'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Laila and Nur; Rami

So I see Laila el-Haddad has announced her baby's birth now. She has fabulous pics there of adorable little Nur (= "Light"... very Quaker!) alone, and of Nur with her Dad, her proud big brother, and with the ever-beautiful Laila herself.

As the first commenter on that post there says, "May she grow up in a free and peaceful Palestine!"

As Laila says there, she did indeed take her laptop to the hospital with her, and on Wednesday or so she and I had a great little IM session in which she told me all about the speedy delivery. (I had earlier told her about the very speedy delivery of my second child, name of Leila, in Beirut back in 1979, so we recalled that conversation, too.)

And talking of fun interactions with fellow-bloggers... since I'm here in Lebanon I took the opportunity to meet Rami Zuraik, author of Land and People. Meeting Rami was every bit as rewarding as I had hoped. Turns out we have huge numbers of concerns and many friends in common.

We talked a bit about the US elections. He said that he felt US influence over the whole world is so great that people everywhere are strongly affected by the US political process. True enough. So he said he felt, actually, like a completely unenfranchized citizen of the US. (Correct me if I phrased that poorly, Rami.) I told him about the theory I've expounded here a number of times in recent years, to the effect that the relationship between the US citizenry and the world's 6-billion-p-lus non-Americans is analogous to the apartheid-era relationship between the South African "Whites" and the country's completely unenfranchized majority...

Also, it turn out I was wrong when I wrote about Rami's blog here, back in November, when I said he is Palestinian. He is indeed, as (yet another) Leila noted there, Lebanese, and married to a Palestinian.

We talked about a huge number of really important and interesting things, though only scratching the surface of all there was to say. In response to Vadim, who commented here yesterday that I have burned up a huge amount of carbon to get here to Lebanon, I would say that a conversation like the one I had with Rami Zuraik, or others that I've had while here, are quite impossible to have in a non-physical encounter-- though my experience is that once I've met someone in person, that establishes a level of mutual understanding from which it's possible to continue to have great communications through electronic media.

Also, without getting defensive here, I should note that from Lebanon I'll be traveling-- overland-- to Syria for a week; and I hope the combined results of all these meetings in both countries make my CO2 emissions more justifiable?