"The attack on the band [Mashrou' Leila] in its home country started with a series of threats and accusations of blasphemy by Christian fundamentalist groups a few weeks before their August 9 concert in Byblos, a tourist-favourite town north of Beirut that hosts an annual summer festival." 'Blasphemy' laws to punish gay-fronted band See also Activists in Lebanon have long fought to end the use of article 534 of the penal code to prosecute consensual same-sex conduct. The law is a colonial relic, put in place by the French mandate in the early 1900s, and punishes “any sexual intercourse contrary to the order of nature” with up to one year in prison. It has at times been enthusiastically wielded to persecute LGBT people, often affecting particularly vulnerable groups including transgender women and Syrian refugees . Human Rights Watch
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51