Lebanese comedian Mario Moubarak was arrested on 6th December, and charged with blasphemy, after an out-of-context clip of his stand-up show was shared online. He had performed a twenty-minute set, titled بِعتِقد (‘I believe’), at the Awk.word comedy club in Beirut, and the club uploaded the entire set to its YouTube channel on 18th May. One joke from that video — that the funeral of Jesus wasn’t a success, since he rose again — was shared on social media, and Moubarak was arrested at Beirut Airport when he returned to the country on a flight from Canada.
Moubarak is one of several comedians arrested in Lebanon in recent years. Another, Nour Hajjar, was arrested twice in the same month. On 25th August 2023, Hajjar was detained at the Ain el-Rihaneh military police station after joking that Lebanon’s soldiers needed to take second jobs as delivery drivers
Hajjar was then arrested again four days later, in relation to a supposedly blasphemous stand-up set from 2018, even though the statute of limitations in that case had expired. The clips of Hajjar had also been filmed at Awk.word, and the club’s slogan is: “If you are easily offended, this event is not for you!”