Samir Kassir

Samir Kassir (Arabic: سمير قصير; 5 May 1960 – 2 June 2005) was a Lebanese-Syrian-Palestinian journalist of An-Nahar and professor of history at Saint-Joseph University, who was an advocate of democracy and prominent opponent of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. He was assassinated in 2005 as part of a series of assassinations of anti-Syria Lebanese political figures such as Rafic Hariri and George Hawi.

Samir Kassir was born on 5 May 1960. His father was a Palestinian-Lebanese and his mother Syrian-Lebanese. He hailed from an Antiochian Greek Orthodox family.

Kassir received his degree in political philosophy in 1984. He gained a DEA (roughly equivalent to a Master's degree in the British university system) in philosophy and political philosophy from Pantheon-Sorbonne University in the same year. He obtained his PhD in modern and contemporary history from Paris-Sorbonne University in 1990, with a thesis on the Lebanese Civil War.

Kassir's journalistic career began when he was a seventeen-year-old secondary school student at the Lycée Français de Beyrouth with unsigned contributions to the Lebanese Communist Party newspaper Al Nidā. The same year, he began contributing to the French-language daily L'Orient-Le Jour that took a strong stance against Syria and Hezbollah. From 1981 to 2000, he contributed to the French international political review Le Monde Diplomatique. In 1982 and 1983 he edited the newsletter Le Liban en Lutte (Struggling Lebanon), which was dedicated to the Lebanese resistance against the Israeli occupation. From 1984 to 1985 he edited the weekly Al-Yawm as-Sābi', and from 1986 to 2004 he was a member of the editorial board of the Revue des Etudes Palestiniennes, the French-language journal of the Institute for Palestine Studies. From 1988 to 1989 he contributed to the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat.

In 1995 he founded a new monthly political and cultural review, L'Orient L'Express, which he edited until it ceased publication in 1998, from lack of interest and pressure from the advertising industry. From that year on he was a professor at the "Institut des sciences politiques de l'Université Saint-Joseph" in Beirut. It was also in 1998 that Kassir became an editorial writer for the daily Al-Nahar newspaper. He became widely known for his popular weekly column in which he wrote strong articles against the pro-Syrian government. He also made frequent appearances on several television stations as a political analyst on news programmes.

Kassir was assassinated using a car bomb in Beirut on 2 June 2005, just a few days after the general elections. The investigation into his assassination directs to Unit 121 Of Hezbollah as part of its policy to eliminate political and journalist threat of those who appose to them and the Syrian government influence in Lebanon.

On 4 June, a funeral ceremony was performed for him in Beirut with the attendance of hundreds.

There was widespread condemnation for the killing and many prominent opposition figures blaming the blast on the Lebanese and Syrian governments. Among them were Hariri's son, Saad Hariri, who said "the blood-stained hands that assassinated Rafiq Hariri are the same ones that assassinated Samir Kassir." Moreover, Elias Atallah, Secretary General of the Democratic Left Movement, urged his allies to the presidential palace and remove president Lahoud. However, the calls remained unanswered. Years later, 14 March allies admitted that had Lahoud been removed, Lebanon would have been spared the later political assassinations.