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On February 6, 2006, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and leader of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) Michel Aoun signed a memorandum of understanding, ostensibly to build a consensual Lebanese democracy on the basis of transparency, justice, and equality. However, a careful examination of the agreement shows that its real goal was the neutralization of Sunni political power, especially after the 2005 assassination of the powerful Sunni statesman and former prime minister Rafiq Hariri. The memorandum's allusion to limiting the influence of money on politics and combating business and bureaucratic corruption hinted at the Sunni leadership's vast financial and entrepreneurial assets. Conversely, its insistence on the right of Lebanese expatriates to participate in the country's elections sought to enlist the support of the mostly Christian immigrants in the Americas. Similarly, its attempt to link Lebanese national security to Hezbollah's arsenal aimed at legitimizing Shiite militarism. Adapted from the source document.

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has apparently retained the hope of a military return to Lebanon from where he summarily withdrew in 2005 following the Rafiq Hariri assassination. In a 2008 interview with a Lebanese newspaper, he accused the northern city of Tripoli of becoming a base for Islamists who posed a direct threat to Syria's security. This and other charges made could not be further from the truth. Far from posing a threat to its immediate neighborhood, let alone Syrian security, Tripoli's hopelessly fragmented Salafi movement is primarily non-combative, its more militant groups have long been defeated and pacified. Adapted from the source document.

In his review of my book Arabs at the Crossroads: Political Identity and Nationalism, the neophyte political scientist Bassel F. Salloukh attempts to instruct me on the fundamentals of research methodology. Sadly, however, his review amounts to nothing more than a brazen barrage of protestations and disapprovals. I counted about two dozen complaints and unsubstantiated criticisms in the one-and-a-half-page review, in which he summarily condemns the book for its purported "sweeping indictment of Arab failures." Salloukh unleashes a fiery litany of pseudoacademic indignation because I found the political-culture approach and crises of identity and legitimacy relevant to the study of failed Arab political systems. The reviewer is certainly free to disagree with my approach, but professional integrity necessitates that he adopt a method more academic than screeching sophomoric objections. Rather than develop an analytical case against me, the reviewer instead opts to swing from the hip, falsely attributing to me things that I never said, such as my alleged identification of a "basic foundational dislocation that has doomed everything Arab."