Ortagus in Beirut for talks with Lebanese leaders, Mechanism meeting
U.S. envoy Morgan Ortagus on Monday arrived in Lebanon for talks with Lebanese leaders and participation in a meeting for the Mechanism ceasefire monitoring committee.
Ortagus had visited Israel on Saturday and Sunday.
Al-Arabiya’s Al-Hadath channel said that Ortagus would meet with President Joseph Aoun, Speaker Nabih Berri and PM Nawaf Salam on Tuesday, adding that she would preside over the Mechanism meeting on Wednesday.
U.S. envoy Tom Barrack is meanwhile expected to visit Lebanon in early November, diplomatic sources told Al-Jadeed TV.
27 October 2025, 15:56
00
racist propaganda ↴
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
27 October 2025, 19:40
00
they're not even the majority in lebanon and look where it brought us.
