Imad Atallah:

Blocking VoIP in the 21st century is similar to blocking television broadcasts in the 1980s. You have every right to be outraged.

Rampant political corruption and bad governance in Lebanon notwithstanding, this telecoms aggression fulfills the national motto of serving the plutocracy of wealth and power at the expense of average citizens and small business owners. Blocking VoIP to safeguard state revenue from international calls amounts to a financial transfer from consumers directly to the government and the few, never audited, telecoms monopolists the government controls.

Queen Rania writing in the Independent tells Israel: It’s about policy, not PR:

By attacking criticism as part of an anti-Israel, anti-Semitic propaganda war, Israel, yet again, fails to understand that the problem is policy, not PR. Now and always, hardline policy and those who embrace it are vessels for darker forces that are at once self-cannibalising and combustible. No good can come of them. They are unsustainable because their sense of righteousness denies human worth. Apart from other hardliners on all sides who now have been gifted the fuel to invigorate their fanaticism and circulate it far and wide, everyone else loses out.