Category Archives: Lebanon

The Phone Numbers of Lebanese MPs

This is not a breach of their privacy. This is simply what other voters all around the world can do: call their representative and demand he/she votes a certain way on a bill.

Our MPs are not voting on bills or doing anything worthwhile for that matter, so we might as well have the option to call and nag.

Have you heard that political parties are beginning to offer airplane tickets for the 2013 elections? You think they’d offer me a round trip to somewhere in Western Europe? Or it doesn’t work that way?

Anyway, here are some of the phone numbers:

Sami Gemayel: 03-554444

Michel Aoun: 03-191918

Najib Mikati: 03-222828

Antoine Zahra: 03-350498

Nayla Tueini: 03-340000

Nadim Gemayel: 03-410452

Samer Saadeh: 03-444448

Bahiya Hariri: 03-720000

Gilberte Zwein: 03-634142

I actually had Antoine Zahra and Samer Saadeh’s phone numbers before and Zahra’s number matches the one on this list. Saadeh’s number isn’t on it.

You can check out the full list here, courtesy of the Lebanese Memes facebook page.

P.S.: As a reader suggested to me on Twitter, you can call and pretend you want pizza delivery.

The October 13th Coward

“They knew it was a martyrdom mission,” he said on a recent talk show. “Those army men knew they were going there to die for their country.”

And that’s what happened on October 13th.

They all died. All of them. Except him. I guess this certain martyrdom mission has somehow eluded him. I guess declaring he’d stay to fight regardless of consequences was a marketing sham – he sure is a pro at those. Some of the bodies of those men who died for our country twenty three years ago were poured down under the concrete of the ministry of defense. Others were never returned to their families.

Some families still have hope that their sons would come back. They still have hope that somehow they escaped the atrocities of that day. Some of them hope their loved ones are sitting in a jail in the country of the army that killed them, praying for a resolution. Some mothers still run to the door whenever they hear footsteps. And it’s all because of him.

I can attest though that Paris is a very nice place to live in. If my government is willing to send me there, I’d go willingly. No questions asked. So I wonder how anyone would think a decade’s stay in Paris is punishment. My idea of a punishment is rotting in jail, getting tortured by a foreign army in a prison cell on their territories, not seeing your family ever again.

But I may be too morbid when it comes to punishments. Maybe the Parisian weather, under the Eiffel Tower, at Montmartre and passing by les Champs-Elysées, is really harsh, especially for older individuals.

And then he has the decency to commemorate the memory of those men every year. And he has the decency to speak on their behalf while he’s figuratively sleeping with the people that killed them. Defending them. Telling everyone that the regime that massacred those men whose only fault was to believe that their commander would stay with them is something that we can trust. Telling everyone that this regime is something that will protect us.

And he also has the decency to call himself the protector of Christians in Lebanon. The only form of official protection that they’ve ever gotten. An army general. Little does he know that he’s single handedly terrorizing Christians daily and bringing them down by setting up the scenarios that he conjures up like a magic spell: be afraid. Be very afraid. They’re out there to get us. He’s on a mission: demoralize the Christians until the only solution they see is his. Bring them down. Tear their spirit apart. He’s always been good at that.

Paranoia is not treatable in old age.

Those conjured up scenarios are always in full swing – even when it comes to the memory of martyrs whose deaths are on his hand. The latest is him accusing his bonafide political rivals of causing their deaths. Add that to the thesaurus definition of political bankruptcy. If you can’t beat them in a political debate in 2012, start telling lies that infringe upon morals and convictions the way you see please and the way some people would more than gladly believe.

After all, isn’t it of the qualities of those rivals to kill and kill and kill? When the shoe fits, why not make them wear it?

It is sad that a civil war event of the magnitude of what took place on October 13th becomes yet another opportunity for him to use as a platform to make himself into a victim, an innocent saint whose only fault was trying to make things right, of being never wrong.

The bodies of the army’s martyrs that died on the day are already decayed under the concrete. Their souls are shrieking for justice, for retribution against their killers. But that’s something they will never get from him as he plays cards with their killers, laughing over their fates over a cup of coffee whilst thinking about what he’ll be lying about the day their anniversary rolls around.

Here’s to more October 13th of cowardly hypocrisy.

Lebanon, What Have We Done Lately?

The I-bomb was dropped in a medical school class today.

Sitting there, actually paying attention for once, the American doctor was giving a lecture about various neurological conditions, one of which is Multiple Sclerosis.

MS is a disease that we don’t quite fully understand yet, similarly to many other diseases of the brain, and we don’t have much of it in Lebanon for one reason. And this reason was illustrated by research done by our neighbors to the South.

Israel.

The word was dropped and those who weren’t paying attention suddenly perked up.

“Multiple Sclerosis has environmental factors relating to the weather. People who live the first 15 years of their life in warmer climates, such as Lebanon, have a much less predisposition to develop MS than those who live in colder climates. Immigrant studies were done in Israel regarding this issue and while we don’t understand the mechanism of why this happens, we are certain weather is a factor.”

As the lecture ended, I was wondering why isn’t Lebanon the country that gets to have its name mentioned by foreign doctors who come to other foreign countries to give guest lectures? Why isn’t my country the one with universities hell-bent on finding new breakthroughs and new discoveries in science and medicine and things that matter?

“Researchers in Lebanon have found a very important correlation between this factor and that disease” – said no one ever.

Then I realized, we’re too busy sending out useless drones to Israel that do nothing except boost our self-esteem and get some of us to freak out over potentially rubbing the thin-skinned bully to the South the wrong way, fight over an electoral law that will get us nowhere and sink deeper into an abyss of ignorance.

What have we done lately? Absolutely nothing worth mentioning.

Insulting May Chidiac

To say these people are retarded would be an insult to those who were born with mental deficits.

To say they are worthless bitches would be an insult to all female dogs everywhere, including those ugly Chihuahuas.

To say these people have half of their brain missing would be an insult to all types of brain pathological atrophies.

To say these people are scum would be an insult to garbage.

The people I’m referring to are those who found it nice and interesting to insult May Chidiac. Why? Because she was considering running for parliamentary elections in 2013. Where? In the “stronghold” of their leader, Keserwan.

I was under the impression Keserwan wasn’t the property of any political leader, let alone someone who originally hails from Beirut’s Southern suburb. But I may be mistaken. After all, to them I’m a Maronite from Batroun who’s just angry his Maronitism is of a second degree compared to our neighbor to the South.

 

(Pictures)

I have something to say to these people who find it okay to call a person who survived an assassination attempt, losing half her limbs in the process, a half human. I don’t wish these people ill – i.e. I don’t wish upon them a car accident that would mutilate them and get them into a course of physiotherapy and surgical operations that would take more than 7 years. What I do wish for these people is a brain with the mental capacities of a ten year old. Maybe then they can actually know the severity of the garbage they’re uttering.

Nicóle Bekhaazi – walaw at the Ó? – Elias Aoun, Ghosn Joe, the 69 people who “liked” Nicóle’s picture and the countless others who agree with them and with whom we’ve all had fights about this same issue are irrelevant. And I wish they  hadn’t gotten the attention they so desperately wanted. But they did. And here I am trashing them. Frankly, I felt like insulting them. I felt like giving them a taste of their own medicine. I felt like attempting to sink down to their level for a moment but I still have a long way to go to reach their low.

Why do I want to do that? Because people like them are not people you can talk to. They are people you talk down to.

On the other hand, there’s the semi-official stance of the Lebanese Forces via their Facebook page. This stance basically called all Aounists stupid.

And this is also beyond unacceptable. You do not call people who differ from you politically stupid just because you don’t agree with them – except the people insulting May Chidiac. Not all Aounists are like that – regardless of whether you agree or not with their politics. And this coming from the Facebook page of one of Lebanon’s leading parties makes this a transgression that cannot be ignored.

The Lebanese Forces need better moderators for their Facebook page: ones that know right from wrong and what can be posted on such pages and what cannot. They could have stopped at saying “May Chidiac is a line you cannot cross.” And it would have had the desired impact.

On the other hand, the insults also made it to LBC news. And I find it very professional of them that they discussed this knowing that she doesn’t work with them anymore.

Bel 3arabe l mshabra7, khara ha heik 3alam. Tfeh. 

MEA Fires Racist Employee

MEA did the only thing acceptable in the situation the company found itself in over the past few days. The employee who was front and center of the racism incidence was fired, as reported here.

While I do not agree that the  name of the employee should have been announced, I obviously fully agree with the steps taken. Not only is firing the female employee and her male accomplice the right thing to do but it’s actually a “pioneering” step in the Lebanese fight against racism.

Never has a racism event gone this public and been met with accountability – and that is the only way we move forward with the issue of racism.

People like to preach about the importance of education in overcoming the issue of racism in Lebanon. I am all for the distinction between a racist country and racist individuals and based on that, I work on never trashing my country when I talk about racism. However, I also believe that education in Lebanon would lead nowhere in the issue of racism.

Education is important, definitely. But the education we get is one that the majority of Lebanese don’t – that’s the majority which lives in the rural regions of the country – the regions we very easily categorize as extremist. Those regions have such high poverty levels and so little educational levels that another solution needs to be devised.

Racism isn’t also a Lebanese problem. It is a worldwide problem that takes many forms. It transcends the hate towards others based on skin color. It is the intolerance towards another’s religion, the intolerance towards another’s nationality. And if a country doesn’t have a predominant problems with someone’s race, then they probably have a problem with differing religions. It is the problem of “difference.”

We dislike those with whom we can’t easily relate.

So what’s different between Lebanon and those supposedly racism-free countries? It’s quite simple: accountability. And that’s what works most with us Lebanese: a slap on the wrist when we do stuff wrong (fines for smoking, for not putting on the seatbelt, for speeding….)

People who get accused of racism in those countries have consequences to deal with. In our country, racism is met with indifference. A prominent TV anchor was blantly saying that an Ethiopian maid who committed suicide a few months ago was deranged (click here)- and he found no trouble at all in passing his ideology to his viewers. I’m sure he got high ratings for that episode as well.

If that anchor had met the same fate as the employee, people would have known that what he said was wrong. They would have known that talking badly against someone else just because you don’t like the skin they were born in is unacceptable. And they would have realized that it is no longer accepted to have it happen.

Their racism would then regress – it would get suppressed. And that is how other countries do it.