And so it happened again!... After
Marie France posters which have been defaced but an ultra-Christian person who, oddly, turned out to be an acquaintance of mine (and he bragged about what he did in front of me!) here comes Mohamad Sibai doing exactly the same thing for the LGBT community in Lebanon who for a while now have been trying to shed a light on their cause without much success. And in he steps with his
homophobic article published in Outlook the mouthpiece of the American University of Beirut - what sparked his outrage is seeing two men holding hands on the street. And as a direct response the
www.lebidaho.com website is doing some posters on the wall specifically targeting this - except this time they have all the visibility they crave!... Mohamad Sibai has "pleasured them at any price" as the title of his infamous article says. Really, sometimes your best ally is you enemy.
3 comments:
I would have loved to see that as a defaced poster. But turned out it is part of their campaign to fight censorship, especially towards homosexuals.
I had a nice idea to contribute (were that poster really defaced by someone) but I was looking through the internet, i came to this:
http://guymeetsworld.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/lebidaho-posters-sticky-sweet/
You know what they say, any publicity is good publicity! But what was special about the Sibai article is not the article itself, but all the responses it got from LGBT-supporters, gay and straight. Homophobic, sexist and racist articles are being published every day, but for some reason or another, this one caught everyone's attention.
Anyway, our campaign is larger than this issue. Censorship has been preventing us from voicing our opinions and fighting for our rights and this is what we are trying to target through this campaign.
Karim, I think the reason the Sibai article got so much attention was because it was published in the AUB mouthpiece. I started my journalistic career in Campus which was the replacement of Outlook (when it was still not being reissued), and I remember how much fuss and stir we made about issues such as homosexuality, abortion, women's rights - so much that Hizbullah published a commique called "Corrupting the youth" banning us from the AUB Campus.
I remember in the next issue - not only did we publish the communique on the front page (translated by myself!) but I also was handing Campus by hand because we were afraid the Hizb's people would take the stacks from where we used to leave them for students to pick up!...
So I guess when AUB, an institution (for all its faults) known to be a hub for being open-minded, allowed such a biased and senseless article to be published, is the reason why it gathered so much momentum.
Mind you, I was not against publishing the article, Sibai is not only entitled to his opinions but also entitled to voice them, but the article was way too lame and silly to be published as it is.
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