THREATS AND LAWSUITS FAIL TO FAZE LEBANESE JOURNALIST
▶ Broadcaster Dima Sadek is paying for her criticism of Hezbollah as her country sinks deeper into crisis, writes Sunniva Rose in Beirut
Sitting on the roof of her high-rise apartment building overlooking the Mediterranean, Lebanese TV host Dima Sadek scrolls through her phone to bring up a recent death threat that caught her eye on Twitter.
Sadek is used to having vocal backers and detractors. In Lebanon, high-profile critics of Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed movement, attract polarised views.
But she draws more attention than others because she is a Shiite Muslim from the community Hezbollah claims to represent. She is also a woman in a country where misogynistic attacks on female public figures are common.
Despite the daily threats, she refuses to back down and is a powerful voice in a country where critics are increasingly silenced, either through court, social pressure, online bullying or murder. In the past 18 months, as Lebanon collapsed economically after decades of mismanagement, Sadek has repeatedly attacked most of the country’s ruling elite.
In an interview with The National only weeks after another outspoken critic of Hezbollah, Lokman Slim, was shot dead, Sadek says she will not give up the fight for accountability.
The threatening tweet she shows The National features Salim Ayyash, a Hezbollah member found guilty by a UN tribunal of the murder of former prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. The tweet shows him pulling blocks from a Jenga tower stamped with the Lebanese flag. Each discarded block bears the name of a different assassinated critic of Hezbollah.
The block Ayyash is removing in the picture bears Sadek’s name.
“They are saying that Dima Sadek is next. That’s funny. So it just got posted on Twitter and it was sponsored. And then it disappeared,” she says.
Her apparent nonchalance in the face of threats like these shows how such attacks have become part of her daily life.
“Those who hate her most come from the Shiite community. She is seriously annoying for them. She represents everything they don’t want a woman to be,” says Alia Ibrahim, co-founder of Lebanese news site Daraj.
Sadek was not always critical of Hezbollah. She started out at the now-closed As-Safir newspaper and OTV television – both sympathetic to the movement formed in the 1980s by Syrian and Iranian military intelligence as a militia in her native south Lebanon.
Like many Lebanese across the sectarian divide, she respected Hezbollah for forcing Israel’s retreat from south Lebanon in 2000 after 18 years of occupation.
“I had huge sympathy for them. But all I knew was that they were some brave guys fighting Israel,” she said. “Of course, now I see it differently. That was when I was 20. Now I’m 40. I do see that it was a bit fishy to see someone backed so much by Iran operating in my country.”
Her opinion changed in May, 2008, when politicians tried to dismantle Hezbollah’s communications network and the militia’s fighters took over central Beirut. Seventy-one people died in the clashes.
“That was shocking for me, because they used to tell us that Hezbollah would never use its arms inside Lebanon,” she said.
The group’s military intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2012 to support the Bashar Al Assad regime cemented her views.
When hundreds of thousands of Lebanese took to the streets in October, 2019, to protest against their corrupt sectarian leaders, she joined them. Together, they chanted: “All of them means all of them.”
The slogan called for the resignation of all politicians, but 18 months later, the political class has resisted the mounting anger against them.
Sadek continues to use her strong social media presence and her slot on Lebanon’s MTV to publicly shame politicians for corruption and accuse Hezbollah of murdering its critics.
More than once, Sadek also became the story.
When her phone was stolen during a protest in late 2019, a video of her reacting to the theft became a Twitter meme.
She was flooded with threatening calls after her number was made public.
At the time, she says, the stress caused her mother, who has since died, to suffer a stroke.
Right now, Sadek has four outstanding lawsuits against her, all brought by some of Lebanon’s most powerful men.
She is being sued by Gebran Bassil, the leader of a Christian party founded by his father-inlaw President Michel Aoun, for accusing him of smuggling ammonium nitrate into Lebanon that exploded last August in Beirut’s port.
Another is by Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri for saying the Parliament’s police act like his “private militia”.
The third is by Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh for saying he hid hundreds of millions of dollars in Swiss banks.
The fourth lawsuit was filed in February by four pro-Hezbollah journalists, days after she went on live TV to accuse the group of assassinating Slim.
The publisher’s bulletriddled body was found in a rental car near the southern town of Saida on the morning of February 4. No one has yet been arrested for his killing.
The lawsuits accuse her of slander and “inciting sectarian strife”.
“I think I just said what everyone knows. I mean, we all know that Hezbollah is behind assassinations in Lebanon,” she said.
Asked whether it was worth the risk, Sadek pauses for a few seconds.
“I don’t want to die. I want to raise my children. I want to see them growing up, but also I can’t just see all this happening and just pretend I’m not seeing it.”
Hezbollah sued Sadek for defamation in 2015. They lost the case, she says.
When she accused Hezbollah of Slim’s murder, she did not offer any proof of the allegation. Instead, her monologue argued that most of the dozen or so high-profile political assassinations in Lebanon in recent years were all critics of Hezbollah and its patron Syria. They all remain unsolved.
“I did a whole argument, saying that in 16 years … very different people with different orientations were killed but they only have one thing in common: they are all anti-Hezbollah and anti-Syrian regime.
“I based my argument on what the international court said,” she says, referring to the UN tribunal into Hariri’s murder.
When the UN tribunal sentenced Ayyash last December, it said that although there was no direct evidence of Syria or its ally Hezbollah’s involvement, the attack “most probably had to involve state actors”.
“The state with the most to gain from Mr Hariri’s assassination was probably Syria,” a judge said.
After Sadek’s February broadcast, Lebanon’s parliamentary media committee summoned the heads of three private TV stations to discuss “unethical media coverage” of Slim’s murder.
Hussein Hajj Hassan – the committee’s head and Hezbollah MP – said insults were not freedom of expression.
But it is not just about vitriol and political spin. Retired sociologist Melhem Chaoul accuses Sadek of engaging in sensationalism rather than journalistic substance.
“She is part of what I’d call post-modern intellectualism: you have a target, and you go after it relentlessly,” said Mr Chaoul, who used to direct the Lebanese University’s Institute of Social Sciences.
Sadek does not have much to say on the matter.
“I could also do entertainment and get more fame,” she says.
Ayman Mhanna, executive director of the Samir Kassir Foundation – a local media watchdog named after a prominent journalist murdered in 2005 – criticised the committee for prioritising Hezbollah’s reputation over journalists’ safety.
He also pointed out that, without official channels for such allegations to be investigated, reporters are left with little to work with.
“It’s not up to journalists to find proof in assassinations. That’s up to the judiciary and they are doing absolutely nothing,” he tells The National. “In this climate, political accusations become the only available tool for the media to express their opinions because both the judiciary and politicians either willingly ignore their duties or are not allowed to conduct them. This is where the scandal lies.”
Sadek believes the fact that several politicians recently turned against her strengthens her credibility as an anti-establishment voice.
“Personally, I feel very proud,” she says.
But in Sadek’s own Shiite community, where vocal dissent with Hezbollah is rare, it is difficult to convince people.
In the neighbourhood of Khandaq Al Ghamiq, a predominantly Shiite area where, in late 2019, residents fought with the anti-government protesters Sadek supports, people are dismissive of the TV host.
One man describes her as “on the margin”, accuses her of being an agent and uses sexist insults.
Being a woman adds to the abuse that Sadek receives. “She’s attacked as a mother, a daughter and a wife. You do not see this happening when hate speech targets a man,” Ms Ibrahim says.
Similar accusations of being marginal and a foreign agent are common and were levelled against Slim, also a Shiite Muslim, for years before his death.
Ali El Amine, a journalist from south Lebanon and a Hezbollah critic, defends Sadek.
“Her courage is important because it affirms freedom of opinion and the right to disagree,” he tells The National. “Freedom of expression among Shiites is difficult and exposes those pursuing it to accusations of betrayal and threats.”
When it comes to Hezbollah, Sadek recognises that she does not represent a serious challenge to the most powerful force in the country.
“We’re too weak. All we have is our words,” she says.
Those who hate her most come from the Shiite community. She is seriously annoying for them
ALIA IBRAHIM
Journalist