement over the Christian district of Jezzine. After weeks (and weeks and weeks) of negotiations, Aoun announced that he couldn’t … Continue reading
Qifa Nabki 
And the people say…