A Tale of Two Nations

A Brief History of the Ongoing Lebanese-Israeli Conflict, from Editor and Publisher:

Because Israel and Lebanon have never signed a peace accord, the countries remain officially in a state of war that has existed since 1948 when Lebanon joined other Arab nations against the newly formed Jewish state.

The two countries have been bound by an armistice signed in 1949, which regulates the presence of military forces in southern Lebanon.

With a large Christian minority in an overwhelmingly Muslim region, mercantile and Westernized, Lebanon was considered the least hostile Arab neighbor to Israel -- and the weakest. The rare skirmishes that occurred were mostly symbolic.



That began to change as Palestinian guerrillas became active. In 1968, Israeli commandos landed at Beirut airport and blew up 13 Lebanese airliners in retaliation for Arab militants firing on an Israeli airliner in Athens, Greece...

Full article available here

Young, Desperate and Hot -- It's a Volatile Mix: Forget the '60s and 'Make Love, Not War.' Today's world is facing a Summer of Rage, especially in the Middle East, from the LA Times:

ARE WE HEADING for a Summer of Rage? A generation ago, young Americans flocked to San Francisco with flowers in their hair for a hippie Summer of Love. But in other parts of the world today the potent combination of young people and sunny weather is producing something very different. The '60s slogan was "Make Love, Not War." The 2006 slogan seems to be the very opposite.

Last week saw a worldwide eruption of violence. As many as 200 people were killed in India on Tuesday when a succession of bombs exploded along Mumbai's western railway line. In Somalia, Islamist extremists tightened their grip on the area around the country's capital. And the Taliban continued to menace Western soldiers deployed in Afghanistan. The crucible of this Summer of Rage, however, is without question the Middle East...

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Related: Israel may send ground troops into Lebanon
Lebanese blog: Beirut Notes
Israeli blog: Live from an Israeli bunker

Education

To succeed as a Ph.D. in English, you have to give up all of the things that attracted you to the subject in the first place:

Undergraduate English majors often treasure the 1989 film Dead Poets Society. The film is set in the 1950s at Welton Academy, a boarding school that is beautiful but strict in an old-fashioned way; it aims more at placing its graduates in the Ivy League than developing their imaginative capacities.



The film centers on the efforts of an unconventional young teacher named Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams, who transforms his English class from an exercise in cultural duty to a whirlwind tour of self-discovery. In one memorable class on Walt Whitman, Mr. Keating coerces a painfully shy student into "sounding his barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world."

Sadly, Mr. Keating's efforts at liberating his students result in the suicide of a boy whose father insists that he abandon his love of acting to study medicine at Harvard. In the aftermath, Mr. Keating is forced to leave Welton, but not before his students stand on their desks in a gesture of support that foreshadows the social upheaval of the 1960s.

Dead Poets Society is old enough now for many professors to have been inspired by it as undergraduates. I remember seeing it during my junior year, and I thought, at that time, that the film encapsulated many of the romantic feelings that led me to become an English major the year before...

Full article at The Chronicle of Higher Ed

Music

The Streets - "Two Nations"
Communique - "Perfect Weapon"
Arcade Fire - "Wake Up"