Iranian president gets rough ride in New York

Ahmadinejad sidesteps questions, laments Us policy in speech at columbia

994 words

26 September 2007

Daily Star

English

(c) 2007 THE DAILY STAR, BEIRUT, LEBANON.

Beirut -- NEW YORK: The whirr of a patrol helicopter circling above, thousands threaded their way past police barricades around Columbia University on Monday to listen, to praise, or to damn Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the prestigious American university that dared to invite him.

Columbia University announced last week, to applause and condemnation, that Ahmadinejad had been invited to speak at the school's annual World Leaders Forum.

The move ignited fierce debate in the press and around the city. The front page of the local Daily News claimed the invitation was tantamount to providing an "access of evil."

"In a university environment we must allow people to speak their minds, to allow everyone to talk so that the truth is eventually revealed by all," Ahmadinejad said through a translator at the start of his speech.

Prior to his talk, a wave of protest united groups as politically divergent as the College Republicans and the Queer Alliance in demonstrations against Ahmadinejad's appearance.

Protesters carried signs that read: "Hitler Lives" and "Don't let Iran get the bomb."

Others aimed their ire at the university itself, chanting "shame on Columbia," from just outside the university's gate.

A man nearby, however, waved a placard showcasing his support for the university's decision. "Long live the power of debate," it read. "Negotiation, not bombs."

Those with student identification cards made it past guards at the gate, funneling into the packed auditorium and filling the adjacent lawn where hundreds watched a live broadcast of the event on a large screen.

Columbia president Lee Bollinger, who had faced criticism for inviting Ahmadinejad and promised to challenge him on a number of issues, began by defending the invitation as a commitment to free speech. He continued by enumerating his concerns over alleged human-rights violations in Iran.

"We at this university have not been shy to protest the challenge and failures of our own government to live by our values and we won't be shy about criticizing yours," said Bollinger. "Let's then be clear at the beginning. Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and a cruel dictator."

Bollinger went on to criticize Iran for its censorship of the press, and policies that discriminate against women, homosexuals and members of the Bahai faith. He also condemned Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust and Iran's alleged support for armed groups like Hizbullah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Bollinger highlighted the imprisonment - and recent release - of several Iranian-American scholars, including Kian Tajbaksh, a Columbia alumnus, whom Bollinger said was still under house arrest.

"The arrest and imprisonment of these Iranian-Americans for no good reason is not only unjustified, it runs completely counter to the very values that allow today's speaker to even appear on this campus," Bollinger said.

He then offered Tajbaksh a position teaching at Columbia and called on Ahmadinejad to assure his freedom and to return Columbia's favor by inviting Bollinger and others from the school to speak about free speech at Iran's universities.

Iran announced the liberation of the last Iranian-American detained on suspicion of harming national security Tuesday but the announcement of Ali Shakeri's release seemed to have little to do with Bollinger's request and was seen more as a show of good grace preceding Ahmadinejad's speech to world leaders at the UN Tuesday afternoon.

Bollinger concluded by saying he doubted the Iranian leader would have the "intellectual courage" to answer the questions he had raised.

In his own introductory remarks, Ahmadinejad hewed to an evasive political rhetoric, which he later revived in response to questions submitted by students despite the moderator's repeated appeals to answer the questions.

Ahmadinejad began by reciting verses from the Koran and then criticized Bollinger's attempts to "provide vaccination" to the Columbia audience before he spoke.

The president's subsequent oratory, which seemed aimed at audiences in Iran, meandered between the divine and material worlds, hinting subtly at the political backdrop against which Iran is pursuing its nuclear ambitions.

"Science is the light and scientists must be pure and pious," Ahmadinejad said. He reiterated later that his insistence on developing nuclear technology was strictly for use as an energy source and called the pursuit of nuclear and chemical weapons "another result of the misuse of science and research by the big powers" that wanted to hold a "monopoly" on science.

Ahmadinejad alluded to the lingering effects of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as to the use of depleted uranium in warheads, in a thinly veiled jab at the United States' own policies.

He avoided pointed questions regarding his past denials of Israel's right to exist and of the Holocaust - "the most documented event in human history," as Bollinger called it - by focusing instead on the "old wound" of the Palestinian displacement.

Ahmadinejad also asserted Iran's right to determine its own policies regarding its energy needs.

"We want to have the right to self-determination toward our future. We want to be independent. Don't interfere with us," he said.

When the speeches and questions were over, the crowds milled about in debate or dispersed to take the arguments elsewhere.

Plastered to the wall of the school's library, the propaganda of various student groups remained come Tuesday.

Iranian university chancellors said the harsh words of Bollinger's introduction only added to their perception of the United States as a bully.

The chancellors of seven Iranian universities issued a letter Tuesday to Bollinger saying his statements were "deeply shameful" and invited him to come to Iran.

In the letter, they asked him to provide responses to 10 questions, including, "Why did the US support the bloodthirsty dictator Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iraqi-imposed war on Iran?"

Is Beirut ready for a memory museum yet?

There are great plans for the Barakat Building in Sodeco, and a new scaffolding wrap suggests those plans are finally moving - but the site's future remains uncertain

1276 words
14 September 2007
Daily Star
English
(c) 2007 THE DAILY STAR, BEIRUT, LEBANON.

Beirut -- BEIRUT: In 1934, Nicolas Barakat's home stood finished: a bright yellow, four-story building that dominated the corner at Damascus Road and Independence Avenue. With sandstone walls, colonnaded verandas, high ceilings and Art Deco floor patterns, it combined elements and materials of both East and West, old and new. It was an architectural reflection of the era's cosmopolitan sea changes.

When the Civil War erupted four decades later, the city divided along that very street, with Christians to the east and Muslims to the west. It was the Green Line, a no-man's land where bullets fell and only trees and shrubs were safe, growing unchecked into the streets along Beirut's new faultline.

Many of the bullets came from that bright-yellow building, which Christian militias occupied and fortified during the conflict. The cement walls and sandbags of what some say was Beirut's most fearsome sniper's nest still remain - an architectural reflection of a different age.

Today the war-scarred building stands as a monument to the beautiful and bloody turns of Lebanon's history. When its owners moved to demolish the building in 1997, local architects and heritage activists fought and won a campaign for its preservation. Five years ago, the city bought the property to be restored as a museum of Beirut's history. But political turmoil and renewed violence in Lebanon have since stalled the plans and the building's future once again stands on uncertain ground.

When Youssef Aftimos, a renowned Beiruti architect who designed the capital's Municipal Building, began the Barakat Building around 1924, he was known for his Mauresque style - an Islamic architecture of curves and arches that was popular in the later days of the Ottoman Empire.

When the project was finished 12 years later, after a second phase of construction by another architect, it retained Islamic architectural features in its sandstone walls and interior arches. But it also combined classical and Western features, including a geometric facade with colonnaded verandas and a taller, four-storey structure. The building's high ceilings, yellow color and the use of concrete are all elements of what came to be known as the Mandate period.

"The outside of this building is very classical," says May Davie, a professor of Beirut's urban history at the Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts. "It has nothing of an Islamic aspect at all. But the domestic life, the [interior], is very oriental, very Beiruti."

Instead of the pointed arches of traditional Eastern design, the Barakat Building's triple arches are concrete-sculpted, rounded and modern.

"This is why it's interesting. It's a transitional architecture. It's a transitional period," says Davie, an early advocate for the building's preservation. "Culture is not something you just create new. It's a reinvention of the old ... The Mandate period was very creative. These people were artists ... This is why we did all we could to keep it."

But in addition to blending archetypal influences, the building added something unique: a central bay behind the corner colonnade that stretches deep into the interior. Rather than showcasing an impressive parlor room on the corner - a typical architectural boast - this stylistic innovation opened the building up with a majestic transparency. Its effect gives every room inside a view of the street.

"It's a more democratic use of space," says local architect and heritage activist Mona Hallak. When Hallak first explored the building in 1996 - its corner treatment had impressed her as she drove by - she was moved by the quality of the sunlight, which filled the central bay and made the stone walls glow. She continued up the stairs to see the city stretch out beneath and beyond the corridor's void.

Inside she found remnants of Art Deco motifs around the marble floors and walls painted pink, yellow, green and blue. It was there, as well, that she found the sniper's perches - thick walls riddled on one side with bullet holes. From the opposite side, snipers had fired through three small rectangular holes aligned beneath the ceiling's triple arches. With a view of the street - and a line of fire - from every room of the building, the gunmen could nest in these dark recesses while commanding the street corner from virtual obscurity.

When the Barakat family prepared to tear down the building the next year, Hallak joined the chorus of architects and heritage activists calling for the city to stop them. Real-estate prices in the neighborhood of Sodeco Square had skyrocketed after the war and the owners wanted to sell the property. Hallak helped to mobilize the group's effort to preserve it, circulating petitions, running ads in newspapers and reaching out to politicians. Ultimately they succeeded, which left the question of what to do with it.

Like others, Hallak agreed that the museum should showcase Beirut's 7,000-year history. But unlike some, she didn't think that it should shirk from portraying the dark and violent cycles of that history.

Hallak grew up in Beirut during the Civil War and her father was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel from an explosion. But having never lost anyone close to her, Hallak says she experienced the war from a distance.

But she remembers one episode clearly. As a girl, she watched on television news as bystanders tossed a rope to someone crumpled by sniper fire in the street. The sniper could have shot them again, as Hallak recalls. Instead he shot the rope.

"It was to show he was in control," she says, adding that she often imagines the scene might have taken place at the intersection of Damascus Road and Independence Avenue. These are the memories Hallak says she wants others to confront, from a time when the city lived in the grip of fear and those who wielded it as a weapon, so that it doesn't happen again.

Hallak has big plans for the museum, including a design competition and fundraising campaign for the restoration work, the construction of an adjacent office building to bring in rent and the establishment of an urban design unit to review development projects in the city.

But she also wants to keep the sniper den.

Preserving the sniper modifications as part of a "museum of memory," as she describes in a color pamphlet that outlines the project, would make the restored building "a place for meeting and reconciliation, a space for Memory so as not to be swept up by amnesia."

When a glossy banner with a life-size image of the restored Barakat Building was wrapped around it this spring, it announced the site would host a "Museum of Memory," the first indication, she says, that her vision could become a reality.

But first the restoration plan needs to be developed. A contingent of cultural advisers from France were due to visit last winter to help in the project's planning. But the outbreak of an opposition protest in the fall, then the battle at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp starting in May, has pushed the group's arrival back indefinitely, says Hallak.

For now the building sits in limbo। On one side is an illustration of its early splendor, a brilliant yellow to which it could again aspire. Behind the wrapping paper is its bullet-pocked reality - a reminder of another potential fate.

Tumult but no terror as Tiesto turns up in Byblos

Chaos reigns among crowd as renowned DJ makes second appearance in Lebanon

1238 words

4 July 2007

Daily Star

English

(c) 2007 THE DAILY STAR, BEIRUT, LEBANON.

Beirut -- BYBLOS: About 50 kilometers to the north, the fighting near Tripoli had mellowed to periodic but minor clashes between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam hold-outs. Sure, the militant group had reportedly threatened to assassinate world-famous Dutch DJ Tiesto at the very concert he was about to perform. But that was months ago, and had been fodder for online dance-music discussion forums and the social networking site Facebook to begin with. Fatah al-Islam is otherwise occupied, people told themselves. (Most of the Web sites that carried stories on the threat against Tiesto have since conceded that it was at best a specious rumor, at worst a calculated hoax).

It was calm and peaceful at 11 p.m. on Monday night as thousands threaded their way through the dark side streets of Byblos. They passed bemused families smoking narguileh, who watched as their children chased each other through the passing crowds. They continued past security guards in navy vests and beige combat-style boots, who silently kept watch from rooftops and hotel entrances, and toward the source of a solitary beam of serene white light, which roved in lazy circles, painting the cloudless night sky and beckoning the party-goers to revelry ... a tranquil respite of electronica ... Tiesto.

For weeks some had speculated that the DJ could not - should not, even - show up to perform. Or that the crowd would not - should not, even - show up to enjoy. Instead, they turned out in droves, coalescing in the main thoroughfare in front of the Edde Sands beach resort, where assault-rifle-toting soldiers in red berets directed traffic with a vigilant eye, shepherded pedestrians down the steep slope toward the flashing green spectral glow of laser lights.

For a moment, the music and lasers paused. From the hillside entrance overlooking the softly lit pools and bungalow bars of Edde Sands, all was quiet. Then, the standard electronica prelude - an up-tempo alien crescendo - launched into an explosion of light and sound as heads began bobbing sideways to the music.

An hour earlier, a diminutive female bartender with dark brown ringlets and a shirt announcing "same sh**, different day," was drinking Kalashnikov shots with her customers. She had heard threats were made against Tiesto after he came to Lebanon two years ago, drawing a crowd of 16,000.

"Last year he didn't come back, so everybody said, 'He must be dead,'" she said with a laugh and poured another shot.

Back at Edde Sands, 21-year-old Roudy Awwad wasn't worried about violence, he explained while leaning on a friend's shoulder and smoking a cigarette. "It's a normal thing here," he said, wearing ripped jeans and a black T-shirt with a mess of long hair piled on top of his head. "It's Lebanon." But certainly your parents must have been worried? "F*** my parents," he said. So ... they were concerned? "F*** my parents," he repeated.

In what could only theoretically be considered "the line" to get into the show, herd behavior reigned. The threat of terrorist activity seemed less of a concern than getting trampled. One man wore a T-shirt with "Bomb Technician: If you see me running, try to keep up," emblazoned across the back. Once past the melee, the mood lightened.

"It makes me happy to see all the people at the concert," said Ahef Abouzeid, a heavily muscled 26-year-old with a shaved head and a tight, white Emporio Armani tank top. A bodyguard from Beirut, he decided to attend the concert even though he had been concerned about the security situation. "We are at war in the north, but we are happy here. I like to enjoy my life, to be myself. And we have a great country, a great place." His parents told him "to go and have fun - and to be careful," he added with emphasis.

A voice over the loudspeaker announced that Tiesto had arrived. He's not taking the stage yet. But he's in the building. The voice asked the audience to "make some noise" for warm-up DJ Caesar K. Some began dancing small gyrations - the best they could manage in tight quarters - like water molecules heating up and trying to escape as steam. Finally, the crowd spilled forward past some invisible border and onto the sand.

Some spread out along a roped-off section of beach - where one could barely see the stage or hear more than the whoomp-bash bass rhythm. A handful of boats ringed the venue's perimeter. Most people, it seemed, went straight for the bar to trade in their two free-drink tickets.

The bar was a Darwinian free-for-all, a nearly all-male crowd within a 3-meter radius of the counter. Men jostled for drinks while the women sought higher ground. One guy in a green polo shirt was doing pull-ups (for no apparent reason) from a beam in the thatched-roof of the bungalow-style bar. Another, with a flashing disco-light pacifier in his mouth, clamored for a drink. A bartender with ripped jeans and an open-collared blue button-down shirt perched on the bar, squatting stylishly on one knee and urging his patrons to be calm. One of the few women in the crowd slipped away from her boyfriend, seeking shelter near a post as the crowd began to surge, growing ever-more restless. Men called out to catch the bartenders' eyes, reached over each other trying to order drinks from the back of the line. The bartender in the blue shirt began yelling back. "Please, man, please," pleaded a youth sandwiched near the front as he kept his drink ticket aloft while burying his head in his arm to wipe sweat from his eyes. The young bartender began to scream.

Back in the sand, reactions to the evening were mixed. Lyne Itani was frustrated by the long lines and poor crowd control. Still, to hear Tiesto, the wait was worth it. "I'm in love with him, said the 18-year-old, who saw Tiesto perform in 2005. "I knew I had to come back."

Laura Horzath, a 21-year-old Australian who works in Tyre as a nanny, said she wasn't too worried about threats. "I'm more worried about the toilet situation," she remarked.

Finally, volleys of fireworks erupted in the sky - exploding in red, then green, then orange and white, trailing down toward the dark water for several minutes to the crowd's applause. Across the beach, outstretched arms raised cameras to try and capture the moment. Two men hugged and spun around in a circle, laughing as the smell of burned powder wafted across the shore.

Tiesto took the stage. In a white and black striped shirt, he perched behind his table, nodding his head and, occasionally, breaking into a reserved dance. The seamless segues and tranquil beats mollified the audience, entranced even among the soldiers and barbed wire and echoes of war.

The green laser lights morphed। At one moment, the effect painted the dancing throngs with undulating waves of light. The next minute, it was staccato bursts, like gunfire, that lingered across their faces a moment ... and then disappeared.