Editor, Daily Nexus,

I was disappointed in reading your coverage of the Lebanese Club’s Middle Eastern Fair (“Middle Eastern Fair Sparks Altercation Between Students,” Daily Nexus, May 31). Only a few sentences explained what the fair was about. The rest of the article was dedicated to a settled misunderstanding between the Lebanese Club and the American Students for Israel on campus. The point of the fair was to increase awareness about Middle Eastern cultures and to promote a positive image, since news coverage in America rarely shows anything positive about the Middle East. Instead of sharing the positive atmosphere of the fair, the Nexus discussed the negative aspects surrounding it.

The fair was amazing and represented the Middle East very gracefully. It provided a lot of information about the cultures, sights, people and traditions of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Israel and Iran. People who came had the chance to discover that Lebanon has 18 different religious communities and is the only Middle Eastern country without a desert, and that the only Roman temple to Jupiter still standing in the world is in Lebanon. Or that the Bible is named after Byblos, an ancient city in Lebanon. And that Jesus Christ performed his first miracle of turning water into wine in southern Lebanon’s village of Qana. If you stopped at the Jordan booth, you learned that in Jordan, there is a city carved into rock 2,000 years ago called Petra. Petra, known as the rose-red city, remained unknown to Europeans until the 19th century. One could have also discovered that St. Paul was born in Syria by checking out the Syria booth, or that the Syrian capital of Damascus is one of the oldest cities in the world. It is unfortunate that the Nexus was uninterested in reporting to us what its reporters learned about the Middle East at the very fun, very successful Middle Eastern Fair.