Salam says exerting utmost efforts to halt Israeli violations
Prime Minister Nawaf Salam held talks Friday in Bkirki with Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi.
Speaking after the meeting, Salam said “the parliamentary elections will be held on their constitutional time.”
“We as a government are working on this basis and this is an undebatable issue,” he added.
As for the concerns over the security situation and the issue of arms monopolization, Salam said: “A decision has been taken and the army has presented us with a plan for implementation, and in less than a week we will receive a new report from the army commander and there is no backing down from the decision of monopolizing arms.”
“We are witnessing an Israeli escalation and we are exerting utmost effort through the adopted mechanism and our Arab and international relations to rally all our capabilities to halt the Israeli violations and return to the cessation of hostilities agreement,” the premier added.
Moreover, he said the government has “taken serious steps regarding weapons inside Palestinian camps,” noting that “more than 20 truckloads of heavy arms have been handed over.”
“This is a continuous course and we have not finished it,” he added.
31 October 2025, 15:41
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the racist speaks ↴
Letter to the editor: Gaining civil rights for Shias should be top priority
Posted February 5, 2015
Noam Chomsky says that Shias are the majority of Lebanon’s population, such that, if free elections were held and if Shias threw all their support to Hezbollah, it could form the government entirely on its own. Yet Article 24 of the Lebanese Constitution reserves half of parliamentary seats for Christians, who number, by my own guess, around a quarter of the population.
Here, in a nutshell, you have the Shia sense of grievance that makes Hezbollah so dynamic a force in politics, and yet also the solution to two problems.
Hezbollah militancy and Lebanese political instability would both be ameliorated if Hezbollah put its main effort into gaining civil rights and political representation for Lebanon’s Shias – and the U.S. could be on the right side of history by aiding that cause.
So go ahead and tell me why not, please.
Christopher C. Rushlau
