Word: lebanons
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...credit, Bono never stops noodling with ways to make a connection. He slips into characters (a soldier in "White as Snow," a journalist in "Cedars of Lebanon"), scats like a young Beat poet and, in a moment he will probably regret, impersonates your office IT guy ("Restart and reboot yourself") on a ham-fisted attempt at life-coaching. Multiple times he asks, "Let me in the sound," as if looking for a place to hide...
...Mahmoud Abbas stand unused, gathering dust in the office of his Fatah movement in Beirut's Shatila Palestinian refugee camp. Posters of Abbas - President of the Palestinian Authority, leader of Fatah and chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) - would normally hang in offices and on street corners throughout Lebanon's 12 Palestinian refugee camps. But ever since Israel's incursion into Gaza earlier this year, Abbas has become politically radioactive to the approximately 400,000 refugees languishing in Lebanon, who were livid at his failure to act in defense of the beleaguered Gazans. "Abbas embarrassed us," says one Fatah...
...stack of unused posters is but a symptom of the collapse of support for Fatah in Lebanon, home to the most politically active population of Palestinians outside the West Bank and Gaza. It was the movement's traditional support there that underscored Abbas' mandate, as chairman of the PLO, to negotiate on behalf of all Palestinians. But the failure of Abbas' negotiation strategy to deliver any meaningful change for the prospects of Lebanon's Palestinian refugees has led many - like their kin in the West Bank and Gaza - to transfer their support to Hamas and other radical Islamist groups...
...refugees of Lebanon have always been more militant than their brethren inside the Palestinian territories. Most are descendants of those who fled Israeli forces in Galilee during the war of 1948; since then they have been prevented by Israel from returning to their homes. Having lived for six decades without citizenship or basic civil rights in the squalor and despair of refugee camps in a country that bars refugees from owning property and from entering some 70 professions, they have long provided a fertile recruiting environment for militant groups...
...Even Abbas' more popular predecessor as Fatah leader, Yassir Arafat, struggled to sell the Oslo peace process to his supporters in Lebanon, where members of Fatah remained committed to armed struggle to "liberate Palestine" and still run guerrilla-training academies. These days, however, even that hard-line Fatah stance is no longer enough for most Palestinians here. High-ranking officials of Abbas' own party fear that he will trade away their right of return to what is now Israel. "Yassir Arafat went into negotiations with the olive branch in one hand and a weapon in the other hand," says...