Tag Archives: politics

The Sleepless Nights of Lebanon’s Tripoli

If you go by the geography they teach at Lebanese schools, you are taught that Tripoli is the second biggest city of Lebanon and the capital of its Northern governorate.

The geography they taught us at school also enumerated the numerous economic riches that Tripoli boasted: its port, its proximity to the border, etc….

The civics course they gave us at school tells us about the numerous touristic advantages of the city of Tripoli: its castle, its old souks….

The sociology they taught us at school mentioned how Tripoli has one of Lebanon’s poorest regions on its outskirts. It’s mentioned only fleetingly, like something we can’t wait to bury under a pile of blissful ignorance as if it’ll make everything okay.

If you look at the latest events taking place in the country, you’d think our Northern border is not at “Al 3arida” but at Balamand. You’d think those Lebanese people of Tripoli have been annexed to the Syrian war. You’d think that this Lebanese city that many find too easy to hate is no longer Lebanese – just a burden that we can’t wait to get rid of. Let’s return it to pre-1920 days when it wasn’t part of our favorite part of Lebanon, Mount Lebanon.

My friends in Tripoli haven’t been sleeping lately. But you’re not hearing about that. You’re not hearing about the explosions going off at any moment, the bullets piercing through the silent December nights. You’re not hearing about the people dying, the children getting shot.

You’re not hearing about the people like you and me cowering away at a corner of their house all night in fear that one of those stray bullets might do them in.

It seems as if our Lebanese media has washed its hands from Tripoli. That city is just not worth the coverage – it’s a “been there done that” type of things. They’ve covered similar incidences there before. What’s the use of covering them now? It might go well with their policy of “let’s show only the good side of Lebanon for the world in order to save the Christmas tourist season.”

Our politicians couldn’t care less as well – as long as they get their share of votes next year. This city, which has one prime minister, four ministers and a bunch of MPs, has no one to speak on its behalf. It only has people who preach about what should take place as they sit in gilded seats somewhere far, far away.

“We condone the presence of arms in the city.” You often hear say. And what will your condemnation really do, mr. politician, while you’re the one secretly buying your people weapons in order to fuel the struggle that you know will bring you loads of returns in a few months’ time?

I am not from Tripoli. But Tripoli is one of my favorite cities in this God-forsaken country. It saddens me to see ignorants portray my friends as a bunch of Islamists who deserve whatever’s happening to their home. It saddens me to have people panic beyond their minds how I had to drop off a friend in Tripoli around midnight a couple of days ago. It saddens me that with each passing day, Tripoli is stripped from the identity of a city where Muslims and Christians lived side by side for years and is portrayed as a place where the next Islamists Emirate will start from.

When it comes to Tripoli, the majority of Lebanese have one thing to say: “On n’est pas concerné.”

The Lebanese Hypocrisy Towards Those Terrorist Children

A friend posted a picture of a dead child yesterday on his preferred social networking website, along with a slur of swear words at the Zionist regime that he figured had taken the life in question. Soon enough, that friend found out that the child in the picture was not an inhabitant of our neighbor to the South but our neighbor to the East. He then deleted the picture. I’m sure he had a good night’s sleep too.

That child, regardless of his nationality, was still dead.

Read the rest of my second NowLebanon post here.

Innocent lives are innocent lives, regardless of nationality. And this applies to those Israeli children too.

The Palestinian Hypocrisy

The Arabs.

Pray for Gaza… you’ve been praying for Palestine for about 70 years. I’m not sure if it should be considered sad that the only thing you know how to do is pray or it’s just you being delusional. You seem not to have gotten the hint: if prayers worked, Palestine would have been liberated, Gaza would be free and everything would be swell. But things are obviously not. Perhaps you should start looking into other options? You know, such as trying to get your governments – hard as that may be – to actually man up and try to change things in Palestine instead of making under the table dealings with Israel while you all pretend as if those things are not happening. In case you don’t know which governments I’m referring to, let me name them: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt.

Gaza on my mind…. Yes, please tell me more how Gaza is on all your minds. Only when it is bombed. You see, the situation in Gaza was pitiful last year, last month and last week. And yet none of you cared. But whenever shit hits the fan there, suddenly you all become concerned. So you change your Facebook profile pictures in solidarity and tweet accordingly, rejoicing whenever one of your hashtags manages to trend. And panicking whenever an opposite hashtag manages to trend as well. Because that’s rare feat for Arabs on Twitter. Meanwhile, as you legitimately panic about all the children dying in Gaza, at least half of you have no problem in extrapolating the situation in Syria to some cosmic entity then bringing it back to give you some peace of mind as to why the children killings there could somehow be justified (here are some pictures if you feel like ruining your day). But what do I know, I haven’t changed my profile picture on Facebook yet nor will I ever. And that’s surely detrimental to the cause of saving all the children. I’d throw in a line here about religious minorities too but that would be all too much to handle.

The bottom line… a week or a month from now, when the situation in Gaza dies down, you will all change your profile pictures back to some version of a duck-face and you won’t care again. And when all those Facebook events asking you to show compassion to Gaza stop, you’re all going back to your normal lives. But the people of Gaza will not. And you’ll keep on preaching about how the state of Israel needs to be abolished from existence, which is just delusional. But I guess you can pray on that too.

The West.

Pray for Israel… I didn’t know you knew how to pray! Now that is a revelation in itself. Israel is the victim here, you say. Please tell ignorant me how did you get to that fascinating conclusion. Hamas is firing rockets! 12,000 rockets have been fired in the past year on Israel! Cue in the outrage. Or not. How many Israelis died due to those 12,000 rockets? One, two, twenty? How many Palestinians were killed in the past year due to the Israelis? And here’s your answer right there. No, the Palestinians are not terrorists. The only terrorists here are people like you with a mentality that keeps praising the oppressor… only because your media has told you so. Then you get your official spokespeople to come on the airwaves and bestow upon the world their rhetorical questioning: But we don’t get why the Palestinians are doing this! Let’s see… Suppose that they started all of this, the correct answer begins with a big fat O. And in case you couldn’t guess what that was, here it is for you: occupation. But you wouldn’t understand because while you live off your cloud nine, worrying about the few thousand dollars less you’ll be making per year, you’ve never been occupied. You’ve never had to go through life wondering if today would be your last just because a foreign military is present on your land. And you’ve never – ever – bothered to think critically about Israel. So pray you do. And give money to Israel you do. And indirectly kill children, you also do.

Israel on my mind… but of course it is on your mind. How could it not be? The only ally in the region to your countries. The only place where you feel safe visiting. The only place that’s fighting terrorism. The only place where religions are protected. The mini-west in that hellhole of the East. Israel is perfect. Only you don’t know that Arab Israelis are treated as second rate citizens because they’re not jews, you also don’t know that with every day passing, it oppresses the Palestinians in whatever piece of internationally recognized territory they have, but that’s not terrorism. And they don’t have the right to do anything about it because if they do, then Israel has the right to defend itself. And Israel is a beacon for democracy… as long as the same people keep winning. Because if the Israeli left ever dared to win, they’d be assassinated. Instead, you throw at the world the only thing you think you know about this piece of the world while you know next to nothing. And you take your ignorance as scripture. And let Israel be on your mind.

The bottom line… While you freak out about violations to human rights everywhere, I don’t see you seeing violation of human rights that happen to the Palestinians every single day. Because you consider them all as less than people – they are not worth living when they’re infringing the rights of the great Jewish State of Israel. While you get appalled at all the dead children in Syria and other parts of the world, you have no problem not caring about the dead children of Palestine… because one Israeli child died… not knowing that the ratio is like 12:1.

The bottom line. 

This is not a repeat of Goliath and David. The weak Palestinians and their useless rockets and their pitiful stones are not threatening the security of Israel – they could only dream of doing so. And anyone who thinks that the Palestinians are a threat is delusional, ignorant and pitiful. More Palestinians have been killed in the past few days of Gaza airstrikes than all the Israelis whose deaths have caused this. But let’s just tweet about it.  And for the record, I am as unbiased a source as you can get from this part of the world regarding this matter but some things need to be said. You can update your Facebook status now and share this because you’ll be saving a life.

Who Won the AUB Elections?

Picture via @WMNader

Back when I was an AUB student, I used to get carried away with the politics of it all. Voting for this party or that will help change things on a bigger scale – I was convinced with that. And I always sought to win, at least during my first two years there. March 14th called themselves Students At Work and they’ve been that way since. March 8th change their name every year. The independents are not really independent and they’ve also become divided. You should also never count out the Jordanians and Palestinians and their sectarian voting.

During my third and last year of undergrad there, I realized that voting for this party over the other – at least in university elections – was ridiculous. My goal as a student was not to take political stances that absolutely no one would care about post the regular 24 hours news cycle. I should be voting for someone who would really try to help me as a student in my university woes. So that last year at AUB, I voted for a mixed list that included a candidate from Amal, a candidate from the LF, a candidate from the PSP and an independent candidate. I had even left an empty spot for lack of “qualified” candidates.

One thing that can be said about my AUB years is that you could always tell who won. As they separated students in front of West Hall with two huge screens and about one hundred security men, you only needed to count the chants, exclude the political ones, to know who won which seat and then follow the winning group to Main Gate and Bliss Street.

But it has stopped being this simple. Every year since, everyone seems to have won AUB. For instance, yesterday’s headlines read:

LF: A tie at AUB with a win in the “fortress” of the FPM.

FPM: A win at AUB. 

And I asked myself the question: who won AUB?

Both sides will extrapolate the AUB elections onto parliamentary elections they both hope they’ll win. The FPM will read into this as them being a majority nationally. The LF will read into this as them being a majority on the Christian field. Both assertions are absolutely unfounded and ridiculous – but they will be made anyway. The students of both sides have already begun celebrating with Facebook statuses and celebratory tweets. We won, we won. All is well. Yay.

With rising tuition fees and a growing disconnect between students and administration, I can say without a doubt that who won AUB yesterday was not the students. Sure, it was a manifestation of free opinion, of democracy, of whatever rhetorical uselessness that gets you to sleep at night. And those students are entitled to their opinion, of course. Let them vote whichever way they want.

The problem is all of these students voting because of their political opinion don’t know exactly exactly how low the attendance in student representative council (SRC) meetings will be once those students they elected start “working” and how little they’ll actually do towards getting them that coveted unlimited printing or whatever promise they gave. And I knew this first hand back in my days: students win and eventually forget they did, until it’s time to mention it on their CVs. Some, from both sides of the political spectrum, rarely skip a meeting. And they try to change things. But they are always faced with an administration that counts on those who absolutely couldn’t care less outside winning and flexing their popularity muscles around.

As AUB students cast their vote against the weapons of Hezbollah or for the weapons of Hezbollah in that university ballot, they were all forgetting one key thing: how will their parents keep paying their rising tuition fees, along with all those university rising costs that are correlated with them? How do they feel about a lack of transparency with their professors and with their administration? How do they feel about AUB remaining the way it is for years and years without change?

Then next year will roll around. And all of these students will still be nagging about the same old things: where’s our unlimited printing? And then they’ll vote the same way again because a vote in AUB is one Hezbollah weapon removed or a firm message for the resistance.

You want to know who won AUB? It’s the status quo that both political camps in the country can erroneously analyze into a vote of trust from the youth that will most definitely be voting for them next year. But hey, it’s not like the “independent” alternative is much better either, with their hypocrisy, their under the table dealings with these political groups they’re challenging and lack of drive to work as well.

I guess we can really say it’s hopeless. The point is: voting for a political party is not a wrong thing to do… if you’re doing so for university reasons, not because some cosmic entity out there is out to get you. It is that courage of voting for someone who differs from you politically, simply because they are better qualified, that everyone seems to lack – and it’s easiest to vote as such in university elections, where your vote really doesn’t matter.

Now Lebanon Censored… By Saad Hariri

Beirut Spring has just reported that a Now Lebanon article criticizing Saad Hariri and praising Najib Mikati has been pulled offline by the website. You can check out a screenshot of the article here.

If you’re interested in reading it, here’s a transcript (via Qifa Nabki):

The Baby and the Bathwater

If we are to believe a report in al-Joumhouria newspaper on Monday, French President François Hollande and Saudi Arabian King Abdullah, in a meeting also attended by former Lebanese PM and Future Movement leader Saad Hariri, will not back current Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Miqati if a new government is formed.

Do the Lebanese not have a say in any of this? We should worry at the carefree way in which Lebanon’s future is always being decided by outside actors, no matter who they are. The region is already polarized between the Sunni and Shiite communities in a dangerous standoff between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Such horse-trading will only serve to entrench further the sense that foreign powers control Lebanon’s destiny and that each side of the political divide is justified in having its regional backer.

Another worrying aspect was the presence of Hariri, a man who must surely concede that his role in Lebanese political life must now be confined to the margins of Sunni politics. He is living in LaLa Land if he still feels that the Lebanese public would welcome him back with open arms and see him as their salvation. In fact, it would be scandalous if he stood for parliament in the next general elections, let alone offer himself as a candidate for the premiership. (Ditto Nayla Tueni and the rest of the absentee MPs who, by their negligence, have done their best to snuff out the flame that was March 14 and insult the intelligence of the voters who sent them to Najmeh Square).

For it is not enough to simply oppose March 8’s fiendish agenda and make all the right noises about democracy, independence, sovereignty and the sanctity of the state. March 14 members must also take seriously their roles as public servants. The recent deterioration of infrastructure and the apparent collapse of law and order during August have woken up the public to the fact that if they want a functioning, safe, peaceful and prosperous country, and if they want laws enacted, it will not happen if the people they elect to achieve these ends are nowhere to be seen.

Which brings us back to the issue of Miqati and his suitability for the premiership. When he accepted to lead the Hezbollah-dominated government in the spring of 2011, many saw him as an opportunist who would trade what was left of Lebanon’s integrity for a place in the history books.

In reality and with hindsight, he has not done a terrible job. He has advanced the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (despite the Syrian dream of killing the process altogether) and spoken out against Syrian violations of Lebanese territorial integrity.Given the fact that he has had to work with a cabinet of which Hezbollah and its obstructionist allies in the FPM are a part, he has made a decent fist of holding things together.

Hollande and the rest of the international community are right to condemn the current government, which has set new standards in uselessness, but we should avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. With the exception of former Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, Miqati is arguably the best candidate we have to lead this country in troubled times.In the meantime, the Lebanese must fight to wrestle their destiny from the hands of those who see Lebanon as a strategic asset instead of a sovereign nation, and all our MPs, without exception, should show up for work.

Saad Hariri, it seems, cannot take criticism. Especially when it’s coupled with praise to his political adversary, which is beyond disgraceful. It seems that Saad Hariri is so worried about his political tenure, all the way from his Parisian lala land (be careful of the cold dear MP, I heard it’s quite chilly this time of year) that he pulled his strings all the way to Lebanon in order to pull the article off a website in which he has influence.

The fact that Saad Hariri cannot take criticism is beyond worrying. It’s also very childish. It’s akin to one of those impertinent children who run to their mothers whenever those “bad kids” on the playground don’t let them play. And this type of behavior is certainly not acceptable from the proclaimed political leader of one of Lebanon’s main parties.

The sad thing though is that this doesn’t only apply to Saad Hariri. Each and every Lebanese politician is off limits by some platform or the other – and what remains, at the end of the day, is an electorate who’s limited by the narrow political opinion it gets from websites that are censored by the politicians it thinks are the best of the best.

And they all run to their mothers crying. They seem to be missing one key element though: good luck silencing the internet.

Update:

The article is back up (here) with the following disclaimer:

Disclaimer: NOW Lebanon has intentionally removed this article from the site. It was not removed because of censorship, but rather because of the lack of proper arguments. We would like to repeat, again, that NOW is not owned, in whole or in part, by Prime Minister Saad Hariri, nor any other political party or figure.

Yeah, right. Such “justifications” are an insult to Now Lebanon’s reader’s intelligence.