Daily Times

BEIRUT: A string of court cases and judicial investigations against Lebanese media figures is testing this country’s reputation as a forum for ideas in a region blanketed by censorship and threats to the press.

Lebanese authorities are getting tough on free speech ahead of national elections, summoning two leading talk show hosts to court over on-air remarks and sentencing an analyst to jail for comments she made in Washington about the Lebanese army.

A raft of taboos enshrined by law is shielding the country’s military, political leaders, and religious institutions from criticism. “The Lebanese journalist used to be a pioneer for freedoms for the entire Arab world,” said Marcel Ghanem, who is facing a suit because of remarks made by a guest on his highly regarded talk show, Kalam Ennas, in November. “Is it possible that today Lebanese journalists are afraid of the specter of the authorities?”

Ghanem and others targeted by criminal suits and investigations say the political class is closing ranks ahead of parliamentary elections in May – the first national referendum in eight years – and trying to tamp down on the torrent of media opprobrium since a national trash crisis disgraced politicians in 2015.

“The vulnerable ‘system’ needs to be protected,” said Hanin Ghaddar, a Lebanese analyst at the Washington Institute, who was sentenced by a military court to six months in prison for comments she made at a US symposium in 2014. Ghaddar, who lives in Washington, said she would not return to Lebanon to serve her sentence. An outspoken critic of the militant group Hezbollah, Ghaddar charged that Lebanon’s Army was showing leniency to the Shiite group while cracking down on Sunni extremists.

Ghaddar’s case is “a mark of shame on Lebanon,” said Ayman Mhanna, the executive director of the Samir Kassir Foundation, a press freedoms organization named after the late editor of Lebanon’s An-Nahar newspaper, who was assassinated in 2005.

“No politician can say that the status of freedom is acceptable in Lebanon when a military court can issue a sentence to prison or exile because of an opinion,” said Mhanna.

Justice Minister Selim Jreissati said Ghaddar was accusing the army of treason, and that this was not protected by the constitutionally-enshrined principle of freedom of speech. “She calls herself Lebanese?” Jreissati said to the AP in a phone call.

Ghanem, who has hosted his show for 23 years, said he was blindsided by the charges leveled against him after he refused to testify in a criminal investigation of a guest accused of defaming Lebanon’s leaders. In a live episode, Saudi journalist Ibrahim Al-Merhi said Aoun and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri were “partners” in “Hezbollah’s terrorism.”

The Iran-backed Hezbollah is a partner in Lebanon’s ruling coalition government and a political ally of both Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and Berri’s Amal Movement.

Jreissati, who belongs to Aoun’s party, said at the time that the press had lost its “moral and professional bearings.” The episode underscored the perils of journalism in Lebanon’s charged political atmosphere, where Saudi Arabia and Iran grapple for influence in the context of a wider regional rivalry that has fueled wars in Syria and Yemen.

Published in Daily Times, February  22^nd 2018.