In the context of a country with any ounce of self-respect, speaking about a garbage crisis that has been going on since July would not only be old news by now, it would be solved old news. Except we don’t live in a country with an any amount of self-respect, and as such Greater Beirut’s garbage situation is still a topic, albeit less hot, of discussion.

A few months ago, when people were actually interested in the garbage crisis, which is to say when the garbage was visible on their streets and not tucked away in some valley somewhere or in a makeshift pyramid near the port, I wrote an article on this blog (link) about the health risks that the crisis might involve especially with the rain season.

As a very brief summary, in theory the garbage crisis and the many variables around it would cause the following:

• Many types of bacterial infiltration of the waters,
• Many heavy metals and other elements-related pollution,
• Burning it will increase the amount of carcinogens in the air, as well as exacerbate respiratory conditions in people who have pulmonary disease when they have it.

As long term effects, we could be looking at an increased cancer incidence as a study after Italy’s waste management crisis in 2004 showed.

What the garbage crisis is not doing, however, is giving you the flu or other common infections that we encounter yearly.

Over the past few weeks, which happens to be the yearly flu season in Lebanon, everyone and their mother decided that whenever they got sick, it was because of the garbage crisis in Beirut. H1N1 – or as it’s more commonly known in the country now H1 and 1 – has become so commonly associated with the garbage crisis that the scientific community is probably considering whether to reconsider all the details surrounding H1N1 altogether.

We’ve also heard about “new” viruses attacking the country, such as metapneumovirus B, causing severe respiratory diseases.

This is, quite simply, incorrect.

For starters, metapneumovirus B is not a new virus. It’s been known for at least 40 years now and is actually one of the leading causes of respiratory infections in children worldwide. Lebanon has had this virus before, and it gets treated the same way we treat most viral infections: address the symptoms and provide the patient relief while their ailment resolves.

The case illustrated in this eTobb article (link) about a 25 year old who had a devastating respiratory infection secondary to the aforementioned virus remains, as it stands, a case that fell through the cracks of medicine in the sense that some people will get complications from common infections and we have no way to predict who would be the victim of such complications.

When it comes to H1N1, this is the current state worldwide:

Outbreaks are being reported in Bulgaria, Canada, Ireland, Ethiopia, Pakistan, etc. What do these countries have in common? Nothing, which is precisely the point.

Every year, the world is swept up by a strain of the Influenza virus which, when a person infected, gives them what is referred to as the flu: runny nose, sore throat, sneezing, fatigue, feeling pain all over your body for a few days, etc…. These symptoms usually resolve in a few days and you’re off on your merry way to health.

Some people may also be infected and not show any symptoms. The way this occurs is in sort of a pyramid fashion:

Assume 100,000 people in Lebanon got infected this year. 10,000 of those would show symptoms of the flu. Out of those 10,000 maybe around 100 would require hospitalization. And out of those 100 that needed hospitalization, 1 might die because of complications.

The garbage crisis overtaking Beirut has nothing to do with this. This will happen again next year, with or without a garbage crisis, and it will also happen the year after as it also took place in the years prior. Having a new shiny ribbon of erroneous but appealing explanation to wrap this whole thing with won’t make it go away. People are getting sick all over Lebanese territories simply because this is an infectious disease, not a garbage-related disease; the garbage does not cause H1N1 or the flu. It’s really that simple.

At this rate, getting the first case of Zika virus infection in this country will also be attributed to the garbage.

Therefore, I’m sorry to say that the answer to your question “how did I get sick” is simply “this is how things are,” and not “it’s the garbage that’s killing you.”

You can, however, protect yourself by practicing as much hygiene as possible. Thorough hand-washing is key to prevent the transmission of the influenza virus. Avoid sick contacts if you can. If you’re sick, don’t be a jerk and go around contacting others. Don’t trust your local pharmacist to start you on Tavanic or Klacid or whatever other medication he feels like giving you. This is a virus and antibiotics don’t work. Rest as much as you can, you’ll get better in a few days.

Over the past couple of days, the entirety of our Facebook timelines has been overtaken by an overzealous, self-indulgent, horrifyingly cheesy, overtly saccharine, grossly inaccurate and utterly comical display of Lebanese nationalistic pride manifesting in a guy who runs a model agency publishing a set of pictures dubbing them “This is Lebanon” to the backdrop of a few self-described facts about this country.

You can check out that post here. And this is a screenshot if you don’t want to expose yourself to the atrocity:

About 10,000 likes to that album later, and countless of shares of its content – both photographical and linguistic – one can officially dub this land braindead; not only are we self-indulgent enough to think we are the shit of the shits where anything can be shat, no. We are so entranced by our Lebanese-ness that we fail to see what’s staring us right in the eye: this is a country where 1% of the cup is full and the other 99% is emptier than space – a space that doesn’t even have gravitational waves – and where most of the population likes to look at the 1% because it gives them a peaceful state of mind.

Mr. Tony Medawar. I understand there’s a very big need for you to drive tourism in the country to get business and models to your agency. Work must be slow. You can blame the garbage piling up outside your window, or did you forget that to include that in your manifesto?

Before I tell you what Lebanon is, let me tell you what it is not.

No we are not a desert. 

No we’re not. But then again how is the randomness of having a country be on a piece of land be any sort of achievement? That’s like saying one should be proud that one had one’s parents. I mean, did you choose them? (I love you mom and dad. <3).

No we don’t ride camels like others.

Oh look at those barbaric Arabs. They ride camels. How horrifying. That’s such a disgusting and backward thing to do that they are definitely nowhere near as advanced as those who don’t ride camels. Like us. Except, you know, Dubai. It’s such a shame though, riding camels would have cut down on the traffic. Did you forget that was Lebanon too?

We have natural ski slopes.

So do most countries north of the equator. Europe says hi. North America too. Some people are freezing in the Arctic.

We are a free country.

Yes, you are a free country that hasn’t had an election since 2009, where you haven’t had a president in 2 years. Is the mark of freedom only that you can wear, drink and eat whatever you want? Is the mark of freedom only what is allowed to some people and forbidden from the absolute majority?

Lebanon is 6000 years old.

Dude. Read a history book. Lebanon was founded by the French and Patriarch Elias Howayek in September 1920. We are literally less than a hundred years old. Some of the patients on my geriatrics ward are older than my country. That is unless you don’t think the Beqaa, half of the North, Beirut and most of the South are part of the country and you want to go back to the days of the Motasarrifiyat, in which case Lebanon would still not be 6000 years old. Maybe you mean Phoenicia? But that wasn’t Lebanon and also had parts of Syria and Palestine. Maybe you mean planet Earth?

The Bible is named after Byblos.

Oh my god, yes. #TeamJesus. Except there’s a little thing called etymology to prove you wrong. You see, Byblos is greek in origin for Egyptian papyrus. The word bible is latin for biblia, which is to say they have nothing to do with each other.

Europe was named after a Phoenician princess.

There was no such thing as a Phoenician princess called Europa. It’s a legend. But then again, what are Lebanese but people who love to live in legends and ignore reality?

Jesus did his first miracle in Qana.

I fail to see how where Jesus did a miracle of turning water into wine 2000 years ago is something that speaks of the caliber of the land or people that live in that land today. But no one really knows where Jesus did that miracle. Scholars say it was in a town called Kafr Qana in Northern Palestine. A debate does not a fact make.

You are reading and commenting on this post because our ancestors created the alphabet.

The Phoenician alphabet is the first documented alphabet. But it did not exist out of the blue. Over the years, what the Phoenicians did was also changed into a whole lot of other languages that died, gave birth to other languages that got mixed with each other to give some of the languages we have today. Such as Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac. You know, semite languages. English is actually of a different origin.

Now let me tell you what Lebanon is.

This is Lebanon, the land turned into a dumpster because its people are so inept that they’d rather take humiliation than seek out change.

This is Lebanon, the land where pictures taken in Spain or Japan are shared widely as part of it, and try to tell people otherwise. *collects head off the floor.*

This is Lebanon, the land whose people don’t ride camels, yes, but ride the backs of foreigners they deem of lesser importance for anything that comes their way.

This is Lebanon, the land whose people are so stuck on the glories of days past, glories that only faintly existed to begin with, that they can’t even begin to think of a future for themselves.

This is Lebanon, where so many people live in their own fictive lala land they think their country is all night life, joie de vivre, Mar Mkhayel on Fridays and Rikkyz on Sundays.

This is Lebanon, where so many of its people have never been past the airport or past the Madfoun checkpoint and think there’s no such thing as poverty, unfairness, and horrifying living conditions in the land of the Cedars.

This is Lebanon, a country with one of the highest braindrains in the world. You’d think such a wonderful place would at least manage to keep its people put.

This is Lebanon, where a girl posing naked in a bikini at our slopes caused a national outrage.

This is Lebanon, the land where people think that criticizing posts like Tony Medawar’s is what’s wrong with the country but fail to see the actual perils behind self-indulgence in a land where next to nothing actually works.

This is Lebanon, the land whose people are so braindead they’d rather gloat in their own death than seek out the reality that tells them of their own demise.

Don’t call it brain dead.

Congrats Lebanon, we have made the international news cycle once more, the first time this year and hopefully the first of many.

No, it wasn’t about that viral Facebook fake-pictures-filled post proclaiming the beauty of God’s gift to Earth. I can hear your hearts break all the way here.

What made us international is actually old news to us. It’s so old in fact that not only does nobody care anymore, but the hype surrounding the issue has disappeared with each vanishing garbage bag stashed away in one of Lebanon’s valleys or on random roads, snaking around curves like white rancid rivers. Out of sight, out of mind – Lebanon style.

There is a bright side to the ordeal, however. Even our garbage bags look nice. They’re white, snow-like, built into winding rivers or towering pyramids.

Say hi to Buzzfeed.

Say thank you to CNN.

Wait for the upcoming onslaught from other outlets as well in the next few days. We are making it big. Aren’t we all proud?

Except, of course, this is *obviously* not the image of the country:

I mean it’s always someone else’s fault, never ours collectively.

Putting lipstick on a dead pig level: Lebanon.

Is anything happening regarding the garbage crisis? Not really. Our government is busy doing other things, or just one thing to be exact: kiss Saudi Arabia’s ass like no country has missed another country’s ass before.

This past week, our government convened for SEVEN straight hours to discuss one item on their agenda: how to formulate a paragraph to please Saudi Arabia in order not to face their wrath manifesting in them not giving us money anymore, beggars-style.

I don’t think our government has convened for a total of 7 hours discussing the garbage crisis, or any other Lebanese crisis for that matter, over the last several months.

Live Love Saudi Arabia.

This past week, Saad Hariri decided to launch a petition across the country in order to show Saudi Arabia that Lebanon loved it so, akin to our country giving them a big fat political blowjob.

No politician cared enough to act about the garbage crisis, or any other crisis, since it started. Have we ever had a “Loyalty to Lebanon” petition circle around the country before?

Live Love Saudi Arabia.

This past week, minister of Justice Ashraf Rifi quit to protest the Lebanese stance towards Saudi Arabia’s recent embassy attack, first and foremost, and to a lesser extent protest the handling of Michel Samaha’s case. It took their reference country being seemingly offended for some ministers to resign.
Months after the garbage piled up on our streets, months after protests of hundreds of thousands… No other minister resigned or was even fazed by the notion of needing to resign.
This past week, Lebanese politicians of all kinds of kinds had something to say about Saudi Arabia. Even those that opposed KSA politically were at loss about what to do.
This amount of political maneuvering has not occurred not only with the garbage crisis, but with out presidential vacuum issue as well.

Live Love Saudi Arabia.

There comes a point where an entire country begging for absolution from another entity for the sake of money, for the sake of empty Arabism, for the sake of useless politics when that country’s capital is drowning in trash becomes not only humiliating but also insulting.

This is where we are today: a country sinking in garbage, but whose priority is how low it can go to its knees. But please, by a all means, don’t call it brain dead.

Let’s keep loving Saudi Arabia.

Oh so close. We almost dropped out of the top ten this year, but no such luck.

After all the hassle secondary to our General Security deciding out of the blue that a good bunch of the country’s passport would no longer be functional, it’s safe to say that apart from that useless bureaucracy, very minimal improvement has occurred to the state of our travel document over the past year. After all, how could it given that the only semblance of governance we get is when Saudi Arabia is upset at us?

Henley & Partners, the world’s leading Citizenship research consultancy firm, published their yearly report about passport strengths – the same one that gets us upset every year – and we’re at #96 when it comes to the worst passports of the world, in a list that tops at #104 with Afghanistan. We share the #96 spot, which translates to the 9th worst passport in the world with Bangladesh, Congo and Sri Lanka.

The bottom 10 is as follows:

1. Afghanistan,
2. Pakistan,
3. Iraq,
4. Somalia,
5. Syria,
6. Libya,
7. Sudan, Palestine, Nepal, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran,
8. Kosovo, South Sudan, Yemen,
9. Bangladesh, Congo, Lebanon, Sri Lanka,
10. Burundi, North Korea, Myanmar.

Meanwhile, a slew of European and American countries top the list with passports that give them access to more 170 countries visa-free. We are allowed access to 39.

The highest ranking Arab country is the UAE at #38 with a passport that grants them visa-free entry to 122 countries. The highest ranking regional country, however, is Cyprus at #17 with 159 visa-free country, bolstered by the fact it’s in the European Union. Our enemy to the South, meanwhile, comes in at #25 with around 147 countries its citizens can enter without a hassle.

The situation is not that bleak, however, because our passport rank has actually gone up from last year, mostly because a bunch of countries fell below us such as Syria, South Sudan and Iraq:

We have, however, gained two more visa-free countries to travel to in the past year, up to 39.

There’s nothing more indicative about how being born somewhere is detrimental to your “worth” as a person as the hierarchy behind passports, a yearly reminder that if you happen to come from a place that is not Europe, not America, and not completely in the good graces of either of those two entities, your worth is inherently lower.

But that’s not the full explanation behind how low our passport and citizenship ranks. This rank is a reflection of the unstable political situation in a country that hasn’t had a president in almost two years and doesn’t seem like it will have one anytime soon, hasn’t managed to vote for a parliament in over 1000 days, has garbage piling up on its streets, has one of the most incompetent ruling classes to exist, has a militia roaming its lands with the ability to shake the country up at will (as in protests because of a caricature on a TV show).

Look at the UAE. A few years ago, they had only access to 64 countries without visas. In 2016, their citizens can visit double that number. Why so? Because their ruling class – new-age dictators and whatnot – have a clear vision for a future that enables their citizens to be the best version of themselves (within the limited freedom confines offered of course). We can make fun all we want of how fake Dubai is, of how silly it is to have a “Happiness” minister, but the fact remains that not only are Emiratis leagues above us now, they are also in an upward trajectory while we slumber in our lower ranks content that we have real snow and not a fake slope built inside a Dubai mall.

What can we do to fix this?

We need to be more aware citizens. We can’t bury our heads in the glories of days past and pretend that is a representation of our present. When the time comes to vote, we shouldn’t go back to what we know thinking it’s what we need – we need to see that there are alternatives to the parties that have been ruining our lives for years. As long as our politicians keep getting a blank space from us to do whatever they want, they’ll be content with keeping a status quo that enables them and disables us, including a passport that forces everyone to stay put – unless they were lucky enough to have a second one on the side to use at will.

  
Over the years, first communions have become less about the religious value they uphold but rather about which child has the best combo of it all: souvenirs, party, ceremony. 

It was the case when I did it almost 18 years ago. My parents went all out. Things have only gotten worse since.

Despite the materialistic aspect of the ceremony, it remains a rite of passage for a lot of Lebanese Christians, mostly Maronites. For many children, it’s the highlight of their 8th year. For most parents, it’s one of the last religious festivities their children will go through .

Yesterday, news surfaced that well-known Lebanese reporter Bassam Abou Zeid wouldn’t be going through that experience with his two little boys: Matheo and Iowan. 

In a Facebook post, Abou Zeid detailed the ordeal his children were going through in the St. Doumit Parish in Zouk Mkayel; the ceremony organizers were having issues handling them so they required the parents to be present during rehearsals, which the parents obliged to, only to be faced with the ultimatum that their children were not a “proper fit” with that particular parish to undergo the ceremony.

When Abou Zeid spoke to the Parish priest to sort things out, parents threatened to take their children elsewhere if Abou Zeid’s children were to remain part of that particular first communion, for fear of them “ruining” it.

To summarize: this is one of the most disgusting things to occur in Lebanese society in years, there’s nothing Christian about this. Those parents – screw them – should be ashamed. Those ceremony organizers should be ashamed as well.

Let’s start with the ceremony organizers.

It is your duty as volunteers to hold such ceremonies to take in children from all kinds of kinds whose parents want them to take the next step in their Christian life. Bassam Abou Zeid’s children having special needs and you not being able to adapt to them does not reflect negatively on the children, it shows your ineptitude at doing your job. I don’t blame you. I blame the Parish that accepted you to run their ceremony to begin with.

To those parents who threatened to transfer their children if Bassam’s boys were allowed to participate, you are nauseating. Not only is this utterly disgusting on your part, it also shows that you are unfit parents, to condemn little boys in that manner, little boys whose only fault was to have special needs, which isn’t really a fault at all. I hope that your children never face the kind of discrimination you’re throwing at Matheo and Iowan. I hope you never have to be the parent in Bassam’s shoes, and have someone like you tell them: oh, we don’t want your children to ruin it for ours. The only thing Christian about you is the sectarian tag on your ID. I advise you to take your children out of the ceremony anyway, there’s nothing Christian about what you are doing there.

To the priest Joseph Eid, it is your duty to make sure that Matheo and Iowan attend that ceremony along with the other children. It is despicable and horrifying if you were to succumb to the parents’ threats about not wanting their children to have their ceremony ruined. It is your job as a priest to make sure that the God you serve, the one who wanted all God’s children to be part of His church, not to have some children be excluded because their parents are dimwits or because your Parish is inept: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” Mathew 19:14. 

To Lebanon’s Maronite Patriarch, there are things more important in Christianity than the number of parliamentary seats Maronites get, what the president can do or who he is. The life matters of your people are important too. This is not an event worth letting by.

I don’t know what kind of special needs Bassam Abou Zeid’s children have, but it doesn’t matter. They’re just kids, and they’re falling victim not only to a religious institution, but to people who have no ounce of humanity in them. Tfeh. 

As I told you more than a month ago, Lebanon would be represented this year – and hopefully represented well – by Marc Hatem on France’s The Voice. Leading up to Mark’s episode, another Lebanese called Kassem, but whose stage name is Lukas, appeared on The Voice and managed to make it through to the next round as part of Zazie’s team.

A short while ago, Marc Hatem took France to Church – almost literally – with a glorious rendition of Hozier’s awesome “Take Me To Church.”

Boasting bombastic vocals which he makes look utterly effortless, Marc blazed through his audition, getting all 4 coaches to turn. His voice was compared to “caviar” by Florent Pagny, whatever that means.

Check out his performance here:

Marc ended up choosing Garou as his coach, which sounds like a good fit given the two have similar vocal tendencies.

Of course, Marc was also well received by French and Lebanese audiences alike with his Facebook page amassing thousands of likes over a few hours following his performance.

It’s sad to see such talents needing to leave the country to make a name for themselves, but this is how things are unfortunately. I wish Marc the best of luck on The Voice’s future episodes.

From the forgotten city that always could but wasn’t allowed, Lynn Hayek and the gorgeous Fayha Choir went out and brought back to themselves and their town victories, about which the least we can say is kudos.

In its first season, The Voice Kids has been one of the most talked and watched TV shows in the Middle East, possibly even surpassing its adult counterpart. Lynn Hayek was one of the talents that turned heads since her blind audition and only reinforced her talent by progressing steadily and surely until she was one of the two remaining voices chosen by her coach, Kazem el Saher.

Earlier in the night, she beat Iraqi Mirna Hanna to qualify for the last round before being crowned as the first winner of The Voice Kids. Her city Tripoli celebrated her victory with fireworks and convoys circling around its streets; it was a moment of happiness that the city hasn’t seen in a long time.

I must say, all the talents on The Voice Kids were entities to behold. I congratulate these kids for doing what most people wouldn’t dare to do and expose themselves to an audience that is more than willing to treat them as jokes, as has occurred with the Syrian contestant Zein with some dimwit comments about him being overweight:

This is disgraceful.

Check out a few of Lynn’s performances:

Meanwhile, in Dubai, a Choir Festival was taking place, bringing in 15 choirs from all around the Arab World in a competition to crown the best one among them. Lebanon’s participants were Tripoli’s Fayha Choir, also known as one of the most sublime singing entities you can hear in Lebanon. We couldn’t have asked for better representation if you asked me, and they delivered spectacularly by winning and becoming this year’s best Middle Eastern Choir.

Check out some of Fayha Choir’s performances:

Fayha Choir and Lynn Hayek winning today is a big deal, not only because they won, but because they won coming from a city that hasn’t seen such moments in a long time, whose people have been forcibly beaten down and forgotten and who haven’t been given any chances that others in the country have gotten.

Winning singing competitions may not be much, but it’s something. Tripoli deserves this. Lynn and the members of the Fayha Choir deserve the recognition they got.

Today, I’m a proud Northener. Thank you Lynn and Fayha Choir, bterfa3o el ras. 

There are many things taking place in the Middle East today that classify as nauseating and despicable. We live in wars and occupation. We fight extremism, or succumb to it sometimes. We try and manage around squashed liberties and an international community that doesn’t care about our well-being outside of its relation to the oil barrel.

But few things are more despicable and disgusting than bullying a kid online, publicly and en masse.

Zein Obeid is an eleven year old boy from Syria who participated on the first season of The Voice Kids, reaching the finals before losing to Lebanese Lynn Hayek. He was one of the participants to get people talking the most, with one viral performance after the next. His stage persona was that of a total sweetheart, but that did not deter some mindless folk from bringing him down because he was overweight.

Leading up the show’s finale, the following picture circulated on social media to mock Zein:

Tfeh.

I didn’t want to share the above picture here, but it’s so wide-spread that I figured having it accompanying a piece where those who came up with it and are sharing it get trashed is not a bad way to do things. It was shared above and beyond by people who figured this was proper joke material. We’re all laughing. Ha ha.

Yes, I am laughing. I’m laughing at the utter and sheer mindlessness of everyone who figured this was a good joke, who decided that publicly making fun of a ten year old in such a way actually constitutes a joke to begin with. I’m laughing at the people who are so insecure and cowardly behind their keyboard-clicking fingers, making fun of someone for being who he is.

Yes, I’m laughing at you for being such disgusting people.

In order to get to The Voice Kids, Zein Obeid had to leave his home in Syria behind and come to Lebanon, a country that has made it near impossible for Syrians to be granted entry. He had to audition in front of a separate jury before being let in front of the coaches where he had to sing for them to be convinced enough to turn their chairs. He then had to go through an elimination process to get to the finals where he was at the mercy of Arab audiences voting. He didn’t end up winning. Imagine how devastating that must feel for an eleven year old, and yet here you are making fun of him just because you’re such a strong warrior behind your computer screen.

In doing what he did on The Voice, Zein entertained nations across the Middle East with his voice and stage presence. That takes an insurmountable amount of courage and pride.

Body shaming people is never okay, let alone when you’re doing it to someone who is only a little boy and whose entire perception of his experience in that talent show is of him doing something worthwhile that he will grow up one day to tell stories about. Why don’t you stand in a mirror, and take a deep long look at yourself before making fun of someone for being whoever they are in their own skin?

You may be making fun of Zein, but he’s the one who’s going to have the last laugh. Zein, if you end up reading this, know this: you are kind, you are so talented, and you are beautiful.

  
Following their huge win in Dubai on Saturday, where they were named Middle Eastern choir of the year, Tripoli’s Fayha Choir announced in a statement on their Facebook page that the Dubai event would be their last.
The wonderful choir, the country and the region’s best, will cease to exist in the coming weeks as it slowly dissolves.

The news left me distraught. Every single time I’ve seen the Fayha Choir in concert, I was left blown away by how wonderfully talented all those young men and women of Tripoli were, and at how beautiful the message of hope they were proclaiming to the world was. Such an entity stopping its activities is a shame, let alone when the cause is purely financial.

  
After hearing the news, I contacted one of the leads in Fayha Choir to inquire about the causes of such a decision. That person’s reply was straight to the point: the choir had grown beyond the capacities of its members and their maestro to be able to support it in the way that it deserves, to be able to attend all events whether here or abroad, or even compensate for the time they spend practicing and performing beyond the joy they bring in doing so.

It’s heartbreaking that such a thing is happening for such a silly reason, especially one that can be rectified. In a city that boasts the country’s richest people, this is disgraceful.
So dear Tripoli’s municipality, instead of panicking about beer ads in the city, why don’t you invest in such a medium that brings your city fame, pride and helps its talented youth express themselves in such a healthy medium?

Dear Tripoli’s politicians, from Najib Mikati to Mohammad Safadi and all their friends, I know it might feel counter-intuitive for you to invest in your city when election season isn’t coming up anytime soon, but your city needs it. Tripoli’s youth need to have their future mean more than just be an electorate number. 

Dear Tripoli’s wealthy class, I’ve seen you times and times again giving Fayha’s Choir standing ovations at each of their performances. That can’t be the maximum support you can give to a group whose name is a better representation of your wonderful city than almost everything taking place in it today.

Dear Lebanon’s concerned citizens, our country deserves to have such a choir that represents it so well survive financial troubles. Speak up. Try to help in the any way you can. 

I considered starting a crowd funding page, but an acute influx of cash is only a temporary solution. The Fayha Choir needs a stable income to support it, one that can only be 

Fayha Choir is a cultural landmark of the country and of Tripoli. Dismantling such an important part of our culture should be a matter of national urgency; this is a medium that allows youth to prosper, to express talent, to entertain people, to send a wonderful message to the world that this country and this Northern city can rise above them being forcibly forgotten and offer beauty to those who’d listen. This is very important. 

If you can help in any way, contact Roula Abou Baker. 

Earlier today, Lebanese minister of internal affairs Nouhad el Machnouk gave an impassioned speech celebrating International Women’s Day in which he proclaimed Lebanese women are not that far behind compared to their male counterpart in the country, something that no other country in the region has achieved. In coming to that conclusion, Machnouk was in part reliant on the fact that Lebanese women were named among the world’s sexiest.

Congrats Lebanese ladies, your value is now directly correlated to your rack and how tight-clad your skirts are. Cue in the applause.

I’m sure this comes as no surprise for a governing body that is as disenchanted and disenfranchised from the population it’s governing as Lebanon’s governments, both current and past. The garbage on our streets is proof enough for that. 

The thing about Lebanon, however, is that it is the center of multiple international studies, as are most countries around the world, especially when it comes to the gender gap and women rights. Among those international studies is one carried out by the World Economic Forum, which was published in mid November 2015. 

That study’s findings can be summarized in the following infographic by LA Times’ Priya Krishnakumar:

This puts us on a shameful list of countries where the gender gap is so severe that the term second sex does not delineate an other-hood but rather inferiority. We are 8th in the worst countries in the world when it comes to equality between men and women, adding it to another worst-of-list for us to be “proud” of.

Happy international women’s day my fellow Lebanese.

Our women can’t pass on our beautiful citizenship to their children, but what matters is that they can wear whatever they want (if their male family members deem it appropriate).

Our women have single-digit representation in a triple-digits parliament, but what matters is that one of those representatives is stunning (and would make a healthy argument to being on that sexiest countries list).

Our women’s wages are always inferior to their male counterparts in the country, but what matters is that those men have no problem spending the money on those women (because financial independence is so passé).

Our women’s participation in the workforce is inferior to their male counterparts in the country, but what matters certainly is those women’s job as housewives, bringing up generations (of children whose girls grow up to be just like their mothers and whose boys grow up just like their fathers).

Our women can get beaten to death legally at the hand of their spouse with no legal protection against that domestic abuse, but what matters is obviously for that man to remain the dominant figure in that household, his word never repeated twice.

Faced with such a reality, some of us Lebanese will look at that list and say: but Saudi Arabia isn’t there. Women can’t even drive there. Yes, because looking up to Saudi Arabia is obviously the best way for our society to move forward. There’s more to women rights than getting behind the wheel of a car.

If our governing bodies think that the entirety of Lebanese women is summarized by the touristy reports they see about Mar Mkhayel on a Saturday night, it’s our duty as Lebanese to be aware that our country extends beyond its party streets.

I hope Lebanon ends up on the other part of that infographic one day. Such a drift will not happen if we don’t all contribute to putting our women forward. These upcoming municipal elections, encourage your mothers and sisters to run. Encourage all our women who are so excellent at what they do to propagate their excellence onto a bigger medium. Mentalities need to change, and that is the best way to do so.

Until then, less Nouhad el Machnouk empty propaganda, and more reality please. Happy International Women’s Day, everyone.

In a recent feature on CNN, while discussing the GOP field, a reporter compared the bickering taking place between the four GOP nominees in their debates to that which takes place between Lebanese politicians, while featuring that infamous clip of live chair fighting on MTV.

For reference, the bickering between US GOP nominees was basically about the following topics:

• Donald Trump’s hand size and consequentially his penis,
• The extent to which Islam hates America,
• A wide array of racist remarks against Arabs, Latinos and African American,
• Calling each other names such as “Little Marco,”
• Accusing each other of vote rigging,
• Fighting on who loves Jesus and God more, repeating “to god be the glory” so many times without anyone noticing that’s literally English for “Allahu Akbar,”
• And, in broader terms, how to make America great again by making America more paranoid, less inclusive and much more xenophobic.

Dear American voters, if you want to know how horrible of a field of candidates you have vying for the top office in your country, know that having them compared to Lebanese politicians should be a wake up call to you, because that must be the highest incompetence honor never to wish upon anyone.

Trust me on this, we have one of the most dysfunctional governing systems in the world and you don’t want that. Our politicians have gotten our country to drown in garbage for over 8 months now with no resolution in sight. Our politicians have failed to elect a president for almost two years no, with no resolution in sight either. Our politicians have taken our constitutional right to vote two times so far, with no near election in sight. Our politicians have failed to manage almost every single national crisis that has plagued this country.

So congrats to you, my dear Americans, for managing to get, in 2016, candidates that are straight out of 1943.

And congrats to our politicians who have become so disgraceful that they’re now a point of comparison to a horrific array of American presidential hopefuls, the most prominent of whom is getting the entire world and many Americans to panic about how inevitable he seems to be. But hey, at least those Republicans haven’t thrown chairs at each other… yet.

Memories of a garbage crisis that is still as is over 8 months after it began are distant now in the country that is in upheaval, outrage, uproar, you name it… over a nursing student’s Instagram caption.

For reference, a nursing student on her way to become a midwife at Université St. Joseph posted to her 14,000+ Instagram followers a selfie of her in pink scrubs, indicating her tenure at Hotel Dieu de France, the hospital with which USJ deals in medical and nursing fields, with the caption: “Be careful bitches, we can kill your babies one day.”

Despite her account being private, albeit privacy must be extremely futile when you’re sharing posts with over 14,000 people, the picture soon made itself onto the Lebanese blogosphere, and the response has been deafening. In a matter of hours, the girl has been expelled from her university with her entire future up in tatters. If anything can be used as an example as to how careful you need to be on social media, it’s her story.

For starters, what this girl did is abhorrent. Her caption is a disgrace to her profession and to the medical field of which she hoped to become part one day, unlikely as that may be now. There’s no nice way to spin this. This goes against every principle in medical ethics that she’s exposed to, against every oath that either nurses or doctors are obliged to swear before starting their careers, and, in non-medical terms, against all rules of compassion that a human being should have.

But in the grand scheme of things, it remains a fucked up Instagram caption by a young, naive girl who didn’t think it through, who was chasing some attention (as is obvious by the 290+ likes as of screenshot time), and who didn’t know that silly, useless and horrific jokes, when said by people whose impact when it comes to those jokes can be tangible, tend to backfire.

The girl’s university was quick to respond. She has been expelled. I believe expulsion is an extremely harsh punishment for such an offense. Suspension with a public apology would have been the better way to go, especially that the girl hasn’t actually affected any woman giving birth or her babies, and will probably never be able to given the fact that midwives in hospitals don’t have that level of authority that belongs to doctors only, which she is not.

Regardless of where you stand regarding the punishment this girl received, one thing has to be discussed in the aftermath: the Lebanese public’s response was as horrific as her caption. It was akin to watching a mob lynching an unsuspecting passerby.

As I combed through online responses to the tens of thousands of shares that screenshot got, people of all kinds were united in either calling her a whore, saying that the only job she’d be fit to do was to be a stripper, attacking her looks by alluding to her undergoing prior plastic surgeries, throwing threats at her, among other things. And the constellation of those “comments” and “tweets” is nothing short of disgusting as well.

Say what you want about her caption, but to attack a person in such a systematic and public way, to call them whores and sluts and retarded over and over again is not only unacceptable, but clearly not the best way for any society or community to deal with such a thing. Doing this to this girl means you wouldn’t have an issue others doing it to you in case you fall in the cracks like she did. Are we supposed to go through our entire social media presence now because someone out there might decide that something we posted a long time ago could turn into a viral public shaming post? The idea terrifies me.

The fact of the matter is that girl’s joke, bad as it was, would always be just a joke and never a threat. Your children’s futures are more threatened today by the situation in the country than by an Instagram caption, but that doesn’t outrage you enough. Your babies are more threatened by the carcinogens filling your food and water and air from the garbage crisis and other kinds of pollution than by that girl’s Instagram caption. And yet here we are today, with a silly joke getting the country up in arms.

Lebanon, you have your priorities very well sorted.

Picture this.

Downtown Beirut, home of the city’s flashiest and most expensive, the place housing essentially all forms of worthwhile Lebanese governance, which also happens to be the heart of the Lebanese capital, is a Lebanese non-grata region: we are not allowed entry to the area’s most important area, Nejmeh Square.

Even prior to the YouStink protests, the area had been a nuisance to enter: you had to be interrogated by army personnel, get your IDs checked out and sometimes even searched before they let you through the barricades. And people wonder sometimes why some parts of Downtown Beirut are empty.

Soon enough, entering Nejmeh Square was no longer a procedure, but an impossibility. The clocked-square housing our country’s parliament became off limits when the people giving that same parliament every ounce of legitimacy it has, or doesn’t, were forbidden from entering. Why? Because we posed a threat to a building that is, for the better part of any given week, month or year, without any official or parliament member not doing their job in its halls.

And yet, the security concern does not apply to everyone it seems because foreigners, regardless of their nationality, only need to flash their better-than-ours passports to enter and enjoy the sight of heartless emptiness behind the barricades, in the heart of Beirut.

Earlier today, a Facebook post circulated, by a man from Tripoli called Rashed Merhabi who was visiting Downtown Beirut when he decided to try his luck and enter Nejmeh Square.

I spoke to Rashed extensively to get the whole story, and here’s how it went down:

Rashed approached the security personnel manning the barricades on the main entrance to Nejmeh Square and he was denied entry, being told that “a decision had been taken to make the public square non-public.” When Rashed insisted that it was his right as a Lebanese to enter the place especially given that there was no parliament meeting taking place, he was rebuffed once more.

So he carefully made his way to the other side of the square where he was told that entry is only possible at the main entrance, which is basically the place he had just come from. So he returned there where that same security officer told him: “What part of you are not allowed entry don’t you get?”

It was then that same security officer allowed two foreigners entry while a family of four from the UAE were leaving. When Rashed asked for an explanation to what he had just seen, the security officer replied: “Yes, foreigners are allowed entry but you’re not. Now get the hell out of here.”

Rashed then tried to reason with the security officer who decided to use the following glowing argument: “Do I have the right to enter your house whenever I please?” Upon being told that his argument didn’t make sense and that they wanted to go to the Starbucks beyond the barricade, they were told: “Those running this particular Starbucks told us not to allow anyone except the ten Starbucks employees entry.”

Seeing that Rashed and his friend weren’t going away easily, another security officer in civilian clothes joins in and says: “we are Parliament security and we’ve taken over this Square. Only foreigners are allowed, now leave.”

The following day, Rashed tried to call Beirut’s Municipality which told him he had to take up his issue with Parliament which then transferred him to the ISF, which ended up being a dead end.

So yes my fellow Lebanese, not only is our nationality detrimental to our potential in any place around the world, but it’s also a hurdle coming in our way in the middle of the place we are forced to call home. Live love Lebanon indeed.

This saga isn’t exclusive to Nejmeh Square. Almost every single orifice in Downtown Beirut that might lead in one way or another to a governmental building, big or small, is blocked off from every single Lebanese that might wander there.

Remember the Roman Baths we used to take tourists to once upon a time? Blocked. Remember the Wadi Bou Jamil area where Beirut and Lebanon’s only synagogue is present? Blocked.

Every single one of us is a subclass citizens in our own country, at the mercy of politicians who think of us as nothing more than bugs infesting “their” spaces, encroaching on the things they hold dear, as we face their henchmen who marvel in the power they are bestowed by the fact that they wear a uniform.

I wonder what kind of government has the audacity to forbid its own people from accessing their own city. It’s the kind of government that is too terrified for its own existence that it becomes paranoid from the reason it should exist in the first place. And they call themselves as servants of the people.

Let’s add brainless comments by plastic Arab pop stars to the growing list of things that have the capacity to rally every single Lebanese behind them. The list includes taking selfies with Israelis, posting useless comments on Instagram, among others.

Earlier this week, Lebanon’s “prime” comedian Adel Karam decided to make fun of Emirati singer Ahlam and her fans, who call themselves “Halloumiyin,” when her show aiming to find the best ass kisser possible also known as assistant was cancelled. That show was called “The Queen.”

So because an Arab diva calling herself and her show “the queen” and her fans after cheese was not comical enough, Adel Karam pointing it out broke the camel’s back and got Ahlam to do two things:

• Call Lebanese “Falafel” sellers,
• Chastise the country for the garbage crisis.

Subsequently, all hell broke loose. Twitter and Facebook hashtags calling to ban the singer from entering Lebanon were trending worldwide. Soon enough, Lebanese were attacking the entirety of the Gulf for what that singer said, because the situation with Saudi Arabia and its repercussions on our diaspora isn’t threatening enough, which means Ahlam was right when she tweeted this:

We got these posts from Adeela’s Facebook page:

A bunch of tweets:

Things culminated with this video from Pierre Hachach:

Sure, some of it is funny and she had it coming to a certain point, but aren’t we taking it too far? What’s offensive about someone pointing out the fact that the country was drowning in garbage when it’s irrevocably the truth? How does that pertain to their character as a person? Why does it mean we have to call for them to be banned from our country?

I guess it’s only offensive when a non-Lebanese does it. We, as a country, have enough pride to go around the world thirteen times, most of it unfounded and detrimental to our betterment as a society.

So my fellow Lebanese, this is a short wake-up call to all the offense you’ve taken because of a tweet by a foreigner; behold a list of things that are more offensive than Ahlam’s useless comments:

1 – The Freaking Garbage Crisis:

You may not have liked her tweet but the country is in fact sinking in garbage. Ironically, more people were upset and offended by her tweet than by the actual garbage crisis. No amount of arguments that the garbage can be taken off the streets is enough to erase this horrible chapter from our Lebanese existence. As a country, we’ve literally been co-existing with piles of trash on the sides of our roads and in our valleys. We’ve been the butt of the joke of international news for months. Is it only offensive when Ahlam pointed it out?

2 – Two Years Without President:

Come May 2016, Lebanon would have officially spent two years of its modern history without a president. No amount of political maneuvering has been able to fix this, and the collective Lebanese population probably couldn’t care less. I’ve lost count on how many failed parliament sessions we’ve had. I guess no one’s counting anymore. A country without a head is not a country that gets to be offended by a tweet.

3 – You Haven’t Voted Since 2009:

These issues feel so passé because they’ve been so rehashed but until we actually head to the ballots and vote for a new parliament or a new anything for that matter, we will remain a fictive democracy that calls itself as such but whose people haven’t practiced any of their democratic rights in years.

4 – The Soldiers Still Kidnapped by ISIS:

Did you forget about those? Because it takes a lot of mental processing for me to bring them into the forefront of my memory. This is your friendly reminder that while many of our soldiers were freed from Al-Nusra a few months ago, many are still taken by ISIS without a resolution in sight.

5 – Our Passport Is The 9th Worst Passport In The World:

As an indicator of how beautiful our nationality is, look no further than at our passport’s strength. We have the 9th worst passport in the world. This translates to us literally being unable to go almost anywhere without having to go through a ton of bureaucratic hoops to get there. But please, by all means, let us panic over a tweet.

What’s So Bad About Selling Falafel Anyway?

I don’t know about you, but I fail to see what’s so demeaning about being told I’m a falafel seller. Didn’t we get a surge of pride only a week ago whenever anyone in any Western series or movie mentioned the world Falafel because somehow that gave us cultural validation?

Don’t we as a country also get a collective boner whenever we hear the story of a Lebanese who made it big abroad by selling falafel?

Since when is being someone who sells falafel offensive? Or is it only that because in the minds of some, being told that they’re falafel sellers infers they’re from a lower social class? In that case, not only have we failed to respond to Ahlam, but we’ve offended every single Lebanese who is one of those struggling to make ends meet for their family. I, for one, would rather be a falafel seller, and all the meanings it entails, than a plastic egomaniac Arab singer, but that’s just me.

We, as Lebanese, need to learn not to be offended by the truth about our country regardless of how hurtful that truth is and regardless of who says it. More importantly, we need to learn to develop thicker skin, however, be it against people like Ahlam or even others who will hurl out worst offenses at us or at our country.

Earlier today, Saudi newspaper Alsharq Al-Awsat, which most of us had not heard of until this point, decided to contribute to April Fools with their joke, the pun being Lebanon.

The caricature translates to: April Fools… the State of Lebanon.

Of course, Lebanon was in an uproar, but none more so than self-proclaimed comedian and frequent let-me-run-for-parliament-as-a-joke Pierre Hachach who decided to pay the Lebanese offices of Alsharq Al-Awsat a visit and, obviously, vandalize them.

He was so proud of what he and his friends did that he posted the video on Facebook, in two parts:

Is it just me, or is it immensely ironic that Pierre Hachach and his friends saw that the best way to respond to someone saying the Lebanese state was a joke was by showing how barbaric the Lebanese people can be and how absent the Lebanese state actually is in preventing such a ruckus from taking place to begin with?

The caricature in question can be interpreted in many ways. I personally found it lame, and not even worth a second glance. It was first and foremost political, coming at a time when Lebanon and Saudi Arabia were at political odds, regardless of what Saad Hariri thinks of this. Any other consideration, be it about its artistic, comical, any other value or lack thereof, is besides the point. As such, the reply to such a caricature should be political and in the same manner that it was made: write about it, tweet about it, insult it, make another caricature replying to its content, or any other civilized manner that befits us as a people and this country whose name we’re so keen to uphold.

We live in a region where freedom of speech is not absolute, where press is almost always afraid to say what it thinks, where dictators own airwaves and where the masses are led to figurative slaughter houses like sheep without knowing so. What happened today is attacking any ounce of freedom of speech this region has left, even if that freedom of speech was expressed in a way that we as Lebanese find insulting.

Lebanon is a regional pioneer when it comes to freedom of speech. In many ways, it’s the most important piece of dignity we have left. I am writing this because laws in my country allow me. You are reading this on your computer in Beirut or Tripoli or wherever because internet in this country hasn’t banned you from doing so. You are able to say whatever you want because we do not live in a security state. Things are not perfect, but things are not Saudi Arabia either.

Pierre Hachach and his friends attacking the offices of Alsharq Al-Awsat is an attack to that last piece of dignity that we as Lebanese have, giving us an image of barbarics who can’t take differing opinions, who think fists are the proper response to speech, who think that chaos is more appropriate than order, and who think that our dignity is restored with violence, not with honor.

How different would that make Pierre Hachach and his friends from those who attacked the Danish Embassy a few years ago because of a Danish newspaper’s caricatures about the Prophet Mohammad? How ironic is it that those same people probably were all about #JeSuisCharlie when the Charlie Hebdo HQ in Paris was attacked in January 2015 by people who were as offended about the dignity of their religion as they are about their country’s?

The answer is not so much.

Pierre Hachach, you would have done better by posting another meaningless Facebook video in which you replied to the caricature than by going down to the newspaper’s offices. I would have probably disagreed with you, but I sure as well wouldn’t be appalled and horrified at how insulting that video’s reflection is of this country you’re supposedly defending.

To that caricature I say: وإذا أتَتْكَ مَذَمّتي من نَاقِصٍ فَهيَ الشّهادَةُ لي بأنّي كامِلُ.

Currently playing in a Beiruti jail and between the Lebanese and Australian governments is a story that, to say the least, is probably going to end up as a big Hollywood production soon. We can only hope whichever studio takes it doesn’t give the leading role to Nicholas Cage, or Carlos Azar for that matter.

Almost twelve months ago, Ali Elamine, in pure Lebanese patriarchal macho fashion, tricked his ex-wife Sally Faulkner into allowing him to take their two children, Noah and Lahela, on a supposedly temporary trip to Lebanon. Clearly, the trip turned out to be anything but temporary as Ali refused to return the children to their mother who hasn’t been able to see them since.

Obviously, such a situation is abhorrent. Ali Elamine is, to put it bluntly, horrible. Not only is he the embodiment of the stereotypes that Lebanese Australians have to endure, but is also such a disgusting creature for doing what he has done. He has no excuses. He is revolting. No one with any ounce of humanity and reasoning can be on his side. He is a disgrace and another entity to the growing list of things to make us ashamed of sharing a nationality with them.

To do what he did, Ali Elamine is using demented Lebanese laws that rely on the religious background of the parents, in this case the Shia Muslim court, which gives the father the upper hand in a custody battle. Add to that the fact that he is essentially legally untouchable in Lebanon, and you have a pretty much sealed case.

As a cry for help, Sally Faulkner, the mother, has been trying to rally media behind her cause for the past six months. On the Lebanese side of the world, nobody cared. Such cases are common enough with asshole Lebanese fathers ever present for her case to register on the Lebanese let-me-see-if-I-should-care scale. In Australia, however, the producers of 60 Minutes saw in Sally Faulkner a story. And this is when they started to turn the lives of her children into a circus show.

Up until now, the custody battle between Sally and Ali was only as such, a battle between two parents. It was unfortunate that the laws in Lebanon are retarded and that Ali is a revolting existence, but that’s how things are. Perhaps with enough media pressure in Australia, Lebanese media would have picked up on the issue and sided – as they should – with the mother, leading to enough attention over here for a safe and sane resolution of the issue.

Except that didn’t happen, because what took place was the following:

The crew of 60 Minutes, which airs on Channel 9 in Australia, paid around $120,000 for an international child recovery agency, with a spotty track record and multiple botched attempts reportedly, and flew with them and the children’s mother to Lebanon in order to recover them.

The recovery attempt occurred as follows: while the children were with their grandmother at a bus stop in Beirut, the crew of that agency, masked and all, rushed out of a van, grabbed the children, pushed their paternal grandmother aside, and rode away with them, reuniting them briefly with their mother.

The whole Hollywood-esque sequence was caught on surveillance cameras, prompting Lebanese authorities to stop the van, arresting everyone inside: the crew of 60 Minutes (including Tara Brown), the mother and the crew of the recovery agency, and – obviously – bringing back the children to their father who clearly knew he had the upper hand on home territory.

Ali Elamine’s path now is clear: play up the fact that his children are Lebanese and are governed by Lebanese sectarian law, and portray their mother as unfit, attacking her reputation, which in Lebanon is akin to a death sentence. 

But the equally horrifying part in this whole story isn’t only Ali Elamine’s character, but rather how Australia’s 60 Minutes crew handled the entire affair.

For starters, what kind of reputable TV show pays over $120,000 for a children kidnapping agency, which is basically what that agency does, to kidnap children?

What kind of reputable TV show does what was mentioned previously not only to reunite the kids with their mother, but to get movie-esque kickass shots to boost their show’s ratings?

What kind of reputable TV show does so in the middle of Beirut, out of all places, without being aware of the laws governing the city, the relationship between the country where that city is located and their own home country?

What kind of reputable TV show is apparently seemingly unaware of what could possibly go wrong in basically kidnapping two children who are nationals of the country they’re kidnapping them from, taking them away from their father and trying to take them back to Australia? Do they not know that Lebanese children are NOT allowed to leave the country without the written and documented consent of their father?

What kind of reputable TV show puts the priority of a dramatic story over the well-being of the children involved, whose lives will be affected in more ways than anyone will ever imagine?

By doing what they did in Beirut, the producers of Australia’s 60 Minutes did more damage to Sally Faulkner’s case to have her children, to the lives of those children and to their reliability as a supposedly top notch investigative journalism show. In a perfect world, you can’t go back from such massive unprofessionalism, except they probably will. The only entities who will be permanently damaged are Noah and Lahela, whose chances of being with their mother have become next to zero, and whose lives have been turned into a real life circus, soon to be a Hollywood movie, or maybe even a book. In custody battles, one of the parents wins, but the children always lose. Now make that loss on an international, Hollywood-esque scale.

Pic via Mawtoura.

Here it unfolds, the worst chapter in the non-ending story of the Lebanese garbage crisis. Don’t be fooled, the crisis is far from over. The governmental “solution” is so short-sighted and non-sensical that the crisis is bound to be repeated if not in 60 days, then in a few months or years. This is how we do things in this country: we put band-aids on gaping wounds, without making sure that the wound itself has actually been stabilized enough to be managed with band-aids; we do makeup coverups for problems that need hardcore fixes.

Perhaps nothing exemplifies how short-sighted and lala-landish our government is than the Minister of Environment tweeting (then deleting) a few days ago that the wave of mosquitoes and flies the likes of which this country has not seen in recent memory is due to nothing other than the heat. He then subsequently blocked everyone who told him off or otherwise.

Ignore the fact that our Minister of Environment’s credentials don’t come anywhere near the science of the environment, and ignore the fact that we’re not actually experiencing waves of heat that could bring this much mosquitoes to our cities, what remains is a minister in a government that is trying to repeatedly fool you: the mosquitoes are due to the garbage, not just the weather.

As they stacked up the garbage in various locations around Beirut over the past several months, from Karantina to the Beirut River, the organic matter in that garbage underwent fermentation and decomposition leading to a wide array of toxins and bacteria. For months, those toxic materials were just lying there, unperturbed. However, the moment those poor garbage handlers started removing it, the chemicals were “freed” allowing them to move up to the Beiruti atmosphere and give you the absolutely horrible smell that feels inescapable.

The smell will remain there as long as they’re removing the garbage. The more time they take, the more we’ll have to endure, so let’s hope the poor fellows handling it physically can sustain the effort it takes before temperatures become higher and work conditions become too horrifying for the to manage.

Many people have reported unable to prevent vomiting many times a day because of the stench. Some have reported feeling ashamed of not being unable to vomit in public. I tell those people, your vomit is more honorable than the faces of those in governance who have inflicted this upon us. Wear it – not literally – like a badge of honor. If you’re having multiple episodes of vomiting, however, make sure to stay hydrated. Use anti-emetics, like primperan or motilium, to try and prevent such episodes as much as you can.

The disgusting smell has the worst ramifications on those with already present pulmonary disease. If you’re asthmatic or have an underlying lung illness and are feeling more out of breath than usual, consult your pulmonologist on adjusting your inhaler dose.

But what can be done about the smell and the mosquitoes and flies other than essentially sucking it up? We have to make sure our homes are safe for us and our children.

The mosquitoes and flies are a huge problem because 1) they exist in huge amounts, 2) they are caused by the garbage crisis, 3) they carry toxins with them as they travel, 4) they might carry infectious vectors from one person to the next and 5) they will bite.

So here’s a step by step process over how to handle things to the best of your capacity.

1. Use face masks while going out if the smell is too much for you to handle. They’re present at most pharmacies and will help to a certain point.
2. Before leaving your house, close the windows and doors to make sure mosquitoes and flies don’t welcome you back home. You can also use low dose insecticide, which will dissipate over the day, to keep the house free of the pests.
3. Make sure to have cleansing hand gel with you at all times. Use it abundantly.
4. If you or your children are bitten by a mosquito or flies, many of which are specific to this kind of fermentation process, clean the bite with a little bit of antiseptic, which will help in relief and cleaning.
5. You can also use antiseptic sprays around the house. Those are a bit expensive, but there’s a cheaper DIY method that Ziad Abi Chaker shared on Facebook yesterday, consisting of mixing mouthwash with equal parts of water (1 cup mouthwash to 1 cup of water), putting the combo in a spray bottle and spraying the house.
6. Maintain proper hygiene, not only of yourself but also of your house. The cleaner it is, the safer it is for yourself and your family.
7. Every time a wave of nausea hits you or a mosquito/fly bites you, curse the hell out of this country and its government for making you go through this.

While our politicians live in lala-land and pretend that the only thing happening in Beirut is basically #Live and #Love, we are dealing with things that no civilized country has to ever deal with. Except the only notion of civility we have is what we propagate to those poor tourists to whom we now have to find an explanation as to why it just smells so bad in the city they’ve been duped to visit. If only odors can be carried over to Instagram posts.

I can’t believe it’s the year 2016 and we are discussing the ways to handle a putrid smell taking over our capital. What will be equally horrifying is the fact that the people in Nehme and other areas in the country where landfills reined supreme had to deal with such things for an extended period of time while no one cared. There’s a reason those people protested the landfill in their area, closed roads leading to it and refused to receive garbage in it again, only to be faced with army men and tanks forcing them to open it up.

In a short period, when the Burj Hammoud landfill opens up, this smell and everything that comes with it will become customary for Beirut. Keep that in mind.

Over the past several weeks, a true grassroots movement has been overtaking the streets of Beirut as a new movement trying to reclaim the city it calls home began its rise; Beirut Madinati was doing something that Beirutis hadn’t seen in a very long time, if ever: they were holding gatherings in different neighborhoods across the city to talk to the city’s own people about their woes, to tell them that we are not a Hariri-appointed list of people who believe they are entitled to your vote, we will work for it and this is us doing so.

Of course, the work of Beirut Madinati did not start when our Municipal Elections became an inevitability. Over the past years, the same supporters and people behind this robust youthful movement were orchestrating many of the protests we’ve all been supporting and advocating for. They called to have Horsh Beirut re-opened and succeeded in it being as such on Saturdays. They fought against the demolition of many of Beirut’s culturally important landmarks. They are fighting against the Fouad Boutros Highway that will destroy any remnant of Achrafieh as we know it.

Today, they are giving their fights a name and it is aptly called: Beirut, my city.

Giving Meaning To The Elections:

Over the past several years, the municipal elections of the city of Beirut were everything but “democratic.” The city’s key parties, mostly the Future Movement, appoints a list of the city’s candidates, without any inkling of equality, and that list ends up winning by near acclamation. No one stands a chance. Correction, no one stood a chance. Until now.

Beirut Madinati is a group of men and women, of all ages and backgrounds, fighting to reclaim the city they call home and let it become the place they know it can be. Their composition is breaking the boundaries of Lebanese politics itself. Instead of having only 3 women on the Municipal board, Beirut Madinati is reportedly submitting the candidature of 12 women – exactly half. One of those women is brilliant Lebanese director Nadine Labaki. One of the men nominated is Yorgui Teyrouz, the founder of Donner Sang Compter, the NGO that has saved thousands of lives since its inception.

The names of Beirut Madinati’s candidates have not been fully announced yet. However, the list was obtained not because someone is something up the echelons of a given party, without any consideration to that person’s qualifications, but through a rigorous process that involved more than 80 members of the movement. All opinions were heard. Even the head of municipality promised by that list will be an engineer because their plan needs someone with that background to implement it.

This is not the politics of Lebanon which has almost always emanated from the dark ages, but rather citizens of this city trying to do things the way they should be done: with a modern inclusive approach, and a futuristic look at how things need to be. Today, Beirut Madinati is giving meaning to Beirut’s municipal elections. They are giving us a choice.

Giving Hope To The City:

Beirut Madinati giving the people of Beirut the possibility of having a voice come May 8th does not come without them being aware of the responsibility that entails. As such, for the first time in years as well, the people of Beirut have a set of candidates who are running to work for a platform that is conceived through careful and scientific assessment of Beirut of 2016, with what they hope for Beirut to become by 2022 when their term ends.

The platform is divided into 10 main entities, which I will summarize below, but you can read the full 30 pages program at this link (click):

1. Better public transportation to encourage people to rely less on private cars (today’s rates are 70%), and enable more use of bikes and walking, thereby reducing traffic substantially as well as pollution.
2. Increase Beirut’s green spaces from 1 squared meter from person to at least 5 squared meters by 2022 with at least one public garden per local community.
3. Work on decreasing the price of apartments in Beirut so they can become more affordable to its people. The average today is $570,000 per apartment.
4. Start recycling programs in the city where garbage goes at rates of 90% to landfills, to a goal of 40% recycling by 2022.
5. Protect Beirut’s heritage. No more random demolitions for buildings that hold value to the city’s past and history.
6. Increasing the number of public libraries and community spaces available. The city currently has only THREE public libraries.
7. Adjust taxation rates in the city to enable better equality and better job opportunities. 1 in 4 of Beirut’s youth are currently unemployed.
8. Make governmental buildings in Beirut more eco-friendly.
9. Improve health in the city by addressing the water pollution, monitoring its quality, and improving air quality by, for instance, removing the open air waste bins (those giant green Sukleen ones).
10. Better training for municipality staff to better address concerns of citizens.

Not only will this program, if implemented, bring Beirut head on into the 21st century city it should be, but it would also boost the quality of life of millions of Lebanese who call the city their home, whether they actually vote there or not.

By bettering public transportation, access to the city becomes easier. You’d no longer need to spend ninety minutes in your car stuck at Nahr el Kaleb every morning. With less traffic, more people would find it easier to live in the suburbs or areas around Beirut, bringing real estate prices down. With better governance, citizens of the city would have better accountability. They’d know who messed up and how. It would no longer be the time for murky politics. The examples and ramifications are endless.

They are also running without politicians backing them. They rely on regular people like us for support and donations to keep their campaign going. So donate at the link (here) if you can.

Your Choice On May 8th:

I may not be a Beirut voter, but I’ll be damned if I weren’t going to use this platform to advocate for such a group. Winning is, obviously, Beirut Madinati’s goal but the showing they will have on May 8th, regardless of numbers, will be substantial enough to tell the entrenched Beiruti establishment that the city’s people are no longer subdued to the demented politics bringing about the same municipality over and over again, different people perhaps, but same useless agenda every time.

Your vote for Beirut Madinati on May 8th is telling those politicians that have taken you for granted over and over again that you are not just another number they can move and calculate however they please, but a citizen who knows he or she is entitled to a municipality that cares for their future and not to have its members gain a title, a source of income for their bottom line, and have this political party or that say they control the city and consequently you.

On May 8th, your vote as a Beiruti matters. Rise above the meaningless politics. Challenge the establishment. Set your city on the path that befits it. On May 8th, vote against the status quo and for a better future.

Beirut Madinati, the independent and refreshing campaign overtaking the Beirut political establishment, has just announced its list of candidates for the upcoming Municipal elections of the city, set to be held on May 8th.

As I wrote yesterday, the work to get to this list at hand was not, in typical Lebanese fashion, a who’s who along the echelons of a political party. It was more than 80 active participants in the movement gathering and discussing for months on ends the wide array of possibilities that they could offer the city. The result is as follows: a list that is equally men and women, 12 members each, representative of all the city’s neighborhoods and communities, and consisting of people who have made a name for themselves in their respective domains.

Not only is the list equally balanced between men and women, but 6 out of 24 are considered of the youth group, 16 are middle aged candidates and 2 are seniors. Compare this with an average age of more than 60 in our cabinet, and the contrast is striking.

The candidates are as follows:

Ibrahim Mneimneh: president, architect and urban planner (Mazraa).

Tarek Ammar: vice president; He’s the CEO of a researching company with over 16 years of experience in the field. (Achrafieh).

Iman Ghandour: Private sector worker, former deputy head of the “IC alumni association,” member of the board of many festivals around Beirut and Lebanon (Bashoura).

Mona Hallak: Architect, Executive committee member of the Association for the Protection of Sites and Old Buildings in Lebanon. Was an activist in the protection of Rawcheh movement and the reason behind “Maison Barakat” being saved. (Mazraa).

Rana Khoury: Advertising creative director and a board member of the Samir Kassir Foundation (Bashoura).

Nada Doghan: Historian and member of the Civil Society. CEO of the Arab project “Kitab fi Jarida” in cooperation with UNESCO. (Msaytbeh).

May Daouk: Interior architect, supporter of Skoon and the Samir Kassir foundation, as well as activist for women rights in Lebanon. (Msaytbeh).

Najib el Dik: Head of the Beirut fishers associations in Ain el Mreisseh and former head of Beirut’s fisherman syndicate, (Minet el Hosn).

Marwan Al Taibi: Journalist, head of the “Al Yawm” newspaper and consultant (Bashoura).

Walid El Alami: Cardiologist who graduated from AUB, the University of Oklahoma and Baylor. He returned to Lebanon in 2012 and is part of the “IC alumni association.” (Ras Beirut).

Levon Telvizian: Architect, professor at the Lebanese University, was head of the urban planning program there. He’s currently an advisor for multiple development NGOs and works with UNESCO for housing in Lebanon. (Rmeil).

Yorgui Teyrouz: Phamacist and founder of Donner Sang Compter (Rmeil).

Abdul Halim Jabr: Architect and urban design expert, as well as part time university professor. Activist against the Fouad Boutros highway and in many other conservation fights in Beirut. (Msaytbeh).

Mark Geara: Real estate developer (Achrafieh).

Houssam Hawa: Agriculture engineer, AUB graduate with a Masters degree from Holland. Activist in many environmental causes. (Achrafieh). 

Carole Tueini: Media sector, was an anchor on MTV before joining Disney MENA, where she eventually became an executive producer. (Achrafieh).

Amal Cherif: Art director and advocate for people with disability (Zkak al-Blat).

Nada Sehnaoui: an artist and painter, founding member of the Civil Center for National Initiative (Achrafieh).

Farah Kobeissy: Political science expert and human rights activist (Zkak al- Blat).

Ahmad Kaabour: Renowned singer, songwriter and composer (Mazraa).

Nadine Labaki: Leading Lebanese director, behind movies such as “W Halla2 la Wein” and “Caramel” (Achrafieh).

Maria Manok: Lower school head of division at Ahliyyah School (Msaytbeh).

Rita Maalouf: Expert in forensics, returned to Lebanon from the United States in 2008. She’s the first forensics expert in Lebanon’s Ministry of Justice. (Ras Beirut).

Serge Yazegi: Architect, urban planner and lecturer at ALBA (Achrafieh).

Good luck to these people on May 8th. Change is possible. Change needs you – if you can vote in Beirut – to go down to your precint on May 8th and choose those that have fought for you for years, choose those who know how it is to lead the city in the proper direction, choose those who are not the status quo.

Write down their names.

Lebanon’s most prominent indie band Mashrou’ Leila, who were embarking on a tour to promote their most recent and exquisite album Ebn El Leil, had a concert planned for April 29th at Amman, Jordan’s Roman Hippodrome.

Today, only a few days prior to the concert, they were informed that their concert was canceled for, as “official” reasons cite “[their] performance would have been at odds with what the Ministry of Tourism viewed as the “authenticity” of the site.” In other, more hidden words, the Jordanian authorities view Mashrou’ Leila’s progressive message, by Arab standards at least, as an agenda they don’t want to advance on their territories. Obviously, that scary message is one of sexual equality transcending genders and orientations. How frightening.

Mashrou’ Leila issued a lengthy statement on their Facebook page which you can check here (link), of which I quote the following:

We denounce the systemic prosecution of voices of political dissent.
We denounce the systemic prosecution of advocates of sexual and religious freedom.
We denounce the censorship of artists anywhere in the world.
We apologize for having thus far failed at creating a cultural environment that allows our children to speak their minds. We believe whole-heartedly that we have only ever acted with the intention of making our world a more equal, and just place, even if “only through song.” We pledge to our audience that we will continue to place the integrity of our art as our foremost priority, and to never succumb to the pressure to compromise our message, or to waive our freedom to speak. We promise to continue to write out of love, and with the desire to spread love. We will fight, as we have always done, for our right to freely play our music and speak our mind.

The ironic thing is that Mashrou’ Leila had been allowed to perform in Jordan, at that specific site, before. Their Jordanian concerts serve as a vehicle for their fans in that country to watch them perform and, more importantly, for many Palestinians to make their way into Jordan in order to attend those concerts.

Not only have Mashrou’ Leila been stopped from holding this particular concert, but they’ve been banned from performing in all of Jordan at all times.

Of course, for the feisty Lebanese who will proclaim Jordan as a backwards-thinking land because of this, please remember how Zouk Mikhayel had a problem with Mashrou’ Leila performing there only two years ago simply because their lead singer Hamed Sinno was openly gay. Leila getting banned in Jordan is not a reflection of Jordan, but about the collective Arab culture that favors oppression over acceptance.

I have to wonder though, how is this reflective of a country whose king and queen proclaim to be champions of modernity and progression in a regressing region?

It’s a shame that Jordanian and Palestinian concert goers won’t get to watch the awesome Mashrou’ Leila in concert. I’m terribly sorry that Arab governments are so scared of music imbued with messages that challenge what they know, in a way that they can’t really fight because, ultimately, progression is inevitable whether it takes a year, ten or a hundred.

In being banned from ever performing in Jordan, Mashrou’ Leila are not just winners. They are triumphant.

In being banned, they’ve reached the echelons of those entities in the Arab world that challenge the status quo so profoundly with what they do that they’re shaking governments, systems and belief foundations to their core.

In being banned, Mashrou’ Leila have proven that their music is not just an assortment of notes strung together to construct a catchy phrase, but rather a message for Arab youth to rise above what they know, what they’ve been brought up to believe and accept that diversity in the heart of their own culture is to be embraced not feared. Today, Mashrou’ Leila are victorious because their message of no fear is causing governments to be afraid.

Mashrou’ Leila’s music will not be silenced if their concert is stopped. In them being forced to be silent, they’re louder than ever, and their music will gain more audiences than they’ve dreamed possible. Today, they are victorious. Today, they should be proud of the walls they’ve broken and of the boundaries they will break with every note they sing.