Lebanon Puzzle
John Churchilly
In a comment written by Mr Akram Miknas, ‘Killing the golden chicken’ (GDN, July 17), he blamed Lebanese politicians and officials for the current financial collapse.
Arabs have a culture of self-slashing depending on secondary or tertiary impacts of events without considering the primary factors that dawned on them by external factors.
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and grand Palestine were all one geographical entity known as “Sham”. Western imperialism decided to dismember Arabia through the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 which was a secret treaty between the United Kingdom and France. Their decision to dismember Sham was done haphazardly without considering the delicate balance between nature and population. France moulded Lebanon to be sectarian, making the president a Christian Arab. They believed that they had achieved the ultimate goal of imperialism but did not expect that Arabs would accept an Arab Christian president. They didn’t understand that an Arab is the one who speaks Arabic and feels like an Arab regardless of religion.
Life in Lebanon continued and with their hard work they managed to create the most beautiful destination for all Arab nations. In the Fifties until the mid-Seventies of the 20th century trillions of petrodollars poured into Lebanon banks making Beirut stronger than Zurich economically. Millions of Arabs opened accounts in the friendly and well managed banking system. At that time Arabs visited Beirut on a daily basis which added to its value. It became a hub for all the Arab nations. In early 1974, I personally exchanged 2.25 lira for each dollar and at that time the US dollar was many times stronger than the current electronic dollar.
The US corporation was gazing at Lebanon in discomfort and began to use their methods of fragmentation and hate inside society. Without going into details, their media were wailing on the deprived Lebanese and ‘poverty in Lebanon’, as an example they brought studies showing injustice in toilet distribution. “The labour force study of 1970 shows that 42.5 per cent of rural dwellings were not provided with an internal toilet facility, compared with 11pc in Beirut; over one-third of these dwellings were not connected to the water network, compared with 6pc in Beirut and 7pc in the other cities; and 14pc were not connected to the electricity grid compared with around 1pc only in Beirut and 2pc in other cities”. (http://www.undp.org.lb/programme/pro-poor/poverty/povertyinlebanon/molc/setting/A/1975.htm)
The US corporation spread hate and at a later stage linked all problems to the presence of PLO and Palestinian refugees as the main factor in so-called poverty. They kept conditioning the population through the media and false information which inspired some factions to believe that if they got rid of Palestinians their lives would be paradise.
April 13, 1975 was the start of civil war in Lebanon when a faction trained by Mossad attacked a school bus affiliated to the PLO. The US corporation knew what would happen immediately after the bus massacre, also known as the “Ain el-Rammaneh incident”.
“Black Sunday” was the collective name given to a short series of armed clashes involving Lebanese Christian and Palestinian elements in the streets of central Beirut, which is commonly presented as the spark that set off the Lebanese civil war. Lebanon’s population was divided between fighting factions and it was meant to drag until 1990 that passed through the Israeli invasion of 1982.