Word: levante
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...political simoon swept the Levant. In Beirut and Damascus the bazaars seethed. Shops were shut, transport suspended. Students marched defiantly through streets emptied of everything but aloof camels. In their barracks, sullen French troops waited tensely, side by side with nervous French civilians...
...came the explosion. In Damascus and Aleppo anti-French riots broke out. Scores of people were killed or injured. In Beirut French shops were burned. (British stores in the same blocks were spared). Strikes spread, markets closed. Nervously, the French explained that the Senegalese had arrived because the Levant was now a French redeploying area for the Far Eastern war. Cried The Lebanon's Premier Abdul Hamid Keramy: "The French think that with their armies they can deprive us of our independence. . . . They can cut off our heads and destroy us, but they cannot touch our independence...
France remained impassive. Without abrogating its League of Nations mandate, France had recognized the de facto independence of the Levant states in the dark days of 1943. Now, the Quai d'Orsay wished to buttress its position with a treaty of alliance and friendship giving France strategic rights (air fields in Syria, naval bases in The Lebanon), economic privileges (preferential tariff treatment), cultural advantages (French to be a compulsory school language). The Lebanese and Syrians are willing to compromise only on the first point...
...Occident also is concerned with the Arab world because in the Levant (Syria and Lebanon), France clings to shreds of empire, and will not give them up without a struggle which may well endanger world cooperation for the peace...
...Oscar Levant, pianist-composer and brittle-brained, self-styled "lowbrow" quiz expert, became an ex-expert when he made an exit from Information Please. Said he: "I don't mind being off the show. I think it's anticreative. Now I can read things I don't have to remember. It was just like my first marriage. We were not only incompatible. We hated each other...