Tag Archives: Lebanon

The Red Hot Chili Peppers Concert in Lebanon: Look At All Those Traitors!

Strip them of their passport and national IDs. Take away their Lebanese pride! Shame on them! Shame on the few thousand people that attended this inhumane abomination!

By all accounts, the concert was a huge success. Some people reported being disappointed but still entertained. Others called it the best concert of the year. I didn’t go but I think the best concert of the year would still be Notre Dame de Paris.

My friends have told me they were immensely professional with an amazing stage presence and spirit.

The setlist for the concert was the following:

  • Monarchy of Roses
  • Around The World
  • Snow (Hey Oh)
  • Otherside
  • Look Around
  • Throw Away Your Television
  • Can’t Stop
  • Universally Speaking
  • The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie
  • She’s Only 18
  • Under The Bridge
  • Higher Ground (Stevie Wonder cover)
  • Californication
  • Goodbye Hooray
  • By The Way

Encore:

  • Chad & Mauro & Josh jam
  • Sir Psycho Sexy
  • They’re Red Hot (Robert Johnson cover)
  • Meet Me At the Corner
  • Give It Away

Now we know exactly what Mashrou3 Leila missed out on for being cowards with “principles.”

And these are the people with “principles.”

Thank you @KingRoudy for the last picture and the following Facebook page for the others.

 

Welcome To The Republic of Cheap Controversy

We, as Lebanese, sure know how to breed controversies. We love it. We adore it. We feed our need for gossip off of it. And it happens so often without it becoming redundant.

We have a need for it.

The latest:

Yes, you guessed it: Mashrou3 Leila’s decision not to open for RHCP.

The discussion regarding Mashrou3 Leila nuclear bombing themselves by giving up their opening gig for the RHCP took a turn that I didn’t foresee. It became less and less about how they got to their decision and more about whether their decision was correct or not.

Of course, the debate isn’t about supporting the Palestinians or not. It’s not about hating Israel or not.

Were they bullied? Or did they reach their decision out of conviction? And it is here that I believe is the issue’s main question.

Mashrou3 Leila signed to be the RHCP’s opening act a long time ago. They knew RHCP had a concert in Israel and yet they still signed the contract. To say they didn’t know about the Israeli concert would infer they are massively ignorant, which they are not. So for all matters and purposes, they didn’t care about the next stops on RHCP’s tour.

And they canceled their gig. Were they bullied into it? Well, speaking from experience, the anti-Israel crowd have a knack for making anyone who doesn’t play for them feel as if he’s an accomplice to killing all the Palestinian children.

You’re not with us? Then you’re a traitor and I hope you can sleep at night knowing the blood of Palestinians is on your hands and knowing that you are also stealing their land. 

It is the same Bush-era logic that they love to hate: you are either with us or against us. You can’t be in between.

Select Lebanese bloggers know how it is when you don’t write in agreement with them. They will bash you. They will threaten you. They will call you names. They will make you feel as if you’ve done something wrong which you perfectly know you didn’t. And if you’re tough enough, you won’t budge.

Mashrou3 Leila budged. And the ripple that they caused was deafening. For instance, BeirutSpring, a renowned Lebanese blogger who doesn’t address all issues that happen in Lebanon and when he does, he addresses the issue with one short and straight to the point post, wrote not once (click here) but twice (click here) about Leila. That second post has a ton of comments, some of which are proclaiming exactly what I alluded to before. Treason and then treason and then treason some more.

The BDS people should be proud. Commenting from their awesome new Macbook.

Another controversy:

We might also be the only country in the world where enforcing a smoking ban is met with a wave of anger and disgrace and people throwing around brilliant logic to justify opposing the ban. You want a taste of that logic? Click here.

Has any other country in the world caused so much controversy by simply applying a law straight out of the 1980s in 2012? Definitely not.

But in Lebanon it did. A smoking ban became an issue of national debate even though it shouldn’t. Smoking somehow morphed into a basic human right, which it isn’t. Some restaurants are even opting not to follow the law – and they’re proud of it (click here).

Some people have said: “the smoking ban supporters preach. The restaurant owners speak facts. The former need to rest their case – they’re not making sense.” Our need for controversy transcends our ability for logical reasoning. So we go with the flow of beautiful rhetoric that pleases our brain cortices and tickles our enthusiasm. Scientific studies? The hell with that. For reference, this is a British case study that shows a positive economic impact for smoking bans (click here).

Previous controversies:

The Lebanese Olympic squad and its Israel-related incident may or may not have happened. But it sure has caused a frenzy. I even asked this simple question: wouldn’t it be a greater victory if we play and win? Wouldn’t it be greater if we debate them and put them where they belong?

All hell broke loose. Because expressing your opinion is frowned upon – unless your opinion is mainstream. Getting called a traitor? It’s become my favorite pastime lately.

The Republic of Cheap Controversy:

When you realize that two of those controversies happened within a week and the third one happened within a month of the other two, you get three national “debates” that have led nowhere except have people go at each other’s throats in such a short timeframe. That’s also without taking into consideration Michel Samaha, the Mekdads or Myriam Klink or anything else that happened in the past couple of months. The republic of cheap controversy unfolds in front of you.

It’s not a republic of shame as LBC wants you to believe. It’s not the republic of anarchy as I’ve told you before (here). It’s another face of Lebanon, one that we don’t notice because it has become so deeply engrained in the fabrics of our society that we don’t notice it anymore – we don’t even notice how often we do it.

Our controversies address deep issues sometimes but more often than not they simply scrap the surface of far deeper problems without diving in. We live off of that – discussions that give us something to talk about while steering clear from more “pressing” issues (the election law comes to mind). Sometimes the discussion is cheap and shallow. Other times, the “discussion” takes a dangerous turn when the allegiance of others and their moral values come into play.

And people are interested in reading and talking about it because it gives them a sense of participating. And we write about it because it makes us feel important – that we are heard and some people want to know what we have to say. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. We’ve all done it.

When will the next controversy take place? I would say it’s a 50-50 chance for next week. Do we love it? Maybe not. Welcome to the Republic of Cheap Controversy.

 

Lebanese Restaurants Not Following The Smoking Ban: Feniqia, Jbeil

I was taking my Australian cousins out to dinner today and I decided to have them try out Feniqia in Jbeil. One of my cousins, who has been visiting Lebanon more or less frequently lately, complained about the place having too much shisha and smoke. So I gleefully told her about the smoking ban and how a decent place like Feniqia was surely abiding by it.

As we neared the place, we saw a man smoking a shisha. But we was immediately next to a window so I thought that maybe that was their policy – you get to smoke if you’re close to an open window as long as you blow your fumes outside.

Then, as we had our dinner, a couple sat next to us. The guy held out his pack of Marlboro and lit a cigarette. So I told him that it’s forbidden to smoke here. He replied: really? So I told him: Yes, haven’t you heard of the new law?

He said that he was aware of the law but that he saw many people smoking shisha. So he called the restaurant manager to make sure. The manager came over and I asked him: isn’t your place abiding by the non-smoking law?

His reply? Of course and without a doubt not.

He said so with pride and left. The guy’s date ordered her shisha and she started smoking as well. So I decided to try and call the number to which you can report such incidences. After much searching, someone on twitter let me know that the number you need to call to report restaurants not abiding by the smoking law is 1214 – the hotline of the ministry of health.

I called that number 3 times. It got disconnected almost immediately. They must be sleeping – such a hot hotline, right?

As for Feniqia, I don’t expect it to follow the law anytime soon. Not even when winter rolls around and it can’t leave its windows open for aeration. And being a regular, I haven’t seen them undergo modifications of the place to bring it up to par with the regulations. And for proof’s sake, here are a few pictures.

Update:

The numbers that you need to call to report restaurants are either 112 or 1735. Call the numbers when you’re at the restaurant not the following day.

A Day in the Life of a Lebanese BDS Supporter

He wakes up in the morning. It’s 8 am. Way too early. What is needed when you need your body to get going? Yes, coffee.
So he tiredly makes his way to the kitchen, rips open a pack of Nescafé and pours it down a New York mug which he bought on his last trip to the Big Apple. He heats up the water, mixes it with the powder.

He starts drinking. Sweet Jesus, the energy is coming right in. So he moves back to his bedroom where he takes out his designer shirt and jeans, even boxers, and gets dressed for work at some internationally renowned firm. He grabs his iPhone, puts his MacBook in his bag. He double checks to see if the iPad is there as well – and let’s not forget the Kingston flash drive.

He grabs the keys to his German car – a newly bought BMW – and leaves his Beiruti apartment for work.

As he chunks the numbers and goes through the daily motion of what brings food to his table, he realizes it is lunch time. His friends decide to go grab a quick bite at the nearby Starbucks.

He vehemently refuses. How could you go support a company which is causing Palestinian children to die and Israelis to take more land that is not their’s?
As his friends leave him alone, he grabs his iPad and refreshes his twitter timeline. Meanwhile, his iPhone buzzes with an iMessage from his girlfriend as he receives a Facebook notification. His best friend, currently working in the US, shared a link on his wall – a very funny video featuring some very trashy pop artist doing something very stupid.

As the day at work draws to a close, this person goes back home where he checks the news. A singer is coming to the country for a hit concert in a few weeks. He thinks for a few minutes if he should take his girlfriend on a date there. Then he decides to check who’s the singer.

It’s that singer! Unacceptable! He was in that place not so long ago. Let’s start our activism, he starts thinking. And then he notices another concert by some other artist – and they’re going to that place soon after Lebanon. And a Lebanese band is opening for them. And he’s so hurt he could almost cry.

How could they do that to Palestine? How could they be so traitorous to the land, the people, the women, the children?

He calls up on his friends using his iPhone. His friends reply on their copycat Samsung phones (yes, I had to). They set up a boycott campaign online using a windows laptop because they are more mainstream. Some time later, the first concert is canceled. The Lebanese band canceles its opening gig.
Victory, victory. Rejoice, rejoice. So the activist can now sleep better. He puts his iPhone on silent, puts his iPad on the charger and switches off his MacBook.

Yes, Palestine will soon be free. One band at a time. One ban at a time.

As he goes to sleep, his head starts thinking about how life would be without his fancy clothes, car, phone, accessories and work. He decides that year 1400-something is not something he’d like. So he figures activism against concerts is the best way to go. One band at a time, one ban at a time.

And Palestine will soon be free. He lays his head to sleep and does so peacefully.

Mashrou3 Leila Not Opening for Red Hot Chili Peppers in Lebanon Anymore

I really don’t get the BDS movement people in Lebanon. Do they think what they’re doing is democratic or do they know what they’re doing is total nonsense? Mashrou3 Leila, even though I don’t like them, are not opening for Red Hot Chili Peppers this Thursday in Lebanon.

Why? Because RHCP have a concert in Tel Aviv on September 10th. Because, you know, f*ck logic.

It seems that artists forbidden from coming to Lebanon are not only those who have performed in Israel before but those who intend to do so later on. Because, as I said, f*ck logic.

When you figuratively tell a band that if they open for someone then they might as well be traitors, how different are you from the Israeli solider you are “supposedly” fighting against?

Not very different.

The fight against Israel can take many forms. What the Lebanese branch of BDS is doing is unacceptable. What the Lebanese BDS is doing is cultural terrorism and I wonder how much more we have to put up with it. Oh wait, they probably think I’m sleeping with the enemy  – fresh from France and all.

So I guess I better stop. They already think I’m a semi-traitor with me always being vehemently against them.

It’s not like opening for RHCP would be beyond great opportunity for any Lebanese band, regardless of who they are. But no. Bta3rfo, beddon y7arrero felestin. Because, as I said, f*ck logic.

As a result, no Lebanese band will get to do this without having “zionism” branded all over them. And as a result, Palestine will be liberated. Because, you know, f*ck logic.