“Faith in humanity abolished” is what everyone’s been speaking about today as they circulate a video of a Lebanese child beating another Syrian child at the request of the Lebanese’s parents. The video is the following:
Certainly, the above is an abomination, a disgrace and whatever word can be inserted to describe the horror of the event at hand. But I have to wonder: why is anyone remotely shocked or even surprised?
We are a country to be pitied. Our houses are filled with maids, all of whom are Sri Lankans despite the fact that most are not, who clean after us in miserable working conditions and for minimal pay. If they ask for a raise, we ridicule them for wanting too much, but who of us would work more than 12 hour days, every day, for $100 a month?
Our injustice does not stop there. We beat those women whenever they try and speak up. We ridicule them in media if they dare to stray from the well-defined line that we’ve set up for them, and our kids observe as we bully them into mental oblivion, every single day until their contract is over and they’re free to go back to their families, mere shells of their former selves.
We are a country of hypocrisy. We’ve been ridiculing Syrian refugees for the past year, calling for them to be sent back home or to have their already miserable living conditions over here demoted even further. Multiple arguments are used and regardless of whether those arguments are correct or not, one thing is clear: when it comes to the Syrian refugees, humane we are not.
We teach our children to stay away from the Syrians around us. We tell them they are filthy. We tell them they are disgusting. We tell them they are to be feared. We tell them they are thieves. And somehow, we pretend not to be doing anything wrong about those people… until there’s a video, of course.
Many of those Syrian refugees do not get the “privilege” that the boy in that video got: to have their struggles recorded. Most of them do not get to be seen getting beaten by Lebanese who use the only superiority they get in their own country: to overpower powerless people who just want to survive.
Only yesterday, Ziad Fares – a twitter user who goes by the handle @ZiadFares1 – witnessed a similar act in a much more public location. At Sassine’s Starbucks shop, he saw a male teenage employee kick a young Syrian girl just because she was selling chocolate in the vicinity. The girl wasn’t bothering people nor was she insiting they buy her unica bars when they decline. The girls stood there, asking the employee why he hit her with him only barking at her to leave. Of course, no one caught it on video for it to become the next “it” viral sensation that Lebanese will use to absolve their conscience regarding their many shortcomings towards all those “lessers.”
Before you begin to be outraged just because it’s what everyone else is doing, take a moment and think: when was the last time you were the bully to a Syrian, to an Ethiopian or any other nationality we’ve come to associate with our unfounded arrogance as of a “lesser” breed? When was the last time you failed to stand up to an injustice to those people taking place around you, forbidding them from having your voice speak up to them when it was the only voice they could have possibly had?
We teach our children to be hateful, to despise those who are different, to feel superior to those we tell them are less important, to beat those who are weak, to take what is “rightfully” theirs by their own hand because no one’s there to fight for their “rights.” We teach our children that it’s okay for their fathers to beat their mothers when they misbehave, fully knowing that they’ll get away with it every single time, and somehow we’re shocked that those children end up becoming parents who teach their own children to beat up unsuspecting children, who can take pleasure in filming such acts on video and who laugh as those children weep in front of them? What a load of bullshit.
That Syrian kid will get justice thanks to that video. I hope for that typical Lebanese man to be thrown in the deepest pits of any given Lebanese jail for his actions, and by the looks of it he might. But I also wish the same for countless other Lebanese who have done even worse to other foreigners here and who have gotten away unscathed.
Your faith in the Lebanese humanity should have been abolished a long time ago.
Update: the father of the child named Abbas in the above video has been reportedly apprehended by the police.
Filed under: Lebanon
