Jean Akouri

“At the core of the gay rights struggle is the reality that people need to be who they are. What nature intended them to be. With trans ideology, full-fledged campaigns are encouraging people to disregard their biology and transform into what some of them wish they might have been.”

🔴 #EXCLUSIVE: Parliamentarian Fouad Makhzoumi told This is Beirut that peace with Israel is Lebanon’s only option to prevent future wars. He also called for dismantling the outdated 1955 Boycott Law, which has been misused to block dialogue with Israel. By @ClaudiaGroeling and @Kalineantoun 📲 Watch the full video via the link in bio.

@EylonALevy Myself and most Lebanese friends get mistaken for Israeli often all around the world. That's usually because there's a misconception that the Lebanese are Arab and subsequently we're expected to look and act a certain way, which we don't as we are Canaanite, not Arab.

Lebanese people look so Israeli. It’s almost like we’re (mostly) Levantine.

@AsharqBSP You gotta buy what you don’t have, which in Saudi Arabia’s case is everything but oil.

أنفقت الأندية السعودية نحو 907 ملايين دولار على ضم لاعبين من الخارج في 2025، لتأتي في الصدارة عربياً، بحسب تقرير (ميركاتو الشرق 2025) تابعوا اقتصاد الشرق للمزيد

@heraldgardner @MuskSucks827 @BecharaGerges The usual narrative… a few rich families who collaborated with the ottomans and benefited from the famine claim the orthodox are sophisticated and Maronites “peasants.” I repeat: the Orthodox generally profusely dislike Maronites and Lebanon. Your posts only confirms this.

@MuskSucks827 @JeanAkouri @BecharaGerges Greek Orthodox are not anti Lebanese. They are simply too sophisticated educated rich urban Greco Levantine to fit in the national mold especially one designed by unsophisticated mountaineer paisesnts I have a whole chapter in my book on this

🚩 The Gatekeepers of Memory: A reply to Charles Hayek’s “Between History and Hallucinations,”👇 By Bechara Gerges There is a particular kind of intellectual violence that disguises itself as nuance. It arrives in the language of rigor, draped in citations and cartographic references, and it tells a people that their search for identity is a pathology. Charles Hayek’s latest installment does precisely this, and in doing so, commits the very sin it claims to diagnose. The argument is seductive in its symmetry: Hezbollah mythologizes resistance, certain Christians mythologize Phoenicia, and both are equally corrosive. But false equivalence is not balance. One of these narratives commands an army, a parallel state, and the capacity to drag an entire nation into war without its consent. The other circulates on social media pages and cultural forums. To place them on the same analytical plane is not scholarly evenhandedness, it is moral evasion. When Hayek dismisses the Phoenician thread as “fantasy,” he is not defending history. He is defending a specific historical settlement, one in which Lebanese identity is legible only through its Arab framework, and in which any community that interrogates that framework is engaged in separatist regression. But who decided that Arabism was the unmarked default? That question is never asked, because asking it would expose the article’s deepest assumption: that some identity claims are scholarship and others are symptoms. The treatment of Syriac is equally telling. Yes, Syriac developed as a literary language in Edessa. But liturgical and ecclesiastical languages are not irrelevant to identity, unless one is prepared to argue that Latin meant nothing to European civilization because it was not spoken at kitchen tables. To call this “appropriation” while celebrating “cross cultural engagement” in the same breath is a contradiction the author does not appear to notice. And here is the deeper wound the piece refuses to touch: the reason these identity movements exist at all. Communities do not retreat into myth when they are thriving. They do so when every other avenue of political agency has been sealed shut. When your state has been hollowed out by an armed faction that answers to Tehran. When your demographic weight has been deliberately altered over decades. When the so called “shared framework” has consistently demanded that you contribute your pluralism while others contribute their militias. Under those conditions, the search for a pre Arab, pre Islamic anchor is not delusion, it is the survival instinct of a community that has been told, repeatedly, that the house it helped build no longer has room for it. Every historical framework privileges certain questions and silences others. The question is why this particular identity construction provokes such anxiety, and among whom. The article ends with a call to choose “honest history” over “comforting illusions.” A fine sentiment. But honest history would require acknowledging that the communities now accused of mythologizing their past were, for a century, the primary engine of the very intellectual tradition the author claims they are abandoning. They did not lose that role because they read too much about Phoenicia. They lost it because the political order that sustained their participation was destroyed, not by mythology, but by armed force, foreign intervention, and the systematic refusal of accountability. You cannot dispossess a people and then mock them for grieving what was taken. The real question Hayek’s essay avoids is not whether these narratives are historically precise. It is what kind of political arrangement would make them unnecessary. Until that question is answered, telling a community to abandon its “myths” while offering nothing in return is not scholarship. It is asking the wounded to be grateful for the blade.

To say that I have been disappointed in the Lebanese Armed Forces’ leadership under General Haykal and their willingness to take on Hezbollah is an understatement. Now, the LAF is openly talking about abandoning Christian villages in the South, subjecting them to Hezbollah attacks and trying to blame Israel. To the Lebanese government, this is a very dangerous decision and you will be held accountable for the consequences of this decision if Christian villages are attacked by Hezbollah. The LAF under the leadership of General Haykal has been a tremendous failure when it comes to fighting Hezbollah. timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry…

תשמעו את טוני בולוס, עיתונאי ומשפיען לבנוני >>

@benappel The Harm We Do Ourselves, which follows a week in the life of an openly gay man in Beirut, touches on how damaging association with this ideology has been to homosexuals outside the West. amazon.com/Harm-We-Do-Our…

'I was gay, I had faced discrimination, and I had fought for my rights. But now that gay rights had become “LGBTQ” rights, I found myself force-teamed with a lot of people whose values were nothing like mine.' My latest op-ed for The Wall Street Journal: wsj.com/opinion/im-gay…

💯💯

@suwaidi_jamal @heraldgardner If anything, the Arab League supported Gulf states, the only Arab countries there are, by imposing fake Arab identities on others. May the League disintegrate fully and historical accuracies reemerge.

Gulf Arab countries are considering withdrawing from the Arab League.

@NotMikeHarlow Thanks for the clarification. AP's language was confusing, and I would have been angry had I read it on its own. Read The Harm We Do Ourselves, which touches on how badly this "LGBTQ+" ideology has impacted gay people outside the West. amazon.com/Harm-We-Do-Our…

What “conversion therapy” used to mean was electroshocking someone until they’re not gay anymore. What they call “conversion therapy” today is anything that isn’t immediately “affirming” a child who says they’re the opposite sex. If a child claims to be trans and you try to get them therapy, or God forbid question that and try to explore other causes, that is now considered “conversion therapy”. Laws prohibiting this are nothing but a one-way ticket to medicalizing children. They deliberately call it “LGBTQ” (letters which have absolutely nothing in common, and are often in direct conflict with one another) to hide behind the past medical abuses towards homosexuals. People are sympathetic to that. Forced teaming a completely unrelated issue with it is the only way they could EVER get support for something as abhorrent as “trans kids”. This insanity can’t stand on its own merit. But the gaslighting is no longer working. Getting a gender confused child help and therapy is a GOOD thing and should be the norm. It’s not conversion therapy, it’s called acting like the adult in the situation! There is no greater evil than coercing a child into believing they’re something they’re not, solely because the adult has a particular ideology. Let kids be kids!

@PeterTatchell This "LGBTQ+" insane concoction from you Western activists has especially hit gay people outside the West very hard. More in The Harm We Do Ourselves, which follows a week in the life of an openly gay man in Beirut. amazon.com/Harm-We-Do-Our…

Some feminists want to exclude trans women. I disagree but salute their work for equal pay etc I get branded a misogynist for supporting trans rights, despite my solidarity with every other feminist campaign for 50+ years I judge people on the totality of their work. You?

Lebanon can have a civil war or a foreign invasion. “Diplomacy” is pretending that there is a third option.

@UNReliefChief Helping means ending Hizballah. Nothing else, absolutely nothing else, will. They should not be able to lift their heads, be they political or military, when all this is done. Anything else is beyond destructive for Lebanon.

Just landed in Beirut. Full programme ahead. Over many years here, through some tough times, I developed that Lebanese radar for anxiety and tension levels. My antennae are rusty, but this feels right up there. Understandably. We’re here to do our best to help.

The concept of "teenager" is a modern invention. For most of human history, a boy of 13 was already a man, apprenticed in a trade or fighting in a war. George Washington was a professional surveyor at 16. Alexander Hamilton managed a trading company at 14. In medieval Europe, noble boys could be pages at 7 and squires by 14. In Rome, a boy put on the "toga of manhood" at 14. The idea that an 18 year-old is "still figuring things out" would have been incomprehensible to our ancestors. I believe this is why we think teenagers are so troubled. They are men and women stuck in a society that treats them as children. Of course they are going to "rebel". We should give them more responsibility and expect much more of them.

@seasidedruze @visegrad24 Do not worry at all. Your "dear people" show and express only what they believe is in their best interest, true sentiments or correctness be damned. Look up "Taqiya" though I imagine you're very familiar with it.

@visegrad24 It's important to note that during the massacre of Druze in Suweida last July, many Syrian Christians sided with the jihadists, showed no sympathy towards us, and accused the main Druze sheikh in Suweida of being a Zionist traitor. Be selective with your solidarity my dear people

Druze residents in Suwayda, Syria, rallied in front of a church, holding crosses and chanting in solidarity with Christians targeted in an HTS-aligned attack on Al-Suqaylabiyah, a majority-Christian town in Hama province.

@visegrad24 Circumstances and current political requirements generally dictate collective Druze action. Look up "Taqiya" for more.

There’s something very simple about the war in Lebanon. If a state, any state, allows an armed group to occupy part of its territory and that armed group starts attacking an adjacent state, and if both the occupied state and the UN have failed to stop that armed group from attacking the adjacent state, then it should come as a surprise to no one when the state that’s being attacked takes matters into their own hands. This isn’t rocket science, and any state in the world would do the same.

@MajdolineLahham This means "civil war" has been launched. How it's managed is the question now ...

#لبنان_لا_يريد_الحزب