You don’t have to earn a star in Lebanon…

byHabib Battah
Oct 17, 2012

You can just buy one!

Even a now defunct (alleged money-laundering) bank still has its star:

Clearly modeled on Hollywood, these sidewalk plaques were erected several years ago in Hamra with a genuinely Lebanese twist of awarding sponsorship over merit.

Perhaps the only one actually earned belongs to Beirut’s garbage collectors:

Though the company, Sukleen, is locally-based, the dirty work is done by mainly non-Lebanese migrant South Asian and Arab workers. No mention of them here though.

Habib Battah

Habib Battah is an investigative journalist and founder of the news site beirutreport.com. Battah has covered Lebanon and the Middle East for over 15 years and teaches journalism and media studies at the American University of Beirut. He is a contributor to Monocle, The Guardian, BBC World, Al Jazeera and others, a former fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University and two-time recipient of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award. Battah's investigative work was recently recognized for outstanding local reporting by the Columbia University Oakes Award for Environmental Reporting. Battah earned a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in Near East Studies and Journalism from New York University.