Fadi Zaghmout

I am not sure if you people are aware of this Jaras Lebanese TV Station. Jaras in lebanese means scandelous. This TV and before that the Jaras magazine were specialized in scandalizing celebrities. While Now and in order to grab more audience to their new TV channel, they are using a policy of shocking people.

They do claim that they are after morals and exposing those who are not, while from the cheap quality of their shows and the way they talk, you can tell that they are only after scandals.

For the past couple of weeks they had this show of showing pictures of celebreties wearing revealing clothers. They started a sarcastic competition for peope to vote for the Arabic Queen of nudity!

Most of people’s phone calls to the program were to attack those singers for what they parecieve as an act of tarnishing the lebanese women reputation is particular and the Arabic women reputation in general.

Now that they got some success from that show, they moved on trying to expose male belly dancers in lebanon and the Arab world.

Yesterday, they showed a dancer named Teddy. He is so quite feminine. They showed
how he dances and moves his belly like women belly dancers, how he wears make up on his face and how he really acts and talks like women. He, himslef, seemed that he wanted some publicity for his work by approving to get on the show. He seems to believe that even bad publicity is good.

He defended himself in a shallow way, and insisted that he has the freedom to do whatever he wants to do. He said that he is religious. and that his performance is an art for sophisticated people.

They showed some other pictures of another feminine belly dancer from palestine. He claimed that he dances better than Teddy! and that when he dance he does actually seduce men!

While I don’t like this Jaras magazie and TV station because of their way of scandalising people, and the cheap quality of their news and programs, I usually find myself drawn to watch it for some dirty gossips!

What was the funniest thing and the saddest thing at the same time with yesterday’s show is people’s sms’s that were shown at the bottom of the screen.

Some were fun, like men asking Teddy to marry them in a sarcastic way, or some other inviting him to their cities in order to make a real man out of him (I wonder how they would do that!) or people saying that we would never free Al Aqsa because we have people like Teddy, or others crying for Saddam to come back from his grave in order to get rid of this dirt as they percieve it. (I have no idea what Saddam, Al Quds and Al Aqsa has to do with this!)

But there has been as well some serious hate messages that disturbed me like “We hope to dance on your grave”, or “You will be dead on my hands” or “hope you will dance your way to hell” …etc

I wonder if we have any rules against hate messages on our media in the Arab world? I know that there are rules that treat seriously any cases of explicit sexual content, but we don’t seem to bother about hate messages! Why?

Isn’t it sad?