February 2025

You are looking at my sister Iman, when she was six years old.

An unscheduled post this week for a special reason.

On a Saturday morning years ago, my father and I sat talking on my parents’ balcony. Iman was on our mind. Iman was always on our mind.

You know, he said, Iman will not last a year after we’re gone, your mother and I. He had that look on his face, the one that always betrayed he knew things; things the rest of us mortals couldn’t possibly know. He was still very well then. We were all well. But not quite Iman. She was forever the child, and forever saddled by the burdens of those who have seen far too much of the mystifying cruelties of life.

The photo is self-explanatory. Nawaf Salam as if ushering in his tenure.

What in Lebanon went weak enough to give prime minister-designate Nawaf Salam the strength to form a cabinet whose profile, for the first time in decades, is somewhat resistant to the ruling class’s dictums?

You’re looking at Fatmeh, sister on her shoulders, journeying on foot back to Northern Gaza.

In a cascade they fell, the unbearable ironies of this past week.

Together, without meaning to, they epitomize this extraordinarily raw hour, by turns terrifying and utterly ridiculous, tragic and joyous. And so we swing between extreme prospects and the new era they threaten or promise.

Would you believe:

The 80-year commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz -Birkenau takes place in Poland as the children of its victims wrap up their own genocide on another people 1,600 miles away.

Poland, a signatory to the Rome Statute that underpins the International Criminal Court (ICC), had to guarantee protection against the court’s arrest warrant to the visiting prime minister of the genocidal culprit.