Inappropriate

It is inappropriate for me to address this in a post right after I blogged about my pool.

It is inappropriate that my volunteer and friend Shogher from Beirut has to sit here and contemplate her dwindling life options. She's here safely, and her mother thankfully arrived in Yerevan two nights ago, but her father is still in Lebanon. She tells me that the relief situation with her friends and family in Beirut is miserable and getting worse still as there is a growing shortage of food and supplies (http://www.unicef.org/emerg/index_35034.html). Everything she had planned for her life continues to escape her. She's left an unfinished dissertation, and can't exactly go back to Beirut to graduate and continue her studies. She called the Lebanese Embassy today and asked them if any other countries aside from Armenia offer asylum to Lebanese nationals and the man on the other end laughed at her.

It is inappropriate for Armavia airlines to be profiting from the poor people displaced as a result of this disastrous conflict. Two nights ago two Armavia airliners arrived in Yerevan with 219 people on board. Most of them were Lebanese citizens of Armenian descent. Armavia looks like a hero for helping to evacuate these people- but as it turns out, the company is profiting from these traumatized people in several ways. First they required the refugees to purchase the Beirut-Yerevan ticket, even though they were physically to be flying out of Aleppo, Syria. Why? Because the Beirut ticket is more expensive. Passengers were still required to pay the Lebanese air taxes, AND in the middle of the night, all the refugees were required to pay for visas upon entry at Yerevan's International airport even though they had been told that they'd be granted asylum. It's appalling enough whenever we get ripped off here, it's just disgusting to take advantage of people in a war situation.

It is inappropriate for western media to spin Condolezza Rice's visit to the Middle East in any kind of positive light as a huge step of diplomacy. How can the US pretend to be a peace-broker when it is simultaneously supplying arms to one side!

Most inappropriate is for Israel to continue this ferocious and utterly unjustifiable attack which ultimately victimizes innocent Lebanese citizens.