Tag Archives: Lebanon

Pity The Nation

Pity the nation whose sons and daughters have to weep biding farewell to their parents as they go to nations you don’t pity,

Pity the nation whose parents have to weep biding farewell to sons and daughters they may never see again,

Pity the nation whose sons and daughters don’t see as a good place to build their future,

Pity the nation whose parents know whole heartedly that their sons and daughters will not be on their side for long,

Pity the nation whose sons and daughters work hard towards making other nations better,

Pity the nations whose parents work hard to get their sons and daughters through tough life,

Pity the nation whose sons and daughters dream of faraway lands where they would become parents,

Pity the nation whose parents’ daily bread is their grandchildren never knowing who they are,

Pity the nation whose sons and daughters have very few reasons to hope,

Pity the nation whose parents have few reasons to want their sons and daughters to hope.

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.

If Felix Baumgartner Was Lebanese

To break off from the morbid/depressing/overly serious posts my blog has had over the past few days, I figured I’d post a series of tweets that were collected by Lebanese newspaper Al-Safir. The tweets are jokes about scenarios where Felix Baumgartner, the man who jumped 39 km yesterday, is Lebanese.

They range from him taking tires to space to his mother giving him 100 cartons of food. You should read them in a Lebanese accent and I won’t bother translating them because the joke would be lost in the translation (for the full article, click here):

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.