Your beard might get you killed in Beruit

Here in Brooklyn, most of our arguments about beards are pretty silly. Why are people getting surgery to insert them on their faces? Should I do that? Are beards are a Brooklyn thing? Oh wait, maybe they aren’t? You might be sick of talking about beards, but consider yourself lucky that unlike in Lebanon, you won’t get hasseled by a cop here just because you have a ridiculous beard. What’s the worst that could happen here, someone tweets mean things at you about being a hipster?

The story, which is one of those things in a warzone we suppose you just have to find funny to keep from crying comes to us courtesy of NPR, who talked to Lebanese hipsters who shared their stories about being mistaken for jihadis because of their giant beards. Despite the fact that one of the people NPR talked to put seven months into growing his beard, which he points out girls like, he told the radio station he might cut it since he’s sick of police stopping him at checkpoints and demanding to know if he’s a jihadi.

One emcee in Beruit nightclub, Hussein Sharafadine, told NPR that a police officer who was photographed holding a gun to Sharafadine’s head told him he was going to burn his beard off. Like a true hipster though, Sharafadine figures newcomers to Beirut are biting his style, since he’s had his giant beard since ’98. So it’s nice to see that some things are pretty much the same everywhere.

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