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Serious satire
"Humor is a funny way of being serious"
-Thomas Edison
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To have your emails deleted please write to me at renatoobeid@hotmail.com
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Copyright© 2001-2010, Renato Obeid
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"Top blog/Renato Obeid's World/Today's pick: This rambling weblog is worth reading not so much for its satirical posts but more for its insight into the minutiae of life in Lebanon, including the etiquette of road accidents and how to hire a taxi.”
-Jane Perrone, The Guardian
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Friday, December 30, 2005
Throughout my boyhood I accumulated a comic book empire (some dating as far back as the 1930’s) that numbered some two thousand by the time I left Australia in 1991, when I left them in the ‘’care’’ of some friends in Melbourne.
When I returned to Melbourne in 1998, the ‘’trustees’’ gave me varying accounts of what had happened to them – one being that the comic books had perished in a fire in their garage.
They probably just threw them away.
A tragedy I compare to the sacking of the Library of Alexandria.
The comics may have gone but the comic remains.
11:15 pm
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
RENATO OBEID IS RENATOOBEIDSWORLD'S MAN OF THE YEAR
- unprecedented third year in a row
"I'm shocked and stunned!This is just so unexpected - a total surprise!When did this happen?"
- www.renatobeidsworld.blogspot.com's Man of the Year, Renato Obeid on learning of the honour.
11:41 pm
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Who would have thought that we’d ever get to the stage where parked cars are more dangerous than moving cars in Lebanon?
When I was boy, in more innocent times, ‘’parking’’ meant something else entirely (a different kind of ‘’bang’’).
1:45 am
Sunday, December 11, 2005
An estimated mob of 5000 Anglo-Australians riot against Australian/Lebanese Muslims at Cronulla Beach in Sydney.
This first race riot in modern Australian history, which has rightly been condemned by all right-minded Australians, came after years of racist provocation by Australian/Lebanese Muslim Australians culminating in the recent stabbing of a lifeguard on the beach where the riots occurred.
How annoying do you have to be to get Australians upset enough to riot?
I got to hand it to them (Australian/Lebanese Muslims).
Nonetheless, despite the best efforts of a small minority of Australian Muslims and the small minority of Anglo-Australians who overreacted to them, Australia remains the world's only truly multicultural society.The Governor of the state of NSW (where the riots occurred), Professor Marie Bashir, is herself of Lebanese origin, as is the Premier of the neighboring state of Victoria, Steve Bracks.
8:00 pm
Saturday, December 10, 2005
This is not in defense of the President but in defense of the Constitution, the institution of the Presidency and the Lebanese inter-communal dynamic.
The Lebanese Constitution clearly states that the President can only be removed if he has violated the Constitution or committed treason.
No evidence of either exists.If the triumphalist parliamentary majority succeeds in deposing the President (whose only “crime” to date was politically opposing late Prime Minister Hariri and not allowing him total carte blanche) and imposing their placeman, then the institution will be weakened to the extent that any Sunni who gets a flat tire will be demanding the President’s resignation for it.
1:30 pm
Monday, December 05, 2005
I’m not scared of bad people just wary of them but I am horrified of stupid people.
Evil has its limits - evil is not gratuitous but is in fact very efficient whereas stupidity is endless, infinite.
You can fight a bad person but you can’t fight a stupid person.
10:30 pm
Sunday, November 27, 2005
SWISS VOTERS ENDORSE REFERENDUM PROPOSAL TO BAN GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS
- would you like fries with that?
Although I’m a fan of Swiss direct democracy (where the people’s consent is required on any major issue) I think that voting on what to have for dinner is taking it a bit too far.
7:00 pm
Saturday, November 26, 2005
TOURIST RIPPED OFF BUYING WATER PIPE IN MIDDLE EAST – WORLD FIRST
- put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Spent a lovely afternoon with my friend Eric (“Ezza” in "Australian"), his wife Vera and his sister Lesley who are visiting from the UK.
Ezza bought two water pipes (complete with plastic carry case with shoulder strap) from a specialty water pipe shop in Jounieh to take back to the UK as presents.
We later saw them for half that price at a homeware shop in Beirut while looking for a nativity scene for Vera, although Ezza insists they were of lesser quality (he would wouldn’t he).
Maybe Ezza should have stuck to gifting Schott’s Almanac – a compendium of fascinating facts and trivia that he got me from the UK.
We couldn’t find a nativity scene that was portable enough to fit in a suitcase so Ezza undertook to build one for Vera when they got home.
Sounds like a Viz comic strip in the making to me.
My favorite item at homeware heaven was a gaudy plastic statuette of Saint George slaying the dragon (missing the sword) for only 7500 lira (maybe the sword is an optional extra).
Legend has it that Saint George slew the dragon at what is now Saint George's Bay in Beirut.The dragon returned last February, engulfing the Saint George corniche in a fireball that killed Prime Minister Hariri and twenty-two others.
8:00 pm
Monday, November 21, 2005
Before I became computer literate, almost four years ago, I couldn’t even turn a computer on, now I can’t turn it off.
3:15 pm
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Somebody rang the doorbell at my apartment earlier this evening.
I went around and opened the door to the other apartment because that is the principle entrance.
I said hello and the two provincials (an elderly lady and her son by the look of it) turned around and just looked at me as if I was an apparition without returning my greeting.
They look stunned and finally managed to say that they had rang the doorbell of the other apartment.
I agreed but told them that the two apartments were connected.
That did little to ease their confusion and they left almost as perplexed as they had came (they had the wrong building - they were looking for someone in the next building).No wonder that these people report so many so-called miracles – it doesn’t take much to surprise them: “we buzzed at one apartment and someone opened the door at another appartment – The Miracle of the Two Doors”.
11:00 pm
Friday, October 21, 2005
(photo:naharnet)
POP STAR PROSECUTOR
A visitor to Prime Minister Hariri’s tomb makes clear what she thinks of the Mehlis report, sentiment echoed across Lebanon as the report, confirming what most Lebanese already knew but are delighted to see acknowledged, is released.
YOU WANT THE TRUTH*? - YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
- Syria rejects Mehlis report findings
*"The Truth" has become a slogan for those demanding to know who assassinated Prime Minisiter Hariri.
8:00 pm
Thursday, October 20, 2005
WAITING FOR MEHLIS
An atmosphere of tense anticipation prevails in Lebanon ahead of today's release of the Mehlis report into the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri.
(cartoon:ramziblahblah.blogspot.com)
11:06 am
Monday, October 17, 2005
(southerner confirms that bird flu is an American hoax and that he's a dickhead)
An owner of one of the sanctuaries, 45-year-old Mohammad Masri, said he did not believe in the existence of bird flu, adding: "This is an American creation aimed at distracting the people from their economic and political problems."
...Masri picked up two of his pigeons and kissed them on the mouth to confirm his birds were not sick.
- Today's Daily Star
3:56 pm
Sunday, October 16, 2005
THE SYRIANS DID IT
The region is awash with rumor, speculation and conspiracy theories about the death, reportedly by suicide, of Syrian Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan last Wednesday and its relation, if any, to the preliminary Mehlis report*, to be released next week, on the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri and possible Syrian involvement.One thing’s for certain, whether Mr. Kanaan killed himself or was killed, there definitely was Syrian involvement in this one.
*The U.N. investigation, led by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis
Middle Eastern society is very uniform and mainstream, right down to conspiracy theories, which aren’t espoused by a minority on the fringes as they are in other societies, but are views adopted by the mainstream majority.
The polar opposite of conventional conspiracy theories and a contradiction in terms.
A conspiracy theory by its very nature cannot be mainstream.
That must be the very definition of an Arab – someone from the Middle East who believes in conspiracy theories.
This, of course, doesn’t include Jews because they are often the alleged conspirators.
According to my own definition, I must be an Arab then – Anthony used to call me Capitan Conspiracy but dismissing as quacks people who know the truth is itself a conspiracy.
Hours after Mr. Kanaan’s death had been announced, the one conspiracy theory spread across the nation – he had been assassinated with three bullets (a la Abu Nidal’s “suicide” in Baghdad in 2002).
It’s the same with speculation about an upcoming event, e.g. Presidential Election (or lack thereof). Almost all of the population, from taxi drivers to ambassadors, postulates the same prediction and, taken individually, manage to sound so original and credible about it.
I’ve adopted a strategy of betting against the famous “Arab street” which is a one-way street where almost everyone has the same opinion, belief, philosophy, etc
That is, whatever the masses believe will happen, will not happen, because nobody can predict what the future will bring, especially in such noninclusive societies.
Also, the future is full of surprises and, by very definition, a surprise cannot be something that everybody knows is going to happen.
I often go as far as to bet on the opposite.
E.g. when everybody was predicting that President Lahoud would not get an extension of his mandate last year, on the strength of that and the fact that Lahoud was perfect at doing whatever it was the powers that be wanted him to be doing (that is doing nothing), I predicted that he would indeed get an extension which he did.
Lebanese love to talk and to be talked to.
There are hours and hours of political talk shows on television that go on forever.
Would that that meant a genuine interest in politics but it doesn’t – it’ more like base curiosity and more of an interest in the arcane Byzantine minutiae of the game of politics rather than a genuine interest in politics itself.
Also, a lot of Lebanese will watch whatever is put in front of them as long as they’re watching something.Which explains why ten-year- olds will quite happily watch a four-hour-long (no snappy sound bites here, just mega bites - what to do Lebanese television editors do all day? certainly not edit) interview with the Speaker of Parliament that their parents are watching.
5:00 pm
Thursday, October 06, 2005
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
There are some rabid Maronite Christians and I don’t approve of them but I can understand why they’re rabid – because they were bitten.
Thus, they are victims – sick victims but, nonetheless, victims.The original blame goes to whoever bit them.
7:45 pm
Monday, September 26, 2005
SCOOBY-DOOBY-DOO, WHERE ARE YOU?
"Unfortunately, we are facing some kind of a ghost..."
- Lebanese Interior Minister Hassan Sabaa on Sunday's attempted murder of LBC journalist May Chidiac - the thirteenth bombing in Lebanon since February.
To the Minister’s credit, at least he lives here.
Some of the country’s top political figures have practically set up a government in exile in Europe where they’re hiding out for security reasons – including the Defense Minister and parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri.
Still, I think it’s a good swap – the half dozen or so of them for General Aoun, who came back from exile in Paris last May.Nobody wants them to put themselves in harms way (besides, it’s not as if their presence here would make any difference) but one cant’ hold a position of responsibility in one country but live in another – especially if you’re the Defense Minister (what kind of defense is that – does he have one of those remote alarms?).
12:00 pm
Somebody recently told me this anecdote about a former Arab ambassador to the Soviet Union they knew (who has since passed away from alcohol-induced cirrhosis of the liver – he liked a drink as you'll probably gather).
After the 1956 Suez War, the ambassador asked for a meeting with the Soviet Defense Minister.
After several requests he finally secured a meeting with the Minister, whereby he thanked the Minister for the Soviet Union’s support for the Arabs during the war and assured him that the Arabs had no expansionist ambitions towards any Soviet territory.The Minster burst into un-Soviet-like laughter and the ambassador never had any trouble securing any future appointments with the Minister.
The same person also told me an anecdote about a young man who was kidnapped at a checkpoint during the civil war.
The person who told me the tale was asked by the young man’s family to intervene with his captors and secure his release.
So he telephoned a high-up in the militia that kidnapped the young man who told him that they don’t have any captive by that name but promised to look into it further.
He did and reported back that indeed they did not have any captive by that name but a willing hanger-on.
Not a case of the Stockholm Syndrome but a case of common cause – the young man was a homosexual and had obviously found that his guards shared the same ‘’interests’’ that he did.
7:15 am
Saturday, September 24, 2005
1:00 am
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
At a dinner party some ten years ago, the subject turned to most embarrassing moments with various attendees sharing theirs.
A friend asked me to disclose my most embarrassing moment and I told him that I couldn’t because it involved him.
Now, with the passing of time and the expiry of the Faux Pas Statute of Limitations (as it had only recently occurred), it can be revealed to this wider dinner party.
I’d known the friend in question for a couple of years then and had always assumed that he was the same religion that I was (Maronite Christian).
That I didn’t know what religion my friend was is a testimony to Lebanese multiculturalism, but, as I got to know Lebanon, I got more politicized and in Lebanon politics is all about religion.
So, while spending the weekend at my house, my friend felt that he had to confess something to me.
He was a bit hesitant but, after some coaxing, he finally began to reveal what it was he wanted to tell me – in stages.
“My mum’s a Muslim”
In Lebanon, if your mother is from one religion chances are that your father, not to mention you, are from that same religion too so I should have stopped right there but I didn’t of course.
“Is that all?” I replied, “What’s the big deal? We’ve both got the same problem – my mum’s a Muslim too!”
“My dad’s also a Muslim,” he continued.
“That’s okay, as long as you’re not one of those bloody Shiites” I “reassured” him.
I had though that this was a safe assumption because his mother is from the north and all the Muslim villages in the north are Sunnis except for ONE village that is Shiite, which just happens to be the village that his mother is from.
Of course, my mother (who was also there) knew that because he’d earlier told us the name of that village and tried to shut me up to no avail.
Of all the villages in all the north, his mother just happened to be from that one.
Anyway, all’s well that ends well and we’re still friends to this very day – once again, a testimony to Lebanese multiculturalism and also a testimony to my friend’s nobility and definitely not to my tactlessness.
PS: I have no problem with Shiites but I call a spade a spade whether it is in our tool shed or their tool shed or anyone else’s tool shed.
7:30 pm
Saturday, August 27, 2005
When my cousins were younger, they’d come over and want to start playing straight away.
I’d tell them that that was antisocial and that they had to sit for a while and make polite conversation before they played.
The two boys put up with this for years.
“What did you do today Omar?”
“We went to the supermarket”
“And what else?”
“We bought cheese”
“No, that’s the same story as the supermarket story, that’s included in the supermarket story - you have to tell me something different, separate”.
Until their little sister came along and put me in my place and liberated them.
“When people visit people they make conversation with each other”
“We’re not people, we’re children”.
Not surprising from a young lady who sternly replied ‘’I’m not a cat, I’m a woman’’ (in English) when she was all of nine years old when I told her ‘’bon appetit cat’’ (it rhymes in Arabic).
My official title for my young cousins is “The Monkeys”.
A term of endearment that I first bestowed on the elder child Fouad and then his successive siblings as they came along.
He was just a toddler when he was first “knighted” and would occasionally protest.
“He called me a monkey!”
When his younger brother Omar was born, I made sport of saying, “Omar’s brother’s a monkey” to circumvent calling him a monkey directly.
He finally cottoned on to this.
“Meaning me!”
“No, not you, Omar’s brother is a monkey”
“Meaning me!”
Ad infinitum.
He finally figured it out and said “Guy’s brother is a monkey”.
Meaning me!
Saul Bellow observed that all fiction is biographical.True - most fiction is derived from fact whereas most non-fiction is fiction in that it is the writer's perspective and opinion.
6:20 pm
Friday, August 19, 2005
JUST CHLLING
My friend's African maids took pictures of themselves standing next to the fridge to send back home.
7:45 pm
Monday, August 08, 2005
Seeing a friend off at Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport this morning, I was surprised to see cigarettes, albeit Marlboro Lights, being sold at the airport pharmacy (it calls itself a “parapharmacy”).
Most pharmacies here used to sell herbal cigarettes (which were probably no healthier than regular cigarettes).They smelt like marijuana – I was smoking them at a pub once when the proprietor kindly asked me to refrain and gave me a complimentary pack of Marlboro Lights.
I prefer the old airport to this Hariri-built Saudi style marble box.
It had a lot more charm and character.
My overwhelming memory of the old airport was that there always seemed to be some fat middle-aged veiled chador-clad Shiite woman passed-out on the pavement next to the outside departures gate, overwhelmed by the heat and the emotion of seeing a son or daughter off to a distant land, being administered to by her kinfolk.
That doesn’t seem to happen anymore at the new airport.
I don’t know – maybe this new airport’s too fancy for faintin’.
But another feature of the airport remains - it’s still the only real melting pot in Lebanon, where you’ll find people of all creeds, classes and ages all united, for once, by one thing, the desire to leave this country.
The good news for fans of fainting (if there are any fans of that genre) is that fat middle-aged veiled chador-clad women still faint with astonishing regularity in Egyptian soap operas.
To save you the bother of watching these annoying programs, here’s a brief synopsis of almost every one of them: a son or daughter wants to marry someone from another class, big drama, fat middle-aged veiled chador-clad mother faints, etc, etc, etc.
A far cry from the fainting spells in Victorian era novels.
‘’Oh dear, I’m feeling a little peculiar, I’m all of a perspiration – bring me my smelling salts, summon an apothecary’’ is a lot more refined then today’s screaming, shrieking shrills.
6:10 am
Thursday, July 21, 2005
A STITCH IN TIME
My cousin, Jihad Azour, is the new Finance Minister in the just announced Lebanese cabinet.
He’d recently ordered some suits from a Beirut tailor, who now wants to know if he wants the pockets made any deeper.Try saying that in any other Arab country.
3:00 am
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
DAYS OF THUNDER
“So foul a sky clears not without a storm”
- Shakespeare
Two days since the Lebanese parliament passed an amnesty law for jailed Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea and the celebrations have yet to subside.
The most obvious manifestation of this are the fireworks which I’ve been hearing day and night since Monday, although they have abated a bit since Monday’s ceaseless barrage.
The first such phenomenon I’ve seen in this country and the first instance of fireworks during the day that I know of anywhere.On my walks I see the remains of fireworks strewn across the road.
9:00 pm
Monday, July 18, 2005
SKYROCKETS IN FLIGHT.AFTERNOON DELIGHT
Fireworks are exploding, church bells are ringing and car horns are sounding as Free Lebanon* erupts in joyous celebration of an amnesty decree for jailed Lebanese Forces leader Doctor Samir Geagea** that has just been passed by the Lebanese parliament.
The Aounists may have won all the parliamentary seats in this area but the Lebanese Forces still rule at the grassroots level.
*The self-styled yet accurate civil war era name of the Christian heartland.
*Pronounced "jah jah" (as in Zsa Zsa Gabor) not "gay gay" as a friend on mine once heard it pronounced on the radio in the UK.
1:50 pm
Friday, July 15, 2005
Monkey season is well underway – as I write I can hear my cousins and their friends playing outside, enjoying their summer holidays.
Thud, thud, thud - man, Omar plays a lot of basketball.
He instigates just about every basketball game played in Harisa.
I’m afraid that the boy will wake up black one day.
There’s quite a community of baby boomers around here.
I don’t know whether there was baby boom after the civil war ended here in 1990 but it would appear that there was – there’s a gaggle of kids in the neighborhood and most of them are under fifteen.
Quite a community spirit around here too, as there is in most communities across the country – the whole community seems to raise kids in this society.
The manouchie man once threatened to slap Omar because he thought that he hadn’t responded as robustly as he should have when he was set upon by three older boys in the village.
He threatens his own son with the same fate too – if you’re afraid to fight back against bullies because you don’t want to be hit, you’ll merely meet the same fate back home.
Fortunately, it wasn’t a major incident – there isn’t that much violence or crime in Lebanon, particularly of the gratuitous kind you often get in Western societies.
For a people who spent fifteen years fighting each other, the Lebanese are quite a peaceful and pacific people.
When disputes do arise, they’re over and done with surprisingly quickly.
My friend Will observed that you’ll often see people cursing each other and squaring off for a fight (over traffic disputes for example), only to have passersby separate them and reconcile them – two people who were seemingly going to kill each other only moments ago kiss and shake hands.
Once at the pub, a British friend of mine observed that another British friend who was drunk and bumping into people left, right and center “would have been beaten up several times by now in a civilized society”.
The drunkard, now an accomplished Arabist so he must have been doing something right, was also asking complete strangers what religion they were.
No one seemed to take offence.
Imagine what would happen if you went around asking people at a pub in Belfast, or even in London, what religion they were.
We ended up bundling him off home in a taxi and carrying on without him – I don’t know what religion the taxi driver was but I’m sure that our friend does.
My friend Eli reckons that we should advertise this aspect of Lebanese tolerance – ‘’Come to Lebanon where you can act like a retard in total safety’’.
Said Arabist was once called a murderer by a famous Lebanese historian for suggesting at a conference that the Lebanese should have just kept fighting until a clear winner emerged.
He may indeed sound like a murderer if you view it in an ad hominen sense but, logically, it may be better than the chronic instability of the Lebanese ‘’no victor no vanquished’’ so-called solution.
Even Lebanese motor bikers are on the whole pacific.
At around midnight one recent night, my cousins and I were outside mucking around when two bikers tore past.
My younger cousin, all of twelve years old, cheekily screamed out some indistinguishable nonsense to them.
Lo and behold, they stopped, turned around and came back towards us.Not a good sign, but they merely wanted to know whether everything was okay – they’d thought that there was something wrong and he was screaming out for assistance.
The manouchie man also once refused to sell me ice cream and a drink when I was treating my cousins because they should have one thing only when someone is treating.
The boy monkeys have shaved their hair off out of the mistaken belief around these parts that shaving your hair off a couple of times when your young will prevent future baldness.
Don’t try this at home – baldness is the external manifestation of an internal process so external “remedies” like shaving your hair off are not going to have any effect on that internal process that is baldness.
One of my uncles did the same thing when he was a lad and he is now just as bald as the rest of his brothers.
At least it’s better than another baldness prevention folk remedy I heard of – having a cow lick your head.
How do you get a cow to lick your head anyway?
The hairdressing had a sense of humor – asking my cousins if they wanted hair gel after shaving their hair off.
The upshot of them shaving their hair off is that they must save a fortune on gel – the younger boy used to practically dip his head in the stuff and I perceive that know that he’s off it for a while, petrol prices will stabilize.
He also marinates himself in eau de cologne and deodorant.
The other day I let him try my deodorant on the condition that he spray it on in Guy’s room and not mine, as is my custom.
The monkeys have even fashioned their own rudimentary basketball court outside – complete with a graffitied message on the wall under the hoop asking people, in formal Arabic, not to park there.
I pity the fool who does.
One poor sucker once parked his car there, so the enterprising monkeys, unable to play basketball anymore, played on the car instead – climbed and stood on it.
4:30 pm
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
E.B: “Sometimes I get so frustrated that I just want to kill myself”
R.O: “That would be such a shame when there are so many people who’d like to kill you”.
11:00 pm
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
BIRTHDAYLAND
It’s always somebody’s birthday in Lebanon.
Let me clarify that, it’s always somebody’s birthday in any country but in Lebanon it seems that whenever you go out to a restaurant, pub, club etc, there’s someone celebrating a birthday – the requisite turning off of the lights, a waiter bringing in a cake with sparklers on it, birthday music playing and people singing happy birthday.In Lebanon, everybody and not just the members of the birthday party gets a piece of cake.
4:00 am
Thursday, July 07, 2005
“How am I supposed to recognize her?”
- a man in an elevator, leaving a social event where he had been asked by a veiled woman if he recognized her.
8:00 pm
Friday, July 01, 2005
A PLAGUE ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES
The Liberal/National Party Coalition, already a majority in the House of Representatives, takes control of the Australian Senate today.
12:00 am
Friday, June 24, 2005
My cousin told me about a friend of his who was paying for something at a village shop with a one hundred dollar bill.
The shopkeeper got a bit overzealous with his state-of-the art anti-counterfeit verification technique (pulling and snapping the note) and accidentally ripped it in half.He then told his hapless customer to take it to a bank and that they’d exchange it for him.
8:00 pm
Sunday, June 12, 2005
ORANGE CRUSH - THE EAST (EAST BEIRUT) IS ORANGE
- General Michel Aoun’s FPM wins a clean sweep in the Mount Lebanon Christian heartland in third round of Lebanese parliamentary elections
TSUNA MICHEL AOUN - banner across the highway in Jbeil celebrating Aoun’s victory (Aoun’s imminent return was pejoratively characterized as a tsunami by his arch foe Walid Jumblat a couple of months ago).
New definition of “sectarianism” in Lebanon: · Christians voting! (How dare they!)
· Christians voting for Christian candidates! (How dare they!)
· Christians voting for Christian candidates not preselected by Muslims nor voted in by majority Muslim electorates! (How dare they!)
· Those candidates actually winning! (How dare they!)
10:00 pm
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Just got back from my sleepwalk to Jounieh.
On arrival at the taxi rank, the hobo who thinks that I’m a priest greeted me (“welcome Father”) but the actual taxi driver was preoccupied – he was chasing some youths with a stick.
It appeared to be politically related because the taxi company supports one candidate and the young men were setting up Aoun paraphernalia.
I stood and watched for a little while, not wanting to intervene because it looked too insignificant to warrant intervention (an old man chasing some boys with a stick) but the hobo kept yelling to the driver “stop it – the priest is here!”
So I thought that if they think I’m a priest, I should fulfill my priestly duties.
Thus, to the protestations of the hobo who was saying “don’t bother with it Father”, I walked over and convinced the driver to renounce violence and drive me up here (he told me “they were disrespecting their elders so I decided to ‘fan’ them a bit”).
Just call me The Reverend Jesse Jackson.
The reason I didn’t correct the hobo is that I don’t like contradicting people – a la the taxi driver who still thinks that my name is William.So I’m all things to all taxi drivers and their hangers-on.
I walk to Jounieh nearly every day now – quite a departure for someone who used to consider showering a form of exercise (my only form of exercise).
I used to somewhat enjoy my walks until I became too "professional" about them - power walking has cut the time it takes in half (from approximately an hour to approximatley half an hour) but doubled my discomfort.
The good thing about walking down a mountain is that you can’t turn back – you have to keep going all the way to the bottom of the mountain because the alternative, walking back up the mountain, is suicide (the only flat terrain in Lebanon is in your appartment).
And the bad thing about walking down a mountain is that you can’t turn back.
It’s not your mountain until you’ve walked it – surveyed and reconnoitered it on foot.
I used to walk down a smaller mountain on the outskirts of Campbelltown to the closest shops (in Campbelltown proper) in the middle of the night when I’d run out of smokes – a forty-minute roundtrip that was counterproductive because I’d be too winded to actually smoke them when I got back (for a while anyway).
Not the safest thing to do in the world – put it this way, I feel a lot safer walking in Lebanon at 3.00am than I do in Sydney or Melbourne.
Quite ironic.
Seeing the ubiquitous police patrols didn’t make me feel very much safer either – what are they doing? Why are they here? Now I know that it’s unsafe, that just confirms it.
I don’t know anybody in Lebanon who has a house alarm – we don’t need alarms we have neighbours.
An informal yet very effective neighbourhood watch.
Put quite simply, everybody watches everybody else.
3:00 am
Sunday, June 05, 2005
ROLL OUT THE BARREL
- pork-barreling in some areas of Lebanon means merely cleaning the streets
Elections in this region might not be until next Sunday but hitherto unseen street cleaners have begun collecting the garbage… and collecting votes.
Just looking out the window here, I can see five of them on the one stretch of street picking up and sweeping.
1:30 pm
Friday, June 03, 2005
GYPSY KINGS
- hotchpotch Hariri caravan heads north
The interloping Hariri carpetbagger express is heading north, where their list is expected to pork-barrel its way to another clean sweep - all twenty-eight seats in mainly Sunni Muslim North Lebanon on Sunday 19th. It’s ironic that Beirut MP-elect Saad Hariri couldn’t even vote for himself in Beirut (let alone the north) because he is still registered in his ancestral Saida (in the south) – unlike his late father who had cynically switched his registration (very uncommon and almost impossible to do in this parochial country) to Beirut.
Despite being born some 13885.73 kilometers away (Melbourne Australia) and having never spent a whole day there in my entire life, I am registered in my ancestral village in the north by mere virtue of the fact that my family is from there.
If I were to die and be buried in the Lebanese region I actually live in (Keserwan), the church bell that would toll for me would literally ring a different toll as there are separate death knells for natives and for non-natives.Taking all that into consideration, I’d have to say that Sheik Saad’s electoral involvement anywhere other than Saida rings pretty hollow to me.
10:20 am
Monday, May 30, 2005
The most specious argument I’ve ever heard would have to be that one put forward by some Muslim apologists for the current sorry state of the Muslim world: Islam is only some fourteen hundred years old, whereas Christianity is two thousand years old and that when Christianity was the same “age” as Islam is now we were in the Dark Ages.
As if we’re living on two separate planets and have to evolve separately and that their evolution has to take the exact same amount as ours did.
It’s a good way of buying time – six hundred years.
True, we had our Dark Ages but when we were in the dark, there was no other role model for us, there was nothing better on offer anywhere, whereas we have since evolved and most of the world has benefited and borrowed from this.
We really thought that the earth was flat but can you honestly tell me that you really think that throwing a tablecloth over a woman is going to protect her and keep her virtuous?
Humanity is now interlinked and interconnected, every religion or civilization that comes along can’t just start all over again and take a specified amount of time to evolve (“just give us two thousand years and everything will be okay”).
Don’t just sit there and wait another six hundred years to evolve, just turn on satellite television or read a book or surf the Internet or talk to and interact with people from different cultures and religions.
All these tools of civilization are luxuries that we didn’t have six hundred years ago.
We had to go through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French and American Revolutions, the age of empire and colonialism, two World Wars etc, you don’t – you can fast-track your evolution and benefit from ours just as we once benefited from your golden age.Evolve “horizontally” by looking across at the rest of the world rather than “vertically” waiting for the passage of years until you reach a certain magic number.
We’re not two thousand years old and you’re not fourteen hundred years old, we’re both as old as humanity and should learn from the collective knowledge and experience of that humanity.
We’re all as old as time and as new as tomorrow.
Old in that we share the collective history of humanity and new in that we, as free men and women, are no longer bound and enslaved by it in this modern era as our forebears were.
History may not quite be bunk as Henry Ford said it was, but in the modern era, history is, for the first time, just that – history.
1:15 am
Sunday, May 29, 2005
SAAD HARIRI DECIDES 2005
- first round of Lebanese parliamentary elections
Voters in France are voting on whether to endorse the draft European Union constitution as voters in Beirut vote on whether to endorse the Hariri ticket (the only real contender – nine of their nineteen candidates have already won by default because there were no challengers) in the first round of Lebanese parliamentary elections.
Voters in the south will vote on whether to endorse a similar fait accompli, the Hezbollah/Amal ticket, next Sunday.With no serious competition expected until the rest of the country votes in the third and fourth rounds, why don’t they just ask Beirutis and southerners to vote “yes” or “no” (a la presidential plebiscites in the Arab world) – which is effectively what they’re being asked to do?
A barrage of fireworks at around 10.00pm interrupted the pub quiz as Hariri supporters celebrated news that they had won a clean sweep as expected.
Fair enough but they could have done this yesterday (or any other previous day for that matter) as those results were almost certainly assured.It’s just like celebrating something as inevitable and as guaranteed as the sunrise.
4:00 pm
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Saudi Arabia's consultative Shura Council has shelved a proposal by one of its members to lift the ban on women driving.
Women can’t drive in Saudi Arabia.
Women can’t drive anywhere.
9:19 am
Thursday, May 19, 2005
RAGE WITHOUT ALCOHOL*
Seventeen protestors were killed as thousand of Afghans rioted earlier this week over Newsweek magazine reports (since retracted**) that interrogators at America’s Gauntanamo Bay prison had desecrated the Koran.
When you’re not allowed to drink alcohol and thus can’t get drunk, fights aren’t just going to create themselves as they would if you were drunk (“is you looking at me pint!”) – you have to work on them, you have to nurture them and create them!(is you looking at me prophet!).
Imagine what they’d be like if they did drink!
I condemn any desecration of any religious text (or any text for that matter - educated people should hold all books "sacred") but how is being killed by your own security forces going to avenge something that happened 12974.0106 kilometers away (the distance between Jalalabad, the center of the riots, and Gauntanamo)?
*A program of alcohol-free rock concerts and other such entertainment organized by the police in Australia for young people ("rage" in colloquial Australian means "a lively party" - OED).
**Doesn't "Newsweak" have fact checkers?
Don't Afghan rioters have fact checkers?
WHO LET THE FROGS OUT?
French people should not be allowed to drink alcohol – they’re the only race I know of who don’t need alcohol to act like dickheads.
Alcohol just makes it worse.
Once at the pub there were only two groups left in the early hours of the morning: a bunch of French teachers from a technical institute at one table and the group of Brits that I was with at another table.
One of the inebriated Frenchmen decided to moon us – “hey English pipull (people), kiss my ass English pipull” he crooned in a singsong tone.
That the owner of the pub was also amongst our number did not deter him.
Not being "English pipull”, I couldn’t take up his kind offer.
Mark twain observed that “a German joke is no laughing matter’’.
I agree but would expand that to any Continental European joke.
I don’t get it.
4:56 am
Saturday, May 07, 2005
THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN
- “DeGaulle 1945, Aoun 2005”*
Historic scenes in Beirut today as General Michel Aoun and members of his former military government arrived back in Beirut after fourteen years of exile in Paris.
After touching down at 5.00pm, the General barnstormed through a quick reception and a short and clamorous press conference at the airport, a visit to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to lay and wreath, a visit to Prime Minister Hariri’s grave to also lay a wreath and, finally, addressing some twenty thousand supporters at Martyr’s Square all within just over an hour.
Here’s one old soldier who’s challenging the “old soldier’s never die; they just fade away” convention, but whether the General’s star will burn as brightly back on Earth as it did in exile (where he assumed near legendary status to many) remains to be seen now that he’s rejoined the fray of everyday Lebanese politics.
*Posters put up by Aoun supporters likening Aoun’s return from exile to that of De Gaulle’s.
I particularly liked the musical component of the celebration at Martyr’s Square – those cats were jumping!
The highlights were a thunderous drum rendition of the General’s “taratata General” and an all too brief Hendrixesque electric guitar riff of the Lebanese National Anthem that should have been a number in itself and not just the filler that it was (I’ve been waiting months for this and expecting it too ever since it became cool amongst young people to be Lebanese).
6:00 pm
I couldn’t get to sleep so I hit the streets in “protest” – my customary silent march against insomnia.
My sleepwalk terminated, as usual, at the Jounieh square.
It looked like a bomb had gone off.
By the dawn's early light, I saw it littered with broken glass and debris but I was going by the “lightning never strikes twice theory” – especially in a place crawling with soldiers and police.It seemed like the safest place in the country – now.
4:30 am
Friday, May 06, 2005
SO TONIGHT WE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT’S 1989
8.30pm
Coming home from Beirut early this evening, the highway was interspersed with scores of cars bedecked with flags and portraits of General Michel Aoun spilling over with jubilant screaming youths flashing victory signs and blaring anthems and beeping the trademark Aoun beep on their car horns (“taratata, General” – the only person I know of, other than the Road Runner, who has his own beep*) celebrating on the eve of Aoun’s return from fourteen years of exile in Paris.
This, along with all the recent pro-Geagea/LF activity (it’s the first time that I see flags of the disbanded LF openly being sold by the side of the road – right alongside Aounist* *and Lebanese flags) led the friend I was with to observe that it was all eerily reminiscent of 1989 when Aounist/LF polarization led to a ruinous intra-Christian war.
Lets just hope that all these, so far benign, manifestations of nostalgia are just that – manifestations of a nostalgia that has been kept alive over the years by the exile of one leader and the imprisonment of another and now revived in the run up to the return of one and the imminent release of the other.
*It's quite a popular tune - I've even heard kids ringing it on their bicycle bells.
**Actually, this is the first time I’ve ever seen an Aounist flag anywhere – this, coupled with the fact that Aounism is more about a person rather than an ideology or party (notionally called the Free Patriotic Movement) and that these flags are the revolutionary color a la mode (Ukrainian orange) would indicate that that they’re new flags of convenience (you’ve got to wave something).
Just as it’s said that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” is playing on some radio station somewhere at any given moment in time, it seems that General Aoun has been giving an interview to some media outlet or another or addressing some conference or other via telephone at any given moment in time over the past fourteen years.
Yet he was uncharacteristically uncommunicative when I settled down to listen to a pre-recordered interview with him on BBC World Service Radio last night.
The interview had barely begun when Aoun Quixote took offence at the host’s asking him how he would get along with old foes and hung up.
Never mind, I went into the living room and had a smoke while watching him being interviewed live from Paris on LBC television, went for a walk to Jounieh – walking past walls plastered with pictures of him stuck right alongside those of Samir Geagea (or vice versa) - and heard the rest of that interview, simulcast live on Radio Liban Libre, in the service on the way back up.
Just before I wrote this, I saw him being interviewed on the evening news.
WHY DOES EVERYBODY HAVE A BOMB?
9.25pm
A bomb has just gone off in Jounieh.
I was putting up the washing on the balcony, overlooking Jounieh, when I heard a loud bang and then saw the subsequent grey/black cloud.
It appears to have occurred near the Jounieh central square.
Sirens are blaring in the distance and a fire truck has just roared past us down the mountain so it’s obviously stretching all resources.
10.15pm
I don’t get it.
Is it just me or did not a bomb go off some fifty minutes ago?
I heard it; I saw it yet there’s nothing on any of the local television channels.
Doesn’t the LBC have a balcony?
They’re atop the next mountain down from us – also overlooking Jounieh.
Yet they’ve got some singing and dancing on, NBN’s got old news, Future’s airing a political interview program and New TV’s yammering away too.
Actually, LBC’s finally covering it with live pictures – at 10.16.
10.30pm
An LBC reporter, live at the scene, is confirming the target – the Voice of Love (Christian) radio station* and a neighboring church.
Both have been completely destroyed.
10.32pm
Future’s finally joined in – an anchorwoman in the studio is talking to a reporter at the scene via telephone.
10.34pm
Future has suspended their coverage and gone back to yammering, promising to bring us any further developments – I suppose that this just doesn’t interest them.
NBN and New TV are finally doing similar studio-to-telephone correspondent exchanges.
P.S: The twenty-five kilogram bomb injured twenty-two people
*Can’t say I listen to the station myself but the Hajji does – in her sleep.
Sometimes when I go to check on the Hajji and find her asleep I change the station on her radio from the Islamic station it’s on to the Voice of Love.
They both broadcast mainly religious music and the Hajji says that she’ll wake up on those occasions thinking that her coreligionists have become a lot more melodic until it slowly dawns on her that she’s listening to Christian chants.
The poor Hajji must have thought she’d died and gone to heaven.
Every bit helps and if people can learn German in their sleep then it stands to reason that they can learn another religion in their sleep too.
Isn’t German just drunk and/or angry English anyway?
Converting the Hajji to Christianity while she’s awake certainly hasn’t worked so maybe I can convert her while she’s asleep.
10:34 pm
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Dad went to a book launch today.
The book’s subject? – Surprise, surprise – Islam.
That seems to be the perennial subject amongst Muslim writers in this country.
And the perennial subject for Christian writers in this country seems to be emigration.
Are the two subjects interlinked perhaps?
How many books are there out there about Lebanese emigration?
They’re probably the easiest sort of books to write – just a compilation (list really) of names, locations, dates and historical documents.
I know of an instance where the author of a book on Lebanese emigration to Australia was soliciting money from prominent Australian/Lebanese families to mention them favourably in his book.
And Arab fiction writers seem to be fixated on the kitsch folkloric past – the equivalent on Australian writers still writing about bushrangers.The one caveat to my reviews is the minor matter of my not being able to read or write Arabic – having never read these books; at least I’m objective (to the extreme).I maintain that I don’t need to read and write Arabic, I understand Arabic (Arabs).Besides, half the Arab world doesn’t read or read Arabic (that is are illiterate) so why should I?This is more an oral language and culture.
Also, some Islamists tell me that Arabic is the lingua franca in heaven, so I’ll save myself the hassle of learning it now and just wait until then.
I maintain that the only thing wrong with Islam is Muslims, just as the only thing wrong with every other religion is also most of its adherents.
The Koran is intrinsically sound.
Sure there are some severe parts in it but there are also such bits in our Old Testament as well.
The difference is that we have evolved to the stage where we don’t follow our Old Testament, or our New Testament for that matter, to the letter but to the spirit.
All religions are intrinsically sound but, as always, it is the interpretation and practice that often deviates from their true essence and usurps, exploits and tarnishes them.
I must say that I have a bias towards the traditional Abrahamic religions though, the big three – (in chronological order) Judaism, Christianity and Islam.I’m a monotheist and I think that any more than one God is a crowd.
8:00 pm
Further to those stories about Beirut dames dragging their Sri Lankan maids along to the recent opposition demonstrations to flag wave and chant for them – the manouchie man tells me that a friend of his witnessed one such team in action at yesterday’s rally in downtown Beirut calling for the release of Samir Geagea.
And, sure enough, the maid was waving the flag, but her chant was slightly improvised – “madam want Samir out”.It must be the Sri Lankan/Lebanese equivalent of the Australian regulation that requires all political advertising to identify the name and address of the perpetrator - resulting in all such television and radio ads ending with a terse “written and authorized by…” voiceover.
11:00 am
Monday, May 02, 2005
Just got back from the pub quiz.
There was a lovely Asian gentleman on the team that I was on.
I say “Asian” because I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask him where exactly he was from.
I’m not a racist but there are so many people that are that I felt that asking him where he was from would a) attract attention to his “Asianess” (maybe he’d forgotten) and b) would be a very obvious question as it was quite clear that he was from Asia and not from Sweden for example.
Asian seems to be such a pejorative term these days that asking someone where in Asia they’re from seems akin to asking a disabled person “how exactly are you disabled?”
As political correctness is about ignoring differences, it seemed politically correct to not ask him where he was from just as you wouldn’t perhaps ask a black man where he was from.He was very intellectual and spoke impeccable French so I’m just sticking with my assumption that he was Vietnamese.
1:00 am
Sunday, May 01, 2005
EASTER REDUX
Orthodox Easter.I don’t know why they’re even bothering with it anymore at this late stage – it’s almost Christmas!
6:45 pm
FLORIDA REDUX
Togo is in political turmoil as both candidates from last week's Presidential election claim victory amidst allegations of electoral fraud and disenfranchisement of black voters.
1:30 am
Happy Labor/Conservative Day (they’re one and the same these days)
12:00 am
Saturday, April 30, 2005
The world's first debt museum, the Museum of Foreign Debt, has just opened in Buenos Aries Argentina to teach people the perils of borrowing abroad.
We have our own "debt museum" here in Lebanon - Downtown.
6:40 pm
EVERYBODY WAS KUNG FU FIGHTING
- 30th anniversary of fall of Saigon
You wait half an hour for a tank to come and then three hundred of them appear at once.
The commander of the North Vietnamese tank that famously crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon thirty years ago today, told BBC World Service Radio that he, being unfamiliar with the South like most of his comrades, used bus maps to navigate his way there (did he stop to pickup passengers along the way so as not to blow his cover?).
Yet there’s no mention of that anywhere in the communist’s triumphalist propaganda - “we stormed the citadel of the running dog capitalist imperialist puppets…just as soon as we found out where it was…using a map of the Number 9 bus route”
No wonder it took them twenty years – they didn’t even know where it was!
“Excuse me, would you be so kind as to direct as me to the running dog capitalist imperialist puppet citadel please?”
“Anyone seen a running dog capitalist imperialist puppet citadel around here?”
Speaking of buses, two young veiled women shot at a tourist bus in Cairo today, missed and then proceeded to shoot each other dead.
Young people these days!
Talk about overreacting!
When I was their age and I missed a target on the Atari, I’d merely restart.
There’s a jingle on Lebanese television for a brand of fruit juice that promises “no war, no struggle, no pain”.Just how this is to be achieved by purchasing that particular brand of orange juice (or any brand of orange juice for that matter) is not divulged.
2:00 pm
Friday, April 29, 2005
Orthodox Good Friday.We really must unify the Christian calendar – to lose one Messiah may be regarded as a misfortune but to lose two looks like carelessness (to paraphrase the Wilde one).
12:00 am
Thursday, April 28, 2005
THIS MUST BE JUST LIKE LIVING IN PARADISE
- view from my balcony at the Paradise Buildings
(photo:Antonio El Zeenny)
7:19 pm
- sign at Our Lady Of Lebanon, Harisa, Lebanon
(photo:Antonio El Zeenny)
5:12 pm
THEY MEASURE TIME DIFFERENTLY IN THIS ANCIENT LAND
- Our Lady Of Lebanon, Harisa, Lebanon
(photo:Antonio El Zeenny)
5:00 pm
Monday, April 25, 2005
PHOENECIAN BLIND
What kind of future is there for a people who can’t even agree on their history?
I’m not a historian nor an anthropologist, but what I’m about to discourse on does not require such advanced knowledge; on the contrary, these are facts that every schoolchild in this country knows but facts that the adults in this country can’t agree on.
What are those facts?
First, lets define the parameters, the two bookends of the Lebanese continuum.
Present: this is the Republic of Lebanon, an independent founding member of the United Nations.
Past: the earliest know inhabitants of this land were the Phoenicians.
Thus, we are Lebanese descendants of the Phoenicians.
Just like people in France are French descendants of the Gauls.
In the interim, this land has been a palimpsest of invaders – from the Greeks to the Romans to the Arabs etc but that does not make us Arabs, just as it doesn’t make us Greeks or Romans.
Just like the French are neither English nor German or any of the other invaders they’ve encountered.
Sounds straightforward enough so far – except for a small matter of cultural and historic genocide committed and still being committed by certain “Lebanese” who for religious and political reasons claim that we are Arab citizens of Arab descent and that our history and even our very existence began when the Arabs invaded (shades of the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero).
They would have us believe that prior to the Arab invasion there was only bacteria here, the primordial soup.
The same arrogant assumption of “terra nullius” that the first white settlers to Australia operated under but have since renounced in these more civilized times.
We didn’t just go from bacteria to bin Arab in one fell swoop – evolution just doesn’t work that way.
It suits them to delude themselves in this way and if it were just an academic matter, I would have no issue with them believing this (or in the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny or any other fantasy they want to believe in for that matter), but its implications are not just academic.
Its implications have been the past ruin of our country and could possibly be the ruin of our future.
The tragedy is that just when the older vanguard of “secular” Arab nationalism are disabusing themselves of this Arab fantasy that has blighted the Arab world’s recent history, young people (who in this part of the world are these days often more backward and retrograde then their parents – a perverted inversion of human nature*) have picked it up for purely religious reasons – stripping it of the flimsy secular veneer their parents disguised it with.
An Italian can proudly claim descent from the Romans, an indigenous Mexican can proudly claim descent from the Aztecs, etc but woe betide the poor Lebanese who dares claim descent from the Phoenicians.
He will first be mocked and then, if that doesn’t work, he will be outright abused and attacked.
The very thing that has happened to me on countless occasions – most recently in an instant message exchange with someone who ought to know better whose last words to me before I deleted her were “you’re a ****ing racist”.
This person is meant to be an educated young Lebanese and is a cofounder of a Lebanese blogger forum.
If educated writers are to behave like this then what hope is there for the rest of the citizenry?
Just as one has to crawl before one can walk, I recommend that she do a little bit more reading before she starts writing.
If she were to do that reading, she would learn that, anthropologically speaking, there is no such thing as an Arab race and that we Lebanese are actually a part of the Caucasian race (as are most “Arabs”).
There is also no nation or continent called Arabia.
She would also learn that the term “Arab” is a modern construct even amongst so-called “Arabs” and that historically an Arab was (logically enough) a person from Arabia or a Bedouin.
Arab as an all-encompassing identity was created as flag of convenience during the anti-colonial struggle of the early Twentieth Century – chiefly to differentiate us from the Ottoman Turk occupiers.
Anyway, Arabism was mainly the brainchild of Orthodox Christians who wanted to establish a secular common cause with their compatriots that wasn’t based on religion and independent of the majority religion, Islam, which treated them and other minorities as second class citizens (Jews were the main proponents of Communism in Europe for similar reasons).
In the West, the term Arab is used as a practical shorthand term to identify the people of this region.
Some of the cultural and historic genocidists are willing to concede that we are Phoenicians but only as a prelude to an ambush – they will then claim that the Phoenicians existed but came from Yemen.
I.e. that we’re Arabs after all.
Of course – the seafaring Phoenicians “sailed” across the desert - it was an ancient version of Australia’s Henley-on-Todd regatta (a novelty “boat” race run by carrying the hulls of boats across a dry desert river bed).
The Out of Yemen “theory” has no factual basis but that doesn’t seem to discourage people who are desperately clutching at straws to “prove” that we’re anything (any Arabs will do!) other than Lebanese.
I once asked a proponent of the Out of Yemen “theory” to actually prove that and his reply was “can you prove that we didn’t come from Yemen?
Prove a negative.
The onus isn’t on us to prove that we didn’t come from Yemen but, as they’re the one’s who have introduced this “theory”, on them to prove that we did.
Yemen – yeah right!
Although to them it’s all about religion, to us it’s not – we Maronites are no more Phoenician than our Muslim brothers but we have become more Phoenician in spirit because we at least recognize it.
There’s no need for all this Maronites are From Phoenicia, Muslims Are From Arabia polarization – we’re Lebanese pure and simple!
There’s an Arabic** quote that sums it all up – he that renounces his heritage has none.
So, seeing that this is so contentious and controversial and that Arabism has played such a big part in our ruin and is so fraught with connotations, why can’t we just agree on the A and Z of our existence – A=Phoenician and Z= the Republic of Lebanon and not worry about all the letters in-between?
Not calling ourselves Arabs is not hostility to the “Arabs”, nor “****ing racism” nor does it preclude our having the best relations with our neighbors and our region (just like not calling ourselves Finns, for example, does not mean hostility to Finns, nor “****ing racism” towards Finns, nor does it preclude our having the best relations with Finland).
Regardless of what we call ourselves, we are peaceful country who has the best intentions towards all our neighbors but our relationship with them should be the diplomatic equivalent of “I like you a lot but let’s just be friends”.
With such a stupidly divided population and such dangerous neighbors, Lebanon, of all countries, should be strictly neutral and nonaligned – anything else has been and will be our ruin.
Here’s to such a future and to a future where a sizeable part of our population doesn’t consider Phoenician a ph-word.
In reply to those who say that the Phoenicians weren’t just in what is now modern-day Lebanon (Syria, Palestine, etc), okay, they were Phoenician too – it’s just that we were the capital of Phoenicia and have chosen to recognize and honor our heritage.
Does London stop being in the United Kingdom because Birmingham and Liverpool are also in the United Kingdom?
What kind of logic is that?
We’re not claiming Phoenician exclusivity; we’re just claiming Phoenician.
My reply to the genocidist’s rhetorical question of (the Phoenicians were here but) “where did they go?” is quite simple – they didn’t go anywhere.
Just because we don’t go around wearing pointy hats and inventing alphabets (been there done that), it doesn’t mean that we are not modern-day Phoenicians just as the fact that French people don’t go around wearing hats with horns and fighting Romans doesn’t mean that they are not modern-day Gauls.
Another tactic of the genocidists is the non sequitur: “anyway, you Maronites are originally Syrian”.
To say that Lebanese Maronites are Syrian because Saint Maroun originally came from Syria is like saying that a South Korean Protestant is German because Martin Luther came from Germany.Anyway, just because we’re followers of Saint Maroun, who fled with his followers to Lebanon from persecution in Syria, it doesn’t mean that we are literally his descendants – monks are celibate Einstein!
Lebanon and Arabism are mutually exclusive – it’s one or the other.
Is it any wonder that a reporter on BBC World Service Radio once referred to our population as “Christian Lebanese and Muslim Arabs” in a report on Lebanon?
If a sizeable part of our population insists on calling themselves Arabs, it will stick but it will stick to them, not us.
This is the only country that I know of where a majority of the population doesn’t even know where they are, let alone who they are.
I’ll help them – you are here, this is the Republic of Lebanon and you are Lebanese.Capisce?
And why shouldn’t we recognize and be proud of our heritage?
People whose heritage consists solely of dancing around banging pots and pans are proud of their heritage yet we invented the alphabet (and thus by extension alphabet soup) and are being pressured into to renouncing ours.
Nothing gets a Lebanese Muslim angrier than the word Phoenician.Use it at your own risk
*A Christian lady I know marvels at this and observes that she can’t even get her kids to go to church.
Unlike Christianity’s gerontocracy, Islam today is a youth driven religion as are all militant religions and ideologies by sheer necessity.
In fact it would appear that young militants have hijacked this venerable religion and that there is even a schism between these Young Turks (so to speak) and the older more philosophical generation of Muslims.
I’ve heard many of these young born again Muslims say that their parents didn’t know and didn’t practice the real Islam.
Funny that – the real Islam compels you to respect your parents and elders and I can’t see how dismissing them as heathens is respectful.
I say born again because most of them appear to have been born into one religion (the old more tolerant form of Islam) and have adopted this ‘’modern’’ more radical form of Islam often as a last alternative after spending all those intervening years in decadence.
Stop sinning only when you can sin no more.
The greater the saint the greater the sinner.
Quite handy – sow your wild oats and then grow a beard and sow sedition and hypocritically turn around and condemn your erstwhile cohorts in so-called sin as decadent and lecture them against everything that were not too long ago revelling in with such relish.
Find religion and lose tolerance.
**Yes we speak Arabic but that doesn’t make us Arabs just like Indians whose official language is English are not Englishmen.
7:30 pm
Thursday, April 21, 2005
A friend of mine in Sydney used to frequent a center run by a “Persian” (sic) sheik where, from what I gathered, they would spend an inordinate amount of time on what they euphemistically called “comparative religion” – “studying”(denigrating really) other religions (mainly Christianity) thereby aggrandizing their own religion.
When I used to stop him from carrying-on in this manner around me, he’d say that I should be “objective”.
I’d tell him that I had no problem with true objectivity, but not his version of it – being “objective” at our expense.
It’s easy to be “objective” at the expense of others and with the beliefs of others but true objectivity, like charity, begins at home.
He reminds me of an old Soviet-era joke, where an American and a Soviet are both arguing that their respective systems are free, democratic etc.
The American says “I can walk into the President of the United States’ office and tell him that he’s a so and so”.
The Soviet replies, “I can do the exact same thing – I can walk into the Soviet Premier’s office and tell him that the President of the United States is a so and so and he’ll agree with me”.
So to, my friend can go to his center and join the sheik in denigrating Christianity.
Here’s just one example of his “objectivity” – unlike Islam, Christianity isn’t practical because it doesn’t allow pleasure marriages (of which he was a fan of).
My poor friend was in the ironic position of not having any trouble finding Australian women to liaison with but having extreme difficulty convincing them to contract a weird pleasure marriage.Another logic defying (not to mention chronology defying) example is that the Koran mentions Christianity but the Bible doesn’t mention Islam.
5:38 pm
Saturday, April 16, 2005
THE DOGS OF WAR
- who let the dogs out?
"Dangerous spy-dogs apprehended crossing Lebanon-Israel border
SIDON: Lebanese authorities have captured two dogs that crossed the border from Israel, checking whether they were booby-trapped or carried electronic implants that could be used for spying, Lebanese security officials said Friday.
The two dogs, Shylo-type, "infiltrated" Lebanon on Thursday through an opening in the barbed wire fence that separates the Kfar Kila village in Southern Lebanon from the northern Israeli town of Metulla.
Immediate measures were taken by local security forces who chased the dogs fearing the dogs might contain bombs.
The dogs wore plastic collars with Hebrew writing on them, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
They were being kept at a local police station while authorities decide what to do with them.
Locals called for the dogs to be put down as a revenge against the Israeli violations of Lebanon's territory..."
- today's Daily Star (Lebanon)
You couldn't make it up if you tried.
POSTSCRIPT
SEEING RED
‘’In separate UNIFIL-related news a bull which had infiltrated Lebanese territory from Israel has attacked Spanish peacekeepers and headbutted their vehicles before being shot dead, An-Nahar daily reported on Wednesday.
The newspaper said the UNIFIL troops were erecting an electric barbed-wire fence to prevent Israeli cows from entering Lebanese territory at the Baathaeel pond when Israeli soldiers unleashed the wild bull on the peacekeepers. A Spanish soldier shot the bull dead after it ran toward the UN troops and began headbutting their vehicles, the newspaper said.
The peacekeepers then buried the bull and continued their work to erect the wire, which according to An Nahar has stopped the infiltration of Israeli cows to the pond area.’'
-Daily Star, Thursday 21st August 2008
12:43 am
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
ABSOLUT MONARCHY
Europe’s last absolute monarch, Prince Rainier III of Monaco, passes away – six days after Time Magazine (Pacific Edition) ran an untimely obituary of the then ailing eighty-one year old ruler.
CNN also did their share of gun jumping, prematurely reporting Pope John Paul II's death on Friday evening, later retracted - the report that is, not the death that eventually occurred on Saturday evening leaving the world much the poorer.
The graphic switched from “Health of the Pope” to “Death of the Pope” and back again within half an hour after erroneous Italian news reports.
Would-be Papal assasin Mehmet Ali Agca, serving time in a Turkish prison (not, as it would appear, working at CNN) has had his request to attend the Pope's funeral on Friday turned down.
That so many people around the world had actual encounters with Pope Jean Paul II is testimony to the outreach and effort of this remarkable man – e.g. I was lucky enough to of had two encounters on two continents and they both occurred practically outside my front door and almost by accident.
The Pope’s visit to Lebanon in 1997 was centered on Harisa – he stayed at the Apostolic Nunciature some two kilometers up the road from where I live and celebrated a mass at the abutting Our Lady of Lebanon Maronite cathedral.
I walked up to attend the mass – the mountain and other areas visited were closed to traffic during most of the visit.
In the run up to the visit, standing on my balcony was like viewing a Soviet-era May Day parade from a reviewing stand as countless tanks and other military vehicles rumbled up the mountain – the country’s entire army and police force were deployed and nowhere more so than up here.
En route to and from Harisa, his motorcade passed our buildings four times and we all stood outside to greet him and receive his blessing, alongside a huge billboard sized Vatican flag and a smaller Polish one made up entirely of flowers that we had commissioned – the centerpiece of days long preparations which also included draping the buildings in giant Lebanese and Vatican flags and putting up banners and posters welcoming the Pope (something that was replicated across the country).
During these preparations there was a festive atmosphere around the building as neighbors gathered around socializing, smoking water pipes and telling the professionals what to do (a florist embroidered the flags with fresh flowers and soldiers commandeered by an army General who lives in the buildings put up the bunting, banners and posters).
On a visit to Australia in 1986, His Holiness visited my old primary school, Saint Leo the Great, in Altona North in suburban Melbourne.
My friend Noel and I, who were fifteen at the time, walked the couple of blocks to the school and waited outside the perimeter with thousands of other people (being ex-students we weren’t in the inner sanctum).
We didn’t get much of a glimpse of him amongst the masses, so, a while after he’d entered the school; we gave up and decided to walk over to the shops a couple of blocks away in the other direction.
About to cross an empty street to get to the shops (everyone else was at the school and the whole area had been shutoff to traffic at dawn), who should happen to cross our paths but Pope Jean Paul II, in the Popemobile (no entourage) en route back from the school to a nearby football field where he was to catch a helicopter back into the city.
The very definition of serendipity.
We waved and cheered and received in return a wave and a blessing all to ourselves.Beavis and Butthead on their way to the shops to get some nachos (having decided that standing around school sucks) had just had a chance serendipitous encounter with the Pope.
4:09 pm
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Before going to sleep, I diverted a great big annoying fly into Guy’s room using a complex maneuver of shutting all the other doors and marshaling it into there.
I intended to just keep it there in a holding pattern overnight so that I could evict it when I was up to it, but I couldn’t find it when I looked for it this morning.
Maybe the deodorant (see archives 1/15/2005) fumes killed it – although I air the room out for an hour post-spraying, apparently they’re still pretty strong according to our freelance Sri Lankan cleaner who pointed it out the other day (lets just hope that her acute sense of smell is a domestic’s deformation professionelle and that it’s not detectable by average senses).
12:45 am
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE OFF THE COAST OF INDONESIA
tsunami warning issued – “RUN!”
Someone once told me about a nighttime fire in an apartment building in a working-class suburb of Sydney.
She’d tried to rouse the sleeping neighbors and evacuate the building to no avail - “THERE’S A FIRE, GET OUT OF THE BUILDING!”
Until her sister intervened with a more drastic approach, addressing the populace in language they understood – “THERE’S A F***ING FIRE, GET THE F*** OUT OF THE F***ING BUILDING!" (my emphasis).It worked and the building was promptly evacuated.
5:00 am
Monday, March 21, 2005
Pulling another correction (staying up all night and all day to hopefully cure my insomnia) – the third in nine days.
I think it’s starting to lose its efficacy, like sleeping tablets (its polar opposite) eventually do and that I’m getting immune to its benefits.
Time was when such a correction would set me right for at least two weeks to a month.
So, it’s become more of a respite and holiday from insomnia more than a cure.
That’s fine by me – one night of insomnia is worse than a hundred nights of wakefulness.
Anyway, it gives me more time to read, write and listen to BBC World Service radio to see what disease they’re advertising this month.
Although they drove me up the well with their pointless “AIDS Season” (as they called it) of programming last year, it was very successful – successfully telling Anglophone elites around the world what they already knew and successful in having them shake their heads at how terrible such a disease was, feel very concerned and contact the BBC urging that something should be done! (And then proceed to do nothing about it themselves).
Speaking of useless so-called activism, I’m relieved to hear that U2 lead singer Bono isn’t going to be the next President of the World Bank (as some in the media have speculated).
He’s certainly no banker (rhymes with?) and I think that he should stop “banking” and stick to his genius (his music).
Notice the airliner that takes off over their heads in the “Beautiful Day” video clip?
It’s none other than a Middle East Airlines plane – with the distinctive cedar tree that adorns our flag.
We didn’t use the red, green and black flag template that most of the rest of the region used.
How they tell their flags apart at Arab League Summits is a mystery to me.
Although at one stage, during the French Mandate, we used the tricolor template - our flag was the French tricolor with a cedar stuck in the middle (just like the flags of Australia, New Zealand etc incorporate the British Union Jack).
It looked quite nice and I don’t think that there was anything terribly wrong with it but we eventually opted for the Austrian template – our current flag was inspired by the Austrian flag (with a cedar stuck in the middle).
We stuck a cedar in the middle of it and then proceeded to chop down all the cedar trees, knowing that we’d saved them for posterity on the flag (a la “They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum”).
Heck, the way we’re going with our quasi-military government, we might as well take the cedar tree off and put a banana tree up there and embrace what is fast becoming a banana republic.
The army should be the guardians of the republic and not the republic.
10:00 pm
Sunday, March 20, 2005
I saw a report on the Future television news a couple of days ago about a boy who got kicked out of a Omar Karami-affiliated orphanage school in Tripoli because his father had attended Monday’s opposition rally.
His mother was interviewed for the report.
I don’t get it – his mother looked well and truly alive to me and his father is apparently in the best of health and quite active (demonstrating isn’t as easy as it looks).
I’ve since been told that orphanages in Lebanon aren’t just for orphans but for underprivileged children too.
I should hope so, or else there’s a Dickensian fraudulent orphan impersonator out there!I told someone at the pub about this and he said “he (the orphan) is very lucky (to be an orphan and have both parents)” and that “they (the people who spotted the father at the rally amongst a million people) must have a very good camera”.
1:45 am
Monday, March 14, 2005
THE QUIET STORM ACROSS THE NATION
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy
-HL Mencken
Hundreds of thousands of people are gathering in central Beirut for an opposition rally one month to the day since Prime Minister Hariri was assassinated.
Although it has been erroneously called a counter-demonstration to last week's loyalist rally (CNN), it is in fact a counter counter-demonstration as last week’s rally (which it has dwarfed) was itself the irrelevant counter-demonstration to daily opposition rallies (a quite revolution) that have been occurring since February 14th.
As to the view from Harisa today, Arlo Guthrie’s famous “The New York Thruway is closed man!” exclamation at Woodstock 36 years ago comes to mind – the Beirut bound lane of the Beirut to Damascus Highway is packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic as far as the eye can see (and has been since around 10.am this morning). With the rally proper set to begin in fifteen minutes, they might not all make it, but they don’t need to – today the whole country is the protest venue.
The army and other security forces have been unofficially sympathetic to the protestors.
Before the dam burst today, the authorities had tried to stop the smaller protests that were occurring but a lot of those meant to be enforcing these diktats merely made a pretence of complying but were really with their fellow citizens.
I heard firsthand stories of soldiers pointing out weak links in the cordon they had setup around the capital to demonstrators, telling protestors to pretend to rush them so it would appear as if they were powerless to stop them and a young lady kissing a soldier and then running past him with scores of her comrades as the gobsmacked soldier just looked on.
That was all before today.Not even China’s People’s Liberation Army could have stopped them today.
2:45 pm
Saturday, March 12, 2005
MIND YOUR LANGUAGE
A Lebanese-Australian I know went to the opposition protests in Beirut.
His Arabic not being perfect, he accidentally fluffed one of the chants and ended up chanting something that meant the exact opposite (pro-Syrian).
Fearing a saboteur, members of the crowd grabbed him and asked him who he was, who sent him and for what purpose.
He explained – telling them that it was a language mistake and that he was with them.
They told him that seeing he was with them, he should stay with them for a while longer and detained him briefly until they could establish that he was fair dinkum.
Another Lebanese-Australian I know, visiting Lebanon a couple of years ago, went to a patisserie and selected a cake.
The shop assistant asked her to then proceed to the register – “el sandook”.
Sandook in Arabic means box, so, unfamiliar with the colloquial use of the word, she thought that he was asking her if she wanted the cake put in a box and told him that it was such a small cake and that it didn’t need a box.
Whereupon he repeated the same request, she repeated her protestations, he repeated the request (not altering it in anyway to make it more understood) ad infinitum.And they probably would still have been there toing and froing now had not another Lebanese expat who was in the shop at the time stepped in and sorted it out.
While we’re at it, the Arabic word for chicken sounds a lot like the word for soldier to the unfamiliar ear, so an American friend of mine once inadvertently called some Lebanese army soldiers at a checkpoint chickens.
Another Lebanese expat I know once asked a shopkeeper if the shoes she was buying came with insurance rather than insoles (the two sound somewhat similar in Arabic) and insisted that they do until the misunderstanding was finally cleared up.
My friend’s mother, who immigrated to Australia from Italy, told me that in her early days in Australia, before she’d learnt English, she was perplexed by all the signs in shops advertising salt (sale meaning salt in Italian).
Another lady I know, also an immigrant to Australia, asked for a ‘’crap’’ at a restaurant rather than a crêpe.
My aunty knew a Chinese immigrant to Australia who when invited to a social gathering and asked to ‘’bring a plate’’ (of something) thought she’d do even better and brought along a whole set of new plates that she’d bought especially for the occasion.
A kid at my high school told his English-illiterate immigrant parents that a detention form that they had to sign was in fact a note attesting that he was ‘’a good boy’’.
FAST TIMES
My two young cousins have given up something for Lent.
Their older brother hasn’t, although his sister has suggested he give up dobbing for Lent (something she thinks he does way too much of).
The middle one even told me a fasting joke that is so silly that it’s funny – this boy gave up Pepsi for Lent, so he’s drinking Coke.
A friend of mine is doing the traditional midnight to midday fast.If you think that’s tough, spare a though for the Orthodox who fast an extra ten days on top of the standard forty days (I don’t know why – maybe it’s some sort of bonus).
12:30 am
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
PEOPLE POWER VS. SHEEP POWER
- rival opposition and loyalist rallies underway in Beirut
- there are more sheep than humans in New Zealand but that doesn't make them a viable majority
The feeling here since February 14th has been one of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Like being awoken in the middle of the night by an upstairs neighbor taking off and dropping one shoe and waiting restlessly for the other one to drop because you know it has to.
My feeling is that either everything will happen here or nothing will, as is the precedent in Lebanon.
There is very rarely a middle ground – things either remain in stasis or spin out of control.
Just like you can’t gradually release a jack-in-the-box – when it’s in it’s in; when it’s out it’s out.Anyone who would want to set such a trap here should bear in mind that although they might set the trap, they may not be immune from it going off in their face in the process or forgetting what it was and opening it up later and being surprised by it (a la the Americans and their Afghan Mujahaden jack-in-the-box).
I’m a pessimist and history is on my side, would that it weren’t.
3:00 pm
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Somebody at the quiz this evening asked me if they were flying Lebanese flags in this area.I replied that they weren’t flying them en masse because they didn’t need to – this is the heartland and they wear their hearts and their flags on their sleeves here with barely an actual flag in sight.
8:00 pm
Thursday, March 03, 2005
RADICAL MUSLIM CLERIC ABU BAKIR BASHIR SENTENCED TO TICKLING FOR ROLE IN BALI BOMBINGS
- Indonesia denies sentence is too lenient
1:00 pm
Monday, February 28, 2005
CLOCKWORK LEMON
As if by cruel yet ingenious design, a majority of Lebanese people are right where the Establishment want them to be – at the exact level of subsistence.
“They” couldn’t have calibrated it any better if they had of set out to do so (which they have indirectly done).
The people aren’t starving thus are somewhat productive* and aren’t at that rock bottom level where desperate people who have nothing to lose rebel yet they cant’ afford to rock the boat and lose the little they do have.
Lebanon ought be making timepieces – the famed Swiss horologic precision is nothing compared to this marvelous mechanism.
*Not exemplars of productivity but “productive” enough to sit in shops all day and glare at customers (who put up with it because they don’t know any better - the crux of the problem in Lebanon regarding high prices and bad customer service etc), to drive buses and beep and swear at other motorists etc – which is all that “They” require from them (the majority of jobs don’t require loads of enthusiasm, just attendance and a willingness to bear the drudgery).
Funerals are seldom-happy occasions but one swallow doesn’t make a summer, let alone a “Beirut Spring”.
Had Rafic Hariri, God rest his soul, died of a heart attack, the numbers at his funeral probably wouldn’t have been any less – only the tone would have been different.
Let’s not forget that an estimated five million Egyptians attended Gamel Abdul Nasser’s funeral when he died of a heart attack in 1970.
As I watched the funeral on television and heard talk of this being the start of some sort of people power revolution, I had my doubts – whether it actually is or isn’t will not be apparent now but later.
I thought to myself that the worst thing these two hundred and fifty thousand* odd people could do is go home.
And go home they did and the “revolution” went home with them
The protests since then have been likened to the Ukrainian revolution and whilst the symbols have imitated the events in Kiev and the events in the rest of the former Soviet Bloc (wearing a particular scarf a la the Ukraine, toppling a statue of Hafez el Assad in Cana etc), the numbers quite simply do not bear this out.
You can’t have a people power revolution without the people.
Whilst Mr. Hariri was very popular and greatly mourned and the Lebanese are fed up with the whole situation, the majority of people (twenty five thousand today and ten thousand last Monday) at the two protests that have been the people who usually attend protests – political activists, partisans and students etc.
The majority of people at last Monday’s protest, judging by their party banners and pictures etc, were Christians and Druze – the old established opposition.
I noticed this as I watched the protests on television and the Western press has since confirmed this but the Lebanese press has chosen not to.
Since then, the leaders of the opposition have called on the protestors to not carry party flags and partisan pictures but to carry only the Lebanese flag.
This is admirable but only the most naïve person would not be able to see the practical reasons for this (alongside the patriotic one).
The Muslims buried Hariri, the Christians and the Druze avenged him.
That is not say that Lebanese of all creeds are not now united, which they are, but that the Establishment (be they opposition or loyalist) have more or less always been united** (or at least the divisions amongst them were not so much sectarian but more to do with dividing the spoils) and that this unity appears to be slow in trickling down to the roots of the cedar tree.
Although all Lebanese are united in grief, Rafic Hariri has only become a national leader since his death.
This is quite simply because there are no national leaders in Lebanon but leaders of the various sects.
It is ironic that whilst Mr. Hariri was a regional and even international figure, he only became a national one in death.
I heard a young Lebanese woman telling BBC World Service Radio “for once the opposition are taking to the streets – the revolution will not be televised”.
This “revolution” is nothing but televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Gucci – this is being called the “Gucci Revolution” as most of the protestors are from the middle and upper classes.
I am not a counterrevolutionary but for the time being, until further notice, there is no revolution - quite simply because there are no people power revolutions in Lebanon or the Arab world.That’s not to say that I don’t applaud these professional revolutionaries but I just don’t think that it has really caught on yet and I don’t know if it ever will.
Lebanon, like any country, needs and deserves to be free and sovereign but that should be only the beginning of the revolution.
Lebanon needs a complete revolution – political, social, economic, you name it.
Above all, all Lebanese need their own personal private revolution – the revolution has to come from within each and every one of us.
And for that you don’t need to stand outside the house of parliament and protest against its inhabitants, you need to stand inside your own house and protest against its inhabitants.
You need to get your own house in order before you start gunning for the big house.
If you must protest to parliament, here’s a time saving hint for you – you don’t have to go all the way to parliament, just stand in front of a mirror because your elected representatives merely reflect you and your society (warts and all).
This is great people and a great country but for it to be truly great, the revolution must indeed not be televised (as this one is) but internalized.
Whilst I don’t believe for a moment believe the treasonous propaganda that some elements have been spouting that unless we’re occupied we’ll all kill each other, I don’t think that the country is going to be much different nor any better post-liberation unless we make it so.
Until then, we should all begin with liberating ourselves from within so that we can be ready for the liberation.
Whilst what’s occurring now is a good start, there’s a danger that all the marching, waving of flags and mouthing of slogans etc (which the Lebanese are very good at) becomes an end in itself and a substitute for actual real substantial reform in the country and becomes the main event.
As to what is going to happen next, if indeed anything does “happen next”, I don’t know.If you want to know what happens next, don’t ask me, or anyone else for that matter, because it’s all speculation and it’s mainly all wrong – just wait for it to happen.
*The Arab media says that there were at least a million there but my general rule of thumb is to divide any “Arabic numeral” by four.
My formula has proven pretty accurate – an opposition MP said in parliament that a hundred thousand protestors had gathered today, whereas the Daily Star put the number at around twenty five thousand.
**Years ago, a cousin of mine visiting Lebanon for the first time remarked that he was amazed that there were politicians from all across the sectarian spectrum at a social function we were attending.
I told him that they were all in it together.
Utility unifies.
The people at the top of the cedar are, like people at the top anywhere, more or less united - divided only when they disagree on how to divide the spoils.
Although Lebanese are essentially ethnically homogenous, Lebanon is one of the most multicultural countries on earth.
On top of its cosmopolitan aspect (you can buy national newspapers in three languages at a village newsstand), you have compartmentalized confessional communities living in semi-autonomy (one’s religion is one’s nationality here).
The Maronite lives as a Maronite, the Druze lives as a Druze, the Sunni lives as a Sunni, the Shiite lives as a Shiite etc - all with their own separate personal status laws (regarding marriage, divorce, inheritance etc).
And this is all within the same ethnic group!
This might sound strange coming from an Australian – Australia being one of the most multicultural countries in the world – but the difference is that Australia is a melting pot that groups all nationalities under an overall Australian umbrella whereas Lebanon is a furnace the fires all its communities into permanent cantons.
What might sound even stranger than that is that Lebanon is a very democratic country - in the sense that there is far greater interaction and personal contact on a grassroots level between the governors and the governed here than probably any country in the world.
And that’s all that matters here – your local member of parliament may have done absolutely nothing for you but may have personally presented his condolences to you at a time of bereavement (or sent a representative) thus you will vote for him.
I’ve tagged along on campaign visits to villages where people didn’t even broach the subject of a candidate’s politics but remonstrated with him for not paying his condolences to them when so and so died.
It also works the other way around – the lowest person in the country can go and pay his respects to the highest person in the country.
Quite literally the lowest person in the country – I saw a midget amongst the tens of thousands of people who filed past to pay their condolences to the Hariri family (a lot of it was broadcast live on television).
Although people were repeatedly urged to walk past and just do the shorthand greeting (touching your right hand to your forehead and then tapping it on your chest) for the sake of processing the huge numbers, said midget insisted on shaking hands with and kissing the family members.
And he didn’t bring a ladder with him – they had to stoop down to shake his hand and kiss him.
A great example of grassroots democracy in Lebanon and a great example of the modesty and outreach of the martyr Rafic Hariri and his family.
Protocol and form are very important in this society – I remember watching the news with some people who commented that a particular politician shown receiving people “doesn’t know how to shake hands”.
1:15 pm
"And in one unforgettable scene an elderly lady, her hair all done up, was demonstrating alongside her Sri Lankan domestic helper, telling her to wave the flag and teaching her the Arabic words of the slogan."
-Kim Ghattas (BBC).
12:00 pm
Saturday, February 26, 2005
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has asked the Egyptian parliament to amend the constitution to allow for more than one candidate to stand in presidential elections.How eccentric!
5:00 pm
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
This is the strangest occupied country I’ve ever known of.
Syrian Vice-President, Abdel Halim Khaddam, visiting Beirut today to pay his condolences to the family of martyred former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, who was slain by a car bomb yesterday, was more or less asked “did you kill our Prime Minister?” by Lebanese journalists.
Proof that this is a free people who shall overcome this national tragedy and that their spirit has not been and will not be broken.
Mr. Khaddam looked very sad and or tired – they must have made him stay up all night to get that affect.
Mr. Hariri is to be buried tomorrow in the huge Disneyland-like mosque he helped build in downtown Beirut.
I’ve finally figured out with he was doing Downtown – he was building a pyramid.
It all makes sense now.
And there’s nothing wrong with building pyramids – just as the Pharaohs put Egypt on the map with their pyramids, the ambitious Hariri put post-war Beirut and Lebanon on the map.
Everything about Rafic Hariri was big.I’m not going to be hypocritical – I was always wary of his megalomania – but with that megalomania came a big heart, big ambitions, big generosity, big patriotism and his death is a big loss to Lebanon and the Arab world.
7:45 pm
Monday, February 14, 2005
FROM SYRIA WITH LOVE-THE SAINT VALENTINES DAY MASACRE
- Former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri and twenty-two others killed in a massive car bomb explosion (aka Syrian Valentine) in downtown Beirut
12:55 pm
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