You probably heard about the complaints in Lebanon of “Israel stealing our gas”. While the premise is indeed infuriating, this is one of the topics where facts and cool heads should matter more than macho politics.

It is easy to get worked up about defending Lebanese gas fields “by force if necessary”, but like gas, this issue is highly combustible. Israel has started creating facts on the ground and Lebanon needs to act effectively to secure its rights if it has any.

There are 3 ways to go about this:

1- We can complain loudly and get ignored by Israel because it’s too busy drilling.

2- Hezbollah can start a war in which Israel lashes out on Lebanon, bombs the south to smithereens, and keeps drilling anyway.

3- Lay off the tough talk and start an international PR campaign, with scientific proof of Lebanon’s stake in the Tamar gas field. The clear goal of such campaign would be establishing a UN entity that will give Lebanon its fair share of the proceeds. Nobody dies, everyone benefits.

Which road would you choose?

.

My friend Joe wrote a post about preserving old Lebanese houses and repeated what I noticed is a common conservationist gripe: Beautiful old Lebanese houses are being replaced by tall glistening buildings.

So I figured it’s about time someone wrote that this actually made sense. Pasted below is the exact comment I made on his blog, after reading that Fouad Chehab’s old residence is one of the lucky few that are actually getting preserved

–

This is indeed a smart investment. But while historically significant houses like this one can become economically viable museums, other old houses don’t have such a luxury.

If you own a very old pretty house, you have three options: 

1- Leave it alone to rot 

2- Invest a lot of money to maintain it 

3- Sell it off for a lot of money to those who will build a building in its place.

While the third option seems unsavory, it’s actually the best of the three.

Leaving it alone will make it an environmental and public health hazard. You’ll have to have a lot of money to invest and maintain it because the government won’t give you the money (Because on their priority list, this is below restoring decent electrical power, health care and public safety and they have limited resources).

If you want to maintain it on your own, it should be for your pure fantasy reasons or because you’re hungry for a pat on the back by conservationists and the mayor, or perhaps running for office in the locale where that house has many cherished memories.

Which leaves us with the third option: By building a high rise, you are providing economic opportunity to many workers, masons, raw material importers, furniture makers, architects, engineers, and of course the government, which will earn considerable taxes from the sales of luxury flats and hopefully use the money to better the Lebanese state of affairs, and who knows, perhaps if we build enough high rises, the government will be eventually able to afford conserving other houses..

Gino’s words of wisdom on the irrationality and futility of Lebanon’s trigger-happy boycotters:

Boycotting is a valuable tool and weapon in fighting tyranny and injustice. However, it should also be well thought-out, well proven and good-intentioned. The boycotting of stuff just for the sake of igniting anti-Israel emotions is unfair to the Arab cause. It taints it and makes it look stupid and inconsistent. So, a word of advice to the over-zealous: please review you evidence well, present your case thoroughly, don’t let your emotions lead you to wrong paths, don’t have double standards [..] and don’t force people to boycott what you’re boycotting.

Amen. Read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

.

In an open letter, blogger Rita khoury shares her ennui with the Lebanese Blogosphere. In an nutshel: It’s boring, repetitive, monotone and non specialized.

While I agree with some of her points (yes, dry spells are dry), I have a nagging feeling that she’s not aware of many of the fabulous blogs out there: For example we have at least 4 fantastic Lebanese food bloggers. 

There’s also, in my opinion, an inherent flaw in her argument. She makes the point that if she’s not aware of your specialized blog, it means you’re not doing a good job with the SEO:

I’m pretty sure there will be tons of comments telling me that one of these blogs already exist. Sure, but do I know about it? No. Was I able to find it on Google? No

But here’s the problem with this logic: If you have a micro-niche blog (which Rita seems to be advocating), only people with similar micro-niche interests will find you on Google because they know what to search for. Niche blogs, by definition, have a niche audience. 

Young:

even in their most obdurate mood Palestinian nationalists recognized that there were Jews in Palestine long before the creation of Israel, something Thomas failed to admit. [..]

The worst thing that could happen is for Thomas’ fate to feed into a new Arab tale of victimhood. Siding with crackpot conclusions like hers only discredits Arabs, especially at a time when the onus is on Israel to explain precisely what it intends to do with the Palestinians it has dispossessed, occupied, and mistreated for several generations

I agree. Unfortunately I know too many people who have her exact same opinion.
 
.

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.

Mr. Hariri’s Legacy is secure. Now is the time to rethink how February 14 is celebrated every year.

Wise athletes retire at their prime. They like their fans to remember them at their peak. They dread the idea of aging, weakening and falling slowly into an arthritis-ridden oblivion. They’d rather make news, one last time, about quitting too soon.

Prime Minister Rafik Hariri (R.I.P) involuntarily retired at his prime. It remains to be seen if the yearly celebrations held to commemorate him will do the same.

Don’t get me wrong. If I were in Lebanon I would have probably turned up. I would have waived a Lebanese flag, chanted till losing my voice and returned home to a very good night sleep.

But we’re human beings. Time heals our wounds, emotions ebb and injustices fade away.

We can’t keep holding such rallies every February 14. We have to stop (the physical gathering of crowds) at some point. So why not now? We can make yesterday’s superb display the last image people remember of February 14 celebrations. We can declare the proverbial victory and announce that as of next year, the celebrations will have more local and cultural manifestations.

The movement will live on in the hearts and minds of people. Physically turning up can soon become a drag..

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…

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