“Mazen Hariz is well-groomed. A bartender and business student, he has fine features, limpid dark eyes and a long, shiny beard topped with a twirling mustache.

Girls like it, he says. But the Lebanese police at checkpoints, which have sprung up on his route to work, aren’t so enthusiastic. He says cops stop him every day.

“They say, ‘What’s this, why do you have a beard?’ ” he says.

Lebanon is a small country, yet its social spectrum is broad. It ranges from cosmopolitan hipsters like Hariz to a very different tribe that’s also fond of long beards: Islamist extremists, who’ve attacked the army and planted car bombs. Hariz says it’s annoying that people assume he’s an extremist because of his beard.”

Read more here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/11/12/363517898/whos-that-lebanese-man-with-a-beard-hipster-or-jihadi

Ana Kasparian (http://www.twitter.com/anakasparian) and Cenk Uygur (http://www.twitter.com/cenkuygur) of The Young Turks discuss. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.