❊ Hariri’s Serious Twitter Gaffe

Yesterday, ex-PM Saad Hariri committed a grave political error by doing something many of us do everyday without thinking: He responded to a tweet by someone who said “Good Morning”.

There’s a problem though: That someone didn’t turn out to be any regular person. He is Avichay Adraee, the Arabic-speaking spokesperson for the Israeli ministry of defense who regularly shows up on Aljazeera to defend Israeli Military action.

Mr. Hariri later tweeted: “If it is true, I want to clearly say I wouldn’t have answered if I had known, because Israel is our enemy”. But no matter what Hariri says or does now, the damage has already been done.

There are only two possibilities here and both of them are bad:

1) Mr. Hariri knew who Mr. Adraee is.

That is a big problem because any sort of contact with the Israelis is a crime in Lebanon, not to mention a political no-no for any person in power

2) Mr. Hariri didn’t know who Mr. Adraee is.

Think for a moment what that means: Mr Hariri, who has tens of thousands of followers on twitter and knows the kind of scrutiny that entails, saw a hello message from someone with a clearly Israeli name, a name that should be familiar to anyone who watches Aljazeera or Alarabiya. Worse, that man is wearing an Israeli uniform in his twitter photo, a photo Mr. Hariri must have seen when he was responding to him because he’s using Twitter for iPhone, a program that shows you the picture of the person before you reply to him. If in doubt, Mr. Hariri could have simply clicked on his name, to see his bio clearly presented as “المتحدث بلسان جيش الدفاع الاسرائيلي للاعلام العربي”

If Mr. Hariri saw all of the above and still didn’t have any alarm bells ringing in his head, that means people will start seriously questioning Mr. Hariri’s judgment and competence to run a country and make major decisions. He will expose himself further still to the “rookie kid” slur his enemies keep heaping on him, and he will make Mr. Mikati look even more mature in comparison.

This is a lose-lose situation for the embattled ex-Prime Minister. When he first started tweeting, we knew all along that doing it himself is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, people will get to know the man and feel closer to him. On the other hand, well, just read the above.