Isn't the Arab Street supposed to be outraged at Western intervention? Not in Beirut, after Gebran Tueni's assassination:
A young man named Ribal with a goatee and a nose ring in his left nostril was tired of the pan-Arab unity rhetoric coming from some quarters of the Middle East. “Everyone who was with Syria before needs to shut up now. We are Arabs. But we are Lebanese before we are Arabs.”Another young man named Haig worried about the future. “If this keeps happening more people are going to start planting bombs. The terrorists are playing here. They are free to do whatever they want. Syria must be punished. The international community must put more pressure on them.” As I thanked him and turned to go he said “Oh, and say hello to Mr. George W. Bush for me.”
When asked who he thought murdered Gebran Tueni, Jad was dumbfounded. “Do you really need to ask that question?” he said.
Okay then, what should be done?
“The international community needs to deal with the Syrians. Lebanon is too weak. They need to do to Syria what they did to Saddam Hussein. Regime change. Definitely. Syria has the same regime as Iraq and it behaves the same way.”
At MEMRI, meanwhile, there's a round-up of Syrian reactions to the UN-commissioned Mehlis report - on the last time a car bomb in Beirut killed a prominent anti-Syrian figure - which points the finger at high-level Syrian involvement. It seems they (or at least the government-controlled media) don't like it at all. One story doing the rounds: Mehlis's mother was a Jewess killed by Syrians, and Mehlis is after revenge. That's why he was chosen to chair the investigation.
"Mehlis takes us to the law of the jungle, and reveals to the world the first shoots of the world government heralded by 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. '"
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