Sunday, August 17, 2014

Supporting wine and Lebanese religious contradictions

"From the harvest of our grapes, the joy in our wine" - such is the new campaign from the Ministry of Agriculture dubbing itself "the national campaign for the support of Lebanese wine". Never did one visual encapsulate all Lebanese contradictions in one go - let me explain: this campaign is supported by the taxpayers' money, a respectable chunk of whom is Moslem, and assuming that a solid proportion of which is against alchohol consumption due to religious reasons (notice I am measuring my words very carefully, using abstract and generic terms due to absence of any statistics or reliable surveys), then we deduce that the money these people put went to promote an industry they vehemently oppose. Go figure! All this at a time when one of Lebanon's big cities (Tripoli) took it upon themselves to ban beer ads over there

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