The more eagle-eyed readers out there might have noticed that I contribute articles on the odd occasion to Al-Akhbar English. It’s a small but very intelligent team, a relatively new project with some exciting writers and a growing reach. I like the site, and I’m sure you do/will too.

And yes, I suppose the English site is affiliated with Al-Akhbar, the Lebanese Arabic political daily newspaper and website. We use their office, in fact. An office that was shot at last night by masked gunmen.

I won’t bore you with the inane details of how it arrived that both the offices of Al-Akhbar and Al-Jadeed TV to come under fire from thugs with their faces covered. It really doesn’t matter. What does matter is this: If you have a problem with the way the news is reported, there are robust avenues for complaint, even in Lebanon with its relatively lax media laws, that you can pursue.

If, on the other hand, you decide that trying to burn down the offices of a TV station and trying to shoot the windows out of a paper is good or justifiable, consider the following: Do not claim righteous anger is a legitimate motivation for your reckless and brainless actions when it is patently clear its manifestation is orchestrated by a political and religious class that views you in the same way one might a household appliance, or a blow-up doll.

If you want to fight someone, fight a soldier. Go fight Assad, or the FSA, or whoever you appear to dislike enough to attack journalistic institutions dozens of kilometers away from Damascus. Oh, that’s right, you wont. I was there at Tarik al-Jdeideh, when things actually got real, when you actually had a fight on your hands and you all hid inside with teta while you got children to ferry arms to street positions.

One more thing. You can’t protest the incarceration of one armed thug by going round and acting like armed thugs. But then again, judging by how you do things, perhaps we aren’t talking here about the cream of the gene pool:

Security footage from the station showed one of the likely attackers fleeing down the street with one of his feet on fire.