Two Grad rockets were fired this week at the south Beirut suburb of Shiyah. This district borders the Dahiyeh – the stronghold in the city which houses the main offices of Hizballah. The decision to strike so close to Hizballah’s nerve center is a dramatic escalation by the Syrian rebels of their simmering conflict with the Lebanese Shia militia.

The official leadership of the Free Syrian Army repudiated earlier claims of responsibility for the rocket fire issued in its name. But the official leadership of the FSA do not in fact command the mainly Sunni Islamist men who do the actual fighting in Syria for the rebellion. So their statements are of only secondary importance.

What is happening is that Hizballah’s long standing but increasingly overt engagement in the war in Syria is now being paid back in kind by the rebels.

Some of Hizballah’s best fighters have for the…

OVER A COFFEE : Holocaust of common sense — Dr Haider Shah

In the face of overwhelming archival evidence, when one denies the occurrence of communal violence, it can be an early warning sign of more sinister things to come

Of late, in the backdrop of the blasphemous movie outrage, there has been a rising chorus of equating Holocaust denial with blasphemy-related offences. Mimicking some honourable media juggernauts, our young e-jihadis have also been citing it profusely over social networking sites. The Holocaust-related discourse, however, took a very serious turn when even our worthy prime minister used the catchphrase of ‘Holocaust denial’ while announcing a national day for rioting, pillaging and killing with impunity. Ignoring the historical context of laws and usages is a dangerous pursuit and must be corrected to purge our discourse of overheated utterances. With this in mind, let us examine why Holocaust denial is a sensitive…

Syria’s Christians fear an Islamist takeover should the current government be overthrown. During the ongoing civil war there has been a well-documented rise in the number of salafi-jihadist groups operating in Syria that pose a direct threat to Syria’s Christian community.¹ These militant opposition forces espouse an Islamist ideology, which incorporates elements of Wahhabism² and Salafism³ and whose stated goals and objectives are by definition hostile towards Christians. Firsthand accounts from Syrian Christian refugees in Lebanon reported by award winning investigative journalist Nuri Kino detail the horror in which they described kidnappings, rapes, harassment, theft and other violent reprisals at the hands of Islamist groups.

Those who survived reported “just being Christian is enough to be a target,”⁴ disproving theories that violence and kidnapping directed towards Syrian Christians is purely incidental or for economic reasons. One individual openly declared “We’re not poor. We didn’t run from…