![\"\"](\"http:\/\/pahichan.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/lgbt_lebanon-metn-ruling-1.jpg\")
<\/a>A few days after Crepaway\u2019s left field ad which featured a same sex couple cuddling by the shore (link<\/a>), Beirut was in full gear to celebrate its own version of Pride Week, as part of the Lebanese International Day Against Homophobia.<\/p>\nMultiple LGBT NGOs\u00a0have scheduled multiple events throughout the week for the occasion,\u00a0from storytelling nights featuring Mashrou\u2019 Leila\u2019s lead singer\u00a0Hamed Sinno, to a conference on Saturday by HELEM about fighting homophobia, transphobia and biphobia in Lebanon.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, however, Lebanon\u2019s establishment dealt a setback to the organization Proud Lebanon which had planned an event this week as part of Beirut Pride Week. The reason was that a\u00a0Lebanese Islamist organization \u2013 hay2at al 3oulama2 al muslimin \u2013 decided that such an event was in violation of their own fragile self and what they believe in, which led them to pressure the ministry of interior which prompted the hotel to cancel the event under the guise of them \u201cnot being able to keep the participants safe.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s intriguing, isn\u2019t it, that a conference about\u00a0basic human rights in 2017 cannot\u00a0be kept safe somehow by security officers. You\u2019d think that they\u2019d be capable of doing the most mundane of their jobs: assign a few officers to the hotel in question, in order to guarantee the well-being of Lebanese citizens who are expressing their constitutionally given right of freedom of expression, but no.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that they can\u2019t guarantee the participants\u2019 safety, it\u2019s that they don\u2019t want to. Our system is\u00a0too afraid of irrelevant snowflake Islamists whose entire existence these days is about making sure nothing about this country moves forward in any way that threatens their power. Our system is\u00a0too terrified of the advances that Lebanon\u2019s LGBT community is making, be it in fighting homophobia to court victories to Lebanon further being the lead\u00a0Arab country in such issues.<\/p>\n
It should come as no surprise that those same Islamists wanted a Coca-Cola poster taken down in Tripoli because it was too \u201cobscene\u201d for their taste. Spoiler alert: it featured two people standing very close to each other. Those same Islamists also objected to a lingerie ad in Beirut under the guise of it being too close to a Mosque. That same ad had been approved previously by the same authorities that were forced to remove it.<\/p>\n
The problem is that we have authorities that keep listening to such pests. When will this country stop listening to such cancerous infestations that are hell-bent in keeping everyone\u00a0in their own dark ages? I guess we\u2019ll never know.<\/p>\n
However, those Islamists and other religious extremists who have terrorized the country with their horrendous thought don\u2019t know that the years of struggle that Lebanon\u2019s LGBT community has and is enduring has made them resilient to the hate and discrimination that infests their being.<\/p>\n
As such, Beirut\u2019s Pride Week is still underway, and if there\u2019s anything to be proud of, it\u2019s the fact that Beirut is the only Arab city to have such celebrations, in spite of Islamists and religious extremists, and in such an open way. L\u2019Orient Le Jour published an article earlier<\/a> saying that obscurantism had won. It may have prevented one event from taking place, but that hasn\u2019t stopped the rest of what was planned from still being underway.<\/p>\n Lebanon\u2019s extremists\u00a0did not win. Their hate won\u2019t win, and it sure as hell won\u2019t find ground this year.<\/p>\n Copy :\u00a0https:\/\/stateofmind13.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kathmandu (Pahichan) May 22 – One step forward, a bunch of steps backwards thanks to cancerous religious extremists whose political reach is always overreaching; this is the story of modern Lebanon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":7308,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,621,490,11],"tags":[524,498],"class_list":["post-7307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-human-rights","category-news","category-slider","category-world","tag-lgbt","tag-ngo"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7307"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7311,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7307\/revisions\/7311"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}