This is why the sight of spiffy young Syrian men and women in our Starbucks coffees browsing the web can seem odd to some (Except for Hamra residents who are used to seeing Syrian AUB students)
As Mark Mackinnon writes in the Globe and Mail, many young cyber dissidents are settling in Beirut where "they feel free to express their opinions and continue their political activism."
"It’s a safe place for us as Syrians. All the other Arab countries are dictatorships," said 23-year-old Ahed al-Hindi as he sat on the terrace of a Starbucks coffee shop in Beirut’s trendy Hamra neighborhood.
Mr. al-Hindi knows that first-hand. He was arrested in a Damascus Internet cafe late last year after the cafe manager filmed him posting what Mr. al-Hindi says were "political comments on the human-rights situation" on a Syrian news website and reported him to the police.
In other words, as Syria is getting more heavy handed, more and more Syrians are coming to Lebanon to freely express themselves. This sounds like an opportunity for Lebanon.
I argued before that since Syria uses brutal force to influence Lebanese politics, it is only fair for us the Lebanese to use our competitive advantage -namely open society and free flow of information- to influence Syrian politics.
This is why the Lebanese should make use of the Syrian crackdown to start to actively interacting with the Syrians who are now calling Beirut their cyber-refuge. In addition to that, the government should take the opportunity to remind the Lebanese of why these freedoms are important and why they shouldn’t be taken for granted.
We should remember after all, that we fought and we are still fighting for those very freedoms, not for some "treacherous" alliances with America and Israel, a theory that is peddled by the same people who are afraid of Facebook.
About Facebook
Facebook is a social networking website that allows people to communicate with their friends and exchange information. Launched on February 4, 2004, Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg ( pictured) , a former member of the Harvard class of 2006 and former Ardsley High School student. Initially the membership was restricted to students of Harvard College. It was subsequently expanded to all Ivy League schools within two months. Many individual universities were added in rapid succession over the next year. Eventually, people with a university (e.g .edu, .ac.uk, etc.) email address from institutions across the globe were eligible to join. Networks were then initiated for high schools and some large companies. Since September 11, 2006, it has been made available to users with any email address[2], if they are within a certain age range. Users can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region.
As of October 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites, with 43 million active members worldwide, with membership expected to surpass 60 million users by the end of the year. From September 2006 to September 2007 it increased its ranking from 60th to 5th most visited web site.
The name of the site refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of the campus community that some U.S. colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.
Sources: Beirut Spring, Wikipedia
Tags: Beirut, Facebook, Lebanese, Lebanon, Syria
