Bloggers of the Lebanese blogosphere touched upon a wide range of topics this past week. Please bear patience and read on and I assure you that your journey will be rewarding. It is difficult to encompass all that was discussed. But among the posts are topics that dealt with: Now please allow me to start with Amal’s depiction of the splits and discords that burdens the Lebanese. Instead of having just one Cedar in the center of the national flag she “plants” many others with different sizes and directions. Lebanon.profile blitzed the blogosphere with lengthy, daily and interesting posts on his blog and on the other blog (mentioned below) where he is also a contributor. Among these posts is one that brings up the dilemma faced by young Lebanese who have to leave their country despite their love for it. Lebanon offers an incredible amount in terms of culture and relaxation. One could not imagine a nicer place to vacation and have an absolutely, incredibly fun time. […] However, this is a place where it's nearly impossible to enjoy life at the age of 24. It's nearly impossible to enjoy a permanent Lebanese life without a villa, wasta, and enough money to travel frequently. It's impossible to escape the oppression of Lebanese politics and society. […] In another location Lebanon.profile discusses how Gen. Aoun is taking advantage of the failures of others, especially the Hariri Camp, to advance his cause. In a third post, he lists the reasons for the successes of the Free Patriotic Movement of Gen. Aoun: Aoun is maneuvering brilliantly in the current political climate. His campaign is successful for four main reasons, that were most likely not conscious efforts: 1. Capitalizing on government failures 2. Appealing to Lebanese Christian culture 3. Using attack dogs to bully the government, but remaining distant from them 4. Appealing to Lebanese abroad Raja addresses the leaders who he thinks are busy with their squabbles while leaving issues like the high death toll due to road accidents unattended. More Lebanese die and suffer severe injury on roads than anywhere else. And since life precedes even material concerns, you would think that the number-one issue on the Lebanese political agenda would be road safety. But it isn't. Politically, the most prominent issues on the average Lebanese's plate are: 1) Lebanon's “strategic alignment” in the region, 2) Protecting or Confiscating Hizballah's weapons 3) Relations with Syria, 4) and all the other mumbo jumbo that we watch on TV and read on the newspapers every day of our brief existence on this planet. […] Dear Head Honchos: Every sovereign country needs to figure out where it stands with regards to its immediate and not so immediate neighbors. But managing the affairs of a State goes beyond foreign policy. We need your attention. We need Representatives; not thieves, or a parliament filled with wannabe foreign ministers. Today, we're not dieing because of your immediate decisions, but we're dieing nonetheless. We are dieing because of your incompetence! Humble Citizen Abu Kais analyzes, in length, what he sees as the reasons behind the current verbal feuds within some sects and among other sects, especially the recent attacks on prominent religious figures of the Maronite church by leaders of the Maronite community. This he believes has its roots in the Syrian intervention in Lebanese politics. I am with everyone who complains about the sectarian system in Lebanon, the near absence of government in Lebanon, and failure of the 14 March political leaders. Successfully tapping into this failure, which has roots in the long Assad colonial rule in the country (yes, colonial), are Bashar’s lackeys, who are slowly engineering the country’s return to being a “Syrian” satellite state. The Shia community is tucked safely in Bashar’s pocket, and the Sunnis have been weakened after Hariri’s assassination. Michel Aoun was co-opted by (possibly) promising him a future presidency. The stumbling block, however, has been one Maronite Patriarch, who never hid his opposition to the regime in Damascus. Anarchistian ridicules the campaign of the Lebanese organization, ATTAC, against the WTO as irrelevant, inefficient and sees it as more of a support for WTO than a campaign against. Some leftist pseudo-leftist activists have been unable to conceal their excitement about a new campaign on (well, supposedly against) WTO initiated by ATTAC. The latest development on this topic is a release/statement that outlines the goals of a campaign titled “Lebanon is not for sale”. First of all, there is something unsettling in the title; the statement basically insists on the national/istic character of the campaign as opposed to its broader class nature.