Unless this anonymous resident was aboard Gulf Air 042 on Tuesday night, it is unlikely that he has ever stepped foot in Beirut:
A taxi driver has been shot in both legs after being attacked and dragged from his car in Strabane.
[…]
Strabane councillor Gerard Foley, who works with the victim, said the attackers had “done their homework”.
[…]
“A man asked me last night ‘Is this Beirut, because there seems to be nothing round here but shootings?'”
Yeah, blame the comment on some anonymous man. OK, so we have the occasional gunfights which are apparently capable of striking a commercial jet flying at 37,000 feet (to put the rumor to rest, no, a stray bullet originating from a gunfight in Beirut’s southern suburbs did not hit the Gulf Air flight which had just cleared Cyprus and was heading towards Tripoli).
Gerard Foley, I’ve determined, as Strabane’s councilor and as the person who heard someone else use the “looks like Beirut” phrase, it would be best that you receive the certificate.
I’ve noticed your fixation on the use of “looks like Beirut” to talk about a messed up or dangerous place.
I’ve noticed that too and I don’t like it either, but once the name of a place becomes part of a lexicon, it becomes hard to undo.
Imagine Saudi fury if they knew that LA was called the Mecca of Porn for instance..
It may be hard to undo, but its not impossible – even if it requires tackling it one person at a time.
I agree with Jad, defeatism is the wrong attitude. We’re supposed to tackle this as persistently (and politely) as Jad does, and just like African Americans tackled the N word. Imagine if a self-defeatist showed up in the civil rights movement in the US and said “yeah, racism sucks, but once a prejudice sticks you can’t get rid of it”. People who achieve progress replace this defeatist attitude with common sense, and persistence. Thanks again Jad!
In fact this is a form of racism against Lebanon, sometime practiced by Lebanese people themselves, as this post describes: http://lebanesefromabroad.blogspot.com/2010/07/dont-be-racist-towards-lebanon.html