by Robert Hamd In 2017, the Lebanese government brought in the international consultancy firm, McKinsey, to analyze Lebanon’s public and private sectors. On Wednesday, January 2, the Ministry of Economy released the report, describing what they saw as Lebanon’s crippling political stalemate in government. The 1,200-page report warns that the […]
By Wissam al-Saliby* Many of my fellow Evangelicals have expressed dissatisfaction with the United Nations, sharing views ranging from, “The U.N. is an evil global government” to, “The U.N. is inefficient and useless.” One question, among many, is “What is the U.N. doing for religious freedom?” I will attempt to […]
By Wissam al-Saliby In March of this year at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, I saw a man sitting next to me writing in Arabic the statement that he will be reading to the council. Adel was a Tunisian head of a non-profit. I said hello in […]
By Brent Hamoud We tend to put faces on unfortunate things. It is not a good practice but we do it anyways. Famine has African faces, terrorism Muslim faces, the drug trade Latino faces, and on it goes. So it is with human displacement where the faces of Syrians, Palestinians […]
By Jade Kassis War has become a familiar phenomenon to us Middle Easterners, who have become acquainted with its violent chaos as well as with its sacrificial loss. War has changed us as a people. We have grown accustomed to feelings of unrest and a lack of control. One minute […]
By Brent Hamoud Much has been made of US President Trump’s executive decisions temporarily banning select nationals and refugees from entering the USA. The order has been met with opposition in forums ranging from airport terminals to federal courts, which have so far blocked the executive decision from going into […]
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are 63.91 million “persons of concern”, which includes refugees, people awaiting recognition as refugees, and people who have fled their homes but not sought refuge in another country. Of these, 16.1 million are refugees, that is people who fled […]
The 1970s were defining for me. Those were my high school years. Growing up between Lebanon and the US gave me the opportunity to experience those formative high school years cross-culturally. I was a mid-western boy living in a Middle Eastern home. Recently, I’ve decided to reread some of my […]