Category Archives: Lebanon

No, Donald Trump Didn’t Sign A Visa Free Travel Order To Arab Countries

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A “news” article by a website called “USA radio” is currently making the rounds that Donald Trump signed an executive order that allows visa-free travel to Arab countries, including Lebanon, excluding the 6 Arab countries of the 7 he had tried to ban two weeks ago. It was written at the same time Trump signed his travel ban order, but only started making the Arab rounds recently.

The article is being shared left and right. To summarize, the news is fake. False. Not correct. You still need visas to go to the U.S. and no American president, for the foreseeable future, regardless of who they are, will sign an order that allows visa free travel to Arab countries. I mean, where do we think we are, la la land?

For starters, the website in question has shared two similar articles worded in almost exactly the same way about Caribbean countries as well as Ghana. Both articles have since been removed. Another article remains about the U.S. establishing visa free travel with “Asia” and that is also fake news.

Usa-radio.com is a website full of fake news, of which this is a bunch:

I know the idea of being added to the list of countries who don’t have to knock embassy doors for visas is tantalizing, but this is still not happening anytime soon, and the Lebanese passport, as well as most Arab countries’ passports, are still among the worst-ranked passports of the world.

Moreover, Donald Trump whose policies are progressively aiming at isolating his country from the rest of the world will surely not sign an order to allow visa free travel from countries whose predominant religion he wants to ban. Let’s have some common sense, people. Also, just check out the actual, official, governmental Visa Waiver Program website (click).

 

If it’s too good to be true, it most likely isn’t, especially when the president whose order you want to be true is building a multi-billion wall to keep his Southern neighbors out. If you want to go to the United States, your only way is to pay that visa fee and go to your local embassy and be interviewed.

As a rule of thumb, when you see an article at which your first thought is “is this true?” from websites you’ve previously not heard of, make sure you use the powers of google to search for reliable sources that you are familiar with that corroborate the information put forth in that article.

How To Make Sure You Can Vote In The 2017 Lebanese Parliamentary Elections

In theory, on May 21st, 2017, Lebanon will be voting for a “new” parliament for the first time since June 2009. It is our duty as citizens, therefore, to make sure that nothing stands in our way from making sure we hold our MPs accountable, to the best of our capacities given the law they are tailoring to make sure they return to power.

In order for you to be an eligible voter in Lebanon, you must be over 21, have no felonies on your judiciary record and, subsequently, have your name be listed on your hometown’s voters register. Every year, on February 10th, the Lebanese ministry of interior publishes all of Lebanon’s voting lists for voters to access them and make sure they are listed correctly.

As such, it’s our duty at this point to make sure that our names are not listed incorrectly or with missing data that could prevent us from voting on Election Day.

Case in point, during last year’s municipal election, I was a representative at the polling station for my father who was running for “mekhtar,” and we faced more than a dozen of voters who had their voting rights challenged because of mistakes in the government’s voting list.

All of this could be prevented by us being diligent.

Step 1: Go to this website (click).

Step 2: Click on القوائم الإنتخابية.

Step 3: Go to your proper mohafazat, caza, and village. Then select your sect as well as gender and sift through the document for your registry number.

If you find any mistakes in your registration, head to your hometown’s mekhtar with your ID. They would fill out a paper that you’d take to your caza’s “ma2mour l nfous” for them to fix your registration information. The whole process takes minutes, and the deadline is March 10th.

It’s our right as citizens to vote and hold those who have taken away our right to vote two times now, and hopefully not a third time, accountable. Let’s not let some silly mistake in our registration be enough reason for some political representatives at our polling place to challenge that right.

Elie Marouni Wants To Build Wall With Syria, Deport Refugees & Says Hillary Is Inept As She Can’t Please Her Husband

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Remember Elie Marouni? The Kataeb MP who, only a few months ago, said women should be blamed for when they got raped? Well, he’s back to his old horrifying ways.

In an interview with Joe Maalouf’s Hawa el Horriyeh, many Lebanese politicians were trying to draw similarities between our herd of politicians and American president Donald Trump. While many tried to distance themselves from the comparison and when asked what they’d do if they were Trump tried to have a more humane and decent approach, Elie Marouni went the exact opposite way.

He boasted that he was a lot like Trump, because he was sick of all the disgust we’re surrounded with. He did not specify what was disgusting exactly given he’s rotting away in parliament since 2009, postponing elections left and right and contributing to the horrific political stagnation we are part of. But, yes please tell me more about your “araf.”

It doesn’t stop there. When other Lebanese politicians criticized Trump’s proposed border wall with Mexico as inhumane, Elie Marouni boasted that if he were the Lebanese Trump, he would build a wall on our border with Syria and get all the refugees out and back to their country. He would also make his wife his personal advisor because “you can’t leave her alone.”

His magnum opus doesn’t stop there. Because Elie Marouni is so funny, he figured the best way to bring down Hillary Clinton, also known as the first woman to ever be the nominee of a major American party for president and the person who got the second highest number of votes in history after Barack Obama, was to address her husband cheating on her: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, then how can she satisfy America?”

Simply revolting. The horrifying part is that there will be many Lebanese who not only agree with Elie Marouni but would also chuckle or applaud his remarks, especially that “joke” about Clinton not satisfying her husband because what are we but a patriarchal society that laughs at the expense of women, especially when they are the butt of the joke of their husband’s indecencies, summarizing them by their husband and not through their own accomplishments?

You see, whether you like her or not, Hillary Clinton is one hundred million times the person that Elie Marouni will ever be, and that’s before we even go into her list of accomplishments that he wouldn’t even dream of matching. And yet, here we are, with a Lebanese MP thinking he has the right to joke about another politician, just because she’s a woman, from a sexual way, while he basks in his own irrelevance.

But you can’t expect much from someone who thinks a woman who is raped should be held accountable for her own rape, especially when he defends himself by saying that “women in the audience agreed with me.” There are plenty of self-hating individuals out there, as is evident by all the Arabs that voted for the man who tried to ban their own family members from entering the country one week into his presidency, but I digress.

What can you expect from a man who wants to keep his wife as close to him as possible because he can’t trust her to be her own person?

Elie Marouni doesn’t think his extent of ridicule and low-level rhetoric stops there. Like his role model Trump, he also wants to build a wall along our border with Syria. The wall is, as he calls it, a wall to control things and not to separate. I guess we must all re-evaluate our basic knowledge and understanding of walls because, as far as humanity knew, the basic function of a wall is to separate. You can refer to what Israel is doing to Palestinians across their land for further information. I bet they also call it a “wall to control things.”

He also wants to send refugees, whom he calls “emigrants,” because they obviously left their country voluntarily to come live in ours, back to their home-land. Perhaps that’s what he meant by the “disgust” he referred to when he said he shared a lot of Trump’s ideas?

This person, ladies and gentlemen, is a member of Lebanon’s parliament, and one who will probably be voted back in this May if he doesn’t postpone elections for the third time that is. Lebanon, we deserve better than an MP who thinks our women’s bodies being violated is not the fault of the person violating them. We deserve better than an MP who has the audacity to bring down women who have done more than he will ever do in four lifetimes just because their husbands are pigs. We deserve better than this level of fear from others legislating on our behalf.

Welcome to the age when xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, sexism and misogyny are worn with pride.

Check the video here.

Arabs Should Look In The Mirror Before Criticizing Trump’s Travel Ban


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Over the past few days, I watched Americans old and young protest against their president’s travel ban. It was a sight to behold – those people who were taught all their lives to fear Arabs, Muslims and to have all kinds of negative connotations with them were standing up for human decency.

The protests haven’t been exclusive to the United States. London and other European cities have had their own share, culminating in an fiery discussion between British PMs about Trump and his policies.

Meanwhile in the Arab world, crickets.

Not a single Arab country had anything to say about the ban. They couldn’t even muster the guts to stand up with their own. I guess that whole “Arabism” theme is only nice when used from Arab Idol and The Voice podiums.

What some countries did was the exact opposite: Kuwait fortified travel bans against 5 Muslim countries, including Syria. The top Emirati diplomat came out in support of the travel ban. And these moves are not without context.

The two Arab countries that have taken the most refugees are Jordan and Lebanon with 1 million and 1.5 million officially registered refugees, respectively. Gulf counties, all of which are not affected by Trump’s ban despite them being the biggest exporters of Islamic terrorism, have taken in a total of zero.

As a side note, that is also the exact same number of Americans that have been killed by terrorist attacks from the countries Trump has banned, while the number is 2500+ from the Gulf countries that he has not banned and who haven’t taken in any refugees.

In fact, Gulf countries have made their visa requirements for other Arabs so disgusting that no one dares speak up against it. I personally have no intention to ever work or live there, so I suppose I can speak up.

KSA has increased its visa price to $1200 for Lebanese nationals in an attempt to curb the number of Lebanese coming in for work, and as a political retaliation at the country not giving it the blowjobs it always needs.

The UAE has made it near impossible to obtain work visas for it as well, and depending on the Emirate you’re applying to work in, you could be rejected entirely despite having proper paperwork. Moreover, the UAE has made it near impossible for Syrians whose families are in the country to get visas to visit; case in point: a Syrian friend of mine who was born and raised there couldn’t go see her family since moving to Lebanon for university studies, but was able to get a 2 year US visa (prior to the ban).

The UAE’s situation doesn’t stop there. They’ve been systematically targeting people for deportation based on their religious affiliation. If the Lebanese state had any decency, they’d publish the list of Shiite nationals who were deported just for being Shiites.

As mentioned above, Kuwait has enforced a visa ban on 5 Muslim countries, including Syria. But this isn’t new for Kuwait. In fact, the country is known for its derision of foreigners coming in, however they are, except if they are Westerners of course.

As a Lebanese, I need a visa to enter every single Arab country even if for a visit except Jordan and Syria. The rest of those countries don’t have a straightforward process either and for some of them, I have to provide the same papers demanded by the US or Schengen visas. And my country isn’t better either. Yes, we have 1.5 million to 2 million refugees, which is probably more than what the country can handle granted, but few are those who are happy with having the refugees here and see them as anything more than a burden in the best of cases or treat them with all the xenophobia they could muster on average.

In fact, it might be hard to believe but Lebanon has strict visa requirements toward certain countries as well. For starters, the criteria we’ve enforced towards accepting Syrians in are hell. Many are turned away at our borders because they can’t tick off the checklist from hell we’ve started to enforce a few years ago. We also enforce inhumane visa requirements on countries we deem as “lesser.” Refer to how Deepa Dermasiri, Malek Maktabi’s New Year Eve gut-wrenching story, couldn’t get a visa to come see her daughter in Lebanon and passed away before she was able to.

What’s worse, the story doesn’t just stop with visas. While Americans protested against a ban that doesn’t even affect most of them, has there been any protests in the places we come from? In the grander scheme of things, has there been protests against the horrendous visa requirements we have for each other to begin with?

Do Lebanese dare to speak up against the rules the Emirati government humiliated them with? Or Saudi visas? Or any Arab visa?

Do we even stand up for minorities in our countries? When was the last time we had protests for some parts of our societies that were oppressed? When did Muslims have mass protests for the persecuted Christians in some Arab countries? When did we have mass protests for women rights? LGBT rights? KSA has Muslim only roads. Just saying.

Yes, those of us who stand up are courageous because it’s so difficult to do so in the first place, but the rest are complacent and satisfied. With what? Religion, money, lack of education… you name it.

Yes, Trump’s ban is all kinds of messed up. But then again, aren’t we all kinds of messed up too? Let’s take a hard look in the mirror at how we treat each other before panicking about how others are treating us, because the fact of the matter is: we treat other Arabs worse than Trump could ever do.

So thanks to the Americans protesting for us. You’re greater than even I thought you were.

No, In 2017, Being Gay Is Still Not Legal In Lebanon… But We’re Getting There

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Lebanon, rejoice. A judge in the Metn area has issued, according to the legal agenda, what most Lebanese would consider one of the more liberal decisions to happen in the country in a long time by declaring that “homosexuality is a personal choice, and not a punishable offense.”

Of course, people were quick to start the celebrations. The ruling, which was championed by LGBT-rights advocate NGO Helem, is a step forward without a debt. But it remains, more or less, symbolic in a country where the actual constitution still stipulates that consensual sexual relations between two consenting adults who happen to be of the same gender unnatural is still there. This judge’s decision is limited to the jurisdiction of his court and could be overruled by Lebanon’s supreme court if they please because of the presence of the aforementioned article 534 in Lebanon’s penal code.

This is also not the first time that a Lebanese judge issues a decision regarding homosexuality as not being “unnatural.” The first time – and the actual pioneering step in this aspect – was through a judge in Batroun (home state pride!) in 2009. The second time was also in the Metn area, back in January 2014. The third time was in January 2016 when a judge allowed trans-people to legally change their genders. 

Another milestone was a 2013 decision by the Lebanese Syndicate of Psychiatry to remove homosexuality off the list of mental health disorders, which has been the case in scientific literature since the 1970s. 40 years late, perhaps, but the move was still the first in the entire Middle East and Northern Africa region.

The common denominator for all previous three rulings is that they remain limited to what the judge in question decreed, because the penal code is unchanged and, thus, homosexuality is still a “crime” in 2017, in the Middle East’s most liberal country.

The ramification of that is that, despite how excellent and pioneering those rulings are, the state and its backwards policemen can still target LGBT people using article 534 and subject them to all kinds of human rights abuses.

And while the ruling is to be commended, the language it uses further perpetuates the commonly-held stereotype, even among LGBT-friendly individuals, that homosexuality, or any non-heterosexual behavior, is a “personal choice.” It’s not a choice. It’s how someone is built. One does not choose their sexual orientation the same way one doesn’t choose the country they’re born in. It’s really that simple.

One of the main problems facing further changes in mentalities towards the LGBT community today in the country and the region is the fact that education about the topic is severely lacking, many people believe the religion they were born into is enough reference about the particular topic and politicians that we vote for couldn’t care less about the issue to begin with.

Exhibits from Facebook comments on the latest posts about the Metn judge’s ruling:

Moving forward, we have to enable more LGBT-friendly parliament members to get to power by showing them that Lebanese progressives are as active voters as the conservatives they wish to court every single elections. And we cannot be content with important but essentially trivial rulings that can be overruled at any moment when our constitution still thinks being gay is an abomination. The core is rotten, and that’s what needs to be fixed still.