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Orosdi-Back: A lost Beyrouth department store from an elegant age

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My mother told me it was located on ‘ Banks Street ’ in Down Town Beirut , the road that leads up to Riad el Solh Square . On most maps the street is also named after Riad el Solh. The store was located opposite Bank Intra, or so I was told. Presumably the location of the store was indicative of the high end goodies on sale inside. The closest comparison to Orosdi Back is the old Allied’s department store in Dubai , for those who remember Dubai in the 1980s. But Orosdi Back was a store from a different age, an age of elegance as opposed to the vulgar modern excesses of the nouveau-riche, something Beirut ’s Down Town is synonymous with! A wonderful blog dubbed ‘language hat’ published some information about the founders of this chain of department stores. According to the blog the chain of stores came about as a result of a partnership between Adolf Orosdi, a Hungarian army officer and his sons who opened a clothing store in Galata in 1855, and the Back family, who were Aust...
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A Reluctant Resistance: Will They, Won't They Strike, Who Knows

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It’s hard for anyone to admit that they have wasted their life believing in an idea that was unrealistic and naïve even at its inception. The idea that Palestine could be liberated is one such idea that just won’t die, it keeps recirculating and reinfecting us with hope. Every 20 or 30 years some regional power decides to use this idea of liberation to achieve some kind of political success over the populations of countries in its region that it wishes to dominate.   Palestine is the perfect idea and cause, pure and good and just, just like the tale of the crucified Jesus. A story of gross injustice and cruelty heaped on a man preaching a new age religion. Same with the plight of the Palestinian people, gross injustice and cruelty. Jesus actually preached and healed and drove out demons in the very environs over which fanatical Western Jews are fighting and burning out farmers and villagers of the West Bank who have more Semitic and Canaanite DNA than many European Jews that ru...
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Palestine's 100 Years War: How Our Militant Past Predicts Our Future

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Palestine’s 100 Years War The Past Rarely Predicts the Future, Except in the Middle East   “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” — Ernest Hemingway, 1946   For as long as I can remember my region has been at war. Everyone alive today can attest to the veracity of such a statement. We cheer the men at arms as they go off to fight, we condemn the failure to find a peaceful solution, we admire the fighter, we condemn the terrorist. We are the same people, the great mass of seated spectators, they whom we cheer and condemn, are also the same, the same breed of angry and desperate men and who can blame them, their lives have been hell.   Searching the vast archives of the internet for one of my own, a distant cousin who was one of those angry desperate men, I found an article dated March 22, 1973, in the El Paso Herald-Post titled “Middle East prediction: the worst is yet to come”. It was earie and ...
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