Stay off Facebook or leave Lebanon, activist told

BEIRUT: Lebanese intelligence officers detained a social media activist for two days and ordered him to sign a pledge to stop criticizing the army on Facebook, the man said on Friday.
Ahmad Ismail, a former prisoner in Israel, was summoned for questioning on Tuesday by Lebanese General Security.
He was released on Thursday after the personal intervention of Prime Minister Saad Hariri.
Ismail said he refused to sign a pledge to restrain his social media activities.
“I was a prisoner with the Israeli enemy, do you think I would sign one for you?” he told an investigator.
The investigator accused him of collaborating with an Israeli agent, supporting the opening of liquor stores in southern Lebanon and insulting the Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil and Hezbollah, Ismail said.
He was told that “Wiam Wahhab’s shoe is more important than you.” Wahhab is a political supporter of the March 8 Alliance, which includes Hezbollah.
Ismail said he was told that his page on Facebook would be shut down if he did not sign the pledge. The investigators said “he had better leave the country.”
Interior Minister Nouhad Al-Machnouk said it appeared Ismail had been intimidated “to stop him exercising his freedom of speech on social media,” and ordered an investigation.
The president of the Union of Lebanese Democratic Youth, Saleh Al-Hudaifah, said such arrests were becoming common.
Some security agencies were trying to return to the era of suppressing freedom and preventing activists from expressing their opinions, he said.
Hudaifah said the union asked “activists who are summoned by security forces after expressing their opinions to refuse all kinds of pressure and intimidation, and the union will stand by all those who defend public freedom no matter what it takes.”
The Lebanese MP Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Progressive Socialist party, said: “Under the well-known slogan ‘the army remains the solution,’ it seems that it is prohibited to express one’s opinion about anything related to the army.”