I have a few questions for anyone still aggressively drumming up support for Hezb, clapping along to the speeches, and doing free PR for a militia that has systematically driven Lebanon off a cliff: How many times do they need to fail before you pause, wipe the saliva off your lips, and reconsider your position?

Let’s do a quick inventory from 2006 to today. The historic pager blunder was just the freshest humiliation in an endless rap sheet of self-owns. Before that: invading Syrian towns, a long trail of political assassinations continuing up to the August 4 Port blast witnesses, the violent coercion of every state institution, drug smuggling, and gang rule through underlings like Michel Aoun.

They’ve dictated every critical decision by the barrel of a gun, while the rest of the ruling class acted as compliant junior partners taking their cut. Not a single one of them has clean hands. Killon ya3ne killon.

If Hezb were an employee at your company, they would have been fired, sued, and escorted out by security twenty years ago. Zero competence. Zero strategic vision. Endless failures. An utter ethical vacuum relishing in cruelty and violence. Yet here you are, rationalizing the decay even after every single promise crumbles—from “invading the Galilee” to refusing to surrender the Ali Taher heights, only to hand them to the IDF in the ultimate betrayal of the Lebanese people, all just to protect their weapons cache.

The “Porter” Slur and Cheap Class Politics

Lately, a crop of pathetic online propagandists has latched onto a deeply revealing talking point: “If it weren’t for the Party, you would all still be working as porters (3attaleen) carrying sacks at the Beirut Port!”

First: what kind of elitist garbage is that? Since when is honest, working-class labor an insult? It is infinitely more dignified to break your back earning an honest living at the port than to be a mercenary butchering civilians in Syria or Iraq for the Assad and Iranian regimes. And if working at the port offended you so much, did you have to store your ammonium nitrate there and vaporize half the city?

Second, this victimhood mythology acts as though marginalization is exclusive to one sect. Have you ever set foot in Akkar? Tripoli? Hermel, Minyeh, or any rural periphery lacking basic infrastructure? We are all getting royally screwed by the same rotten sectarian machinery, but only one militia uses it to coerce the country into submission at gunpoint. If Tripoli produced armed drug cartels and cross-border mercenaries, state security forces would crush them overnight. Hezb gets a pass solely through violence, backed by enforcers like Gebran Bassil looking away for fresh dollars to build tacky chalets.

Drop the charade of solidarity. Hezb’s own ecosystem drips with toxic classism. The elite party brass from Southern strongholds don’t view the people of the Bekaa and Hermel as equals—they are cannon fodder for Iran’s meat grinder, sent to die so Southern leaders can negotiate geopolitical leverage from secure villas and civilian hotels.

You Aren’t Iran’s Partners. You’re The Sopranos Meme.

Every time disaster strikes, the fanboys puff their chests: “Who else is going to protect our dignity?”

What dignity? Entire Southern villages are reduced to rubble from Ali Taher to Nabatieh. The Israelis are erecting checkpoints and dictating terms on Lebanese soil, exactly like the Syrian occupation did for decades.

If you’ve watched The Sopranos, you know the scene where Paulie Walnuts thinks he’s an indispensable insider because Johnny Sack strokes his ego: “Carmine loves you, Paulie.” Then Paulie runs into Carmine Lupertazzi at a wedding, smiles, and Carmine hits him with a cold, blank stare: “Who the fuck are you?”

That is Hezb’s relationship with Tehran. You genuinely believe the Islamic Republic will halt the global economy for Nabatieh? You think the IRGC won’t trade you for pocket change and sanctions relief the second it suits them? Iran has over 89 million people; Lebanon doesn’t even have 5 million. How many of us have died compared to them?

Lebanese youth are fed into the meat grinder to buy time for Iranian diplomats. You aren’t strategic partners. You are valet parking attendants holding their coats and shining their shoes—the exact manual labor you mock to justify abusing the rest of us, all as payback for an era when you weren’t ruling by decree from tunnels.

The “State Neglect” Lie

Then comes the most exhausted excuse: “The Lebanese state abandoned us, so we had to build our own resistance!”

Cut the bullshit. You were the state the moment Bashar al-Assad was forced to withdraw and left you holding the keys.

Since 2005, nothing has happened in Lebanon without Hezb’s explicit green light. When you weren’t running cabinet ministries directly, your hand-picked puppets were. Who shielded Riad Salameh for decades to facilitate illicit financial networks and launder drug money? Who provided political cover to the banking cartels while Lebanese depositors were robbed blind? Who dispatched thugs to beat women and children during the October 2019 uprising?

Look at the 2006 Mar Mikhael Agreement: Michel Aoun kneeling to Hassan Nasrallah in a church, trading national sovereignty for presidential motorcades. Look at Gebran Bassil grinning like a schoolboy next to a gifted rocket. That corrupt alliance ruled Lebanon for fifteen years, dismantling institutions, gutting the economy, assassinating opponents, and engineering the collapse we are circling today.

You cannot set fire to the house, lock the fire department outside, and then cry that nobody put out the flames. And you certainly don’t get to demand keeping the very rockets and drones that completely failed to keep Israel out. Why keep them? To terrorize your own neighbors and relive the May 7 invasion of Beirut?

Rejecting the False Binary

Whenever this reality is laid bare, apologists scurry to their favorite false dichotomy: “If you criticize the resistance, you side with the Zionists.”

Spare me. Both are vile curses on this region.

Despising Israel for its brutal apartheid, its assault on Palestinians, and its historic violations of Lebanon doesn’t mean ignoring the internal rot that left us entirely defenseless. An entire generation had its future stolen under the boot of a militia that treats the Israeli threat as a permanent hall pass to crush dissent and destroy the country from within. That is another reason Israel is such a problem: Hezb always used it as an excuse to keep abusing Lebanon and the Lebanese.

Notice how quiet the southern border was when Hezb operated as Bashar al-Assad’s private death squad? If Israel was always hellbent on invading regardless of provocation, it had years to do so while tens of thousands of your fighters were bogged down in Qusayr and Aleppo. Remember when Hezb shipped ISIS fighters, the ones who slaughtered Lebanese soldiers, across the border in air-conditioned buses just to swap for their own captured goons? I do.

That truth shatters the fantasy, which is why it panics every propagandist in your ranks. You’re ashamed of the horrors committed in Syria, humiliated that you lost, and terrified that the Syrian people might one day extract revenge for what you and Iran did to them for over a decade.

Spare us the lectures on honor. Stop lying to the Lebanese public, and stop lying to yourselves. For once, look at the devastation around you and take some damn responsibility.

And fuck off.

I walked out of the Regal Cinema theaters downtown DC. It was past midnight, so the WMATA metro was already closed for the day. I was gonna have to bike it back home. As I turn towards the descending escalator, wondering if I should throw my leftover popcorn or try to bike home with it somehow, a bolt of lighting went up my spine and hugged my face with a familiar numbness.

It was an ad for Toy Story 5.

My eyes welled up with tears. It’s been three months since my father died. I remember it well, thirty years ago, just after my sixth birthday. It still is one of my earliest, and fondest, memories with my father. He took me to the premiere of original Toy Story. We were living in Kuwait back then, right after I was born in Lebanon.

I still remember how excited he was about 3D animated movies. The light in his eyes. He rarely was this excited about something, much less a CG movie about toys. He wasn’t very expressive. I take that from him. He told me how much work and effort and talent it took. How cool it was we were able to go watch it. How talented and groundbreaking the animators were.

My father was a graphic designer, and I remember sitting on his lap as he clicked away on his trackball mouse on a bootlegged Photoshop 5.5 on our loud Pentium 3 powered desktop hooked up to a Chinese UPS so his work doesn’t disappear with every power cut in Lebanon.

You never expect when the grief will bubble up, and I will not spend this article telling you about it and how to deal with it. I want to write this to reflect a bit about my feelings having not been able to see him IRL for the past 6 years after having to escape Lebanon.

When I last saw him, hours before the first flight to depart after a COVID lockdown re-opened Beirut’s airport, that thought was in the back of my mind, that he might pass away before I saw him again. I quickly dismissed it though, because my grandparents had lived into their late 90s, and I told myself I’d see him again, that this situation in Lebanon can’t last forever, and I will be able to go home and see him again without a military tribunal summons and death threats I had caused on with my loudmouthed Instagram account and more sober blog posts.

That didn’t happen, and instead, I had to sit with my mother and sister, and watch his funeral, with the photo I picked for him, on his casket, on St John’s Zgharta’s YouTube channel. I couldn’t even go back home for the funeral. Couldn’t take his casket to his tomb. Couldn’t hug my aunt who was with him in his final moments.

There’s so many questions I run through these days. Were all the decisions I took the right ones? Was it worth it? Was he proud of me? Was he angry I abandoned him after dodging illegal detention and the attempts on my life became too much? Was he upset the Lebanese security forces harassed him in our hometown when they couldn’t find me in Beirut, and went up to Ehden to deliver my summons to him, and he told them to fuck off?

Did he think in those final moments, I wish I could have seen my son again? Could I have done anything to stop this? Was there something I could have done differently? But those are the wrong questions to ask. And I can never know the answers to for sure.

My dad was the life of every party and dinner we went to. Distant relatives and second cousins would line up to hear his crazy stories about living in the US as a young man. They loved his crass, irreverent humor. He was loud, and his laughter was almost as loud as his sneezes.

It was rare to see him without his pipe, and the ritual he would perform each time he had to clean the bowl, and reload his tobacco: Dunhill’s Early Morning, the round aluminum blue box with a rooster crowing. So few people smoked pipes, that the tobacco was hard to get in Lebanon. Only one tobacco shop would sell them somewhere in Jounieh, and looking back, I remember those trips fondly now. He made sure I never smoked a pipe, and to this day I still haven’t (cigarettes have been my bane). I tried to find his pipe tobacco here in the States, just to smell it, but I’ve had no luck yet. Most smoke shops here are now just disposable vapes and Kratom bottles. If any of you ever find some, please let me know.

Life’s circumstances meant that as an adult, I saw him much less, and we were rarely in the same country at the same time. Some years, we barely talked, but since coming to the States, I, like millions of Lebanese in every corner of the globe, talked to him on WhatsApp almost every day. Short calls, nothing major, but he was a person I called with good (and bad) news I had. Even today, I find myself grabbing my phone to call him when newsworthy things happen to tell him, then realize that I can’t anymore.

Many times the past year, I found my life thrown into ruins after spending painstaking years trying to build something in my life in exile. My old life in Lebanon continued, just without me in it. Slowly, I accepted I had to move on too, like my old life did.

Then, I got laid off from a job I loved in the humanitarian field and could actually help NGOs do some good in such a cruel world, but when administrations changed, that entire sector was killed overnight. I was in a loving, committed a relationship I thought was progressing to something more serious, abruptly and unexpectedly ended. Calls with him had helped navigate those moments. His notorious sense of humor that made me cringe as a child, was now a welcome relief. He helped me realize a lot of the things that I felt were major, were actually nothing. He had a habit of poking fun and teasing you if you thought something was so important, when really, big picture, it wasn’t.

Today, after rebuilding a little bit of the life that has been shattered more times than I can count, I am in a better place, mentally, physically, health-wise. I also remembered, slowly, the person I was before the 2019 Thawra turned me into a crude caricature, a vessel of the mood on the street, my only priority and focus for many months if not years. Looking back, I relish every moment and would do it all over again. But, I also understand now the cost I had to pay. I always knew what it could cost, but it takes a while to actually make peace with the extent, and I think it’s worth it for a free, non-sectarian Lebanon I can be proud of. The cost was never seeing my father again before his sudden death, out of the blue, 7 timezones, a Mediterranean sea and an Ataltinc ocean away.

Now I read more. I say yes to things I wouldn’t have before. I accepted parts of myself and others that I had just tucked away and ignored instead of understand, adapt and accept.

But the questions still linger when I am alone with my thoughts on an Amtrak or an L train that’s being held up for “police activity” in the tunnel under the East River where my Google Fi reception cuts off. Should I have just skirted under the radar, rode under the wave and not decided to throw myself into it fully? I now know the answer: No. I see now what we all did was one step in a long road, and looking back, I see how far we’ve all come. But also, how an impossibly long way to go we still have.

It is not my turn anymore. Already younger men and women are doing far better than I could ever dream, and I look up to them and admire their wisdom and tenacity. I will always be here to support, counsel or boost, but I am no longer in Lebanon and I am no longer on the front lines, and don’t plan on being if I have a say in the decision.

I wasn’t sure why I was writing this exactly. It took many weeks to finish. I usually blurt out things stream-of-conscious style and publish immediately, never taking so much time to finish an article. I was impatient like that. I still am most days.

As I type these final words sitting in an unassuming building of NYPL, one of my favorite hidden gems in NYC just across the street from Bryant Park in Midtown, it became clear why. I have never been a good painter, like my unrivaled and loving mother Grace, a lifelong painter and artist that gave me my love for art, beauty and creating, as well as all the good things in me. I am not as strong, compassionate and emotionally well-rounded as my kickass sister Amanda. I am not good at music, or sports, or maths. One thing I love though, and always have, is writing. I wanted to write to memorialize my father, who I called John/Pap but others knew as Hanna, Jean or Jacomo depending on when he came into your life during his 73 years on this Earth.

I am also writing this to say that I am retiring from writing on Lebanon. My father’s passing feels like the last tether I had, has been cut.

I am not there to tap into the reality on the ground, and I find myself struggling to make sense of the current situation we find ourselves in, and can’t imagine myself going back anytime soon. I don’t want to leave this hanging. I will write more about my new life here, but after 16 years of writing about Lebanon, it’s time to stop.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for everything you all gave me since 2010. I wouldn’t trade that for anything else in the world, and it made me the man I am today. One I know my father would have been proud of.

To those lucky enough to have known him, and those who didn’t, but still wrapped me and my family with so much love and affection to ease the pain, thank you. To anyone dealing with grief, I feel you. I don’t hate it as much anymore, as painful as it can be sometimes. It is a part of the person we love that has left us, that stays with you. I don’t know who said this or where I read it, and I don’t wanna look it up right now, so forgive me. It goes something like, we die twice, when our heart stops and brain quiets, and a second time when the last person who remembers us dies too. That’s how I feel now when the tears well up at a red light, or when something reminds of what I have lost. The parts of him I have in me, the good and bad, are still alive as long as I am.

With love,
Gino

The last photo we have together, courtesy of my dad’s life long best friend, Mazen.

The “Entrepreneurs” and The 7arboo2s

A big part of my career has been fighting against the Free Patriotic Movement, the “Aounists.” After a brief moment in my teenage years when I was mesmerized by their “progressive” orange plan in the 2005 elections, I quickly got disenchanted when Michel Aoun sold his soul to Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah in 2006, right after the first elections following the end of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, five years after Israel’s occupation. Many in the anti-Syrian occupation camp allied themselves with Hezbollah and other Syrian occupation collaborators. As someone who went down to protest on March 14, 2005 with my family, and even my beloved late dog Titan, it felt like a betrayal. Only days before, Hezbollah and other Syrian assets had staged their own protest to “thank” the Assad regime for 29 years of brutal, humiliating occupation, rivaled only by Israel’s.

The Aounists were the only ones who hadn’t allied themselves with Hezbollah, and I was excited about them. I was born after Michel Aoun ran away to France and abandoned his supporters and family, who were subsequently crushed by the Assad regime, so I didn’t know enough about the man’s failures and damage. To me, he was just the only one who seemed not to have betrayed what had motivated an entire people on March 14, 2005, when enough pressure was built to eject the foreign army whose checkpoint I had to pass every Sunday on the way to my hometown in Ehden.

On February 6, 2006, the Mar Mikhail “Maronite wedding” between Aoun and Nasrallah took place, not even a year after the election in which Aoun had run against the so-called elite sectarian parties aligned with Hezbollah. Those elites, mind-bogglingly, included Saad Hariri, whose father had been assassinated by Hezbollah and Assad months before he capitulated to Hezbollah and effectively anointed them the successor to the security state the Syrian occupation had left behind. That assassination was the moment the regime had clearly crossed a line and pushed so many of us into the streets. Not out of personal devotion to Hariri, but because a car bomb cannot be the way our lives are governed. Enough.

That betrayal by what was called March 14, followed by the betrayal of the FPM, cemented my political beliefs. I realized none of what was on offer represented me, not even remotely, and I knew I wasn’t the only one. Looking back, these were all small steps on the road to October 17, 2019. But I digress. When the FPM got into power on Hezbollah’s back, they proved to be just as bad, if not worse, than the rest. It became painfully clear how blatantly corrupt, incompetent, and most importantly, cruel they were.

One of my relatives, whom I am no longer in contact with, remained a die-hard Aounist. Even when I was being illegally detained, she still supported the disgraced and reviled Gebran Bassil. In one heated conversation, she let the mask slip, and I finally understood the mindset behind supporting someone who had demonstrably made all our lives worse. She said something along the lines of, “Berri and Junblat and Hariri have been stealing for decades. Now it’s our turn.”

That statement was problematic on so many levels. The most obvious was the sectarian angle. Christians in Lebanon were largely left out of the post–Civil War spoils. After being the pre-war elites, the resentment never really subsided. You can see it in the obsession with Bashir Gemayel to this day, the “if only” refrain that many right-wing Christians use to explain why the country is helpless and unreformable because of one assassination among so many. To her, the naked corruption of the Aounists was payback, or at least finally getting a piece of the cake after years of operating in the shadows of the Syrian occupation and its local collaborators. Electricity was coming on for fewer hours. The country was collapsing. Yet she was happy that Gebran Bassil could buy tailored suits and shoes with lifted soles, even as her life savings vanished.

It’s a zero-sum mindset I keep seeing in both Lebanon and the United States: when a once-privileged group feels that a once-oppressed group doing better is a threat to them, instead of something that could make society better for everyone.

Then the word “7arboo2” (حربوق) popped into my head and started flashing. It’s a Levantine Arabic term used in Lebanon and Syria to describe someone exceptionally clever, sharp-witted, and street-smart. It often carries the sense of someone mischievous or sneaky, always one step ahead, blending intelligence with a sly edge. Looking back, it connects closely to the “Ma T3isha” idea I wrote about last year. A problematic idea in our society, where the slyness and shamelessness of ripping people off is framed as a positive trait, even an admirable one.

That’s when you realize how deeply naked, unchecked capitalism dominates our psyches, to the point that someone who can extract capital from a captive population and then flaunt the wealth hoarded from other people’s labor is seen as aspirational. It’s not that different from the United States’ obsession with billionaires who spend fortunes building bunkers for an apocalypse they believe is coming, instead of using even a fraction of that wealth to address the very conditions that make them feel the need for private islands and underground shelters when late-stage capitalism finally buckles.

That relative couldn’t even imagine a world where Bassil might have actually done something in the public interest instead of building his entire identity around “protecting the sect’s rights,” when in reality it was only his offshore bank accounts getting protection. Meanwhile, his tayfeh declined even further under his father-in-law’s presidency, just like every other tayfeh, except for the tiny circle of elites from each sect who continued to thrive. It was the worst blend of capitalism and feudalism, the za3ims and their peasants, repackaged as “sect survival” while the country hollowed out around them.

Seen through Mark Fisher’s lens, what we were living was not just corruption or sectarianism, but a failure of imagination carefully cultivated over decades. Capitalist realism shrinks the political horizon until extraction feels inevitable. The “7arboo2” becomes aspirational, the za3im becomes unavoidable, and the idea of public good starts to sound like a children’s fantasy. When people say “at least it’s our turn,” they are not defending obvious theft as much as admitting they cannot picture a system that doesn’t revolve around it.

Even after decades of blaming Israel and Syria as the reason nothing works and why we “can’t have nice things,” the Aounists and the rest of the sectarian elite never dared to deviate from that exploitative occupier mindset. They kept it exactly the same, just without the occupation excuse to soften the blow anymore.

That is the real damage. Not just our stolen money or crumbled institutions, but a collective surrender to the idea that this is the only way things can function. And once that belief settled in, decline stopped feeling like a policy choice that can change, but instead like a fate we’re all doomed to.

Conclusion

But if capitalist realism is a failure of imagination, then resistance has to begin there too.

Mark Fisher didn’t argue that capitalism is literally unbeatable. He argued that it convinces us it is. The spell works by narrowing what feels possible. So breaking it does not start with some grand utopian blueprint. It starts with rejecting the zero-sum lie. Rejecting the idea that politics is just organized theft. Rejecting the idea that public good is childish.

In Lebanon, that means refusing to see the state as a carcass to be divided among tayfehs, and instead as something that can actually function for everyone. It means building and supporting networks that already operate outside the za3im logic: mutual aid, independent unions, civic coalitions, cross-sectarian movements like October 17 that briefly cracked the illusion and showed people they were not alone. It means insisting that electricity, water, banking, justice are not sectarian spoils but baseline rights.

In New York City, and across the United States, it means refusing the billionaire bunker fantasy. It means pushing back against the idea that housing, healthcare, and education are luxuries in the richest city in the world. It means organizing tenants, strengthening labor, supporting public institutions, and making solidarity feel more practical than hoarding. The same imagination that tells a Lebanese voter “at least it’s our turn” tells an American worker “that’s just how the market works.” Both can be unlearned.

Fisher wrote about “cracks” in capitalist realism, moments when the inevitability flickers and something else becomes thinkable. We’ve seen those cracks. In the streets of Beirut in 2019. In union drives across the US. In communities that choose cooperation over competition, even when the system rewards the opposite. During Zohran Mamdani’s historic campaign, defeating the Republicans, Democratic establishment, the billionaires and zionists, by listening to people, then talking to them honestly and working with them on creating a platform, instead of letting DC think tanks and consultants do that work and then use comms people to try to sell it to the voters with doublespeak and PR.

The point is not naïve optimism. It is disciplined imagination. To insist that decline is not destiny. That corruption is not culture. That sectarianism is not nature. That capitalism, especially in its most predatory form, is not gravity.

If the sickness was believing there is no alternative, then the cure begins by acting as if there is. Not abstractly, but locally. In how we vote. In how we organize. In who we platform. In what we normalize. In how we refuse to admire the “7arboo2” and instead admire the person who builds something durable and shared.

That is how you break the spell. Not by waiting for the system to collapse, but by practicing, in Lebanon, in New York, and beyond, the world you want to make possible. It’ll never happen if we don’t work for it, whether it’s in our homes, at the office, school or community at large.

This week, Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem declared: “When Trump threatens Khamenei, it’s our duty to confront this threat.” Qassem, the only top-level Hezbollah figure not killed during the militia’s failed decade-plus campaign in Syria to support Bashar al-Assad, said this after Hezbollah launched its catastrophic “support front” war against Israel, lost badly, and signed an agreement to disarm and retreat.

This comes just weeks after Hezbollah sent some of its remaining fighters to assist the IRGC in brutally killing Iranian citizens protesting their dire living conditions. Meanwhile, Israel has not stopped striking areas across Lebanon, especially the South and the Bekaa, where hundreds of thousands of homes remain in ruins as Hezbollah attempts to renege on what it agreed to under last year’s ceasefire.

During this entire Israeli campaign, over 300 Lebanese have been killed since Hezbollah agreed to the ceasefire. Hezbollah’s response has not been to protect Lebanese lives, but to threaten fellow Lebanese, scramble to maintain its once iron-clad grip on the country, and try, unsuccessfully, to smuggle briefcases of cash from Iran’s foreign minister every couple of months. Not a single peep from Naim Qassem about the dead, except to blame the Lebanese government, which had no say in Hezbollah’s war and no say in what Hezbollah agreed to with Israel after its worst miscalculation in a long series of astounding miscalculations since 2000. A streak so disastrous that Hassan Nasrallah, in a rare moment of honesty, admitted after the 2006 war he triggered by kidnapping Israeli soldiers: “If I had known, I wouldn’t have.”

Let’s pause and reflect on what this actually means. Hezbollah does not give two shits if hundreds or thousands of Lebanese are killed by Israel. But it sends fighters to kill Iranians in a heartbeat, and eagerly drags Lebanon toward a possible U.S. attack on Iran by insisting it will join the fight to defend Khamenei, all while its leaders hide in holes and wag their fingers at Lebanese trying to move past the dark decades of Hezbollah hegemony after the fall of Assad and Nasrallah’s assassination by Israel.

This is precisely why Hezbollah’s outsized influence in Lebanon must be reined in, decisively and without illusion. A group that treats Lebanese lives as expendable while rushing to defend the Iranian regime and murder Iranian civilians is not a resistance movement, a political party, or a protector of Lebanon. It is a foreign-controlled militia that sees Lebanon as a staging ground, not a country.

As Maya Angelou famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Hezbollah has shown us exactly who it is, over and over again. It showed us in Syria, in Iran, in Lebanon’s ruined South and Bekaa, and in every war it drags the country into without consent or accountability.

As long as Hezbollah operates above the state, makes war without consent, signs agreements without accountability, and threatens Lebanese who dare to move on, Lebanon will remain trapped in a cycle of destruction it did not choose. As Joseph Aoun tries to buy time and leans on meaningless slogans of “dialogue” with Hezbollah, we risk falling into a deeper hole than the one Hezbollah dug beneath our cities, towns, and villages, while never building a single shelter for the people it claims to defend.

Hezbollah hates the Lebanese people. It especially hates those who support it, who have paid the highest price. When they die, Qassem is silent. But when his daddy Khamenei is threatened, Qassem jumps to attention. Is this who we want ruling us? Someone with such contempt for our lives and livelihoods? Is this what some still believe will protect us from Israel, when Israel attacks Lebanon daily and Hezbollah is busy sending its death squads to the streets of Tehran?

Shame on us for letting such a wretched group rule us for so long. And shame on us if we do not shed this hegemony once and for all before it is too late.

Virus Hunters — Amy Cherrix ★★★★★

I feel like all of us try to push the dark memory of the COVID pandemic into the depths of our minds. We avoid it at all cost. We keep the expired COVID test kits in our medicine cabinet just in case. Our nostrils itchy remembering those swabs that felt like removing your brain via your nose to get mummified in Ancient Egypt. But, we need to understand this period more, and this book was a toure de force of recording the history of Project Warp speed that developed the vaccines, step-by-step, meeting by meeting. For me, it was also eye-opening, to understand that Trump’s unorthodox approach was instrumental in getting through red tape quick, but also that scientists had been preparing for decades and were able to quickly come together and adapt it for this virus. It gives names to those nameless heroes. It also showed me how science and public health and politics are very different. Today, instead of being proud of Warp Speed, the current administratio…

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Merry Christmas y’all. I hope you spent it with people you love, exchanged gifts you meant, and maybe helped someone who is having a harder time than you in this late stage capitalist circus we all pretend is normal.

Today’s post is one I decided to pen after a delightful interaction I had with my regular 7-Eleven guy. After paying, he asked me, “Do you celebrate Christmas?” I said of course, who doesn’t? He replied, “Muslims maybe?”

That is when my early schooling years growing up in Kuwait and learning about the Quran came in handy. I told him there is a whole chapter in the Quran about Mary, Maryam, and that Muslims believe in Jesus’ immaculate conception too. Same God/Allah included. Why would Muslims not celebrate Christmas?

My 7-Eleven guy is an Ethiopian immigrant, and apparently another customer had given him grief for saying Merry Christmas to them. After this exchange, he smiled, dabbed me up, and I was on my way. On the drive home, I remembered all the cringe memes and reels s…

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This time was no different, except instead of a civil war, it was a war Hezbollah launched, and lost, against Israel.

Israel is preparing another assault on Lebanon. That’s perhaps one of the things people were most grateful about the Pope’s visit: it would make Israel hold off from its daily bombing raids.

Hezbollah is under pressure internationally, regionally, and domestically over its military role and the growing perception that its decisions no longer reflect Lebanese consensus, as if they ever did.

Into this moment walked Pope Leo XIV. And Hezbollah tried to scramble.

The Attempt to Attach Itself to the Visit

From the moment the visit was announced, Hezbollah moved quickly to ensure it would not be symbolically sidelined. Scouts appeared in strategic locations. Party-adjacent media figures began packaging the visit as an implicit validation of “Lebanese resilience.” Influencers aligned with Hezbollah attempted to weave the event into a narrative of coexistence, national unity, and mutual respect that goes against how Hezbollah treats its own supporters, much less those it disagrees with.

The motivation was obvious: At a time when the party faces increasing isolation politically, diplomatically, and within large swathes of Lebanese society, it could not afford for the Pope’s presence to appear as anything other than inclusive of all Lebanese spheres, including its own.

But the moment, and the Pope, didn’t play along. Just like he shut down Queen Rania of Jordan’s shameful comment caught on a hot mic, trying to discourage him from visiting Lebanon.

The Pope’s Message Was Unambiguous

When Pope Leo XIV explicitly called on all armed actors, including Hezbollah, to put their weapons down and return authority to the state, it punctured the party’s attempt to appropriate the visit.

It was not framed as an attack, nor as a sectarian statement. It was framed as a simple principle: a functional country cannot have competing armies.

It is the same message repeated by every international body, every constitutional scholar in Lebanon, and every person not aligned with Hezbollah. But coming from the Pope, on Lebanese soil, during a moment of acute regional tension, it carried a moral clarity that Hezbollah could not easily absorb or ignore. It meant that they can’t stop skirting what they agreed to after losing a battle they instigated.

And so, the failed counter-narrative began almost instantly.

The Disingenuous Counterargument

Within hours, Hezbollah-affiliated influencers launched a coordinated line of reasoning: If Catholics can follow the Pope, why can’t Hezbollah follow Ali Khamenei?

Presented as a question of religious freedom, it was a textbook reframing tactic, shifting the conversation away from military decision-making and national sovereignty toward cultural and sectarian equivalence.

But the equivalence breaks down immediately.

Catholics following the Pope concerns doctrine, faith, and personal belief.
Hezbollah following Khamenei concerns decisions of war, peace, and national security, matters that directly affect the entire Lebanese population, regardless of sect, belief, or political position.

Lebanon does not pay the price of alleged Catholic obedience to the Vatican (I say alleged because remember, the Lebanese church and right wing mouthpieces still defend convicted child molester priest Mansur Labaki, even after the Vatican convicted him and defrocked him, along with the French courts).

However, Lebanon does repeatedly pay the price of Hezbollah’s military obedience to a foreign state and the Ayatollah’s wishes for better negotiating positions.

Attempting to merge the two is not only inaccurate, it is a deliberate attempt to obscure the core issue, and not even Hezbollah’s influencers take it seriously because of how disingenuous it is.

Lebanon’s Structural Reality

Lebanon’s crisis is not about religious authority or coexistence. Despite Hezbollah’s constant and aggressive attempts to reduce the entire Shia community to just Hezb, the reality is that that is not true, not by a longshot, especially after Hezbollah’s defeat and its decision to stand against the October 17, 2019 uprising that started in areas and neighborhoods Hezb claims to own.

The current crisis is about monopoly of force.

It is about whether a state can function when an armed group retains the ability to unilaterally start or end conflicts with a neighboring entity.

And it is about the democratic impossibility of a political system in which one actor is not accountable to the institutions the rest of the population must live under.

The Pope’s statement, then, was not an attack but a reiteration of a principle that any sovereign country requires: a single, unified authority over weapons and war that is democratically controlled, not with Hezb car bombs and militias ineffective against Israel, but very effective against unarmed Lebanese who don’t bend the knee.

No rhetorical pivot can change that.

Why Hezbollah’s Narrative Fell Flat

Hezbollah misread the room. Badly. It is so stuck in its past glory days, it is incapable of doing anything else.

Lebanese exhaustion has reached a level where symbolic gestures no longer land. That includes segments of society Hezb considers “theirs”. The population has lived through a collapsed banking sector, a hollowed-out state, rolling blackouts, border clashes, drone strikes, and the constant threat of escalation and none of which they chose.

So when the Pope called for disarmament, most Lebanese heard something they have long wanted themselves.

And when Hezbollah tried to reframe the visit as an issue of religious double standards, the response, across the digital public sphere, was muted at best, dismissive at worst. Their pick-me energy that was more cringe than believable.

There is a growing understanding that Lebanon can no longer carry the weight of a permanent militia structure that makes decisions on behalf of millions who did not consent to those decisions.

What the Visit Ultimately Revealed

The Pope did not shift Lebanese political dynamics. He did not broker a new consensus. He did not break Hezbollah’s entrenched position.

I don’t believe carrying the Vatican flag along with a Nasrallah photo is sincere, it’s just to say, “See?! Look how tolerant we are! Now, let’s forget we agreed to disarm after we lost the war we started, and give us some slack for this performative stuff to try to bask in the coverage the Pope’s visit brings.”

In that sense, the Pope’s message landed exactly where it needed to. Not as a command. Not as a condemnation. But as a reminder.

That Lebanon cannot survive indefinitely with its sovereignty held hostage to parallel structures, not even ones that portray themselves as guardians of national dignity, when that has never been the case.

In that clarity, many Lebanese found something rare: An articulation of the obvious, delivered without fear and platitudes meant to waste time, hoping that some miracle that will never come, will help Hezbollah get back to its peak, which even they know is never gonna happen again.

Hezbollah got where it is by turning politics into a racket. They keep weapons and networks that answer one central authority in Tehran, never the Lebanese State. They trade alleged safety for coerced silence. They deliver services in areas where the state can barely show up, but those services come with conditions. Ask a politician or a journalist to push back and you see how the system closes around you. Or how a car bomb t-bones your car when Nasrallah ordered the hit. The message is constant and simple. Shut up, or you will be charred pieces, a message to anyone thinking of anything but kneeling at the feet of the Iranian commanded group.

This is not theory. It is daily life in Lebanon. You hear it in cancelled meetings, in the sudden absence of a candidate, in a neighborhood that once had multitudes of ideas, but now has only empty slogans of obedience. You see it in the informal taxes, the jobs that only go to people who know which side to kneel to, the threats that arrive by silenced guns or by tire slashed at night. The vocabulary is not only violence. It is control. It is power exercised in the smallest interactions so you learn to preempt the risk of public friction. You force someone who dared speak out against injustice, to go on TV and apologize and grovel for forgiveness after the dreaded “sa7soo7”.

When Hezbollah took its model across the border into Syria, it did not bring a different version of itself. It brought the same blueprint. Proximity to the state was used to justify intervention. Loyalty to an axis was used to excuse brutality. What looked like solidarity on paper translated into checkpoints, patrols, and forced displacement on the ground. The same ethic that says, “We defend the people” too often read as, “We decide what happens to people.”

So now consider the recent episode. A decision is made, not by the state, not after debate, not with any clear mandate, but by a single actor who holds enough muscle to make choices for everyone when their handler in Iran wants a better bargaining chip with the West. That actor opens a front. The consequences are immediate and national. Homes are destroyed. Lives are shredded. Borders shift. The economy, already reduced to a husk under Hezbollah’s hegemony, takes another massive blow. Civilians bear the largest cost. Lebanon, already hollowed by corruption and mismanagement, takes another gut punch while it was already down.

And then the rhetoric flips. The sounds you hear change from orders to laments. Suddenly the same people who shut down debate call for national unity. They claim victimhood. They ask to be exalted and refuse any self reflection or criticism by supposed partners. They expect the country to put aside the logic of accountability and reach for a shared blanket called solidarity. They do this while the country is still paying for the chaos they created.

There are several angles to unpack here, and none of them are flattering to the party asking for sympathy. First, there is the ethical problem. If you impose catastrophe on people who never agreed to it, you owe them more than rhetoric. You owe them restitution. You owe them explanation and a political process that makes future unilateral choices impossible. Asking for sympathy without offering reparations is a moral failure.

Second, there is the political problem. Forgiveness without change is permission. If the state and society make a habit of absolving destructive unilateralism, then we fossilize the pattern. That’s what got us in the mess we’re currently in. The next time the calculus tips toward confrontation, the incentives are there. The apparatus that produced this war will be free to try again because the political cost is low and the social price is manageable for them. That is the opposite of deterrence.

Third, there is the practical problem. Who carries the bill? The families who must move. The farmers who cannot get their crops to market. The small business that counted on a summer season and lost it. The country’s public finances, already fragile, will be called upon to rebuild roads, fix electricity, and support displaced people. The social contract is being taxed to pay for decisions not made collectively. That is not solidarity. It is socialization of a private militia’s failure.

Now the group layers on performative grief. You see the speeches. You see the tents. You see appeals to identity and ancient wounds. There is a grammar to this performance. It translates failure into martyrdom, error into sacrifice. The old tactic works on audiences that lack the luxury of distance. When your neighbor is sleeping on a mattress in a hall because their house is gone, compassion is immediate and necessary. But compassion should not be confused with political amnesty.

We have to be precise about what we ask of society. Compassion is an individual choice, private and immediate. Political responsibility is public and durable. If Lebanese society is to rebuild, it must do both things without confusing them. We must care for victims and we must demand changes to the structures that created the victims. We must rebuild neighborhoods and we must dismantle the conditions that allowed a single armed group to impose disaster on millions.

There is a more uncomfortable point here that must be addressed. The party asking for sympathy is not a monolith of pure evil. It remains a social and political actor with clients, with municipal reach, with people who depended on it when the state was absent. That makes the problem harder. People will say, “But we cannot simply cut them off. Doing so risks civil conflict.” True. That is why blunt calls for eradication are naive. But the proper answer is not to accept unilateralism. The proper answer is to rebuild political institutions so that no group can choose war by itself, and so that the social dependencies that make people tolerate coercion are reduced.

Policy must do the things politics cannot. The Lebanese state, and the international actors that care about this country, must knit together a set of guarantees. End the parallel command. Strengthen institutions. Offer economic alternatives where patronage once ruled. Protect free speech. Make political life livable without a Hezbollah car bomb exploding whenever their leader feels inconvenienced. That means the state must be capable of defending its citizens, not least from factions that claim to defend them as well as Israeli aggression.

Meanwhile, the moral grammar of blame has to be clear. Accountability is not vengeance. Accountability is the mechanism by which societies learn what is permissible. Call it justice. Call it responsibility. Call it necessary pain. If you bomb a bridge and the people who used it lose their livelihoods, you should not be on your knees asking to be forgiven while the people who suffered fix the bridge out of their pockets, and you complain that your smuggling routes from Iran are being intercepted.

The trick of asking for fear and for empathy at the same time can only work if we allow it to work. We have let it work for too long. The choice now is whether Lebanon will continue to absorb the private bets of armed actors or whether it will make a different bargain. The bargain we need is simple. You can be part of the political community. You can hold power. You cannot be both a state inside the state and a national savior. If you choose to act like an army without public authorization, you accept the costs along with the consequences, like an army that lost a war would.

Hezbollah wants both fear and grace. That is a convenient posture for them and an unsustainable one for Lebanon. We can keep making their bill our bill. Or we can insist that those who decide for everyone else also carry the price. Sympathy does not have to be withheld from anybody, but forgiveness cannot be cheap. If we want resilience and a future for this country, the path is to care for victims, to insist on accountability, and to make sure that the people who decide wars do not get to decide the terms of the aftermath by fiat.

And here is where many will jump in with the usual “but Israel!” deflection. Fine. Let’s actually look at Hezbollah’s track record there. The last two major wars were triggered by Nasrallah, acting on Iran’s timetable, not Lebanon’s. After 2006 he said, “if I had known, I wouldn’t have done it.” Well, this time he did know. He knew exactly what Israel would do, and he still went ahead. The militia he leads is no longer the disciplined force it once claimed to be. Years of fighting for Bashar al-Assad and participating in atrocities hollowed it out from the inside. That rot showed. They crumbled faster than the bargain-bin drones they bragged would “liberate Palestine.”

So let’s be honest. Hezbollah’s only consistent talent is provoking Israeli brutality, not deterring it, and definitely not protecting Lebanon from it. You can see that in the surrender terms they accepted once it became obvious they had no way out. And now they are trying to wriggle out of those same commitments as Israel prepares another escalation, all because Hezbollah spent months refusing to do the very things it agreed to after its latest disastrous miscalculation.

In the end, Lebanon cannot keep absorbing the fallout of one group’s unchecked impulses. A country this battered does not have the luxury of pretending that unilateral war-making is some kind of noble tradition. It is a burden. It is a death sentence for every family, every business, every generation trying to build a future here. And it is something imposed without our consent.

Hezbollah wants to be feared when it is strong and pitied when it is cornered. It wants total freedom to act and total forgiveness when the consequences arrive. It wants to decide the war and outsource the suffering. That model has hollowed the country out. It has turned national life into a recurring cycle of crisis, paralysis and cleanup.

Lebanon deserves better than a political physics where one actor supplies all the decisions and everyone else supplies all the damage control. Sympathy cannot be demanded. Legitimacy cannot be fabricated. Unity cannot grow in soil fertilized by coercion and car bombs.

A normal country cannot exist as long as its fate is decided in opaque meetings between a militia leader and a foreign patron. If Hezbollah wants to be part of a national project, it must act like it. If it wants sympathy, it must stop manufacturing disasters that leave millions bleeding for choices they never made.

Until then, Lebanon’s only real path forward is clarity. No more emotional blackmail. No more forced solidarity. No more pretending this cycle is sustainable. The people who keep choosing war cannot keep sending the bill to the people who are simply trying to live.

And at some point we have to admit a basic truth that everyone knows but few will say out loud. Diplomacy and deals, as imperfect and corrupt and compromised as they often are, have still delivered more stability and protection for Lebanon than Hezbollah’s entire mythology of “resistance.” Negotiations stopped wars. Agreements opened borders. Diplomacy brought relief, investment and breathing room. Hezbollah’s gambles brought car bombs, funerals, evacuations and rubble.

If we want to move forward, we have to stop pretending the opposite is true. No country can rebuild its future on a fantasy. It is time to deal with the world as it is, not as Hezbollah’s slogans insist it must be.

Only then do we stand a chance of escaping this cycle and claiming a normal life again.

Dean grew up in Syracuse, surrounded by Lebanese students from the American University of Beirut, my alma mater. His memories of that time are full of political debate at the dinner table and an unshakable sense of community. “They were all over the political spectrum,” he recalled. “Even two people from the same religion could be completely opposed. But we would fight about politics and then have a beautiful meal together. Our cultural identity held us together.” For him, Lebanon was never distant. It shaped the way he saw the world, and it shaped the way he speaks about public service today.

When I asked what message he would give young Arabs and Lebanese in America who want to serve but rarely see people like them in senior government roles, he pointed to the moment we are living in. “The Zohran Mamdani campaign personifies what is possible,” he said. He spoke with pride about the immigrant communities that saw themselves reflected in the campaign and the unprecedented support that poured in. It was clear that this victory meant something far deeper than electoral politics, helping him decide to join the administration of a 34 year old, at 74.

Dean first met Zohran in the winter before the primary. The outcome was still uncertain, but their conversations were not about poll numbers. They were about governing and the responsibilities of public office. “He asked thoughtful questions and wanted to understand what he did not know,” Dean told me. “It was hard not to say I will help you in any way I can.” That relationship eventually led to Zohran asking him to serve as First Deputy Mayor, a role that carries tremendous operational and political responsibility in a city of more than eight and a half million people.

The transition period has been intense. The city has more than three hundred thousand employees, and in reality closer to three hundred and seventy thousand when you include the health system and housing agencies. Dean described the work ahead as both enormous and urgent, and he insisted that the movement that helped elect Zohran must remain engaged.

“The movement did not stop on Election Day. We need the same excitement and energy,” he said.

They have already received fifty thousand résumés from New Yorkers who want to serve.

Throughout the interview, Dean returned again and again to the question of affordability. It is the heart of the agenda, and also the measure by which this administration wants to be judged. I asked him what he hopes a New Yorker will say one year from now after watching this conversation again. He answered simply. “That something has changed in a practical way. That their life feels more affordable. That they feel hope.” He spoke about childcare, housing, free buses, and a tax system that treats people fairly. These are the issues he believes can transform daily life in the city.

There are many people who say these promises cannot be fulfilled. Holidays are approaching and families will sit around tables where political debates are as unavoidable as the food. Dean had a message for the skeptics.

“People say these things cannot be done. And then three months later, they are done.”

He pointed to the example of universal pre kindergarten, which was once considered impossible but became reality because government chose to act. “What part of this agenda is wrong,” he asked.

“Childcare. Housing. Free buses. Equity in taxation. The argument is always that you cannot afford it. We will show that you can.”

And because we are Lebanese, food naturally became part of the conversation. Fresh bread, hummus, and tabbouleh arrived at the table. Dean laughed when I told him I learned to make kibbeh the way my town in Zgharta prepares it. He responded with pride and familiarity. “You have to make that for me. And I make tabbouleh every week,” he said. It was a small detail that I felt revealed a lot about him.

As the interview came to a close, Dean reflected on service with a sense of responsibility that felt genuine.

“These jobs are a privilege,” he said. “Our obligation is to deliver hope and make this city affordable so people can stay.”

It was a fitting final line. It captured the connection between heritage, community, and the work of making government serve ordinary people, instead of the wealthiest few.

With New York’s political landscape reshaping, Dean Fuleihan offers a clear view of the work ahead. And watch the full conversation below.

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Like many of you, I assume my beliefs, hopes, and dreams are second nature. No need to restate them. No need to explain. It is obvious to my community what my politics are, right?

But if I am honest, the journey that brought me here was messy, full of contradictions, heartbreak, and the occasional misplaced hope.

Six years after the October 17 Revolution changed our lives forever, I have spent enough time reading, reflecting, and talking with people, both those who lived the Thawra and those who watched from afar, to start seeing our uprising with fresh eyes.

One book, recommended by a friend, hit me like a ton of bricks: Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.

The book and the déjà vu

In Bevins’s telling, the 2010s were a decade of spectacular uprisings, from Cairo to Santiago to Hong Kong, that lit up the world and then fizzled out. His argument is brutally simple: movements that reject structure, leadership, and long-term strategy often win the streets but lose everything else.

Sound familiar?

I was disappointed that Lebanon’s uprising did not make it into the book, but I understood. Bevins’s expertise was Brazil and South America. Still, his pages felt like déjà vu. He was describing us: the speed of our mobilization, the brilliance of our improvisation, the moral energy that felt unstoppable.

Back then, we celebrated being leaderless and horizontal. We wore it like armor. And honestly, in a country where one wrong speech can get you assassinated, just ask Lokman Slim or Mohamad Chatah, that armor made sense.

But leadership is not just about one person standing in front of a crowd. It is about structure, about how people coordinate, make decisions, and protect themselves from chaos or co-option. That is the part we never built.

1. Leaderless meant powerless

We said we did not need leaders because everyone was the leader. That worked for the first few weeks. It made us uncrackable, unbribable, beautiful in our defiance. But when the tear gas cleared, there was no one with the mandate or mechanism to translate that energy into power.

That is what Bevins calls “the missing revolution.”

And it is exactly where Zohran Mamdani got it right.

Mamdani’s campaign in New York was just as grassroots and just as viral as we were: TikToks, Reels, rallies, you name it. But underneath the spectacle was structure, data teams, neighborhood captains, volunteer coordinators.

He showed that horizontal does not have to mean chaotic. You can keep power distributed while still being organized. We had fire. He had a furnace.

2. We knew what we hated, not what we wanted

We were crystal clear about what we stood against: corruption, sectarianism, theft. But if you had asked ten of us what we wanted instead, you would have gotten eleven answers.

Bevins calls that the “anti-power trap,” defining yourself by opposition instead of creation.

Mamdani avoided that trap. He did not just say the system is broken. He ran on what to build: rent relief, public housing, climate justice, accountability. Every viral moment pointed to a policy, not just a posture.

That is what we were missing. We had rage, but no roadmaps.

3. The digital high and the organizational low

Instagram “Stories” had just launched, and my feed from the streets of Beirut became a sort of national bulletin board. The diaspora would tag me, I would repost, people would find each other through my stories, communities forming in real time. It was the most beautiful side of being horizontal, spontaneous connection, unfiltered solidarity.

But there was a darker side. We mistook connection for coordination. The same digital platforms that made us powerful also made us scatter. Every rumor, every ego, every live stream pulled us in new directions.

Zohran’s campaign went viral too, but his virality was a gateway, not a distraction. Every meme led to a meeting. Every post led to a signup sheet. That is the difference between a protest and a program.

We performed revolution. He prepared to govern.

4. The void always fills itself

When we left Martyrs’ Square, others filled the vacuum: the same warlords, the same clientelist networks, the same sectarian narratives. Power abhors a vacuum, and ours was wide open.

Mamdani never left a vacuum. Every rally ended with a next step: phone banking, policy drafting, or block meetings. Every volunteer had a role. When opportunity came, they were ready to take it.

We were not.

We thought refusing to play their game would change the rules. It did not. It just meant they kept winning by default.

5. Maybe failure is not the end

Bevins ends on a note of sober optimism: failure is not final, it is fertilizer. Every protest, even the ones that collapse, leaves behind people who have seen what power really looks like.

Zohran’s victory did not come out of nowhere. It came from years of smaller losses, failed campaigns, half-empty meetings, quiet learning. The difference is that when the political window finally opened, he already had the machine ready to move.

We had our window in 2019. We just did not have the machinery.

The next time it opens, and it will, we cannot make the same mistake.

So what now?

If we burn again, and we might, we cannot just rely on rage and spontaneity.
We need structure. We need strategy. We need the boring stuff: lists, spreadsheets, bylaws, budgets.

Zohran’s story is not about America or Lebanon. It is about what happens when movements prepare for power before they get it. He shows that virality and discipline can coexist, that charisma means nothing without a calendar, and that democracy, at its best, is built like a campaign office, not a stage.

And look, I know Lebanon is not New York City.
Our obstacles are heavier, our risks deadlier, our rulers crueler. But it is also true that Lebanon is smaller. Our streets are denser, our networks tighter, and we do not need millions of dollars to get our message across.

In a time when we are sandwiched between Iran and Israel’s geopolitical theater, we might not control the regional game, but we can control how we live inside it. We can organize locally, push for transparency, demand competence, and carve out small islands of sanity amid the chaos.

Because improving our daily lives is political resistance.

The street gives you a spark.
Only organization gives you a future.

Back then, wasn’t like now. Being at those protests was risky. The Israeli chokehold on free speech in the US was still ironclad. You could be punished for being against indigenous people being kicked out of their grandparents’ home so a “Jacob” from Williamsburg could move in, and instead of paying taxes here, have our taxes bankroll his life built on the ruins of Palestinians. After two years of genocide still being committed by Israel in Gaza, most Americans now see the Israeli occupation for what it is. And that brings me to the reason of this post: Zohran Mamdani’s victory despite zionist billionaires throwing tens of millions of dollars to try to smear him as an antisemite for being for equal human rights for all.

That day, Zohran spoke at that protest. I took a video that day of part of his address, as he had particularly captivated me. He had just been elected as a NY State Assemblyman for Queens and parts of Brooklyn. He left an impression. This is the video I took:

Even back then, Zohran Mamdani always reminded people that antisemitism was a scourge that had no place in the movement for Palestinian liberation. If anything, Zohran is consistent, and it’s one of the many things I respect and admire about him.

Since that day, we would stay in touch and Instagram via DMs, and I constantly told him he should run for mayor. In October, he replied “loading” and I flipped. It was his time. It was our time. Now, a year later, I woke up in Sunnyside in Queens, and ran to get the NY Post with its hilariously offensive cover announcing his win.

In today’s podcast, I speak with my friend Russ Finkelstein, who was the person I went to that protest to with in 2021. After all, I’ve spent countless hours talking politics with him, arguing even, but after we spent weeks huffing and puffing up flights of stairs to knock on doors for Zohran, along with 999,998 other New Yorkers, there’s no one I’d rather unpack what this means, what we can learn and where we’re headed with a New York City with a leftist mayor, a progressive that refuses to throw immigrants, trans people, queer folks and women under the bus while trying to become Diet Republicans like so many racist, octogenarian Democratic leaders who not only refused to support their party’s nominee, but conspired against him in things that were reminiscent of the dark times before the US invaded Iraq, the mass hysteria and hatred towards Muslim and brown people that caused so many deaths in so many places around the world.

Zohran, make us proud! And we are all supporting your administration.

I’ve been trying to stay quiet about this one.

I’ve known for months that Hezbollah is being disarmed quietly.

I figured they would stop, look around, and realize their time running Lebanon is over.

After their humiliating defeat in the “Hamas support” war they started and lost so badly, I thought they’d step back.

Today, though, Hezbollah’s head Naim Qassem, the guy who usually cuts ribbons when a new chicken shop opens in Dahieh, is threatening to kill all Lebanese if he can’t stay in charge.

Even after losing.

Even when the majority of Lebanese not only don’t support his party, but hate them with every fiber of their living for what they’ve done to us, Syrians and Palestinians.

And the best part?

Iran sent Larijani to sit with Naim Qassem and give him orders, while his moped boys waved Iranian flags.

And this guy has the audacity to talk about sovereignty?

You attack our own government at the orders of a foreign imperialist power like Iran?

Tfeh!

Let’s deal with the elephant in the room.

“But, …

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This is my endorsement for the Beirut Madinati coalition running in the 2025 Beirut Municipality elections this Sunday, May 18.

Let me take you back to 2016. That was long before the Thawra and probably the first time many of you heard of me or the work I do. It was during the garbage crisis, when Lebanon became a global punchline. Rivers of trash flowed through our streets, forests, and actual rivers. The world saw it. We lived it.

Out of that mess came Beirut Madinati. A group of young, progressive, non-sectarian Lebanese who refused to play the March 14 versus March 8 game. A game that served one purpose only: to distract from the fact that Hezbollah had taken full control of the state, while the rest of the sectarian parties lined up under its umbrella to loot the country and our bank accounts.

Beirut Madinati shook things up. So much that all the traditional parties panicked. Even as Hezbollah was still busy assassinating some of their so-called rivals, all these parties magically found unity. They pulled together one sectarian, xenophobic, completely unqualified list and sold it to Beirut. The same list that left the people of Beirut to fend themselves after Hezbollah’s explosives stored at the Beirut Port decimated Beirut, with the municipality busy getting salaries for not doing anything.

Here’s what they won’t say out loud: we got more votes than any single one of those parties. But because of our Syrian-occupation days, winner-takes-all municipal law, they managed to scrape through. They had to fuse into some Frankenstein political list just to block a group of independents who had nothing but ideas, transparency, and actual plans.

Imagine being that scared of change. Now, imagine even after Hezbollah’s been neutralized, the sectarian parties salivating that they don’t need to share with them anymore, went back to the 2016 Power Rangers villain assembly, and joined them in one list, backed by the remnants of the Hezb and Assad regime and their cronies.

A lot’s changed since 2016, and the same tired tricks shouldn’t work anymore. If you’re a Beirut voter, you already know what to do this Sunday. If you live in Beirut but can’t vote, show up and help out by volunteering on the ground. Make sure the sectarian list of has-beens and clueless puppets doesn’t get away with cheating or scamming voters. And if you’re in the diaspora and believe in what Beirut Madinati stands for, chip in and help fund the campaign. Every bit counts.

The other lists have money, corrupt sectarian “media” like Corrupt Banker MTV and Hezbollah’s favorite toilet paper, Al Akhbar. We’ve just got each other. And honestly, that’s more than enough. We already beat their guy, Makhzoumi, a few months ago, despite the full-force lies and disinformation campaign from the Hezb-MTV alliance. We can do it again. We will do it again. Till we take Lebanon back from the thieves and war lords hiding behind hired pens and washed-up TV personalities.

Earlier this week, I dropped an episode and an article laying out the ridiculous smear campaign cooked up by one of Lebanon’s most corrupt bankers, aired on his own friend’s TV station. I showed how their one and only “accusation”, that some new media platforms got grants from Soros’ Open Society Foundations, is something MTV also did. They took tens of thousands of dollars from the same source to supposedly promote “investigative journalism”. That investment clearly flopped, considering how the campaign ended up: full of lies, personal insults, and zero evidence. Just another desperate PR move to boost the corrupt banker’s image in DC. It didn’t work. The banking secrecy amendments passed, thanks in large part to pressure from the US, no matter how loud and hysterically MTV screamed.

Then came last night. It turns out an MTV show had been trying to entrap random people into echoing their weak talking points against the change MPs and the Thawra as a whole, given how no one was buying MTV’s sloppy narrative, they needed a grassroots boost in their mind.

But they got a surprise: a live caller who went completely off-script.

He called out MTV for acting as a mouthpiece for the “deep state” and for laying traps for MPs, the same MPs who, as he said, stood with him in the streets, in the courts, and everywhere else. At the same time as the Thawra, Marcel Ghanem and his brother were busy hosting wanted fugitives like Ali Hassan Khalil and Riad Salameh's entourage, people like Ibrahim Kanaan. As we were getting beaten up in the streets by Hezbollah’s thugs and their client governments, the Ghanem brothers were on TV every week polishing Riad Salameh’s image and floating garbage like “The Thawra will cause a civil war,” trying to scare people away from the only movement that ever threatened to bring real accountability to the TV’s main funders.

I didn’t post any of this on Instagram. MTV is notorious for abusing copyright claims to silence criticism. I remember when Pierre Rabbat’s show used to steal content from us. We’d call them out, and they’d get our posts taken down instead of owning up to it and apologizing.

So I’m posting this here instead. Let the caller’s honesty speak for itself. If anyone was still wondering how low MTV is willing to go, now you know.

What’s really sad is that they dragged Joe Maalouf into this circus. His segment right after that mess was actually solid, it exposed the depravity of convicted pedophile priest Mansur Labaki. The same priest MTV’s owner loves to platform on his newspaper and TV channel, AND during Good Friday and Easter, just to make sure the irony really lands.

I still think there’s good in Joe. Years ago, MTV forced him out was after he stood up for a trans woman tortured by one of Murr’s municipality buddies. He got fired for it, and that’s when he did some of his best work that I was lucky to witness first-hand. I hope history repeats itself. Joe doesn’t belong doing the dirty work for a cheap gang that lost all credibility years ago, Marcel, his brother, their boss, and the man who bankrolls them all, which we will make sure is held accountable, no matter how many times they try to smear others to hide their own corruption and complicity.

The saddest thing about the failed smear campaign against change MPs and independent media outlets like Megaphone and Daraj is how lazy it was. For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around why the elites who enriched themselves before the Thawra chose to just copy-paste a right-wing conspiracy theory from the 2010s about George Soros. Then, it finally made sense, and in today’s episode, I’ll break it down with you.

The Bankerjiyyeh’s Mindset Post-Hezbollah

There’s one concept (I know how much Lebanese love this word) that is very apt to start things off with: the Mafia-Militia analogy. Its premise is that Lebanon, in the past few decades, has been ruled by a coalition between Hezbollah (the militia) and the Mafia (the corrupt politicians, bankers, and warlords), united by their hatred of anything that could threaten their ill-gotten gains and their domination of the Lebanese population they’ve been robbing for generations.

Nasrallah’s last misguided intervention, dragging Lebanon into a full-on war with Israel that Hezbollah was hopelessly ill-prepared and ill-equipped for, neutralized the Militia part.

The one thing I’d say here is that the militia thought it was an equal partner in the self-proclaimed “Axis of Resistance.” Meaning, it was one leg of a four-legged chair with the Iranian regime, the now-fallen Assad regime, and groups like the Houthis and Hamas. The October 8, 2023 war Nasrallah launched led to the painful realization by Hezbollah that they weren’t actually partners, but simply bodyguards. They were there to take a bullet for Khamenei, but the Islamic Revolution of Iran wasn’t coming to save them when they got themselves in trouble.

It’s a difficult realization, tough to swallow, even though the rest of us could obviously tell. Now Hezbollah knows they weren’t really a partner. With Assad gone, Iran sitting with the US in Oman, and their entire Captagon empire crumbling along with their ability to smuggle Lebanese subsidized goods to fund their war machine in Syria, even their black-market illegal bank Qard El Hassan, are all gone now. Not even laundered Iranian cash via airplane is coming in anymore.

Now, just like Iran’s regime turned out to be a fickle partner, so did the local Mafia in Lebanon. They couldn’t care less about Hezbollah’s decimation. All they saw was that they no longer needed to share the spoils with the subterranean Nasrallah. They no longer had to abide by the unspoken (but often spoken) omerta they had with Hezbollah.

So the only obstacle left for the Mafia keeping their ill-gotten gains was a handful of our brave MPs and media outlets who don’t leave every interview with Mafia people carrying a wad of cash as a “tip.” The same group of people that pushed out Hezbollah’s PM choices and rustled up a loose coalition to get Lebanon Nawaf Salam as prime minister. That’s cause people like that, will not let the elites trying to keep their spoils and make us, the taxpayers, bail out the destruction they wrought while they remain untouched. Please.

But why the Soros conspiracy?

To understand this odd choice of smear, we need to understand why the reforms are actually happening. It’s because the Deputy United States Special Envoy to the Middle East, Morgan Ortagus, flies in whenever one of the Mafia tries to derail the reforms and gives them a little scolding. Like good little boys, they go down to Parliament and vote for reforms, with some extra protections too, thanks to our MPs’ coordinated pressure.

It’s because, as in a recent interview I had about the banking secrecy amendment laws passed last week with Dr. Moe Farida, “ma byemsho gheir bel sermeyyeh.”

But why does the US administration care about corruption in Lebanon so much? Why haven’t the Mafia been able to wiggle out of meaningful reform like they always did every single time Lebanon got money from foreign powers to keep the country going, while the Gebrans and Nabihs and Saads of the country milked it dry?

The simple answer is Hezbollah finances. Hezbollah, like any terrorist group, cannot have bank accounts without allies like Riad Salameh in power, who helped them steal millions of our deposits via “Sayrafa” and by smuggling subsidized goods to fund their operations in Syria. Remember when some banks helped uncover Hezbollah money laundering, and Hezbollah blew up explosives in front of cooperating bank HQs?

Cash Economy = Hezbollah Coming Back

The current, basically cash-only economy, means it’s just a matter of time before the group starts to replenish its ill-gotten funds to oppress Lebanese people first, and second, to put on a show every now and then by firing a few Soviet-era rockets and Temu-bought drones to maintain the lie to their shrinking base that they are actually “resisting” occupation.

Understanding that the current situation of zero fiscal policy and an economy in the complete darkness of cash transactions means Hezbollah might be able to sustain itself , if not as the multinational private mercenary force it was for the past two decades, at least as an armed group able to destabilize and derail any meaningful change in Lebanon for the better.

Now we get to why Soros. It’s not like he’s a household name in Lebanon, and in a country where most organizations, government agencies, and even media outlets need foreign donations and investments to stay afloat, it’s no surprise that even MTV, the spearhead of this lazy Mafia-bankerjiyyeh smear, also received a ton of money from Soros-funded initiatives.

And unlike MTV and the Mafia mouthpieces, I brought receipts, instead of only insults and rants like toddlers in Assad’s nursery.

The Lebanon Media Recovery Fund (2020–22) was a brilliant project to help support Lebanese media after the collapse and to support proper investigative journalism in Lebanon. A democracy without a free press that holds those in power accountable, at least in the court of public opinion, can never thrive. The total fund was USD 764,627 and wrapped up in 2022.

The core funders were:

The idea was that if TV stations were rewarded for doing good investigations, instead of the Thursday glazing sessions the Ghanem Brothers put on every week for whoever paid them the most, they might actually shift to real journalism. That means, instead of Marcel hosting wanted fugitives from the law like Ali Hassan Khalil because he might get a fancy watch out of it, they could, with some help and support, maybe do actual journalism for once. After all, why would anyone risk angering the Ghada Aoun-types of Mafia-Militia corrupt judges (thank goodness she’s gone) when they can easily fund their operations from the month before any election, when the Mafia-Militia shower TV stations with patronage money? I think that’s why Marcel is so butt-hurt he hosted them after their historic victory: they didn’t pay him to go on, like the rest normally do.

Bki, bterte7. Say hi to your sugar daddy Riad Salameh next time you visit him in his jail cell.

MTV, LBCI, and Al Jadeed were part of Pillar 5:

This was the amount of money and support they were given:

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Now that that’s out of the way, and we’ve proven that Soros money made its way to MTV too, why would they do such a lazy, sloppy job when the one accusation they were hurling was one they were part of too? And it was never really an accusation in the first place, since anyone can submit a grant proposal and get one, all of this is publicly available information, not some scandalous thing MTV “uncovered.”

That’s because, like we already discussed, it’s US pressure forcing reform now. And like we all know, being able to lobby the US for changes in policy is crucial. Given no one would believe freshly-minted MPs and news organizations caused the collapse, and not not the Patek Philippe-clad Mafia-Militia who were in power for decades, they needed to frame it as some ideological struggle between “globalists” and “extreme left” versus right-wing conservatives.

This was such a sloppy attempt to dupe the Trump administration into thinking that the corrupt bankers are the good guys, so that the administration stops putting pressure to reform Lebanon. MTV was trying to convince the administration in DC that reforms are actually helping some global conspiracy by people like Soros, instead of the reality: not implementing reforms is just protecting the felony crimes by the Mafia and Militia that robbed us all of our bank deposits and savings.

Luckily, the Trump administration didn’t fall for this lazy, badly put-together fantasy, and the banking secrecy amendment law passed. They saw through the lies and understood that the Mafia-Militia didn’t suddenly become right-wing darlings, they just don’t want to give back the money they stole and thought they could outsmart US officials. A true “hail mary” pass if I’ve ever seen one, for those that benefited from the ponzi scheme at our expense. Thankfully, the US administration saw through the lies and is focused on making sure Hezbollah doesn’t engratiate itself as easily this time, instead of making sure a handful of bankers and politicians don’t give up the money they stole, or at the very least, stop stealing more.

This time the law passed without the loopholes that the Bankerjiyyeh put in every single previous attempt to fool the IMF, the US administration, and any other possible funders to get us out of the mess the Mafia and Militia created, without the Mafia and Militia ever suffering consequences for their crimes, but handing the bag to us, the taxpayers, instead.

What’s Next?

Lebanon has two months to decide how to distribute the losses incurred thanks to the ponzi scheme of the century pulled off by Riad Salameh at the behest of the Mafia and Militia.

The best way to do it, in my humble opinion, is to give back all the small depositors' money. It’s not even 20% of the total amount that was stolen and squandered according to the Finance Ministry (84% of depositors have less than USD 100,000 in the bank, which adds up to about $20 billion out of the roughly $100 billion lost since 2019.)

As for the big depositors, who held the majority of the money before the banks shut their doors (except for politicians and bankers) in October 2019, let them show the now-empowered banking oversight committee how they got their money. For those who made it legally, it should be a piece of cake: bring the receipts, get your money back. For those who made it illegally, I assume they’ll probably just stay quiet about it, and that money doesn’t need to be paid back by selling state assets or making us, the taxpayers, clean up the mess to make the thieves and corrupt politically exposed people’s portfolios whole again.

Then, in the upcoming elections, when we get even more MPs who are not part of the Mafia-Militia, we can finally start to criminally pursue all the big depositors who didn’t come forward to prove their money was clean. But for now, we can at least stop returning the spoils to the thieves. And hopefully, we can return the retirement accounts of so many honest Lebanese who got screwed over by the buffoons copy-pasting 2015 Twitter conspiracies to try and throw wool over everyone’s eyes, from the Trump administration to the smallest depositor wondering if they’ll ever see their money again.

Things are changing. The world is changing. The hope of the Mafia existing without the Militia is gone. It’s never too late to course-correct. Not everything is spin, and smear campaigns might get you trending on Twitter, but they won’t change the reality on the ground. And one last thing: khayyeh, shba3o.

You’ve made so much illegally, and you’ve never paid for it. That’s a pretty good deal. Just take the L and stop trying to steal even more by using Assadist and Hezbollah tactics of threats, lies, and intimidation, the same tactics you always pretended to be against.

Shba3o.

Is the pro-Mafia and pro-Banks elite minority really willing to let Hezbollah slowly regroup, just for the chance to make a quick buck by ripping off the Lebanese taxpayers, or at the very least, keep what they stole and have us bail out the banking system?

When does the short-sighted greed become too much to live with? Weren’t they supposed to be against Hezbollah, like they groveled in front of President Trump? Now you’re trying to lie to the US administration to keep this cash economy going and give Hezbollah a lifeline just when it’s finally giving up, all to protect the dirty money you illegally moved around and now can’t anymore because of the amendments that were passed, despite your desperate, and quite honestly pathetic, attempts to smear everyone but the perpetrators.

Not this time. Course correct. Do the right thing for once.

I will be diving deeper into the smear campaigns and why they failed so spectacularly on Monday’s episode!

In the meantime, Dr Mohamad Farida, from the Depositors Union, took a break from advocating for the amendment in ongoing parliamentary sessions, to give us all an update.

The images below are from the Library of Congress archives, taken by the English photographer Francis Bedford in 1862. Bedford accompanied Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, on a royal tour of the Mediterranean, Egypt, the Holy Land, and Syria. During that journey, Bedford captured over 200 photographs, including scenes from Tripoli, Beirut, Baalbek, and Damascus.

Take a look at these snapshots of Tripoli from over 160 years ago. They offer a glimpse into the layered history of a city too often overlooked today.

Enjoy, and when youy get the chance, go visit. Tripoli stays with you. Spend the day there!

1946

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This week marks fifty years since the Lebanese Civil War began. I've been alive for three of those five decades, born just after the guns fell silent, into a nation caught between Syrian and Israeli occupation. While I never directly witnessed the war, its shadows have profoundly shaped my life and the lives of all Lebanese people.

Our generation grew up inheriting trauma. Our parents came of age amid conflict, and their unspoken scars inevitably passed down to us. Beyond psychological wounds, though, the legacy of the war has been entrenched deeply into our national psyche. It looms like an omnipresent specter over every political debate, every demand for change, every aspiration for a better Lebanon.

Every attempt at reform or modernization seems trapped by one phrase: "We can't, it might reignite a civil war." We can't conduct a census, we can't dismantle corruption, we can't address inequality or political dysfunction because doing so is painted as an existential risk, an invitation…

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In a country worn down by decades of missed opportunities, clientelism, and political gridlock, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam emerges as a rare figure—intellectual, principled, and, perhaps most importantly, sincere.

In his first televised interview with an Arab media outlet since taking office, Salam laid out a vision for Lebanon rooted in accountability, transparency, and national sovereignty.

I will try my best to cover everything Salam does, and select the themes he touched upon in every major interview and what to make of it. Here are nine I selected from the interview below:

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This has been my longest running topic on this blog. The OG readers will remember. I started in 2011, and a lot of us feel it is gonna happen, it’s just a matter of time. We’ve done the hard part. The taboo is gone. Public opinion has shifted. Cannabis is no longer a dirty word in Lebanon — it’s a reality. People talk about it openly, joke about it online, and most importantly, no one’s pretending it isn’t being grown, sold, and used across the country.

What we haven’t done — and what we must do now — is ratify that cultural shift into real, urgent policy.

Because while we keep dragging our feet, young people are still getting arrested for minor possession. Farmers are still forced to operate in the shadows, paying off militias and middlemen instead of taxes. And the revenue? It’s not going to schools or hospitals. It’s going to Hezbollah. It’s going to cartels like Nouh Zaiiter’s. It’s funding weapons and conflict — in Lebanon, in Syria, and beyond.

We have a functioning government now. A cabinet. An executive branch. Elections coming up. There are no more excuses.

Why legalize cannabis cultivation and use right now? Four reasons:

1. Economic urgency.
   Lebanon is broke. Legalizing cannabis and taxing it properly could generate millions in new revenue. We need every lira we can get — not just from international aid, but from sustainable, homegrown industries.

2. Public safety and sovereignty.
   Keeping cannabis illegal only benefits armed groups and criminal networks. Legalization takes power away from Hezbollah-linked cartels and puts it back in the hands of the state. It also frees up law enforcement to focus on actual threats, not small-time possession cases.

3. Justice and accountability.
   Our prisons are overcrowded with people whose only crime was smoking or carrying weed. Decriminalization is a first step toward fixing a system that punishes the poor and protects the powerful. Legalization gives us a framework to make that shift permanent.

4. A ticking clock.
   The people currently profiting from the illegal trade will not give up quietly. They are already organizing, lobbying behind the scenes, and preparing to either block reform or co-opt it for their own gain. If we don’t act fast, we’ll be stuck with a fake legalization scheme that rewards the same actors we’re trying to disempower.

I made this video on my iPad a few years ago, it still stands:

The priority is clear: decriminalize cannabis immediately.

This isn’t radical. It’s common sense. No one should be thrown in jail, extorted, or dragged through court over a joint. Decriminalization is the bare minimum — and it's long overdue.

Then, we need a real plan to regulate cultivation — one that works for the people, not just the powerful.
That means:

• Creating a transparent and accessible licensing process for current cannabis farmers — especially those in Bekaa and other marginalized areas — so they can transition from the black market to the legal economy without fear or bribery.

• Taxing the industry properly and using that revenue to invest in public services like healthcare, education, and infrastructure.

• Making sure the profits stay in the communities that grow the plant, instead of being siphoned off by armed groups or politically connected cartels.

Lebanon’s cannabis economy already exists. It's just illegal, dangerous, and captured by the wrong people. We can either keep pretending that’s not the case, or we can finally build a system that turns a black-market reality into a legal, regulated, and fair industry.

The culture has changed. Now the law needs to catch up.

Let’s get it done — before the same people who kept us in the dark for decades find a way to profit off the light.

I want to see ministers in the new cabinet take the initiative, and if they don’t, let’s see it in electoral platforms for the upcoming elections. This might be the best chance we get in a long time, let’s not waste it.