Lessons learned from living in the Middle East.

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly

And here we are, never a dull moment in the Middle East. The image above was originally taken in the year 2000 by yours truly, today I switched it out a bit to become a bit more "artworkish". And voila, just to be clear, I have no clue what has happened in Syria will mean, either to Syrians or Lebanese or anyone else. If anyone has a crystal ball now is the time to say what they say - because comes a point where Leila Abdullatif comes in handy you know. But funnily was just speaking to a close friend saying that "if we learned anything in the Arab World it is that it is always from bad to worse", and he answered with "and there's little we can do about it anyhow" - to which I retorted "and this too we learned".

So basically, there are two lessons: The first is that things go from bad to worse, and the second is that there's little we can do about it. So at this point we back from the macro to the micro - to handling house chores and problems and being able to afford medicine, and putting food on the table, because honestly, when did geopolitics ever do that instead of us?

Anyone who says they know what is going to happen is lying

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly (2018)

Another post with a long title. But again, I could not avoid it. I was talking offline to political scientist, a real one not one of those silly talking heads that pop up on TV and start guessing, and he said "no one knows what is happening, this will change from hour to hour" - already the seismic shock of the admission of the death of Hassan Nasrallah by Hizbollah has sent shockwaves on all fronts, not least of all internal. The repercussions of losing such a seasoned player is akin to when Rafic Hariri was assassinated in 2005, It was a puzzle whose parts were thrown in the air and now being recofigured, in a different shape, with a different picture, and same players minus one. But again, just like Hariri had a firm grip on the constituents of the state, same goes for Nasrallah.

And obviously, this begs the question - now what? Late writer John Le Carre once said "society is unconcerned with the aftermath of sensation." We are now on the front pages of newspapers, worldwide, but soon a different crisis will emerge and dethrone us. And if we are going to count on the Lebanese politicians, who have proven to care for no one but their own interests (though, truth be told, their longevity in the business might prove they are doing a good work taking care of themselves - except well, those who were assassinated) then we might be stuck in the same loop.

Because as it is half a million people have fled the south of the Lebanon occupying as many governmental schools as possible (schools which are not equipped to handle them), and - whereas a lot of people are doing splendid work on the ground distributing mattresses and food for them, already the Lebanese society is stretched to the extreme between the financial, political, and economic crash it has been facing since 2019 - not to mention the influx of Syrians who fled their own country for obvious reasons. And now we are at the gates of winter, and people's goodwill shall soon dry up.

Which brings us back to: Anyone who says they know what is going to happen is lying.

Living on the Faultline of gratitude after the earthquake

The 16th of March 1956 earthquake - artwork by Tarek Chemaly

Anyone who knows me, knows that I am not an "optimist" by any long shot.

I take the data, rationalize it, take my decision, and hope for the best. Being in Lebanon this means that it is a hit or a miss game, most of the times a miss.

In an audio that has been heavily circulating via Whatsapp in Lebanon, a voice (I am attributing it without evidence to Mrs Marleine Brax, the Director of the National Center for Geophysics in Lebanon, because the voice is knowledgeable and armed with scientific data and speaks with the humble authority of someone who knows what they are saying) goes that if the epicenter of the earthquake was Aleppo or the other side of the Faultline - meaning the Lebanese Bequa'a valley - likelihood there would not be any Lebanon to speak of today.

Imagine the devastation you are seeing on the news in Turkey. Now imagine it - again - in tiny Lebanon which is already battling corruption, inflation, poverty,  state and banks financial collapse, which has no president, only a caretaker government, and a parliament barely hanging by a thread. Oh and this is the same country which is still patching up the humongous August 2020 explosion's aftermath which is at best legally murky.

Now imagine we have on top of all this have to deal with a deadly earthquake - incredibly deadly earthquake to the tune of 10,000 or even 20,000 deaths because at this point statistics are just "numbers" being thrown in a race against time to save anyone from under the rubble.

I contacted a Syrian man I know out of politeness to see how he is faring, his long and prolonged sobs informed me of the news before he said anything. His brother, sister in law and niece are all dead - he is getting his news from a third party because he cannot travel to Turkey as he needs a special document to go in. My first sentence to him - even before the condolences - was "I have nothing smart to say to you".

At this point, I cannot go through more emotional upheavals. What I am going to say is very selfish, but sadly it is true, I have gratitude the epicenter of the earthquake was not closer to - or in - Lebanon. We are already going through a "serie noire" in Lebanon to which I cannot add anything.

On the issue that Jackie Chan is producing a film in Syria

Source

Lately, news transpired that (honorary Oscar winner) Jackie Chan is shooting a film in war-torn Syria.

Now everyone is up in arms about it.

To begin with the film is called "The Home Operation" and is about how China evacuated its nationals from Yemen in 2015. The director of the film, Song Xinyi said: "It takes the perspective of diplomats who are Communist party members, who braved a hail of bullets in a war-torn country and safely brought all Chinese compatriots on to the country’s warship unscathed.”

The film is being shot in Hajar Al Aswad - a place in Syria where in 2012 the Free Syrian Army took hold, then in 2015 the area was under the Islamic State, before being captured by government forces in 2018. Suffice to say, that the fact that China backed Bashar Al-Assad in the Syrian conflict already has everyone very mad.

Now of course, the idea of locals dressed as Yemenis, while the surrounding sets are composed of war-torn buildings, makes people queasy - without factoring the political implications (I do wonder at times, if anyone contributed to producing any film where locals are used as props - hell, this has been a mainstay in anything related to Lebanon and marketed outside of it - see here).

Let's go back a little though: To (some examples of) films produced in war-torn Lebanon. Anything from the brilliant "Beyrouth, jamais plus" (written by the late Etel Adnan, directed by also the late Jocelyne Saab), going on to the oeuvre of the late Maroun Baghdadi (Beyrouth ya Beyrouth, or - I know this is an unpopular opinion - the underwhelming Little Wars (Houroub Saghira) to the wonderful Hamasat (written and recited by Nadia Tueni)), and landing eventually to West Beirut Ziad Doueiri (which caught the post-war Beirut to shoot a film about a war-era Beirut).

Fine, I will already anticipate the criticism that these are films done by "Lebanese" directors (even if many of them built their careers outside Lebanon). So the "opportunistic" element might be missing as in the case of Chan/Syria. As a side note, and interestingly the film "Beirut" (released in 2018) was actually shot in Tangiers in Morocco (and, go figure, was criticized heavily for not looking like its namesake city).

So let me tell you about the 1981 exceptional "Circle of Deceit" by the German director Volker Schlöndorff. I shall let you read about the plot of the film here. I saw the film at a festival in Beirut and was fresh out of my army military service (therefore it must have been 1998), and its climatic ending was obvious for me for the said reason. But this did not detract from the use of Beirut and its war-porn imagery (which leads to the said ending).

Look, if you are going to say that Circle of Deceit is "unethical" for using Beirut during the war to question the ethics of its main protagonist, then we - seriously - have a lot to discuss. The film is a delight to be honest.

But here we go - again, another unpopular opinion - for production purposes, having a ready-set background of a destroyed city in a film that includes a destroyed city is budget-cutting heaven. 

From what I hear, the inhabitants of Talooine (yes, that's from Star Wars) are having issues about their city being shot in Tunisia at the time. 

Har har.

Or wait, that was Jar Jar (sorry :) )... 

The current Ukrainian crisis showed that some refugees are more equal than others

Source: The Art Of Boo

Moustafa Byoumi wrote a brilliant article in The Guardian lately (please read here) whereby he detailed how "racist" the coverage of Ukraine is. Of course, by now, many of us are familiar with CBS News foreign correspondent Charlie D'Agata masterpiece of journalism when he uttered live on air (about Ukraine), that it "isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen" - now of course, when Mesopotamia was a civilization, I am not sure what the rest of the world was.

Let me give you this other story, when trying to save almost extinct species, human beings - when interviewed - wanted to allocate more money towards species with anthropomorphic features. Anthropomorphism is that quality where the animal species has much more "resemblance" to the humans. And even the title of this post is a paraphrasing of George Orwell's "all animals are equal, some more equal than others". I am not directly comparing almost extinct animal species to refugees, but sadly the comparison does stand on the ground.

I have previously detailed the one-sided love between Lebanon and France (please look here). But this is just a small example of how hard it is for a Lebanese to get a visa to Europe. Lebanon has hosted, per capita, the highest amount of Syrian refugees in the world. When Europe was squabbling about a thousand here and there, we had more than 2 million (the latest figures still indicate 1.5 million if you want to know). Even inside Lebanon, the Damour massacre has displaced so many people who still did not go back to their original villages. 

Actually, Christian Lebanese always had this fallacy in their head, that Europe wants them. It would welcome them with open arms. But of course, these are the same people who never tried to apply to a Schengen visa - last time I did it took 60 papers. 60. Papers. I can tell you stories about how embassies treated me (at the time I was teaching at a university, with two full passports filled with stamps and visas and still, they made it incredibly hard to get the visa. Small example: I asked (backed by papers) to get a multiple entry visa. I got one. For how long? 4 weeks! When did finish? One day before Christmas! So it was impossible to actually spend the holidays in Europe even if then I was loaded with money).

But all this to tell you, no - as Lebanese, Syrians, Afghans we are not so welcome to Europe. Of course, just to be clear, considering I grew up in a war, all these sights from Ukraine bother me immensely (and yes, they trigger flashbacks for me). But whereas the whole world rallies around Ukraine (and rightfully so), when all this was happening in Palestine, no one moved a muscle.

Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph put it as succinctly as possible when talking about Ukrainians, "(they) watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts" - you hear that Lebanese "influencers"?