If you’ve never lived outside of Lebanon, you’ll be excused for thinking that satellite TV is something you subscribe to by paying some guy a small monthly fee in return for watching every international TV channel under the sun.

The way this works is that a “cable provider” installs a large satellite dish on his roof, connects it to various networks like Orbit Showtime Network, and then sells end users (or neighborhood re-sellers) access to that feed by laying a coaxial cable from his end to the back of your TV (often by throwing the cable from roof to roof). Like the local electricity ishtirak provider, this is a shady operation that involves various kinds of hacking, but everyone does it because it’s convenient.

This is not how things work in the rest of the world. End users are expected to buy decoding boxes to get access to the various channels. The amount you pay depends on which “bouquet” you choose. So if you subscribe to a news bouquet (in which you only get access to 10 news stations), you pay $20/month. But if you want a large selection of stations that includes news, entertainment and movies (like the one many Lebanese take for granted) you could end up paying as much as $150 per month.

Now, Aljazeera has decided to crack down on Lebanese practices and is asking to be paid a charge of $1.5 for every end user of its channels. What is interesting is the reaction of Lebanese neighborhood cable providers, a reaction which is very revealing of Lebanese attitudes to copyrights. United Cable Lebanon (UCL), one of the largest cable providers has responded by taking out Aljazeera from its service packet, and replacing its feed with a message that Aljazeera wants more money.

Basically the cable providers’ argument is that the Lebanese can’t afford to pay so much for cable TV because they don’t have access to credit, and that the government needs to protect them from “businessmen who have been making deals with the foreign satellite companies to exploit the Lebanese market.”

In any other place in the world, this logic would be considered insane. It assumes that people are entitled to cheap satellite TV provided by shady cable providers, and that somehow people are  entitled to government protection from the TV stations who are simply asking to be paid licensing fees. This is like asking the government to stop Microsoft from cracking down on $1 bootlegged CDs of Microsoft Office because people are poor and don’t have access to credit.

But Aljazeera, for political reasons, still wants to be watched in Lebanon. So I’m assuming that a settlement will eventually be reached in the end.

How a couple of tweets by an obscure writer reached the [Saudi] King and resulted in an arrest order and a possible death sentence in the matter of three days is nothing short of astonishing.

A very sad story..

Mine had to be something where I can, at a glance, get a feel at what’s going on in Lebanon and hopefully get inspired to write new posts. This is why I created a sort of Lebanese “news dashboard”, which is part twitter feed (I used the big fat twitter list), part blog posts (Lebanon blogs I’ve subscribed to across the years), and part news feeds from Lebanese websites and newspapers in all three languages .

I found it surprisingly useful and it made me discover articles I wouldn’t have otherwise read. So I thought of sharing it with you, and a couple of days ago, I gave it a domain name.

So with no further ado, I introduce beirutspring.info , and I hope you find it as useful as I did. It’s still a work in progress, so if you have any comments or feedback, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

The Syrian conflict is no longer just about a brutal dictator repressing peaceful protesters [...] The Syrian revolution is now the fault line in Middle Eastern politics, through which U.S.-Russian competition, the U.S.-Iran conflict, the Iran-Saudi regional rivalry, and the Shiite-Sunni ages-old conflict will play out.

Remember when Lebanon was that fault line? Marc Lynch is now calling Syria “Lebanon on steroids”, but to me the larger question is: Are we in the Levant destined to choose between being under a dictatorship or being the playing field of meddling foreign powers?

Let’s say someone somewhere set up a website that allows you to buy guns that will be sent to the resistance in Syria. Forget for a moment that this is a brilliant idea for a scam and imagine it’s a legitimate site. Would you donate to it with a clear conscience?

This is a hypothetical situation but it raises some interesting questions about war, propaganda and morality. Would you pay money for a weapon over which you have no control, that can possibly kill children and innocent bystanders?

What about in situations like the one happening in Syria right now. A powerful army is indiscriminately shelling a city to stamp out an insurgency, killing hundreds of innocent bystanders, and the world is proving incapable of intervening. Would you make an exception to save innocent lives? What if you were guaranteed anonymity? What if that same army has killed members of your family when it shelled your own city during the Lebanese war? Would revenge be a better motivation for you?

If you believed that it was ethical to donate guns to Lebanese southerners during the Israeli assault and occupation, would you be a hypocrite if you respond no to the questions above? Does it really make a difference if the assaulting army is made up of people who speak your language?

For the Lebanese who need a bit of mental torture, please try to honestly answer these questions.

What about me? Would I hypothetically donate money to send guns to the Syrian resistance? I’m still grappling with an answer.

the last thing we want is artists doing self-censorship because they’re afraid of what would the activists say [...] I’m very sad to see the blogosphere and the activists using their influence to damage the freedom of expression in the country.

He is not alone. Other bloggers who think the racism charges against Lebanese TV stations is unfair are treating this as a matter of free speech and are painting the online activists as some sort of thought police. I don’t think this is a fair characterization.

To start, the stations in question already exercise several forms of self censorship:

• A self censorship with political patrons: MTV doesn’t criticize the Murr family and its political allies, Future TV doesn’t criticize the Hariris, Almanar doesn’t criticize Hezbollah ..etc.
• A self censorship on religious deference grounds: When was the last time Ktir Salbeh made fun of the Maronite church and the patriarchy?
• A self censorship from topics that clearly inflame sectarian feelings. Everyone steers clear from vulgar sectarian stereotypes on TV.
• Self censorship dictated by social and cultural norms: For example, you don’t make fun of a Lebanese politician who just died
• Self censorship dictated by political taboos: For example, you don’t publish stories that portray the state of Israel in any positive light

The reason online activists are doing what they’re doing is not because they’re in some sort of witch hunt. It’s because they see the weakest elements of society, –the poor, the foreign domestic workers, the homosexuals and yes, the women — as fair game. These people are not been treated with the same tactful care that is given to other groups in society. Little gestures like not making fun of people who are committing suicide, or not making women-beating jokes when someone was just killed by a wannabe rapist are simply escaping the peripheral vision of our media editors.

The purpose of our online feedback is simply to call attention to such issues. We don’t want to punish anyone and by all means we don’t want to muffle the free opinion of anyone.

To everyone above who support boycotting MTV, please don’t forget to boycott every relative and friend of yours who has a maid at home [...] When you do that, i’ll be glad to boycott MTV, till then, please when your write comments start it with :”As a hypocrite..”

On the face of it, this makes perfect sense and rings true to many people. We all know individuals who are living embodiments of the Ktir Salbe caricatures portrayed by MTV. How come, the argument goes, we are choosing to single out MTV for our moral indignation?

The answer is simple, and it has two parts:

First, the standards that apply to mass media are different than the standards that apply to normal people. Normal people should be shamed in their private circles because this is the extent of their damage. Public media outlets on the other hand need a public response, because they are (whether they mean it or not) promoting a casual and cavalier attitude towards an important delicate issue.

Second, the “everybody does it” argument is a known moral fallacy that is referred to as the “golden rationalization”:

It is based on the flawed assumption that the ethical nature of an act is somehow improved by the number of people who do it, and if “everybody does it,” then it is implicitly all right for you to do it as well. [...] when more people engage in an action that is admittedly unethical, more harm results. An individual is still responsible for his or her part of the harm.

America is full of racists, and so is France and many other countries. This doesn’t mean that racist attitudes on TV in these countries will go unnoticed. To the contrary, they are severely punished and the stations immediately wash their hands of the anchors/actors who make mistakes.