Monday, November 16

In God We Don’t Trust

The sorry state of Lebanese activists who want to separate the state from religion.

I was checking my email this morning when I was treated to a Facebook event invitation: “The Lebanese Laïque Pride – مَسِيرَة من أجل دولة علمانيّة في لبنان”. The Idea is simple: All you guys out there who think that Lebanon should have a secular state should come and express yourselves. It sounded like an exciting idea: Like-minded people in a collective act of civil activism hoping to effect some change, what’s not to like about that?

But then you look deeper.

The event doesn’t have a website. The organizers don’t reveal their faces. They used a weird picture to represent their cause: A Nacho salad platter. Moreover, “The meeting point and itinerary are yet to be announced”. Even the choice of the word “pride” suggests a pre-admission of defeat. It’s a way of saying “we know we are outnumbered and unpopular, but we still believe in our cause”. So many things can go wrong it’s hard to believe anyone decided to attend that rally (a rally that could easily be hijacked by flag waving partisans who can claim ownership of the event if it were a success, and deny involvement if it flopped )

In a way, that Facebook event is a perfect symbol for today’s Lebanese secularists: Anonymous, scattered, unfocused and powerless. The last time they had an ally in power, his ideas were shot down faster than you can say “Elias El Hrawi”.

No matter how much we pretend otherwise, the fact of the matter is this: Organized religion is part of the very fabric of this republic. Demonstrating against this won’t get rid of it. You can’t even legislate against it (remember, MPs are also chosen by religious affiliation).

Still, all hope is not lost. People like the Minister of Interior Ziad Baroud are working behind the scenes for the long haul. Seemingly small measures like dropping religious affiliation from the Lebanese ID card could end up having a profound impact. If the Minister of Education follows suit, future generations could very well be ready for change.

16 comments Lebanese politics

Monday, November 9

Lebanese Women And The Law

Can an outrage over women’s treatment in the law create successful single-issue politicians?

Photo by Lara Zankoul

So apparently, I can prevent my wife from traveling if I wanted to. I could abuse her, beat her and forcibly summon her to my home whenever I so demand. It seems the Lebanese penal code couldn’t care less about what I do in my own house. So i learned from reading this excellent article in the Daily Star by Josie Ensor and Dalila Mahdawi.

We knew it all along. The Lebanese rulebook is littered with laws that are obsolete, decrepit and outright anachronistic. Some of them are funny. For example, if you fall from the balcony on someone’s car, it’s your own fault. But the rest, like those relating to women, are not. They are unfair and very consequential. They split families, they break souls and they force many people to make difficult choices.

The matter got me thinking. We are supposedly a democracy, and if i’m not mistaken, we have more female voters than we have male ones. Why won’t Lebanese women vote in more sister lawmakers that would improve their lot?

I blame “electoral lists”, the set-menu system that encourages aspirant politicians to coalesce around zo3ama (Big Men) with big pockets/guns. This leaves us with a parliament where a handful of honchos set up the big-picture agenda and ignore the domestic mundane topics.

And yet the laws are so shocking I couldn’t help but wonder: Imagine a certain Lady XX deciding to run for elections. Now imagine her creating a clever ad campaign that exposes these individual laws (with real examples of their tragic consequences), with the simple promise: If you elect me, I will dedicate myself to changing these laws. It’s all I’m going to parliament to do, I will do nothing else.

Would I be too optimistic if I believe that Lebanon has enough sensible people to vote for her and get her elected?

11 comments Plain Talking

A Quick Congratulations..

After almost 4 months of labor, a Lebanese government is finally born. I hope that as Prime Minister Hariri said,  this government would be one of performance, not of care taking. Amen to that. Here’s to seeing good results soon.

2 comments Lebanese politics

Monday, November 2

Obama One Year On. A Lebanese Perspective

La Stampa, one of Italy’s most influential newspapers decided to run a feature called “Obama, One Year On”. Both in print and online, It published opinions from bloggers and commentators from around the world relating to the first anniversary of that historic election. I was one of those fortunate enough to be asked for a contribution. Below is my piece as it was published.

Obama. One Year on, the shame remains

One year later, I still resent how the election of president Obama made me feel about my country, Lebanon.

In a swift, blistering move , America’s first black president laid bare the primitive way in which we chose our leaders. Our President had to be a Maronite Christian, our constitution says. The Prime Minister has to be a Sunni Muslim, the Speaker a Shiia Muslim and the deputy speaker an orthodox Christian.

In that fateful day, president Obama exposed my country as a fraud. A fake melting pot…

Having many religions used to make me proud. But November 2008 made me see a different place. I saw a country where tribes coexisted in an eternal power struggle, where leaders of the various sects negotiate their power relationships. It dawned on me: Lebanon could never produce a minority president. Lebanon could never have a president Obama.

I wrote back then: “How can you not be embarrassed, watching the Obama spectacle, if you live in a country where your destiny is dictated by the God you worship and the clan you belong to? President Obama puts to shame our obsolete system that assigns a different set of laws to [Muslims and Christians]”

One year later, as I watch our elected leaders spending endless months trying to form a government, I still feel the same…

8 comments opinion

Thursday, October 15

Global Warming And The Lebanese

With such a small industrial production, does it matter if the Lebanese care about global warming?

So today is blog action day, and the topic is climate change. I really don’t know what “action” the people behind this day are talking about. What I really care about is our role as a tiny nation, whose minuscule green gas footprint is so small it hardly registers. Do we, as Lebanese, really need to take part of this great debate?

When it comes to global warming, the Lebanese are divided into three categories: The preachy (“do you know that your gas-guzzling Hummer is going to kill us all?”) , the apathetic (“Global warming? Whatever dude”) and the skeptic (“Global warming is a hoax man, I can’t believe you’re falling for this”)

What I don’t see is people asking: How can we benefit from this worldwide scare and put Lebanon at the forefront of action to find a solution? (and cash in on it)

I can hear what you’re thinking: But we’re a small country, we can hardly make a difference. But that’s exactly where you’d be wrong. It is precisely because we are a small country that we can try out new ways to power our lifestyles. America and China are too big, too industrialized to use their countries as labs, but Lebanon? with our pathetic electricity supply, we really have nothing to lose.

If you think I’m talking pie-in-the-sky, I invite you to look at our enemy down south. Israel, a country with a similar size and climate to ours, is putting itself at the forefront of research to fight global warming. Do you know that Israel will be the world’s first country to use electrical cars on a wide scale?

Renauld-Nissan needed a small country to test what an all-electrical-cars market would behave like. They needed a government that would install electrical filling stations all over the country, entrepreneurs that would make money out of the venture, and scientists that would keep improving the efficiency.

It is a failure of our nation, of our society, of our politics, that Renauld-Nissan –whose CEO Carlos Ghosn has Lebanese roots– chose Israel, not Lebanon as a battleground against global warming.

(Photo credit)

Please also take your time to see what my blogger friends had to say for this global action day: Lilliane, Rami, Maya, Chantal, Joe , Darine, Hummus, Cafethawra

12 comments opinion

Tuesday, September 22

Should Lebanon Have A Gun Debate?

Is having unlicensed weapons in every other Lebanese household really such a bad thing?

This morning I read a NowLebanon article that blew my mind away (pun intended). If the statistics in the article are correct, almost 50% of Lebanese households now have one form or another of weapons, with most of them unlicensed.

Some of the stuff in the article is really chilling, take this paragraph for instance:

Bassam, 24, got his new M16 as a present from his father. It is his new toy, he said; he even lets his eight-year old cousin play with it and has taught him how to hold it.

But while there seems to be a consensus in civil-war-scarred Lebanon that having guns is a very bad idea, nobody seems to be making the counter argument. This is why I venture in the name of balance to play the devil’s advocate, even if I carry the risk of being shot by the anti-gun folks.

Here are the three main arguments why gun ubiquity could be a good thing, and I urge you to have an open mind about them:

1- The if-you-want-peace-get-ready-for-war argument:
The idea is that If everyone has weapons, people will really think twice before starting a war. People are more likely to talk and negotiate their difference if they know that the other party is no military push-over.

2- The I-sleep-better-at-night-with-a-rifle-in-my-closet argument.
Whether perceived or real, many Lebanese are losing sleep over the threat that the ‘other’ will raid their homes at nights, kill their kids and rape their wives. If having a gun (that you’ll never use) in your drawer makes you sleep better, then go ahead. The country could use the gain in productivity and loss of stress that would give you.

3- The economic-wheel argument.
The guy who sold you the gun and made a huge profit will probably use the windfall to send his kids to school and buy stuff, ensuring more employment for teachers, sales people and manufacturers all over the country..

These are not necessarily arguments I agree with. In fact, on balance, I believe that something must be done to control and reduce the proliferation of guns. But I also think it’s important to for people to consider the other side of the story to enrich the debate and make people more informed. What do you think?

(Photo source of boy holding a bubbles gun)

11 comments Plain Talking

Friday, September 18

The Battle For Tabbouleh

Making the world’s largest Hummus platter is a delicious, exciting and pointless exercise

In the Hollywood movie ‘You Don’t Mess with the Zohan’, Adam Sandler plays an Israeli agent who just couldn’t get enough of ‘Khhummus’. He gorges on the delicacy by dipping everything from chocolate to chicken to his father’s eye glasses in it.

What we see as a goofy if harmless comedy,  Fadi Abboud, the president of the Association of Lebanese Industrialists, sees as a sinister attempt to hijack our beloved Lebanese cuisine by our enemies down south. Mr. Abboud believes  that Lebanon is loosing hundreds of thousands of dollars because the world thinks that Hummus, Tabbouleh and Falafel are Israeli inventions.

So what is Mr. Abboud’s  plan to rectify that error? First, we break the Guinness world record for largest Hummus plate on earth. After that, we “file an international lawsuit against Israel for claiming ownership of traditional dishes that are believed to be originally Lebanese. ”

While Mr. Abboud’s intentions are doubtless good and the whole exercise will be a lot of fun (I mean come on, the online discussions this would spark? The “hummus is Lebanese” Facebook page? All priceless!), this all sounds to me like an exercise in futility.

Trying to prove that a dish was invented in a specific geographic area, let alone one as tiny as Lebanon, is like trying to pinpoint exactly where the Arabic language was invented. You can’t tell for at least two reasons. 1- this old dish was invented before current borders and ideologies. and 2- You don’t just invent a meal like that. It’s a process that took thousands of years and input from all kinds of peoples and areas.

And don’t get me started with claiming ownership by creating the world’s largest plate of the stuff. This Dubai-esque exercise sounds like a giant penis-measuring competition only adolescent boys would engage in. I just hope the Israelis won’t hop in and play the game. Besides, Mr. Abboud seems to be fighting an imaginary threat. In my experience, people in the US and the UK refer to our food -correctly- as “Middle Eastern” cuisine, with many even calling it Lebanese.

To wrap this up, let’s make that giant delicious bowl of Hummus, but let’s not pretend it’s anything other than a whole loads of fun..

*Update*
I want to sincerely thank Ms. Anissa Helou, the internationally known food writer, for pursuing the matter with some of the world’s leading experts on the matter. Please read more about her findings in the comments section.

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16 comments opinion