Word: shied
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most schizoid of Lebanese towns, home to both ancient beauty and modern terror. Dominating the landscape are the magnificent, 2,000-year- old ruins of three Roman temples, their stone pillars rising high above the Bekaa Valley. Since 1983, Baalbek has also been under the control of the Shi'ite Muslim fundamentalist group known as Hizballah (Party of God), whose members claim allegiance to Iran. Operating under several different names, Hizballah is believed to have plotted the 1983 bombing of Marine headquarters in Beirut that killed 241 Americans. Since 1982, groups tied to Hizballah have kidnapped more than 30 Westerners...
...fundamentalist Shi'ites will not give up their capital without a struggle. When 20,000 people, mostly schoolchildren, gathered in the ruins for a Peace Day sponsored by the Lebanese Ministry of Tourism in June, Hizballah fired its antiaircraft artillery and the celebration ended in panic. The ruins had been transformed, complained Hizballah in a communique, "into a market where women show their flesh and where obscene proposals are exchanged...
...despite these good works, the people of Baalbek resent the Iranian accents affected by their local sheiks, the ban on alcohol and the isolation of their economy. "Lebanese Shi'ites are a joyful people," says Hussein, 40, a shopkeeper. "We don't mind Hizballah fighting Israel, but they're not fighting Israel from Baalbek. Whenever there is an Israeli attack anywhere in Lebanon, they turn on the air-raid siren. It's a good way to politicize people. But if they hear people are dancing in the park at Ras-el-Ain, they also turn on the air-raid siren...
...late afternoon, as the sun god worshiped here by the ancients transforms the acropolis to a glowing pink, visitors clamber beneath friezes of grapevines and laughing fauns. Zeinab, 26, a Shi'ite woman from Baalbek, trudges down the dusty road past the temple of Venus carrying a bag of bread and an empty bucket. She is eight months pregnant and wears a long, loose- fitting dress. "The tourists should wear what they want to. I like to see them," she says. "Since they started coming, it feels a lot freer...
...flags, George Bush's instincts, formed during the cold war, sometimes seem outmoded. He has been too quick to endorse the status quo. By defeating Saddam Hussein but then letting him remain the President of Iraq, Bush chose the devil he knew over the uncertainties represented by Kurdish and Shi'ite rebels. In his response to the dizzying events in the U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia, Bush has been slow to realize that multinational communist states are, almost by definition, relics of a cruel, failed ideology and therefore not viable in anything like their present form. The Balts and Slovenes are motivated...