med sunset

Lately there has been a fair amount of buzz about these cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a terrorist, which were first published in a Danish newspaper several months ago. Some leaders and clerics in Saudi Arabia and other countries have called for a boycott of Danish products and stores in Kuwait and the Gulf are obliging. However, today at my grocery store all of the Danish cheese and butter was still in place. So far the most absurd report is that a gang of armed men temporarily took over an EU office in Gaza in order to register their disapproval. Way to challenge the insinuation that Islam breeds terrorism by engaging in an act of terrorism.

There is still no bird flu documented in Lebanon or Syria, but a lot of Lebanese have stopped eating chicken. Some of my students stopped eating it last Fall, and it did no good for me to explain that you don’t get sick from eating chicken, you need to be exposed to live birds. Chicken is now about half price here and I read this a while ago about a guy in Saida who has publicly eaten raw chicken to try to persuade people to buy it.

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day and we are off to Syria for the weekend. We are going to Aleppo, a very interesting city in the northern part of Syria. Aleppo is one of those cities that claims to be the oldest consistently inhabited city in the world – along with Damascus, Byblos, Jericho, and some cities in Turkey and Iran. We went ahead and got expensive Syrian visas in Washington D.C. right before Christmas, since we wanted to avoid another possible border debacle. I’m really looking forward to it, even though it sounds like it is going to be rather chilly there- below freezing at night. I will post some pictures next week.