Ad Blitz Satirizes Lebanon's Divides

But before the billboards went up, they had to go through the formality of getting permission from the intelligence branch known as General Security. At first, officials refused; one compared the ads to Nazi-era segregation. It took two hours of face-to-face meetings to reach a resolution, by convincing the officials that the campaign was intended to be ironic.

Then when the billboards went up, 50 were defaced or torn down. Some residents stopped them from going up in the first place. In Lebanon and abroad, e-mails flitted back and forth, some of their authors believing the messages were real.

"People were seriously panicked," Andraos recalled. "Are there really signs like that in Lebanon now? The mere fact that people think it's possible, that there might be signs like that in Lebanon now, means we're not really that far off."

Members of the group say people have criticized the timing, and the group delayed the campaign's next step after the assassination last week of a government minister, Pierre Gemayel. But they plan to distribute as early as this weekend 15,000 business cards with the same theme at bars and restaurants in Beirut. Each card lists a person's name and religious affiliation. Next, they will send copies of the cards to Lebanon's 128 legislators.

"We want it to be raised as an issue," Fayad said, "but we don't have the pretension to say we have the answer."

At a cafe near downtown, Randy Nahle, a 21-year-old student, wondered about the way out. His father is Shiite, his mother Maronite Catholic. The neighborhood he sits in, like virtually every one in Beirut, has its markers: the posters and religious symbols on walls, the muezzin or the church bells that identify its affiliation.

For once, he said, something organized spoke to his rejection of being "categorized or oversimplified."

He smiled at his favorite ads, the ones that identified doctors by their sect. "It has infiltrated our fabric so much, almost indelibly," Nahle said. "If I have an earache, an Orthodox doctor will understand it better. It's an Orthodox ear."

He recalled sitting with a Shiite woman at a cafe near the American University in Beirut. She treated him as a fellow Shiite until he revealed his mixed background. She looked at him disapprovingly. It's bad for the children, she said. "They're going to come out confused," she told him.

"I said, 'You know, the problem of this country is we don't have enough confused people. The problem is we have too many people blindly convinced by their political orientation, by their religion, by their community's superiority.' "

She smiled, he recalled, and then laughed a little uncomfortably.