How The Lebanese Reflect

The day before the presidential election, the French took a day off from campaigning “for reflection”. In Lebanon, we reflect in a different way.

Make love, not politics..

Don’t worry if you live far away, the vicious media-war is alive and kicking on the web. The online flag bearers of the two camps, Lebanese-forces.com (pro-Gemayel) and tayyar.org (pro-Aoun) have both modified their designs for the occasion and added cheesy statements on how loyal the Metnis are. But the edge definitely goes to Lebanese-forces.com: Just in case you missed it, the face of the murdered Pierre Gemayel stares back at you three times in a tiny space, complete with slogans of loyalty to the slain.

The information battle has two fronts: The rumor mill and the resurrected documents. Come to think of it, it’s more of a battle of creativity than one of coverage.

At the rumor trenches, Lebanese-forces.com quotes “knowledgeable sources” who assert that Assaad Herdan of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) has set up a pro-Aoun “Security Operation Room” in Metn. The devilish plan is to create turbulence if things aren’t looking good for Aoun’s candidate.

But the FPM holds the high creative grounds in Rumors: According to tayyar.org, and you better have a long attention span for this one, a bunch of nationalized Syrians will put on their traditional costumes and silently vote for Amine Gemayel. After that, they will parade in front of the “authority’s media” and scream pro-Aoun slogans. Those images would somehow create a backlash that will push the Gemayel camp to get out and vote. Quite the diabolic scheme I must say.

And now, to the resurrected documents. Tayyar.org dug deep into Lebanese newspapers’ archives (how does this work, do they assign someone to do that?) and found a statement that Amine Gemayel had made to Annahar some time ago: “Our alliance with Hezbollah is strategic, not political”, Ouch! Of course, that was in response to the document lebanese-forces.com had revealed a few days ago, which uncovers the FPM’s old platform on Hezbollah, that “somehow disappeared from the tayyar’s website after the M.O.U between the FPM and Hezbollah”.

Hang on tight, with all this reflection going around, this is going to be quite the ride.