Dubbed the “Yellow Vest” protest, French protesters took to the streets of Paris and many other French cities.
This was the fourth Saturday of nationwide protests it what seems to have started as a grassroots movement with broadening demands by the week.
Their demands relate to high living costs and, based on their claims, French President Macron favoring the elite and his effort to modernize the French economy “too fast”.
An estimated 125,000 protesters took to the streets of France with 89,000 police officers deployed.
In many instances, the protests escalated into riots. Riot police were deployed with water cannons, tear gas, and flash bangs being used. Over 1,700 people have been arrested.
In the middle of the chaos, of course, you will find Lebanese people managing to place themselves in the middle of these situations and having a good time.
Conservative estimates put the number of Lebanese people in France as 250,000 – excluding Lebanese descendants.
In a video (can be found at the end of the article) uploaded by @pedrokhawaja on Twitter, we see a good 2 minutes of live commentary as a confrontation between protestors and riot police passes the Lebanese guys.
We don’t actually get to see the guys but right from the beginning, we hear one of them yelling “٤ خسات ب ألف” or “4 lettuce for 1,000LL” (~$0.70 USD).
As protestors start walking passed him (and away from the police), he begins to yell “wil3et wil3et” or “it’s starting up”. When they begin to run, then he proceeds to start swearing in Lebanese (unsure at who).
One of the protestors yells to a girl with a name sounding like “Saida” – which is the name of the city in Lebanon. Of course, this caught the Lebanese guy’s attention and we, right away, hear him say to the other Lebanese guy “her name is Saida” and proceeds to yell out “Saida” a couple times.
It quickly escalates as the police move forward throwing flashbangs and tear gas – to which he said: “they started the fireworks”. We hear him coughing, probably not from the yelling but from the tear gas used by the police to disperse the crowd.
One of the flashbangs/tear gas shot by police from around the corner, catches him by surprise, exploding just a couple meters away from him. As a reaction, we hear him yelling “Ya Mar Charbel, it dropped close”.
We see in the video, the gas smoke getting thicker filling the streets. The video ends with him going inside the (presumably) Lebanese restaurant where we hear several Lebanese guys telling him to close the door.
Be sure to turn the sound on and enjoy the video!
لبناني ب #باريس ٤ خسات ب ألف pic.twitter.com/aJAd9alYpA
— Pedro-khawaja® (@pedrokhawaja) December 8, 2018