Under pressure from the orphans of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, i.e. Lebanese Forces and their media like LBC TV station, the Minister of Justice of Lebanon succumbed to pressures and ordered a summon for me based on...a tweet. The tweet was a "quoted tweet" in which I comment on a tweet by the Twitter page of UNIFIL in Lebanon in which it reported a high level meeting between "senior Lebanese Army officers" and Israeli occupation officers. This happened the day after the Jerusalem move by the US. I wrote: "Disgrace. Disgrace. Lebanese Army commanders meet with officers of the Israeli enemy while Arab streets are boiling with anger over Jerusalem. Let us call for disarming the Lebanese Army while keeping the arms of the resistance". (The last sentence was written as irony but some Lebanese--like Americans--don't have an appetite for irony). As you know, the Lebanese resistance movement started in 1978 by a bunch of Marxist-Leninists and later broadened to include other secular and leftist forces and later other Islamist-oreinted forces. Throughout those times, the defense of Lebanon against Israeli aggression and occupation was undertaken by those volunteers with the exception of the time when Emile Lahhud led the Lebanese Army and when he was president, and insisted that the Army be used in defense of Lebanon. I have lived in the US uninterruptedly since 1983, and yet the Lebanese Ministry of Justice can still be concerned over my tweets from California.
PS If I were a pro-Saudi right-wing Hariri writer, the story would have been picked up by all Western correspondents in Beirut and by Human Rights Watch office in Beirut. They would have raised a hue and cry over the muzzling of freedom of speech. But the views of anti-Israel leftists, are not considered worthy of protection by those people.
PS If I were a pro-Saudi right-wing Hariri writer, the story would have been picked up by all Western correspondents in Beirut and by Human Rights Watch office in Beirut. They would have raised a hue and cry over the muzzling of freedom of speech. But the views of anti-Israel leftists, are not considered worthy of protection by those people.
