yesterday i was accused of being racist towards Lebanese because i said that Lebanese don’t pronounce the letter قاف but they say كاف instead. for example,

كومي سوري instead of قومي سوري

i excluded  those who live in jabal (the mountain).

in fact, i said on other occasion that i noticed that anyone who lives in the Lebanese mountain do use the letter قاف , but the Lebanese mostly say that only Druze speak the قاف , that’s not quite true i think.

the mountain is mostly inhabited by both of Christians and Druze, and i think the reason why Christians stopped speaking the قاف in their dialect (not to be understood that i am saying each cult has a dialect of its own, i think there is a dialect for each geographical location instead)  is because they spend most of their time in beirut and only go to the mountain on vacations, contrary to Druze who for many reasons have stronger bonds with their community, villages and land that their language still lives on, even for some who live in beirut.

what really drives my intention to write this post- even though right now i am in an indifferent phase about writing what i think and suspicious about why i should write and be read in the first place- is this lady who accused me (said later on that she was joking) and who’s activist and one of the prominent activists on the Occupied Palestinian cause in lebanon.

what she’s saying basically is that racism is synonym with any criticism (assuming that my note on قاف is criticism in the first place) you make against a group WHEN you’re not part of that group. so if a lebanese made my observation, she/he wouldn’t be racist, but because there is this national divisions among people, because i am from syria and i am talking about lebanese, my observation is basically racist.

which is pretty much parallel to the logic of Zionists who stamp you with “anti-Semitic” when you are non-Jew AND criticize either Zionism or Israel. and if you are a Jew and did criticize Israel or Zionism, you’re a “self-hating Jew”.

how friendly is racism, if it is about labels, not concepts.

seriously, most activists i met, know, or worked with, become movers on the ground, so busy and so devoted on fixing reality, without making an effort to reading this very reality they’re so busy fixing it.

that’s why activists are the worst defenders of the causes they’re advocating for. and that’s why most activism basically sucks.