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Serious satire
"Humor is a funny way of being serious"
-Thomas Edison
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Copyright© 2001-2010, Renato Obeid
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"Top blog/Renato Obeid's World/Today's pick: This rambling weblog is worth reading not so much for its satirical posts but more for its insight into the minutiae of life in Lebanon, including the etiquette of road accidents and how to hire a taxi.”
-Jane Perrone, The Guardian
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Monday, February 20, 2006
BACK IN THE USSR An American print journalist recently pointed out the obvious – that all assassinations and assassination attempts since the Hariri assassination have been aimed at Orthodox Christians and erroneously observed that they were the only major confessional group in Lebanon without a militia. Not true – the Baath party, the SSNP, the Communist party and several other ostensibly secular groups have militias and were all founded by Orthodox. Just like the Jews were the founders and main proponents of communism in Russia because as a religious minority they weren’t able to achieve power, the Orthodox in the Levant seized upon secular pan Arabism as their only means of achieving power in the mono-religious polity of the Middle east. Another reason why Arab Christians pioneered Arabism is that they wanted to establish an identity and commonality (and thus equality) with their compatriots that was secular and wasn’t based on religion but notional race. Small wonder when you consider that the constitutions of twenty one out of twenty two Arab states stipulate that the head of state must be Muslim and the unwritten constitutional understanding of the odd state out (Lebanon) stipulates that head of state be a Maronite Catholic. They quite simply have no other choice but than to be disingenuously egalitarian.
4:15 am
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