Category Archives: Politics

Al Manar & The Lebanese Forces Israeli Agent

He’s a “known” Israeli agent. He’s roaming the streets of Beirut. He has pictures with Israeli soldiers in the background. His name is Pierre Nammour. And he’s “threatening” with murder in Downtown Beirut.

They focus on his neck. He’s wearing a Lebanese Forces Cross. Because it’s common knowledge that the LF are known for being Israel-loving, non-Lebanese Lebanese. Showing that Cross, with its split base and the delta, will definitely add credibility to the report, they thought.

Throw in an interview there and you’ve got a scoop. Al Manar just unveiled an “Israeli agent” who wants to start war in Lebanon. There’s even a video.

A few comments though.

1) Assuming the pictures are real and not photoshopped which they may clearly be (Al Manar are sure pros at forgery), I’m sure I can find many, many pictures of Lebanese with Israeli soldiers in the background. It’s a byproduct of them occupying part of the country for approximately 20 years. If you go and take pictures at the Lebanese border now, odds are you will have an Israeli soldier in your picture’s background. It’s not enough for me to call them traitors but apparently it is for Al Manar. A Hezbollah militant decides to smile for the camera with an Israeli soldier in the background… Automatic traitor. Or not.

2) If Pierre Nammour is such a known traitor and those pictures are real and he has served in the Israeli army and he has killed Lebanese, etc., then why isn’t he in jail? I’m certain his political affiliation cannot pull enough strings to keep him out as Al Manar’s party did with “others.” Because even when it comes to treason, Lebanon has various degrees. There are some which don’t serve you politically and there are some which do.

3) How this shows that Israel is behind the assassination of Al Hassan is beyond me. And that was Al Manar’s conclusion apparently.

4) Al Manar has certainly made a splash out of the man saying that he’s willing to kill those who threaten him if the need arises. I wonder though, how many of the militants that Al Manar loves and cherishes would say the exact same thing and have probably done it more than once before and not only against Israelis?

5) What’s probably the best testament to the bullshit in Al Manar’s report is the fact that it’s one minute long. I would assume exposing an Israeli spy who’s threatening civil war would warrant more airtime.

Pierre Nammour is definitely an instinct-driven man, like many other Lebanese, who thinks with his beretta first and foremost. That’s definitely not acceptable but he’s not the only one in the country who thinks that way. Should he be turned into a news item? How about we turn the million or so Lebanese who think like him into news pieces too?

No one should expect anything remotely acceptable from a TV station like Al Manar, known for the absolute and utter crap they air day in day out. But it is a sad day when treason becomes a passe-par-tout accusation.

Till when should the Lebanese airwaves be littered with “n’importe quoi” news just because their target audience likes them?

The Political Side of the Achrafieh Explosion

A three meter crater took the life of eight people in Achrafieh on Friday. One of those eight people was the head of Lebanon’s ISF intelligence, Wissam Al Hassan.

The assassination of Wissam Al Hassan cannot be tackled except by asking two main questions: how and why.

How was he assassinated?

No, I’m not referring to the bomb which went off but as to how this bomb found Al Hassan on the day that he returned from abroad, on a busy street in Achrafieh at the exact same time he was passing. The answer cannot but be clear: there was an informant among Al Hassan’s entourage who monitored his every move, waiting for the right time to press the trigger.

Why was he assassinated?

Some people want to think it’s Israel. Al Hassan has rounded up many Israeli spies – but the biggest fish that he caught was non-other than Michel Samaha who happens to be Bachar el Assad’s favorite man in Lebanon, possibly surpassing the allies that are giving men in Syria to defend the regime. Being the head of the investigation with Samaha, Al Hassan managed to find connections and revelations about the work of the former and the involvement of the Syrian regime in the everyday lives of Lebanese, something that existed in theory before. But never this practically. Al Hassan managed to create causality between Samaha and many incidences which took place on the Lebanese scene and by virtue of Samaha’s proxy, the causality extended to our neighbor to the East.

Al Hassan has also created a tough link between Samaha and high ranking Syrian officials, such as Bousayna Chaaban, who – it transpired – had asked Samaha to work on dismantling the fragile status quo that existed in Lebanon. In order to do so, Samaha had too much help.

The investigation has also led to the unveiling of documents which accused one specific party on the Lebanese scene with an assassination that is uncannily like Hassan’s: a man who just returned from a trip abroad, as he went to a meeting, on a side street in a bustling region.

1 + 1 = 2

The informant who managed to conjure up the plan that took away Hassan’s life, as well as the lives of eight other people in Achrafieh, is most definitely Lebanese. You need to be Lebanese in order to have that much proximity to the second man of the ISF. The execution of the idea was also Lebanese – and God knows we have way too many Lebanese traitors in our midst who can’t wait but execute the commands they get. The command is, obviously, Syrian – straight out of Damascus. The Syrian regime in its current state can only send out a request. Some Lebanese are all too willing to abide.

The question to be asked is: why would a beaten but still fighting Syrian regime want to get Al Hassan out of the way, fully knowing that this won’t stop the investigation taking place into Samaha?

The answer is simple: the investigation was going way too fast for the liking of the crumbling regime and its Lebanese arms that were readied to be broken by it. Killing Al Hassan would buy time for the parties affected by his work to catch their breath and ready their upcoming steps. This is the tip of the iceberg for Lebanon. What will come soon will be much worse. After all, isn’t time valuable enough to kill for?

The assassination of Wissam Al Hassan is also another attempt by said “foreign agent” to instill chaos between Lebanon’s Sunnis and Shi’a. Those who benefit from such a scenario are Israel and Syria, the former because it would weaken Lebanon, especially its foes, and the latter because the Alawite leadership sees no problem in pitting the Sunnis against the Shiites. Iran, on the other hand, doesn’t have it in its best interest to have such a strife in Lebanon because it would damage the only section of the country it cares deeply about.

Israel is probably smiling giddily at what’s happening in Lebanon now. This is all too good to be true. But it stops at that – because the immediate interest in the whole matter is for the Syrians to defuse some of the tension on their regime. And that’s a gamble they’re willing to take. Will most fingers be pointed at them? They’re sure of it. But they can take it because the whole world, apart from Russia and China and Iran, have their fingers already pointed at the regime and they haven’t succumbed. They can kill their own people for months on end and get away with it. What’s a top ranking Lebanese official compared to the tens of thousands that have been killed already?

Israel may have done it too. They’ve killed tens of thousands and have assassinated Lebanese officials before (Imad Moghniyeh comes to mind). But I believe Syria is more plausible and it seems our president and prime minister share that belief.

The Future for Lebanon

This won’t be the last of assassinations to hit the country. I hope it is. But my instincts tell me it’s not. The March 14th movement is effectively comatose after what they did on Sunday. The big comeback they were planning to make turned into a knife that got sunk right through their heart – could they recover from it? I don’t think so. The anger in the streets is the most substantial in recent memory – even surpassing that of the May 2012 events in the Sunni streets. The dichotomy couldn’t have been clearer: as people celebrated with baklava in one part of the country, others were protesting with burning tires. Because burning rubber brings dead people back. The country is on the verge of a volcano if things keep escalating. Our politicians need to sober up for just one fraction of a moment and see exactly how big a mess they’ve all made out of things.

The 2013 elections are definitely in jeopardy. If the situation doesn’t start to get better really soon, I don’t expect we’ll be heading to the ballots in May to vote for the same people all over again.

The government should obviously not resign at the moment because a political void is exactly what those who planned the Achrafieh blast want from us. Our president needs to head out to the U.N. and immediately ask for “peace” keeping forces to be spread around our borders with Syria. I’d even call for the borders to be shut down because their economic value has become non-existent.

May all the victims of the Achrafieh massacre rest in peace.

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.

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.