43. Understanding Lebanon w/ Ayman Makarem

43: Understanding Lebanon with Ayman Makarem, Part 1 Matthew Remski: Hello everyone, this is Matthew Remski and welcome back to Antifascist Dad podcast. I've been off for about six weeks for gardening, a few family trips, overhauling the home office, and now sailing into season two of this podcast with episode number 43, Understanding Lebanon with Ayman Makarem, also known as Politically Depressed on YouTube. Ayman Makarem: I think I made a video a few weeks ago that I still really stand by, and I don't see that much has changed. And I think it was part of the emphasis of us doing this, which is that there are very few Lebanese voices and people being platformed on leftist podcasts, on alternative spaces, that I find deeply frustrating, because there's a lot, and there is a lot to learn and to learn from. Matthew Remski: You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. And the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, where subscribers get early access to a second weekly episode. And today it's the second part of my interview with Ayman, because we went long in our discussion of the complexity of Lebanese postcolonial reality and how leftists can better educate themselves about it. But remember, if you can't afford to support the show for whatever reason, those Patreon episodes all eventually get unlocked, so you'll be able to hear part two right here in a couple of weeks. Also, I'll just remind you that my book, Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times, is available for sale. There's a link in the show notes. I was immediately attracted to the scholarship and content creation of my guest today, Ayman Makarem, not only because getting a nuanced view of Lebanese history and current conditions is rare, and I think this is a real blind spot while the state is now a new front line in Israel's genocidal aggression, but also because it's clear that that nuance is hard-won. It's experientially won, at the commensurate cost. To be politically depressed, as Ayman's YouTube handle puts it, is to be lucid about the absence of easy answers, to be frank about how exhausting this violent world is now. To start, I watched his primer video on Lebanon's long and tortured relationship with Israel, and one thing I noticed quite clearly was this sustained insistence that tuning into the real working class in every party to a postcolonial conflict space means never falling into the simplicity of campism. And sure enough, Ayman has a video about that as well. I'll link to a bunch of his videos now. What do we mean by campism? We mean the tendency to align uncritically with any state or any resistance or insurrectionary movement opposing the US or the West, where the reasoning of anti-imperialism becomes the sole but also the sufficient justification for support, regardless of what that idealized state or movement's authoritarianism, human rights abuses, or actual politics looks like. So if uncritical praise of, let's say, the axis of resistance, for example, in the mode of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," is in earnest, it might be misinformed, it might be naive, it might be propagandistic, or all of the above. And if it's coming from leftists or Marxists, it's probably not standing with the complexity of workers' lives in Iran, in China, or in North Korea, because there is nothing all good about any state project, and it's not uncommon that resistance movements conceal their flaws with displays of courage and force. So I learned from Ayman, for example, something I never would have understood before: that among the many complexities tearing at the seams of Hezbollah, in terms of strategy and morality and preparedness, is that this group does not offer its followers an economic vision of the future that's that different from the neoliberal standard held by the ruling elites of the country. Now, this interview is in two parts, and I didn't intend it that way, but I had so many questions about his background and methodological approach to this material that I got to the 45-minute mark and realized that we hadn't really gotten into Lebanon's past and present. So in this first half I ask Ayman about four lenses that shape his analysis: belonging to the ancient Druze faith, his queerness, how he developed his anti-authoritarian leftism, and what it has cost him in terms of mental health. Now, because the history we cover in these episodes is complex, and because it reaches back over a century, and because we meander a bit, I just want to nail down some timeline data points that Ayman touches on so that you're better oriented. A lot of these are included in a timeline and an essay that I'll also link to that he's prepared. So, 1916, 1917: the Sykes-Picot Agreement secretly divides the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France, and then the Balfour Declaration pledges a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and together these launch the colonial partition of the land known as Bilad al-Sham into what eventually becomes Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. During that same time, and into 1918, there is a huge famine in Mount Lebanon in the region that kills roughly half of the local population. This is a catastrophe that Ayman says is largely erased from national memory. In 1920, France creates what's known as Greater Lebanon, annexing Beirut, Akkar, the Bekaa, and Jabal Amel to Mount Lebanon to build a client state anchored by the Maronite Christians. This is an Eastern Catholic sect dating back to the fifth century. They've been historically dominant in Lebanese politics and in all colonial-era alliances. Between 1936 and 1939, the Great Palestinian Revolt occurs, and it's eventually crushed by Britain and by Zionist militias, including the Haganah. In 1943, in the chaos of the Second World War, Lebanon gains a degree of independence after the pro-Vichy French administration in Lebanon is defeated by Free French and British forces. However, Lebanon's postcolonial elite maintains close and cooperative ties with France even after gaining a measure of sovereignty. In 1948, the Nakba displaces Palestinians into Lebanon and also ethnically cleanses Lebanese Shia border villages. Israeli forces strike deep into Lebanon, and by the 1950s there is an Israeli doctrine of collective punishment that is enacted, and it includes a proposal to install a client Christian regime in Lebanon and annex the south completely. So there's a long history of unresolved sectarian and class contradictions that erupt into a civil war that runs from 1975 to 1990, during which time Syria invades in '76, backing the Christian right, and Israel invades twice: Operation Litani in 1978, and then the Beirut siege in 1982, which results in the territory in the south being occupied. Israel is not pushed back out until 2000, but in the long lead-up to that, in 1983, the truck bombings of US and French forces in Beirut mark Hezbollah's emergence as an anti-occupation resistance. In July of 2006, Hezbollah raids northern Israel, capturing two soldiers, and Israel responds with a 34-day air, sea, and ground campaign, destroying Lebanese infrastructure and killing over 1,000 people. There's a UN-brokered ceasefire that expands their peacekeeping deployment to the Litani River. And now, the present genocide in Gaza. Hezbollah, unprepared to defend the south, many of their operatives maimed by the pager attack in 2024, and now over 1.2 million Lebanese displaced by Israel's advance. Ayman Makarem is a Lebanese Druze writer and video essayist, currently based in Vienna. Producing analysis for the From the Periphery media collective, he examines Lebanese, Palestinian, and regional history through anti-authoritarian, anti-sectarian, and class-conscious frameworks. Here's part one of our conversation. Ayman, welcome to Antifascist Dad. I'm so happy to meet you. I want to thank you for taking the time. Ayman Makarem: Thank you for having me. Matthew Remski: So you have the chair today as our resident expert in Lebanese history and Lebanon's current vulnerability to annexation and genocide by Israeli forces. And I think it's a crucial story to get clear on as genocide in Gaza overflows into a different but connected landscape, and leftists around the world, I think, frankly, are struggling to understand it all. We're going to spend most of our time on this, but just off the top, so that listeners will know what you're going to walk them through, I'd like to ask if you could do a two-minute summary on the conditions in Lebanon currently, and how they are the outcome of a century of colonial chaos. Ayman Makarem: At the moment, as most people know, there has been a very intense aggression on Lebanon by the State of Israel. They are currently occupying a good portion of the south of the country. I think it's about 10 to 15% of just straight-up occupation — like their presence of troops on the ground, and in the place that they're there, they're just demolishing villages as a whole. There's also a further buffer zone, wherein they have what they call like free action, or freedom of movement, to sort of attack or do ground invasions or whatever. And it's very much ethnic cleansing in the south, with periodic bombardments and demolitions and the like. In the rest of the country, it's been six years of this — seven years of this — total economic collapse, which the World Bank has called one of the worst economic collapses in the world in the last century. This affects absolutely everybody in the country, most of all, of course, migrants, the working class, and the poor. I should mention also, with the occupation in the south and the Israeli aggression, there is still a displacement crisis. There are still, I think, at the moment, over 300,000 people displaced, a lot of whose villages are completely destroyed. And Lebanon is in this perpetual crisis — a political crisis which is a result of 100 years of, I mean, colonialism, but also so much interference from regional powers, internal contradictions that are built into the makeup of the Lebanese state. What I and other Lebanese leftists call the Lebanese entity, right, which I'm sure we'll get into. But I think those are the main things. I mean, the Israeli aggression, but also the economic collapse. I do want to emphasize that, you know, when we talk about Israeli aggression, we're talking mostly about the south and up until Beirut, including the Bekaa Valley to the east. There's not that much bombardment of the north. But that's not to say that there's not oppression in the north also, especially economic oppression. Leading up to the latest escalation of the aggression in March of this year, there were other buildings collapsing in Lebanon, but these were buildings in the north, in Tripoli, and they were collapsing, and this was a national kind of scandal. People — their homes collapsed on top of them because of neglect, poor infrastructure, lack of investment, stolen wealth. Tripoli is Lebanon's poorest city, but it also bred the richest people of Lebanon, like our former Prime Minister Mikati, who was, I think, the richest Lebanese person. And so there's a class war that underlies the regional war and the Israeli aggression that sums up what I call the polycrisis in Lebanon. Matthew Remski: I think that's an excellent overview, and it will be our main subject. But I do want to approach it through a little bit of discussion about your method and approach, because this is what really drew me to your work to begin with. What I've noticed is that you bring just a ton of nuance to issues that typically provoke pretty rigid responses and positions that tend to ignore the people on the ground, who are going to be very, very diverse if we use the word polycrisis. And my understanding is that this nuance just doesn't come out of the ether. I think it comes from what I've seen — maybe four sources that intersect with each other. So, you know, firstly, you are Druze, you are also queer, you are an anti-authoritarian leftist, and you have had to deal with significant mental health stress. And so I wanted to just take those lenses one by one, because I think they inform the way you're a political commentator in a really interesting way. So to take the first one — you say that the most common answer to any big question, any theological question in the Druze faith, is "it depends." And I'm wondering if that has soaked into you in a way that helps you reject crude answers to difficult problems. Ayman Makarem: I think so. I mean, I don't want to pretend that all Druze — there's obviously, like any community, it's not a monolith. There are some Druze that are very convicted and that have this sort of set idea of identity and the like. Just some background, for those that don't know: the Druze are a very small religious community, mostly in the Bilad al-Sham region — the Levant, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Jordan. We're a breakoff of Sunni Islam, but we're very much our own thing. And we don't have a central authority, we don't have a pope, we don't even have like a holy building. We have holy sites, but those are scattered around the region. And so, without this rigid hierarchy of theology, we're not all told the same thing. Also, the holy book is only read by the clergy, although they don't act like a clergy in the other sense. About 90 to 95% of Druze are known as — there's the new term, let's say the PC term is "the uninitiated," but I like the original term, "the ignorant." Matthew Remski: That was the division. That was the division. Oh, boy. Ayman Makarem: We're the ignorant ones. We're the ones of the ground, of the earth. We don't have to — you know, it's all so complicated, theology, God, spiritual, so it's like, just be good people. Leave the complicated theology and eschatology to the whatever. So that's the backdrop to the fact that, you know, I didn't have to read a holy book, I didn't have to go to Sunday school, I didn't have to go to mass. And so with that came a lack of, like, an origin myth — you know, where did I come from, whatever. But I also like to extrapolate this, not just to me as a Druze person, but also as someone from Lebanon, someone from the Bilad al-Sham region, which is very diverse but also very — almost like unified. I'll give you a good example, outside of just the religion: whenever I ask my mother how I cook a dish, how do I make this dish, I get the exact same answer — you just said "hassab," it depends. Some people put this spice, some people put that spice, some people put, you know, onions, others don't put onions. And I've always found that so funny and interesting. And, because — like zaatar, the thyme mix, there is a distinct mix that is the Halabi mix from Aleppo, the Jordanian mix, and then variations. Same goes with accents. Sometimes the accent that I speak from Beirut is very different from my friends in the north, to the south, to whatever. And so there isn't this "this is how we the Lebanese say this thing" or "this is what we the Druze believe." To go back to the Druze thing, it's because, yeah, this sheikh says that, this sheikh says that. I've asked numerous times, is this food actually haram? Do we believe in this or that? And then the ambiguity — this I love, and I've told this story several times before — the ambiguity leaves room for creativity. I've asked my mother once — we believe in reincarnation, right? So in my new-atheism phase, I asked my mother a kind of gotcha question, which was, okay, mom, if we believe in reincarnation, and we believe that there is a finite amount of souls — you know, I can see where this is going — Matthew Remski: Yeah. Ayman Makarem: — how do we account for the rising Druze population? My mother sat there for a bit, and she came up with an answer that isn't in the book. I don't think she's heard this from a sheikh — this is just her intuition. She said, "How do you know we're the only Druze in the universe?" Matthew Remski: Oh, my goodness. Is that an answer from the uninitiated? Like, is that part of what is meant by "the ignorant" — that you could possibly come up with an answer that suits the time and the materials you were given? Ayman Makarem: Yeah. A really fascinating example of this is reincarnation. I've only been hearing from a friend of mine who's doing his PhD specifically on the Druze and their tradition of reincarnation. So, we understand reincarnation and believe in it — I personally don't, but that's a different story. But not because — you know, if I ask you something about Christianity, like, why do you believe that, well, it says this in Matthew 10:12 or whatever. But for us, we don't have that. And so you ask someone about reincarnation, why do you believe this — they don't have a source to point to. They have anecdotes, they have stories. And what's very interesting about these stories is they have similar themes and motifs, and there's a sociological explanation for why those themes keep cropping up. Family deeds, guns, you know, lost relationships. And my friend theorizes that has a lot to do with the shifting of empires, or whatever, and especially administrations. But what's interesting that he tells me is that according to the sheikhs, the clergy, reincarnation — you're not able to recall your past lives. Matthew Remski: It just happens. Ayman Makarem: But there's no way of — whatever. And that anecdotal evidence is folklore evidence. It's not something that comes from a hierarchy of knowledge, but it's something that's more common with the uninitiated. And so, yeah, you ask any Druze person, why do you believe in reincarnation — they'll say, if they believe, well, you know, my uncle, or his daughter walked into the house and found these things there's no way she could have known about, or whatever. And so, yes, I do think there's something in the Druze experience which leaves room for difference. And again, also with the Lebaneseness. But again, there are those that stick very much into a sectarian thing that's like, no, this is how we do it and this is how it is done. Matthew Remski: What I'm hearing, though, is that this very unique religious upbringing is probably antithetical to rigid ideas of nationalism. It's probably antithetical to rigid ideas of, well, this is exactly how things should go. And it sounds like there's enough — or there's a sufficient amount of improvisation — that when you are able to see injustice, it is not necessarily going to — you can see it in all of its forms. It's not going to be associated with, you know, this power versus that power. It sounds like there's a certain amount of fluidity in being able to identify the material conditions around you, and to not get stuck on identities and labels as much as maybe other people are trained to do. Ayman Makarem: I will say that there are definitely a lot of sectarian-minded Druze people who do get stuck into it. I'm also a minority within this group, but there definitely is something in that. And I also think about the fact that — two things. The Druze clergy, since we don't have a formal church, and people don't get paid to be a pastor or whatever, they have jobs. So when you go to a Druze village, you'll often see farmers or butchers or pharmacists or grocers in the sheikh — the clergy garb. They're clergymen, but they also work, right? And I think not having this rigid, especially economic hierarchy and power structure, is part of the reason why the Druze have historically tended toward socialism. The main political party of the Druze is known as the Progressive Socialist Party, founded by Kamal Jumblatt. It's no longer progressive and it's no longer socialist — don't get me started on this — but I do see something in the fact that there wasn't that rigid hierarchy to begin with, and that there's this connection with workers. They are workers themselves, the clergy. There isn't that same dissection as, like, Catholicism, where it's the aristocracy, the nobility, the clergy, and the workers, or whatever. But I will also say, because we're a tiny minority — in Lebanon, 5%, in Syria even less, we're only 2 million people — we have always worked with those around us. And interestingly, there's a lot of misconceptions of the Druze, that we just follow the winds of change, or whatever — and this is how some Zionists describe why the Druze in, like, now the State of Israel acquiesced so early on. This is a misreading, and it's a selective reading, because actually — and I point this out in my video essay on the Druze — the Druze have a history of fighting for and with those around us. So Kamal Jumblatt was a chief ally in Lebanon of the PLO, and this was part of the backdrop of the civil war in the '70s — not just as a progressive politician himself, but very close with Yasser Arafat against the sectarian Maronite Christian oligarchy at the time. Same goes for Syria. One of the most important national figures of Syria is Sultan Pasha al-Atrash, a Druze man from Sweida who, in 1925, led the Great Syrian Revolt against the French, who wanted to carve up Syria and create a Druze state and an Alawite state and an Aleppo state, and he was like, no, fuck that, we are all Syrians. And so there is this necessity of working with the quote-unquote majority. Matthew Remski: Right. Ayman Makarem: But — historically, now it is very different, and it's very frustrating — but to align with, especially, nationalist movements, but also progressive and socialist movements. But these are tendencies. I do not want to say that all Druze are revolutionaries. Far from it. Matthew Remski: Well, actually, I should thank you, because I was heading into idealizing your minority culture there for a moment, and that doesn't do anybody any favors. The other sort of lens that I get from you — and this is from watching your videos — I get the impression that growing up queer in Beirut was not that different from growing up queer in maybe a conservative Global North culture, and that you were mostly able to pass or avoid overt persecution. And I just want to set that against the fact that large parts of the US-centric world believe that being queer in West Asia is dangerous — uniformly dangerous — because of Islam. And so I'm just wondering what that experience has taught you. Ayman Makarem: Well, for that first part, class definitely plays a big role. Matthew Remski: Right. Ayman Makarem: Like, it's hard to deny the fact that I had access to private space, that I could invite people over, or whatever. And I think persecution of, and oppression of, queer people — working-class and poor queer people — the lack of space really puts them into the public eye. I want to talk more about that, but before I do, I do want to make a point that there is something very interesting that's been happening — interesting and horrible — in Lebanon, which is that the most explicitly homophobic and queerphobic and transphobic group in Lebanon today is a group called Jnoud al-Rab, Soldiers of God. Matthew Remski: Oh, boy. Ayman Makarem: And they're Christian fundamentalists. Matthew Remski: Oh, boy. Ayman Makarem: They're Christian fundamentalists in certain areas of Beirut whose whole thing is just beating up queer people and Syrians. They are being funded, allegedly — but this is common knowledge at this point — by Antoun Sehnaoui, who is a notorious Lebanese banker, very recently pictured with Benjamin Netanyahu at a dinner for Lindsey Graham. Matthew Remski: Oh, boy. Ayman Makarem: And so it's this interesting constellation that, I think, subverts some of these ideas that it's Islam, or in many cases Hezbollah, that is the chief persecutor of gays and queers in Lebanon. This is, again, why Lebanon, I keep saying, is the place where simple ideas and simple narratives go to die. Matthew Remski: Right. Ayman Makarem: Now, I've talked about class a little bit, and I do want to emphasize this, because I've been organizing with a group called Queer Mutual Aid Lebanon for the last six years — I helped found it, actually. And I never like talking about my queer experience too much, because, again, I do give off this impression that it's fine, you know, that I can go and whatever, and we do have gay bars, and we do have lesbian bars, and we do have drag queens — we have some of the coolest drag queens there are. But having met and talked to and learned about the experiences of trans women, of trans migrants, of sex workers — it's a very different experience, completely — and Syrian queers in Lebanon, there's a lot more violence because of their exposure to public — the necessity of working in the public space. I, for instance, come from a pretty well-off family. And, there's an interesting thing, actually, I don't know if this is too much of a digression, but I have a very foreign affect. My English is very good, it actually affects my Arabic. I look quite foreign — even in Lebanon, I sort of stand in a certain way. Matthew Remski: Describe that a little bit. You're saying that somehow, posturally, you carry yourself in a way that can be flagged. Ayman Makarem: Oh, I don't know how to explain it, actually. My mother clocked it once. She was like, you know, the way you stand, sometimes it's a bit gay, or like a bit effeminate. Matthew Remski: Oh, wait, no, I'm confused. So you're talking about a posture that your mother says looks gay, but I thought that you were saying that your posture looks foreign. Ayman Makarem: Yes. So I don't know how to explain this — like, my Arab friends think all Europeans are gay. And I've noticed — Matthew Remski: I have not heard that before. Ayman Makarem: — when I first came here, I genuinely thought every single person I've seen here, every guy I've seen, is gay. And, okay, this is a theory, I'm very sorry, but this is a thing I've talked to other people about — there is standing with posture, standing up straight, and whatever — Matthew Remski: Right. Ayman Makarem: — that is read both as foreign and gay. And I've noticed, when I go back to Beirut, the ways that I try to pass as straight are the same things that I do to pass as Lebanese — as in, I slouch more, as in I kind of deepen my voice a little bit. Matthew Remski: Okay. Ayman Makarem: And what's funny is, yeah, that if you're a bit foreign, there's a lot more leeway. I'll give you a story — I'm sorry if this is a digression. Matthew Remski: I don't think so. I think this is super important. And I've got a follow-up on it too. Ayman Makarem: All right, go ahead. I was at a friend's wedding about two or three years ago — I've told this story before, I guess not on this podcast, obviously, but anyway — it was a dry wedding, but I was with a group of journalists and whatever, and they had tiny bottles of alcohol. So I got a bit tipsy and started dancing. And it's a dry wedding because the friend of mine was marrying a guy from a very conservative family — conservative to the point that some of them left before the music started. Matthew Remski: Right. Ayman Makarem: Yeah. And so I was a bit tipsy, and I was dancing, and I enjoy dancing Oriental dance, and that's more a feminine thing — the male dances, the dances left for male people, are very boring, it's just kind of holding your hands up and like, oh, ooh, ooh, but there's not a flair to it, you don't use your shoulders or your hips. And so I started dancing like that, and what started happening is that women from the groom's family started dancing with me, cheering me on, pointing at my hips, "higher, higher, Allah, Allah." And I was having the time of my life. I went and sat down because I was pooped, and these women kept coming up to me, "no, no, no, come, come, come." And they even started passing me around to some of the guys, and the guys were doing their male dance to me, and some of them were quite cute. I was having a really good time. But what I started noticing is that because the table I was in were her journalist friends, some of them were white — European, Swedish, whatever — and they were talking to me a bit in English. So I started noticing that they were fine with me dancing in this very flamboyant way because they thought I was a foreigner. Matthew Remski: I see. Ayman Makarem: And — the other shoe drops — at the end of the thing, as I'm about to leave, I go say bye to them, and they're talking to me in English, and they're like, "where are you from?" And I tell them in Arabic, "I'm Lebanese." And I saw the look on their face that — oh, that thing that you were doing wasn't just funny, but is, like, actually — Matthew Remski: It was transgressive. Ayman Makarem: It's transgressive, actually — no, like, you're Lebanese, why are you dancing like that? And so there's that interesting thing of the leeway of, I'm foreign, so I'm allowed to be gay or act effeminate, but then if it's a Lebanese thing, it's like, no, something that should be regulated. Matthew Remski: I feel like this is an entire episode on its own, but I'll just maybe leave it at this one point of clarification, for my own sake. How does the various approaches or understandings or presentations of homophobia or social conservatism, in that vein, intersect with this impression that I've had, from the little bit of travel that I've done in West Asia, but then also within Muslim or Arabic communities here in Toronto — that there is a kind of homosocial intimacy that seems to be available to Arabic men that is just completely unknown to me as a white person. Like, I can see younger men and grown men walking down the street, arm in arm, holding each other's hands, patting each other's hands, speaking to each other in very soft voices. And I'm like, that is a level of friendship and closeness that I have never been able to feel in my life. And I'm getting the sense from you that that can be separated out from what it means to actually be queer, in a way that I probably can't understand. Is that a very complicated issue? Ayman Makarem: The thing is, because I find myself so outside of these things but inside them at the same time, I don't experience them in that kind of organic way that I think a lot of people do — as in walking down the street holding hands. I mean, it's not a thing in Lebanon as much as it is in, like, Iraq and the Gulf and the like. Matthew Remski: Right. Ayman Makarem: But I have this other story that I've been thinking about when it comes to these things, which is the very first time I saw queer, like, Arab representation, was in a film. It's one of the best Lebanese films, even though I really, really don't like the director — but it's a film called West Beirut. I don't know if you've seen it. It's set during the civil war, it's a very accurate portrayal of the environment that my parents lived through. There's this one scene where the main character — it's told through the lens of a young boy, or not young boy, I mean teenager, let's say, I think it's like 14, 15 — very much had that kind of coming-of-age thing set during the civil war. Anyway, he's in his bedroom with his best friend, and there's a very, very homoerotic kind of tension between them, and they're kind of fooling around a little bit, and then it ends up being kind of like just them playing around. I remember very clearly asking my mother — probably wanting to pry, or get her to say, you know, it's fine — when you ask these questions where it's like you want a specific answer. But anyway, she told me — I was like, "isn't that a bit gay?" — and she was like, "well, for young guys it's okay, but they grow out of it." And I do want to say, because I've sort of started off by saying my mother clocked a gay stance of mine — she's been very supportive, she's very smart, she's just very curious. I don't want to paint her as, whatever — she's actually been a very important figure for me. Matthew Remski: And I also thought that when you asked her about the scene in the film, she was going to say, well, it depends. Ayman Makarem: No, no. Yeah, yeah. There was a clarity to it, where it's like, that's a thing that can happen. Matthew Remski: Yeah. Ayman Makarem: But it's just the thing that, khalas, you get older, and then you get married, you know, to a woman, and then whatever. It's not a thing that's available as a lifelong thing, but as kids, you can fool around. I do want to emphasize one thing, though, that I missed in the last question, because it's about what the queerness kind of enables me to see, again, through the QMA work, the mutual aid work, and all these other people I've experienced and witnessed and learned about, and organized with, and been in community with. I've also reckoned with the fact that there's a class thing, for sure, but there is a difference within, especially, Beirut — an openness that doesn't exist in other Arab-majority countries. And a part of it, I do have to say, I think, is because we do have a feminist movement, or at least we did, and I kind of owe it a lot to my lesbian sisters and feminists that opened up space and protected us — you know, some of the more popular bars are lesbian bars — and then with that comes certain other, let's say, progressive politics, or whatever. And so there is a bit of an ecosystem that I don't think people have studied enough. It's very hard — we in QMA do a bit of oral history, and try to gather information from elders and the like. But yeah, I definitely don't want to give the portrayal that it's just anything like any in the Global North, or in some conservative place — but definitely, in certain segments of the society, you are able to do it. There's also something about class, wherein, because gender and sexual norms have so much to do with class, it's hard to separate. Matthew Remski: Right. Ayman Makarem: And, I'm never fearing that I'm going to get expelled from the family, or whatever, and a part of it is because there's not that much relying on me to get married and have kids, and whatever. Sorry, that gets very deep there, and I don't know if I'm able to explain that all, but — Matthew Remski: As I said, I think this is its own episode, and maybe we'll return to this at some point. And I had two other sort of framing questions, but we're already half an hour in, and I want to get you telling us how to better understand the situation on the ground in Lebanon. But maybe the last framing question is — I think listeners will probably get, at this point, that a through line of how you approach this material is the through line of lived experience. And this became a little bit more clear to me when, in a particular video — I can't remember the subject — you were talking about the contested legacy of Noam Chomsky. And if we just leave aside his views and his personal choices for a moment, which are under examination right now, I was really struck by your comment that here is somebody who is an extraordinary describer of international relations and American empire, and at the same time, this is somebody who never did any fieldwork, he never did any interviews. It's unclear that he knew anybody in the countries that he was talking about, ever. And so his default to really geopolitical abstractions made his work very provocative and informative, but also, at the same time, kind of dissociative and disempowering — it was very difficult, you found, to engage with it. And this resonated with me because I remember going through his books and going, wow, that's an incredibly dark vision of the world, and I don't know what to do with it. So I'm wondering if you can say more about that before we get into how you understand Lebanon. Ayman Makarem: Yeah, there's a lot there. I consumed so much of his — especially his talks — to a certain point I started talking like him. And there's so much information, and there's so much that helped me break from my very Westernized socialization, specifically in terms of the view of American history, of colonialism, of all of these things. You know, again, the one sentence that sums up the pinnacle of that sort of transformation, or subversion, is when he said that if the Nuremberg trials were upheld, then every postwar American president should be hanged. Right? And so all of that really helped dispel a lot of myths for me. But, you know, all of his speeches — he paints this very cataclysmic picture, and then just, like, two or three sentences at the end says, "but all of these things are designed by humans, and they can be disassembled by humans." Thank you. Matthew Remski: Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Noam. Ayman Makarem: I say in that video that for me, the real moment that I started to reexamine how important Noam Chomsky was to me and my political thinking was during the October 17th revolutionary uprisings in Lebanon, because I realized — I'm Lebanese, I'm not American, I am here, and I don't know what people are talking about. I don't know any of these politicians, I don't know these structures, I don't know this history. And so I'm kind of useless. And I think that's when I started to be more interested in local history, but then also local discourse, and then also action. Because it's, like, doubly removed to be talking about the Pentagon Papers during a revolution in Lebanon — because not only is it so far removed, like, we have nothing to do with the Pentagon Papers, but then also, what do you do? You can't act on it. And there's not — he was never part of, like, a movement, in a sense that he's on the ground and in conversation with a bunch of other people, and you can place him. And that's why he's such a standalone figure in a lot of ways, which is quite unique. I'm not discrediting it, but definitely in his older age, he started getting very lazy methodologically, and a lot of his sources were just these white reporters in Bosnia or in Syria — you know, till the very end, he kept saying Robert Fisk was a good journalist. Was a good journalist. Matthew Remski: Oh, boy. Ayman Makarem: And he just was not listening to Syrian journalists who were like, no, this guy's embedded in the Assad army, this guy is clearly doing this, this, and that. And so there's so many ways I can talk about this, but I will talk about two different figures who are kind of comparable in terms of stature. One is Jean-Paul Sartre. There's a famous anecdote about Sartre — that even when he was already a renowned intellectual philosopher, all these things, he would still go on the corner and hand out communist pamphlets. That lack of ego — that just because you're this person, whatever, the menial work of organizing, of distributing information, of cleaning and cooking, this shouldn't be pushed down to the dregs of the followers of this movement, you know what I mean? It's very hierarchical in that way, and I find that Sartre story kind of interesting. The other one is Edward Said, because Edward Said not only sits in the pulpit of Columbia and writes his big books, his very intellectual postcolonial, poststructuralist things — he also got directly involved in Palestinian politics and the Palestinian National Committee. He met with Yasser Arafat, he traveled to Palestine not just as a Palestinian, but to meet with people. He moved to Lebanon — this is super important — he moved to Lebanon, I think in '77, to, as he said, refamiliarize himself with Arabic. Matthew Remski: Amazing, because he was like, if I'm going to be talking to people, then I need to — Ayman Makarem: And that's exactly my experience in October 17th and that revolution, where I'm like, my Arabic was poor, I couldn't talk to the very people that I should be organizing with. And so I had that same transformation, or the realization that I needed the transformation — where it's like even the language needs to shift. And there's a beautiful scene in one of his documentaries, because, as he says, when he goes to Lebanon and meets these people, none of these people have read Orientalism. Like, all of his stature as a Columbia professor and whatever was meaningless. He had to start basically from the beginning with these people, and earn their trust and respect and admiration, whatever. And there's this beautiful scene — one of my favorite scenes of cinema — with Edward Said sitting with a group of, like, five Palestinian women refugees in the south of Lebanon. And his humbleness, his humility, the jokey nature — it's not, "here's the great Edward Said meeting with the people," you know, and they're all telling him what he should do, and he's kind of negotiating. It's so endearing. But, yeah, to me, all these are the things that are completely lacking in Chomsky. And also, this is part of the queerness dismantling the hold that the daddies have on me, you know, these authorities — because for me, growing up, Noam Chomsky was like a demigod. You can't question him, he said this thing, it's true — which is not very good for an intellectual praxis. And so Chomsky saved me from several things, but then I needed saving from Chomsky, and I think I'm two degrees removed from it at this point. Matthew Remski: I really appreciate this account, because I've been through, I would say, a very minor version of the same — having spent the last six years primarily invested in American politics. I'm a dual citizen, but I live in Toronto, and I have actually been ignoring, in some ways, what's happening in our local environment, and I'm trying to catch up with that now. I don't have to move back somewhere and reacquaint myself with a language, or sort of reconnect with a fundamentally different culture. But I understand this position of — you were swept up somehow in not only an abstract form of study, but also maybe the radiance of intellectual celebrity. And then you come back to earth, and you realize people are messing up your home, and you should learn about it, and you should learn how to defend it, and who's actually doing the community gardens. So, yeah, I hope that people will, given our current media landscape and how dominant especially American news stories can be in the Global North, and especially in North America — I hope people can grasp a little bit of that. Like, where is your attention, or what is it being pulled toward? And do you sometimes kind of forget where you live? Ayman Makarem: It's this connection that I was also thinking about — how with these daddy figures that we have, I mean, Said is one of them, to be honest with you, but it's this idea that — Matthew Remski: But he's a pretty gentle dad. Ayman Makarem: I know, I know. But I think a lot of us want to be those people. Matthew Remski: Yeah. Ayman Makarem: Not just learn from them, or whatever, but — and in the same way, I see a lot of leftists online who basically all think they're Lenin, or all think they're Marx, or something, and not one of, like, the millions of organizers, the ordinary people, and the workers, and the cooks, and the people making the banners. I don't know — this is why I think so much about the Sudanese revolution, I don't want to go too much into it because I can get really digressing, but I do want to say — Noam Chomsky, whenever he was asked who is the most important anarchist in history, he would always say it is the ordinary men and women of Catalonia in the late '30s who organized that society, or whatever. And I think that's very true. But I think a lot of people are scared of the kind of mediocrity of it — even though that is what social movements are, all politics are local, and you are much more effective — this is what I had to learn — much more effective where you are, with the people around you. I think people are figuring this out with, like, how to resist ICE in the United States. Not to forego learning about what's actually happening in the highest chambers of power, etc., but it's functionally immobilizing if that's all you do — because if you're starting from where you are and thinking about how to overthrow Trump, you're not going to get there. The process of movement building is something Chomsky never actually talked about, and is something that people often ignore as the actual basis for any of the stuff we'd want to do, and the change we'd want to affect. Matthew Remski: Ayman, I want to make a note to myself to maybe talk with you later about the attraction of daddy figures in particular ways, because I think we probably would have a lot to say about what it might feel like to be Noam Chomsky, or what it might feel like to be Edward Said. I think there's a fantasy that maybe you've had, and certainly that I've had, of, oh, this is a person who is sure of himself, this is a person who is settled. This is a person with — I mean, with Said, it's like, oh my God, the suits are incredible, and it looks like he's so comfortable all the time. Does he ever get uncomfortable? Does his back ever hurt when he's sitting? He just crosses his legs in this wonderful way. Anyway, I just think there's so much in that — in intellectual life, and wanting to be some sort of hero. And I think we live in an age of spectacle in which that's really emphasized. Ayman Makarem: I didn't read this growing up, but there's this children's book that caught my attention later in life, called Everyone Poops. Everybody Poops. And there's also a queer analysis in here, and that's where "daddy" does come from — because, again, I do it with a bit of a tone in the video, "Daddy" — where it's everyone fucks. There's this very basic way to dissect the grandeur of individuals — more colloquial ways of saying it — everyone puts their pants on, one leg at a time. Matthew Remski: Right. Ayman Makarem: But, yeah, there is a lot to discuss, and that is the topic of my next video essay, a bit — where it's like, actually dissecting the ecosystem of daddies, and especially of white men who are claimed as thought leaders, and I'm like, there really aren't. And this is what draws me actually to Black feminism, because in Black feminism there isn't that Lenin figure, you know — it's an ecosystem, it's a tradition, and they talk to each other. I've never read a book or listened to someone that doesn't refer to one another, building off of one another, even when critiquing. Matthew Remski: And even in the hero pantheon, I never get the sense that anybody is putting bell hooks in some sort of ivory tower or something like that — that she is where she is within her own home and community, that's where she comes from. I don't think that the heroes, the luminaries, are isolated in the same way. Ayman Makarem: No, and they don't put themselves up in that, whatever — bell hooks is not her actual name, and then also with the intentional lowercase and everything. But yeah, and my favorite things of bell hooks, for example, are her New School talks, where every single one she's surrounded by two or three other writers and artists and thinkers, whatever — it's never just her on a pulpit. And that's Chomsky — just him on a pulpit, reading from a thing. So it's that tradition of it all, because it does feel like a great-man thing, as opposed to someone who undeniably comes from a tradition, and comes within a background and within the institution, etc. Matthew Remski: Okay, so let's get back into the territory of so-called great men, and this is where we can really look at Lebanon today. Why do you frame your analysis in terms of the co-development of what you call the Lebanese entity and the Zionist entity? So I'll leave you all hanging there. Part two is up on Patreon now. Please consider supporting this work, and if you can't, part two will be posted here in the wild in a few weeks. That's the show. Take care of each other.