In case you missed it, the illustrious exchange above took place on Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV last week. The topic was Syria and the guest on the left, who was defending the regime, angrily accused the guest on the right–a regime opponent–of getting his information from bad sources like Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and “web sites.”
The anti regime guest on the right remained cool until the the pro-regime guest accused him of being an Israel collaborator who could barely string together a sentence and was basically “an idiot.”
The anti regime guest then said off camera: “eat shit” to which the pro-regime guest exploded in a high pitched scream, throwing a glass of water on his opponent and then adding: “My foot in your sister’s (another word for a kitten).” The word begins with a “K” in Arabic, and was used in a phrase that is a bit raunchier than the rough English equivalent of “motherf**ker”
It’s astonishing to hear this kind of language on a Al Manar, a channel that plays Muslim prayers much of the day and whose title translates to “the beacon” in reference to its dissemination of news supporting the “Party of God.”
Couple this with Hezbollah’s alliance with rightist Christian politicians, whose rhetoric often displays xenophobic/Islamophobic undertones, and you have some pretty interesting– some might say sacrilegious alliances– being spawned by the conflict in Syria.
Ironically a lot of the mainstream media likes to conveniently explain Hezbollah’s alliance with the Assad government in religious terms–based on very distant/weak doctrinal linkage between the practice and beliefs of contemporary Alawites and Lebanese Shiites. Of course this assumption conflicts with the very secular nature of the regime and many of its followers, as seen to some extent by the exchange above.
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Video link via Gino’s Blog
Post script: This is not the first time the Syrian conflict has sparked this type of language on Lebanese TV. Last year MTV saw a similar K-word incident, also dropped by a pro-regime guest. Thanks for asking Karl.
