If you wear a beard in Beirut

The French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen is visiting Lebanon, and it seems like an opportunist attempt to gain support of French citizens who are anti-Muslim (maybe many French-Lebanese dual citizens?).

I’m not a political analyst or social critic, but I do tell stories for a living. Most of those stories so far have been reported from and about Lebanon — a country with a history of complex relations between religious sects.

Sometimes I struggle to tell these stories — who are they for? Foreigners, who have a fairly monotone view of Beirut and the relationship Islam has with society? Do I add caveats? Or should I address locals or those who lived there and understand the nuances? I don’t really know. So, I’ll just tell this story for myself.

In 2013, I moved into an apartment on the third floor of an old building in Beirut’s Qantari neighborhood. The surrounding structures all appeared to have been recently torn down and rebuilt into luxurious apartments for Beirut’s middle-upper classes, making my building the last of its contemporaries.

It was painted daffodil yellow and had pine green shudders. No elevator, just three flights of giant stairs. On the corner was a Harley Davidson Motorcycle shop. Next to it was the Qantari mosque, where my landlord would go to pray five times a day and whose call to prayer I would hear on the occasion I was lying in bed awake at 3 a.m.

On Fridays, I’d cover my head with my pillow to drown out the sound of the national anthem blasting from the school at the other end of the road. On Sundays, I’d hear the bells of a church two blocks away ring through my open balcony door, where a view of the Mediterranean was obstructed by a gauche bank building.

Directly across from my apartment were two general stores. One was owned and operated by two young Syrian guys. When I was absent from the store for a few days, they’d ask me where I’d been. Next door was a cell phone shop, owned by a British-Lebanese dual national who was dragged back to Lebanon by nostalgia. His experiment lasted just about a year before reality sent him back to London with his wife and two kids. In his place, a Syrian refugee ran the store (he’s now in Germany; I don’t know who runs the store or if it’s even open anymore).

Below me was a small shop that we paid monthly for TV service. The first month I had an issue with their service and got into a yelling match with Ali, the tanned, mustached and raspy-voiced guy who installed the service and collected the bills. I thought he was ripping me off. He might have been, but either way we became friendly after that, and he’d always scream out “Hello!” in English, while zipping by on his motorized scooter when he saw me on the street.

One of the most interesting people I met was my landlord’s mother. She was an elderly woman, usually donning a white head scarf. She was always jovial. She lived on the first floor. I don’t think she got out much, but sometimes she’d step outside her front door and look out off the steps onto the street. I’d pass her on my way out of the building, and she’d greet me joyfully and gab about how the neighborhood used to be when her kids were kids and all the changes that had taken place during and since the war.

Her children had grown up in the building. Now her grandson and his two children were living on the fourth floor of that same building. (I have a great story with him, but I’ll save that for another time).

I remember a few stories of our interactions, but for the sake of brevity I’ll recount one. It was around the summer of 2014 and I’d started growing a beard. Many pious Muslim men wear beards as a show of faith. Many pious Muslim and non-Muslim men also wear beards as a show of fashion. Mine was the latter as I’m neither all that pious nor Muslim.

As I descended the stairs, she caught a look of my new facial hair and immediately stuck her finger in my face. “Get rid of it!” she said, loudly and playfully, but there were clear serious undertones.

“You don’t like it?” I asked.

“No, not at all!” she replied. “I don’t let any of my sons have beards!”

Her son, my landlord, must have been in his 50s. And it’s true, he’s clean-shaven every day. I didn’t end up shaving my beard, and she dropped the issue. She went back to telling me stories about the neighborhood and the old days. I still have a beard almost three years later. But if I shave it one day, I think I’d like to go back and show her. Even if she’s forgotten about me by then.

Europe’s Populists Want to Make Polio Great Again

MILAN—Diseases rarely seen in modern society are popping back up in Italyand elsewhere in Europe, where a slew of rumors linking vaccines to supposed complications like autism are spreading with the help of populist politicians.

The most prominent backer of such rumors here is Beppe Grillo, Italy’s most popular politician and the leader of the populist Five Star Movement.

“Vaccines have played a fundamental role in eradicating terrible illnesses such as polio, diphtheria and hepatitis,” Grillo wrote on his blog in 2015, when he first seized on the issue. “However, they bring a risk associated with side effects that are usually temporary and surmountable… but in very rare cases, can be as severe as getting the same disease you’re trying to be immune to.”

Despite all the qualifiers, the message was one of fear and conspiracy, always useful to those who want to rally the masses. Grillo was riding a wave.

As The Daily Beast reported in 2015, that year was supposed to be the year that measles was eradicated in Europe. The goal was set a decade earlier when vaccines, though not mandatory, were not-so-subtly required for school admission in a growing number of European countries. But instead of eradication, Europe faced one of the worst outbreaks of the preventable diseases of measles and rubella in recent memory. The number of cases of measles in Europe grew by 348 percent after 2007, climbing from 7,073 cases then to 31,685 cases in 2013 according to the World Health Organization. For the moment, Europe is polio free, and globally the crippling, deadly disease has been on the way to eradication—thanks to vaccinations. But the measles example shows how quickly such gains can be reversed.

Grillo’s party picked up on the issue and the ensuing polarization over vaccines has had a palpable effect on Italian society, taking a bad situation and making it all the worse.

The Five Star Movement (or 5SM, if you will) is Italy’s most popular political movement. Populist, euro-skeptics who bill themselves as outsiders, the 5SM began in 2009 when Grillo, now 68, and his web-strategist colleague, Gianroberto Casaleggio, began hosting gatherings through the website Meetup.com to draw out disillusioned Italian youth.

Grillo’s fame derived from his stinging political satire as a TV comedian in the ’80s. He was banned from television in 1987 for his critiques of the establishment and waited in obscurity for almost 20 years. Then, in 2005, he roared back into public consciousness when he took out a full-page ad in the Italian daily La Repubblica calling for the resignation of then-Italian Central Bank Governor Antonio Fazio, and another full-page ad in the International Herald Tribune demanding a ban on parliamentarians with criminal records. These exploits led to Time magazine naming Grillo a “European Hero.”

Grillo’s personal star and the 5SM’s internet savviness fueled their meteoric rise over the next few years. Their ability to tap into the disenchantment caused by the political establishment also contributed to their success, as did their publicizing of environment issues that appeal directly to Italy’s youth.

In 2013 they were the most-voted-for party in Italy. And despite a sluggish performance in local elections last month, the 5SM is expected to be a major player in next year’s elections for parliament.

With all that power, Grillo often uses his influence to propagate fake news and disseminate obscure weblinks to conspiracy theories.

Grillo regularly posts questionably sourced stories on his blog, which is said to be one of the top 10 read websites on the planet. His anti-vaccination propaganda, in particular, drew condemnation in a New York Times editorial published this past May.

He is not alone, as we know. The ranks of anti-vaxxers in the United States have included Jim Carrey, Jenny McCarthy, and even American President Donald Trump.

Earlier this year, @realDonaldTrump wrote on his Twitter account, “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes - AUTISM. Many such cases!”

Such issues are becoming more common across Europe. In France, more than 20 percent of the population does not support vaccinations. Marine Le Pen, the leader of far right party the National Front, said in early July she was “completely opposed” to mandatory vaccinations. Such attitudes have also caught on in recent years in, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, Ukraine, Austria, and Germany, where 504 cases of measles were reported by mid-April (compared to just 33 cases from the same period in 2016).

In Italy, the first half of 2017 saw the number of measles cases triple from 2016. Out of 3,000 new cases of measles recorded through June, 40 percent of the infected faced complications. Italy’s last outbreak of measles saw 18,000 registered cases and led to 15 deaths. The fallout for doubting vaccines has made such an impact that a few Five Star Movement members have walked back vaccine doubts. Paola Ferrara, a Five Star Movement member who works in the city hall in Rome, said in May she considered vaccinations “essential.”

But vaccines aside, the 5SM does plenty of damage to Italian society by propagating other baseless rumors. In May, other high-ranking members of the 5SM helped propagate a vicious conspiracy targeting NGOs and charities working with refugees. 5SM repeated claims by a public prosecutor from Sicily that accused groups of colluding with human traffickers with an aim of unsettling the Italian economy. No evidence has been found to support this claim.

While some members have walked back to the center on vaccines, the movement has shifted further right on a number of issues including on receiving migrants. Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi said her city could no longer afford the “devastating social cost” of receiving refugees. Only a few months earlier she had delivered a different message:

“We as mayors and our cities face the effects of large immigration inflows. It is our duty to guarantee dignity, shelter and human warmth to newcomers. Negative attitudes and closure offend our human dignity.”

So do fake news and conspiracy theories.

Originally published in the the Daily Beast.

With countering migration in mind, Italy to deploy troops to North Africa

The Italian parliament approved measures to increase the number of troops in North Africa earlier this month in an effort to combat migration and terrorism in the region.

After the approval Jan. 17, Italian officials said troops would focus on countering terrorism and ensuring security. Doubts, however, remain over the true motive, considering recent frantic efforts to prevent refugees and migrants from setting sail for Italian shores.

“It is clear that Italy’s foreign policy priorities have shifted and managing migration flows from Africa through the Maghreb is now the most pressing issue,” Riccardo Fabbiano, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst with the Eurasia Group, told Al-Monitor. “While remaining loyal to its NATO commitments, Italy is trying to prioritize the issue of migration, which is already a central theme in the current electoral campaign.”

Italy said it would remove 200 troops from Iraq and half its Afghanistan operation from 1,500 troops to 750 in order to increase its North Africa operation. An additional 30 troops will go to Libya, taking the total troop count to 400, while 60 new troops will go to Tunisia and 470 will go to Niger where they hope to combat human traffickers.

The deployment of Italian troops in Tunisia has been requested by the government there to help with training and advising the Tunisian military. Tunisia is still weary of militant attacks after three incidents in 2015-16: the Bardo Museum attack, the Sousse beach attack and the cross-border Ben Gardane attack.

Next door, in Libya, the current 370 Italian troops have been training the Libyan coast guard. Migration is a major electoral issue, and Italy is prepping for parliamentary elections on March 4. While the troop deployment has been advertised to help fight terrorism, the Italian motives seem to be intertwined with migration as well.

“Is there any clear distinction to be made between counterterrorism and migration? I don’t think there truly is one,” Jalel Harchaoui, a doctoral candidate in geopolitics at Paris 8 University and a frequent commentator on Libyan affairs, told Al-Monitor. “Both phenomena tend to come hand in hand with anarchy. Right now, minds are particularly focused on migration. But in 2015 and 2016, the focus was on Daesh [the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State] and jihadist groups in general. One thing is certain: If the overall security situation worsens in Libya, both banes will experience an uptick. That is the fear.”

Over 100,000 refugees or migrants arrived in Italy in each of the last two years. Last year, the total was 119,130 while in 2016 the number was significantly higher at 181,436, according to The Guardian. The majority set sail from the Libyan coast after traveling through the Sahel. The Italian government has worked with and built relationships in recent years with both competing governments in Libya over trying to halt the large number of people from taking to the sea. Rome tends to favor the United Nations-backed government of Fayez al-Sarraj, based in Tripoli.

“Specifically on Libya, the marginal increase in the size of the mission is nothing new — this mission’s aim is twofold: guarding a military hospital in Misrata and training the Libyan coast guard,” Fabbiano said. “Nothing changes with this increase. What changes, though, is how this military presence should play a more effective role in stemming migration, thanks to the parallel missions in Niger and Tunisia.”

In Libya, however, the increase of troops hasn’t been received particularly well. The collective memory in Libya still recalls the Italian colonization that lasted from 1910 to 1947. When Italy deployed naval vessels off the Libyan shores in August last year, Libyans hit the streets, calling on the Government of National Accord (GNA) to step down. Posters circulated of the Libyan resistance hero Omar al-Mukhtar, who battled Italian colonization in the 1920s.

Conspiracy theories are circulating, according to a field worker with an international nongovernmental organization working on the ground in Libya who wasn’t cleared by the organization to speak to the media. There is a widely spread theory: Italy wants to reoccupy Libya, the source said, with local media presenting the topic from a negative prospective.

Internal politics in Libya may allow such rumors to spread, too. The GNA seems to be the favorite of Italy at the moment, but the Libyan National Army, which rules the eastern part of the country and is led by Gen. Khalifa Hifter, is increasingly in vogue with international rulers. The competing governments are locked in a chess match for power and legitimacy over Libya. Meanwhile, Libyan leaders have often had to walk a fine line between seeking international help and legitimacy and maintaining popular support on the domestic front.

“Italy has displayed a tendency to strike deals with the GNA in Tripoli and also local groups across the western half of Libya,” Harchaoui said. “Hifter has a political incentive to criticize Rome’s action in Libya.”

But with the elections approaching, these policies could change based on the winner. Currently, Silvio Berlusconi’s center right coalition — who supported the increase in troop deployment to the region — is thought to have the best chance at winning an outright majority or forming a successful parliamentary ruling bloc. The country’s most popular single party, however, is the Five Star Movement. While the movement voted against the deployment — arguing it wouldn’t allow the new government to set a foreign policy agenda of its own — they have also repeatedly voted against forming coalitions with other parties and are unlikely to receive enough votes to rule on their own.

“Nobody knows what Rome’s new Libya policy will [be] after the elections,” Harchaoui said. “And nobody knows what the migrant flow will look like when the winter season is over.”

Originally published in Al-Monitor