 I'm here in the Sufi district of Beirut with Aiman Mahana to talk about the Lebanese Revolution. So tell me more about how your work with the Samir Kassir Foundation has been intertwined with the revolution journalists. I joined the Samir Kassir Foundation in September 2011 as executive director. So I was very privileged to join an organization that was dedicated to the funding freedom of expression in the Middle East. And we expanded the work of the foundation to focus on monitoring violations targeting journalists and media professionals. Have you felt that your work has connected you to the revolution in a deeper way? Look, the revolution in Lebanon is a huge uprising against all forms of wrongdoings at every level of the government. This is what journalism was supposed to cover. Even if we are a non-partisan, non-political organization, today what we see on the streets, what we hear from the people demonstrating, is totally in line with all the values of good governance, rule of law that we try to contribute to through supporting quality and independent journalism. So you see that the revolution has had a positive impact in this sense of freedom of speech and supporting journalists? Absolutely, not only for journalists. Freedom of speech in general. There is a before and after October 17, many of the old practices are not acceptable anymore, and there is a spotlight on them. Unfortunately, our political class does not get this. The same political class that thought it was totally okay to discuss attacks on WhatsApp two days after huge white fires destroyed 3 million trees in Lebanon is a political class that is completely disconnected from reality, completely disconnected from the ground. Could you explain the economic crisis in Lebanon further to me? In March, Lebanon needs to pay probably around $7 billion of debt principal. I'm not talking about interest, which the government doesn't have. It means that regular people will not have access to their savings or to their deposits or to their checking account in U.S. dollars. Something needs to happen beforehand. Do you believe that this debt, this $7 billion debt is connected to the corruption of the government? The fact that we have reached $86 billion or $88 billion of debt and that we are the third most indebted country in the world and we do not have neither Japan's economy nor are we members of the EU like Greece so there is nothing that can explain such a level of debt other than bad governments even if they will not corrupt. Those who are in power today and were in power in the last decade or two decades or three decades have proven to be incompetent. Two years ago, the government decided to increase the wages of everyone working in the public sector and said that it would cost $1.2 billion a year. Well, at the end of that same year, the government recognized that it actually cost $1.8 billion. So within six months, the government miscalculated how much money it has to pay for wages for people working inside the government by $600 million. So even if they were not corrupt, a minister of finance who makes such a mistake is fired. A minister of environment who thinks that the best way to deal with the garbage crisis is to throw the trash right next to the airport and then realize that birds will come and eat garbage and actually cause risk for flights who think that the best solution is to send Lebanese hunters to stand by the highway and shoot at the birds meters away from the airport is an incompetent minister and needs to be sacked. Absolutely. And a prime minister who condones those decisions is even worse and needs to be sacked. So whether it's incompetence feeding corruption or corruption feeding incompetent, who cares? We're at the level of complete collapse because of that political class. So you would stand by the original intent of the protests and the revolution to completely change the political system. Do you agree with the new ideas of women's rights? I mean, I'm sure you do, but do you think that they're plausible? Absolutely. They're not new ideas. There have been hundreds of campaigns for women's rights since the early 90s in Lebanon. Same for every other major reform for civil marriage, for transparency. These are things that civil society in Lebanon has long been fighting for. And unfortunately for many years we lacked a political translation of these demands. And it's good that this revolution brought these socio-economic issues and social issues to the center of the political discussion. So what would you say are the motivations for people who are against the revolution? It's very difficult in any society where people don't have agency to embrace something new. So you have one group of people who is afraid to lose their typical way of getting their actual rights. You have another category of people that clearly is motivated by identity politics. The fact that identity is still a very important ingredient of who I am in Lebanon makes people still attached to things they know. They would be totally okay with not having electricity as long as the Shia or the Sunni or the Druze or the Christians don't lose whatever imagined power they have. So we need to recognize that these people do exist as well. And they are in their right. They have the right to support whomever they support. What we're demanding is a level playing field when it comes to competing with these ideas.