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.
A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares 