by latimes.com

Pope Francis arrives in Cairo on Friday — the first visit by a pontiff to the Middle East’s most populous country in 17 years — at a time when Christians across the region find themselves under threat by political repression and violent attacks. In Egypt, Coptic Christians have been chased from their homes, their churches and a monastery attacked. In Iraq, Assyrians have been displaced from villages, whole neighborhoods and business districts gutted by Islamic State. In the West Bank, Iran and Lebanon, Christians have grown accustomed to celebrating under guard.

“Some of the oldest Christian communities in the world are disappearing in the very lands where their faith was born and first took root,” concluded a Center for American Progress report on the plight of Christians in the Middle East.The Middle East-North Africa area has the highest concentration of Muslims of any region of the world: 93% of its more than 340 million inhabitants. Christians in the region face not only the threat of Islamist violence, but subtler challenges. Many wind up leaving because they can’t find jobs and face social discrimination. Countries such as Saudi Arabia make it difficult for Christians to practice their faiths openly. We talked to Christians across the region, from Egypt to Iran, on the eve of the pope’s visit.

by Nazeer Rida

Beirut – The Lebanese Army Command announced on Tuesday that it was intensifying its “preemptive” attacks against extremist bases and locations on the outskirts of the northeastern border town of Arsal. The offensive coincided with the arrival of a new batch of American weapons to the army. The cargo was unloaded at the Riyaq airport. The operations, which have been upped for a week, indicate that the Lebanese military has taken the decision to decisively end the presence of extremists on the outskirts of Arsal. The militants from groups, such as ISIS and al-Nusra Front, have taken up the mountainous border area as a safe haven.

Lebanese political forces informed on the operations told Asharq Al-Awsat that the preemptive measures “target the militant fortifications to prevent their expansion” into other areas and to “thwart their mobility.” President Michel Aoun had highlighted to Army Commander Joseph Aoun and members of the Military Council last week the importance of the preemptive operations in order to prevent terrorist attacks in Lebanon, revealed the sources.

The army had carried out at dawn on Tuesday a wide military operation against ISIS positions in Lebanon’s eastern mountain range. The National News Agency said that 20 ISIS members were killed and wounded in the operation in the outskirts of Ras Baalbek.

features.foreignpolicy.com

A decade ago, while studying at business school in San Francisco, Fadi BouKaram started feeling homesick for the sunbaked hills of his native Lebanon. He typed “Lebanon” into Google Maps — and was stunned to find himself looking not at the Middle East, but at Lebanon, Oregon, a mere nine-hour drive from his apartment. He was puzzled: There was a U.S. Lebanon? Could there be more?

Another quick search led him to Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Then to Lebanon, Kentucky. Altogether, he found more than 50 Lebanons in the United States. The reason, of course, is that the word “Lebanon” appears more than 70 times in the Old Testament. What, BouKaram wondered, if one day he visited all of them?

Ten years later, this germ of an idea had landed him in a police station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, chasing a mother-daughter meth-dealing team that had stolen and gutted his rented recreational vehicle, the one he had slept in for five months, the one that had carried him 17,800 miles through 37 states, and left him with a better understanding of the American heartland than nearly all his coastal elite friends. But more on that later.

BouKaram, now 38, spent much of his childhood in bomb shelters in the Beirut suburb of Sabtieh at the height of Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s. The war, combined with the conflict with Israel, left the country decrepit in every way. BouKaram got his degree in electrical engineering and soon landed a job. In 2005, he was so close when former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated with a car bomb that his face was cut with glass from the explosion. “I needed a break,” said BouKaram, who decamped to San Francisco shortly after to study.

by Josh Wood

BEIRUT // For generations, Armenians have been involved in an uphill battle for the international community to recognise the Ottoman Empire’s massacre of their descendants during the First World War as genocide. Now, 102 years after the slaughter and death marches began, and with Turkey not only continuing in its denial of genocide, but also lobbying against it being labelled as such by other countries, recognition may have finally come from an unlikely place. Hollywood.