Category Archives: Viva!

Saudi Arabia says Lebanon has declared war against it

Say what? So Saudis and Israelis going to team up while #45 tweets and blows smoke up America’s…

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The Saudi kingdom fears that Iran-backed Hezbollah is seeking to consolidate power in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia and Iran have also traded accusations over Saturday’s attempted missile strike on Riyadh by Yemeni rebels.

How to Explain to Your Son Why White Supremacists Are Marching on Your Town

“Explaining to your biracial child why white supremacists are marching feels like asking him to try to hold battery acid in his bare hands. How do you tell him and still protect him? How do you keep him safe but preserve his warm and generous heart? He’s on the cusp of adolescence—a door is closing. You clear your throat.

You tell him: Those men are filled with rage, and they aimed that rage at black and brown bodies, at queer and Jewish bodies, at Muslim and female bodies, at anyone who would defend the dignity of those they called Other.

They think you are Other, you say, full of shame.

You tell him: They want America to heap all blame on black and brown bodies, set those bodies on fire, and call the ashes victory.

You tell him: Whatever their true grievances, those men falsely choose to believe that if bodies like yours and his could be disposed of, their own lives would be better somehow.

You tell him that there are so many other things to discover—in the world, in people—so m Illustration: Xia Gordon.

You have to say something. Your son sees that you’re not taking him to violin, and he knows you are supposed to go. He asked to take lessons, wanting to learn to play like Yo-Yo Ma or Eric Stanley. Your son is eleven with golden skin, and you are his mother, but your skin is dark brown.

Your husband, whose skin runs pale to pink, who has shaggy hair and a sloped English nose, has gone to his studio this Saturday morning to take photographs. His studio sits in downtown Charlottesville, a few blocks from Emancipation Park, where the Unite the Right! protest is slated to take place in the afternoon. At the center of the park, Robert E. Lee’s stone effigy sits high on a horse, no more than a mile from your home.

The protestors began to arrive yesterday from all over the country. They announced themselves with a spectacle of guns, swastikas, Confederate flags mashed up with Klan iconography, and makeshift military garb. At nightfall, they poured onto the University of Virginia campus, an orchestrated pre-demonstration. The images flooded your Facebook feed: droves of angry-looking men held up Tiki torches, their collars arched, their angular faces shiny by that flickering light. They chanted, Jews will not replace us! They chanted, White lives matter! to which you thought, They do. In videos, when counter-protesters arrived, skirmishes broke out. Those fiery poles were brought down with alarming force.

Today, protests are not scheduled to start for hours, but violence is already mounting again. Throngs of alt-righters rove the pedestrian mall, parading past stores and restaurants that your family knows well. These men are uniformly white, or rather: pale, and tan, and ruddy. They cover themselves in Klan robes, Nazi regalia, camo, business casual. They carry shields and flags and sticks and canisters of Mace. Too many hold up assault rifles: United, they say. Chests wide with pride, they raise flags that glorify the murder, enslavement, and genocide of bodies marked as Other. That’s what they claim your body is.

The counter-protesters have come early, too: black and white, and brown, and pink, and bronze. Many are from out of town, but you recognize some faces. They hold signs, shields, pepper spray, or nothing at all. They look massively outnumbered and woefully out-weaponed. If this is a battle, the word asymmetrical comes to mind. A group of religious leaders kneels along the park’s perimeter, men and women with arms looped together, their faiths visible on their robes, singing hymns and lowering their heads in front of all that fury.

You’ve braced since winter for these men and their movement. You watched the video of Robert Spencer, the UVA graduate who popularized the term “alt-right.” In footage he offers a strident Hail Trump! along with an arcing Hitler salute, returned by a fervent crowd. More intimately, you’ve seen a local provocateur, Jason Kessler, position himself at the center of your public square. One Friday evening, walking out of a movie theater, you watched a crowd of locals encircle him. At the center, Kessler smirked and performed. You’d worried over the crowd’s righteous anger—that somehow, Kessler fed on it. You watched Kessler on YouTube, too, calling anyone who opposed him “Antifa,” singling out the one black guy in the crowd to ask about the one black city council member, whom Kessler blamed excessively. He veiled his message of white supremacy with the right to free speech.

Sure, speak, you’d said, then challenged yourself to listen to his specious claims of white genocide, delivered like shouting Fire! in a crowded theater. You kept listening through the alt-right’s stated remedy: to disappear brown and olive-skinned bodies, to create an all-white nation atop the graves of slaves and in the place where you stood. You received their vision of a great and terrible America as sharp jabs to the hollow of your throat.

All morning, your phone has been buzzing, an urgent, endless string of texts from a group of people you know, most of them women. Months ago, you joined this informal group in an attempt to prepare for and oppose these men. The group met on Sundays, sitting in cramped circles in rotating living rooms. At the last meeting, people took turns saying what they planned to do on the day of the march. You’d remained ambivalent about whether or not to attend at all: Would your presence show resistance? Or would your righteous anger be appropriated by the other side? Would you be safe? Now you worry about those group members who text from side streets and parking lots, asking for the number for legal aid, or for medical assistance, like a renegade triage of saints.

A helicopter has been circling for hours, its constant drone vibrating in your skull. When you step outside, you can see its anxious silhouette circle above the trees. Your phone trembles again: the governor has declared a state of emergency. Uneasy, you text your husband. Your son looks up and registers the worry on your face.

Now every shade of white supremacist—the swastika-yielding ones, and the torch-wielding Polo-shirted ones, and the armed, our-government-is-illegitimate ones—have all been let loose on your small college town. All that adrenaline and rage is radiating out from Lee’s statue and toward your tree-lined streets. Some men, you hear, are getting into cars and driving to traditionally black neighborhoods, like the one where you live. You hear that some have physically assaulted the line of clergy, or are trading blows with counter-protestors.

So, no, you’re not going to violin.

You’re not going anywhere today.

***

You hear the sound of your husband’s bicycle falling on the front porch, the screen door rattling closed behind him. He’s still breathless when he finds you in the kitchen. It’s crazy over there, he says. He tells you he saw hundreds of men marching toward the park under a haze of tear gas. He tells you he saw dozens of fights, breaking out all at once, and long lines of police, seemingly guarding buildings, doing nothing to intervene. He watched bands of grizzled men dressed in camo and helmets, holding guns muzzle-up or across their chests, at the ready. He saw a black man, in his fifties, scrubbing at his eyes, white liquid and tears running down his face. He saw a white man, in his twenties, holding a bandana to his head, trying to stop blood from flowing. Your husband recognized photographer friends weaving in and out of the crowd, their eyes wide with shock. As he biked back home, he passed a man shouting, Race war! He passed a man shouting, Dylann Roof is a hero!

You feel seasick, like you’ve been forced to gulp saltwater.

The helicopter chop-chop-chops.

On your computer, on your phone, you watch as the story of the day grows darker. A friend posts pictures of grotesque propaganda: xeroxed flyers locked inside Ziploc baggies, weighted down with kitty litter, scattered overnight in his mostly black neighborhood. A protestor throws urine onto members of the press. Leading up to this day, you’d pictured contained horror, a rally rung around that long-dead Confederate general. Hateful signs, holstered handguns, and a crowd of counter-protestors circling with police in between. But this is chaos, spreading lawlessness. Here are fresh images of a group of white men chasing down and beating a black man, in daylight, in full public view. They strike his head with flagpoles, over and over, even though he has fallen to the ground. The man’s skin is the same color as your brother’s; his blood is bright red. This is happening, right now, in a parking garage that sits right next to the police station.

You feel your son behind you, so you swiftly scroll down, though his eyes linger on the screen. You wonder how much he saw, though you can’t bear to ask yet. You’ve been telling him, for weeks now, that these men were coming. But you couldn’t have known what their arrival would mean.

They’re why we aren’t going to violin, he says.

You nod and close your computer. It’s Saturday, and normally you’d go to the store, to the park. Let’s go outside and shoot a few baskets, you say.

You open the screen door and step out. Your yard is set far back from the road and sheltered in a grove of walnut trees. Your son turtles his head behind you.

We’re gonna die! he shrieks, mockingly. His octave betrays a kernel of fear, but mostly he’s trying to make you laugh.

But not today, you answer, half guilty, half relieved.

So what, you tell yourself, if you didn’t join the counter-protestors downtown today? So what if you didn’t even make it to violin? You’re still resisting, just by playing ball in the yard in your brown skin with your gold boy. You’ve resisted in the stories you’ve written, in the votes you’ve made. You resist with the kindness you extend to all your students, in all the skins in which they arrive. Resistance teems in your blood, inherited from your parents who plotted their own escape from the segregated South, and managed to preserve warm and generous hearts. You will resist with your reedy compassion for even those men who would demean and defile you.

The two of you four-square the basketball in the driveway. Mid-August and it’s warm out, humid. The towering magnolia under which you were married is slowly being overrun by vines. The helicopter blades still thrum overhead, sounding like Vietnam in a movie.

You palm the ball to your eleven-year-old and really look at him. This is a kid who became a vegetarian at the age of eight, because he loves animals, even though, he acknowledges, bacon tastes delicious. This is a kid who raps to Kendrick Lamar and Hamilton with equal zeal, bleeping out the curse words in both. This is a child who donated several months of allowance when he learned that this nominal amount could provide a lifetime of clean drinking water to a stranger somewhere in the world. This is a boy who can watch shrill YouTube videos for hours, and hold a grudge for years.

The basketball goes back and forth between you.

It’s really bad, your son says.

You look at your phone.

It’s really bad, you answer.

He’s only eleven but you’ve already explained the concept of prejudice to him. He understands that people hold biases, even when they don’t want to, even when they don’t realize. You’ve calmly described histories of racial oppression—in schooling, in housing, in jobs, in pay. You’ve tried to steel him against the disdain for brown bodies by offering these anecdotes, like vaccinations. You’ve warned him that someone may well look at his skin tone and imbue it with some false disease, or mock it with distorted accolades. It’s painful to tell these things to your child, but the alternative is worse: What if, for example, he had the audacity to move his hands quickly during a traffic stop, the way his own father might? So you’ve cautioned your son to move very s-l-o-w-l-y, and explained that even slowness might not be enough. For some bodies, misdemeanors can hold a death sentence, and even good behavior may be met with hostility. You’ve told him like your own parents tried to tell you.

When you were a child, your parents hedged their stories of growing up under sanctioned Jim Crow racism against the hope that things would be different for you. You were born in the suburbs of northern Virginia; your childhood was so starkly different from theirs. And so, they handed you a heavy, battered shield, hoping you’d never need to lift it. They understood that convincing you of the need to shield yourself at all was its own kind of injury.

Your son has the ball; he is dribbling, dabbing.

You look at your phone yet again.

Oh fuck! A car has barreled into a crowd of people. Bodies thrown, bodies crushed. Oh god.

What’s wrong, what happened now? your son asks.

You realize you’re cradling the ball.

You’ll have to tell him soon.

Let’s go back inside, you say.

***

Earlier this summer, you had lunch with a friend you don’t see as often as you’d like. She is an art person, in her forties, like you; her skin is brown like yours. At the end of lunch, she shared a story as if confessing, her shame swaddled in a kind of pride, because the shame shouldn’t have even been hers to carry.

This past winter in Charlottesville, she and another mutual friend—a guy you know, brown too, who air-kisses you on both checks when you see him—were walking downtown. They passed a venue just as a concert was letting out. A small group of people hurried behind them, talking loudly.

This friend of yours was not afraid—she often walked downtown at night. But at once it became clear that the strangers from the concert, who were white or tan or sunburned, were taunting your friends. One of the strangers shook liquid from a water bottle onto them. When your friends turned to ask what was going on, the group called your friends niggers. One of the strangers punched your male friend, another punched your female friend, so hard that she fell and blood ran from her nose. As you listened to your friend tell this story, your throat tightened, your hand flew to your chest.

She told you that the police showed up right away, but the officers could not hear her story. They only understood the story offered by the strangers: So, you all were fighting each other? the police concluded.

One officer gestured to the young woman who’d assaulted your friend. She says she lost an earring, he explained. While your friend remained bleeding on the ground, he stooped and shone his light to help her look for her jewelry.

***

It’s almost dinnertime, though no one in your family is hungry. You find yourself watching a video of the car that plowed into the crowd: the car rushes into a collection of bodies and then screeches back out at the same frenetic speed. You recognize the narrow one-way road, a corridor barely fifty feet from your husband’s office door. There are screams, bodies fly, limbs torque at odd angles. Nineteen human bodies broken. A town of souls battered. One young woman, dead.

Did you just watch it, too? your husband asks.

You feel heartsick, lost.

So, someone drove their car right into a crowd of people? your son says. You don’t show him the video.

You all notice the helicopter sound has stopped. You peer across the table at your husband, both of you sighing at the reprieve. Maybe things are quieting down, ending. Moments later, you learn the helicopter crashed.

Phone calls and messages pour in from friends and family. Charlottesville, they exclaim, unbelieving.

As night closes in, you look back and forth between screens and the faces of your child and husband. Your thoughts loop around as you scroll through posts and tweets, searching for answers, trying to figure out what it all means. People you know are outraged, horrified, heartbroken at the chaos, the devastation. But when you read those men’s responses, you feel like you’ve been knocked to the ground. You taste copper, like blood, at the back of your throat.

We will be back! the men say, triumphantly. This is our town now!

***

Days later, when you pick up your kid from his summer day camp, he tells you his group hiked up to Humpback Rock. From there he could see all of Charlottesville: the university, the towers of the hospital, the downtown mall. You turn up the radio as another national news story about August 12 comes on. Many sides, the president says, and you twist under your seat belt as if he’d said, So, you all were fighting each other? A spokesperson for the Fraternal Order of Police suggests that there hasn’t been much of a problem with protestors openly carrying guns, as if your town hadn’t watched the police cede their authority to armed and angry men. In nearly the same breath, the spokesman seems to admonish the counter-protestors: Why bring sticks to a peaceful demonstration?

Meanwhile, communities all over the world hold vigils. They mourn Heather Heyer, the young woman who was killed. They mourn a sense of safety, of decency, and the dream of what America claims it wants to be. They are losing sleep, like you have. They hold shame in the cave of their chests for the brazen hate those men displayed—maybe even for the systems of oppression that harm so many but feel nearly impossible to dismantle, and are sometimes hard to even speak of out loud.

When you put your kid to sleep that night, you perch at the edge of his mattress. At the foot of his bed, his violin lays silent in its case. Earlier, you listened to him play: a series of impatient shrieks, then a long yearning note like someone singing. He is still only practicing for the person he will become.

You think of those men who came to march on your town, to intimidate, to oppress, to injure, to stoke fear. You think of Iraq, of Syria. You think of desperate unaccompanied minors crossing borders, and of those murdered boys in Mexico, restless in unmarked graves. You think of the riots in Ferguson, and of the brown boys in your own Jeffersonian town, just a few years older than your son. Too many of them already feel marginalized, their grievances ignored or dismissed. Too many suffer silently, with burning guts, with clenched jaws and bruised fists. You think of all this and feel ashamed, for all the beautiful places you’ve been in your life, for the comfort of your home and the shelter of your yard. It feels newly fragile in your chest.

Explaining to your biracial child why white supremacists are marching feels like asking him to try to hold battery acid in his bare hands. How do you tell him and still protect him? How do you keep him safe but preserve his warm and generous heart? He’s on the cusp of adolescence—a door is closing. You clear your throat.

You tell him: Those men are filled with rage, and they aimed that rage at black and brown bodies, at queer and Jewish bodies, at Muslim and female bodies, at anyone who would defend the dignity of those they called Other.

They think you are Other, you say, full of shame.

You tell him: They want America to heap all blame on black and brown bodies, set those bodies on fire, and call the ashes victory.

You tell him: Whatever their true grievances, those men falsely choose to believe that if bodies like yours and his could be disposed of, their own lives would be better somehow.

You tell him that there are so many other things to discover—in the world, in people—so much of it beautiful.

You lift the shield and pass it to your son, even though its protection is a kind of wound, too. You hate that this hurt has a job to do, that it feels so necessary. And you worry, still, that it won’t be enough.

The post How to Explain to Your Son Why White Supremacists Are Marching on Your Town appeared first on Guernica.

The Paradise Papers: another tax-shelter leak implicates Apple, Trump, Putin, Hollywood, Twitter, Facebook, the Queen and more

1.4TB/13.4 million documents have leaked from Appleby, the offshore law-firm that is part of the “magic circle” of firms employed by the super-rich to manipulate their finances; the documents are supplemented with another “offshore provider”‘s files, and the company registries of 19 tax havens.

The documents are full of explosive revelations, including the fact that the Queen’s Estate has stashed millions in the Caymans and then funneled the money to abusive sweatshops; Trump’s inner circle are massive money-launderers and Trump Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross secretly took a fortune from Putin’s son-in-law; Twitter and Facebook took in millions in laundered investment capital that originated with “Russian state financial institutions”; Nike and Apple using legally questionable tax avoidance schemes; and much, much more — hundreds of stories that will ooze out in the weeks to come.

The publication of this investigation, for which more than 380 journalists have spent a year combing through data that stretches back 70 years, comes at a time of growing global income inequality.

Meanwhile, multinational companies are shifting a growing share of profits offshore – €600bn in the last year alone – the leading economist Gabriel Zucman will reveal in a study to be published later this week.

“Tax havens are one of the key engines of the rise in global inequality,” he said. “As inequality rises, offshore tax evasion is becoming an elite sport.”

Paradise Papers leak reveals secrets of world elite’s hidden wealth

[Juliette Garside/The Guardian]

Eric Trump and Don Jr. are planning to open ‘plantation-style’ luxury hotels in poor black areas

Eric Trump and Don Jr. are planning to open ‘plantation-style’ luxury hotels in poor black areas:

truth-has-a-liberal-bias:

russalex:

danipup:

I feel sick.

These assholes are unbelievable.

From the article:

Amid those cotton fields will rise the Trump Organization’s project designed like an “antebellum plantation” in towns near Cleveland, Mississippi. The town population is just barely over 12,000 people with a majority African-American citizenry. Located in the Mississippi Delta, it’s being pitched as a place where The blues can be celebrated. “A plan that some black residents view as Trump’s effort to monetize the threadbare music invented by slaves in the Mississippi cotton fields.”  […]

George Bush Sr says he voted for Clinton over ‘blowhard’ Trump

US President Donald Trump is a blowhard driven by ego, according to George Bush Sr. And that’s why he, a staunch Republican, voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Source: George Bush Sr says he voted for Clinton over ‘blowhard’ Trump

The 93-year-old reveals he voted for Mrs Clinton at the 2016 election and describes Mr Trump as a “blowhard” driven by ego, who lacks a commitment to public service.

Mueller has enough evidence to charge Michael Flynn & Son

;>)

 NBC NEWS: WASHINGTON — Federal investigators have gathered enough evidence to bring charges in their investigation of President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser and his son as part of the probe into Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation.

Michael T. Flynn, who was fired after just 24 days on the job, was one of the first Trump associates to come under scrutiny in the federal probe now led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign.

NBC EXCLUSIVE: Mueller Has Enough Evidence to Bring Charges in Flynn Investigation #AMJoy http://pic.twitter.com/K4e4sVlyxq

— AM Joy w/Joy Reid (@amjoyshow) November 5, 2017

Mueller is applying renewed pressure on Flynn following his indictment of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, three sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News.

The investigators are speaking to multiple witnesses in coming days to gain more information surrounding Flynn’s lobbying work, including whether he laundered money or lied to federal agents about his overseas contacts, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.

Mueller’s team is also examining whether Flynn attempted to orchestrate the removal of a chief rival of Turkish President Recep Erdogan from the U.S. to Turkey in exchange for millions of dollars, two officials said.

A spokesperson for the special counsel had no comment.

“Paper trail leads directly back to Mike Pence—proof Pence knew Michael Flynn was a Russian agent” @Funder on #AMJoy https://t.co/mK7L0yJI2Y

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) November 5, 2017

Flynn’s son, Michael G. Flynn, who worked closely with his father, accompanied him during the campaign and briefly worked on the presidential transition, could be indicted separately or at the same time as his father, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.

If the elder Flynn is willing to cooperate with investigators in order to help his son, two of the sources said, it could also change his own fate, potentially limiting any legal consequences.

The pressure on Flynn is the latest signal that Mueller is moving at a rapid, and steady, pace in his investigation. Last week, investigators unsealed indictments of Manafort and Manafort’s business partner Rick Gates. They pleaded not guilty.

Investigators also revealed Monday that former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to lying to federal officials and had been cooperating with Mueller’s investigation.

If the senior Flynn is charged, he would be the first current or former Trump administration official formally accused of criminal wrongdoing by the Mueller team.

So far, the probe has only ensnared campaign officials, and the White House has argued that the connection to the president is minimal. An indictment of the president’s former national security adviser and his son would scramble that dynamic.

Israeli Christians Are Coming To Lebanon For Pilgrimage; Patriach Rai Wants Lebanese Christians To Be Allowed To Go To Holy Land

:>)

The most amazing story coming out of the Middle East this week is a report by Haaretz around two days ago about a massive undertaking by the Israeli Maronite and Christian populace to be able to come to Lebanon for pilgrimage, a country that is at war, and has no diplomatic relations with Israel.

The way these Israelis go at it is the following: they leave Israel and enter Jordan with their Israeli passports. In Jordan, they are issued Palestinian travel documents which they use to travel to Beirut. Those travel documents are then confiscated at our airport, and are only valid for a one week entry.

During that one week, the itinerary that the Israelis have includes: Mar Charbel in Annaya, Batroun’s convents, Harissa, Maghdouche, Baalbek, etc… as well as some Beirut mall, of course, which they are allowed to visit for a few hours only. They stay at facilities provided by the Maronite Church, are not permitted to leave their groups unattended, and the entire trip is planned from points A to Z in the utmost details in order to prevent any fallback from such measures in both countries.

In fact, they are not even allowed to talk to Lebanese people at the sites they are visiting for fear of someone recognizing where they’re from and tipping off authorities. They keep to themselves, spend a week here, and go back to their country reportedly very “appreciative” of the experience they got.

The Haaretz report (link) says that hundreds of Israeli Christians have been using that method to come to Lebanon for pilgrimage. I was intrigued as to why Israelis would want to come to Lebanon for Christian pilgrimage when they are literally living in the Holy Land. As it turns out, the majority of those coming into Lebanon are Maronites, who have bonds to the region being where the seat of Maronitisim and its main holy sites are.

The origin of such a pilgrimage trip reportedly goes back to 2014, which also happens to be the last time a high profile Maronite figure visited the Holy Land was when Patriach Bechara El Rai went there in 2014 when the Pope was also visiting. During that visit, the patriarch reportedly met with Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian authorities, in Ramallah and discussed with him issuing Palestinian travel documents to Israeli Arab Christians who wish to visit Lebanon for pilgrimage. As it turns out, Mahmoud Abbas obliged.

Since then, those trips have become increasingly less hidden, with authorities in Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine deciding to turn a blind eye to these people going about their religious escapades in a country they’d normally not be able to visit. For $1800, the people wishing to visit Lebanon register their names with a yet unidentified priest in Galilee who then transmits that list to the Palestinian authorities for travel documents issuance.

Given that many Israeli Muslims are allowed to go to Saudi Arabia using Jordanian passports for Hajj, I don’t believe that such trips into Lebanon purely for religious purposes should cause any uproar. Even Al-Akhbar, known for their anti-Israeli crusades against anything that is touched by the Zionist state (as long as it’s not something they’re dependent on of course), was not entirely critical of the visits, labeling them under the guise of religion, rather than politics.

As it is though in the Middle East, everything is political.

Soon after the Haaretz report surfaced, Patriarch Rai announced that he believes Lebanese Christians should also be permitted to be able to visit the Holy Land and Jerusalem as part of religious pilgrimage. Rai believes that such visits would not fall under the much-dreaded normalization, but rather under religious auspices.

To that effect, during his much talked about visit to Saudi Arabia later in the month, he will discuss the logistics of how KSA, a country also with no diplomatic relations to Israel (yet), facilitates its own pilgrimage process of Israeli Muslims. As per the Haaretz article, Raï said “when I visited the Holy Land, I met with my community and had no political activity. And I don’t see anything wrong with this.”

Except while Patriarch Raï sees nothing wrong with such a move, a Lebanese population that rose up in arms about a movie with an Israeli actress will sure run towards the guillotines and shout treason and normalization at anyone who agrees with such a prospect.

Currently, a Lebanese citizen who wishes to visit the Holy Land cannot do so unless they are in the possession of a second nationality which permits visits to Israel, and even then that person would technically be breaking Lebanese law, although I wonder: how much emphasis can we put on laws whose application is as arbitrary as the Lebanese raison d’etre, only put into action when there’s enough political backbone for them to be applied, only enforced on those who don’t have IMDB pages to their names or enough clout to escape the judicial system?

I find the premise of religious causes outweighing political ones to be appealing, but this is the Middle East and not La La Land (that movie deserved the Oscar fyi). In a region as volatile and as precipitous, and between two countries that are constantly in conflict, whether actual or an undercurrent, should religious pilgrimage be allowed?

I’d like to say that if the Israelis are doing it, then we should do it as well. But while those Israeli Arabs have technical means with which they can access Lebanon (Palestinian documents, as they also happen to be Palestinian), Lebanese Christians only have their passport as their means for visitation. Such visits are, therefore, not technically feasible in the first place.

Add to the technical aspect of things all the treason threats that those who undertake such visits would get. It wasn’t a long time ago that people accused me of treason and sympathy with Israel because my name indicated I was Christian, solely due to me not wanting Wonder Woman to be banned. Even Al-Akhbar which was okay with the visits from Israel’s Arabs (apparently it considers them to be forcibly naturalized), the mere mention of such reciprocity had them be up in flames.

Such visits from Lebanon cannot be done in hiding – as their Israeli counterpart is happening. The Lebanese state has to sign off on them to begin with, and such a thing will never happen.

Until then, let those Israeli Arabs enjoy the many convents and spectacular views that Lebanon has to offer. By the looks of it, such visits will not be lasting long now.

 

Filed under: Lebanon Tagged: Christianity, Israel, Israeli Christians, Lebanese Christians, Lebanon, politics, Religion