Salon.com: "How Lebanon Rescued Me"

[Hissyspit]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/08/04/beirut/index_np.html?source=newsletter

How Lebanon rescued me
I fled America for Beirut's cultural freedom. Now I watch as bombs destroy my refuge -- and the best hope for a viable Middle East democracy.

By Alia Malek

In March 2003, I fled to Beirut, Lebanon, wanting to escape the made-for-TV war on Iraq, the monotony of Washington, and the man who had become my boss, John Ashcroft.

Naturally, in this era of pretexts, the convergence of those events was itself also just an excuse. Even if my job as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department had not been increasingly meaningless under the Bush administration, I would have been fantasizing about returning to Beirut, as I had ever since it seduced me in the summer of 2000, when I first visited it as an adult.

So it was with irony, sadness, disbelief and anger that I watched thousands flee last month from Lebanon.

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