Lebanon

Thursday

Paul Wood

The mood in Lebanon is for revolution

When 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate left in Beirut’s port exploded last week, a three-year-old girl named Alexandra Najjar was torn from her mother’s arms as they ran inside from their balcony. In the same instant, every-thing in the apartment was flying through the air — doors, window frames, shards of glass, the air-conditioning unit, the family’s piano — and something hit the little girl. She died later from her wounds and on Lebanese social media she has become the ‘Angel of Beirut’, a symbol of the innocent people ‘murdered’ by their government’s negligence and incompetence, as her father, Paul, put it. He gave a restrained and dignified interview to

Monday

David Patrikarakos

Lebanon’s existential crisis

It had to happen. On Monday evening, just under a week after 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse at Beirut’s port exploded and killed over 160 people, the entire Lebanese government resigned. This was not a surprise. The blast resulted from negligence of the grossest kind. Three cabinet ministers and seven members of parliament had already quit. And frankly, in these times: who would even want the job? Prime Minister Hassan Diab made the announcement in a national TV address. It came after days of protests in which demonstrators hung effigies of Lebanese President Michel Aoun, and even Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. That anyone would dare to

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Local lockdowns, busy beaches and an explosion in Beirut

Home Some 2.7 million people in Greater Manchester and parts of Lancashire and West Yorkshire, where many Muslims live, were put under tighter restrictions on the eve of Eid al-Adha. Wedding receptions, gambling in casinos and eyebrow-threading continued to be banned when the government decided to ‘squeeze the brake pedal’ to control coronavirus, in the words of Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister. Aberdeen was put back into lockdown. People would have to wear masks in church from 8 August. The sudden actions came after new cases rose from a probable 2,800 to 4,200 a day, according to a survey by the Office for National Statistics, based on 116,026 swab tests

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Will the Beirut blast change Britain’s foreign policy?

What should the British government do to help Lebanon recover from the Beirut explosion? Ministers say they are working to provide the Lebanese government with technical support and financial assistance, but they are coming under pressure from senior Conservative colleagues to use the disaster as a turning point in the way Britain approaches the Middle East generally. Tobias Ellwood, chair of the Defence Select Committee, and Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, have both called for Britain to take a more active role in the region, or risk seeing hostile states such as Iran and terrorist groups filling a ‘vacuum’. These two MPs have been instrumental in pushing

Thursday

Michael Karam

How Lebanon unravelled

Lebanon will be 100 years old on 1 September. But the joke circulating in Beirut is that the country may not be around for the party. Eye-watering hyper-inflation, not helped by the Covid pandemic, has brought the country to its knees, just as famine and extreme poverty sparked its creation after the end of the Great War. Lebanon eventually won full independence from the French in 1943, and became an impossibly glamorous, multilingual entrepôt with a rare facility for doing business. According to Major General Sir Edward Spears, the British minister to Syria and Lebanon, the country ‘sprang from a far older and higher’ civilisation than the French. Even so,

Thursday

Paul Wood

Letter From Lebanon

Look down from the mountains outside Beirut and, on most days, you’ll see a grey blanket of smog choking the city. The smog comes from diesel generators: almost every building in Lebanon is hooked up to one because of rolling power cuts. This isn’t because Israel bombed one of the country’s few power stations in 2006, though it did. Instead, the power cuts are a constant reminder to the Lebanese of their politicians’ greed, venality and incompetence. Successive governments have failed to build new power stations. Some are supposed to be finished next year, finally, but everyone knows they won’t be enough. The Lebanese will tell you that the ‘generator

Thursday

Justin Marozzi

Hair-raising stuff

Ask most people whether they fancy a four-month, 5,000-mile trek across the Middle East and they might conclude you need your head seen to. With civil war raging in Syria, Iraq mired in internecine conflict while mopping up the remnants of Daesh, al-Qa’eda running amok in southern Yemen and simmering strife between Israelis and Palestinians, walking across 13 countries might not seem like an obvious itinerary. But Levison Wood, it is fair to say, is not your average traveller. A committed biped, he is the author of a trio of books on walking the Nile, Himalayas and Americas respectively. Ostensibly unlike the other television-led journeys which preceded it, this expedition

Thursday

Mick Brown

Beautiful thoughts for all occasions

Kahlil Gibran was 40 years old, a short — he was just 5’3” — dapper man with doleful eyes and a Charlie Chaplin moustache, and in the first throes of the alcoholism that would result in his early death, when in 1923 he published The Prophet. A collection of 26 prose-poems, written in quasi-Biblical language, the book takes the form of sermons by a fictional sage named Al Mustapha, on the big questions of life: family, friendship, love, work and death. These range from the profound to the banal. ‘Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love

Thursday

Christopher Meyer

Double speak

Tom Fletcher, a young star of the Foreign Office, made his reputation last year when he blogged his ‘valedictory despatch’ from Beirut, where he had served as ambassador for several years. From time immemorial ambassadors had written these despatches on quitting their posts. It was the occasion to spread your diplomatic wings with candid observations on the country or career you were leaving. A few have been small literary gems and have been republished in book form. Some were laced with indiscretion. In his farewell despatch, Sir Ivor Roberts, our man in Rome earlier this century, was extremely rude (rightly so) about the way the Foreign Office was run. His

Thursday

Laura Pitel

Turkey can’t cope. Can we?

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thenextrefugeecrisis/media.mp3″ title=”Laura Pitel and Migration Watch’s Alanna Thomas discuss the second migrant crisis”] Listen [/audioplayer]In Istanbul, signs of the Syrian influx are everywhere. Syrian mothers sit on pavements clutching babies wrapped in blankets; children from Homs, Syria’s most completely devastated city, push their way through packed tram carriages begging for coins. Arabic adverts offer rooms for rent. It’s almost inconceivable how many Syrians Turkey has taken in as refugees — around 2.5 million of them so far. That’s almost three times the number who have sought refuge in Europe. And while the Turks are hospitable, Turkey has more than any country should bear. Yet still more refugees arrive. This

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Even great wine can’t quite give me hope for Lebanon

Housman had a point. If men could be drunk for ever, the human condition would be tolerable. But thought always forces its way on to the agenda. ‘And when men think, they fasten/ Their hands upon their hearts.’ This occurred to me in the context of Lebanon. That is a country designed to be a paradise where the nymphs dance to Pan’s pipes. An Arabic-French cultural coalition, modern Lebanon should be an entrancing amalgam of sophistication, religious influences and sensuous delights. Lapped by the Mediterranean, it could draw on 5,000 years of that great sea’s civilisation. There is also the landscape and the climate. For much of the year, you

Thursday

Michael Karam

How Lebanon is coping with more than a million Syrian refugees

Beirut If any of the Syrian refugees who have made it to the relative safety of Europe have been watching the smash-hit TV show Homeland (season five), they would be baffled by its warped depiction of their compatriots’ plight in Lebanon. Unlike the vast majority of Homeland’s viewers ,they would know there are no government-sanctioned camps guarded by nervy UN soldiers and run from the inside by menacing Hezbollah operatives. This is out-and-out nonsense and insulting to the Lebanese, who have arguably done more than any country to absorb this unfolding human tragedy. For the record, Lebanon, a country a tad bigger than Wales, plays host to around 1.5 million

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

Coming up for air

The thing that the photojournalist Don McCullin likes best of all now, he tells me, is to stand on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland in a blizzard. He made his name in conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Biafra, Uganda — hot places full of fury, panic and death — but these days he finds his greatest solace in the English landscape. I can see why he is drawn to that wild part of Britain: its isolated beauty, the feeling of being roughed up by the elements but not destroyed by them. Clean air, too: you must get a cool, fresh lungful up there. He’s 80 years old in October: talking to him

Thursday

James Forsyth

Merkel’s folly

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/merkelstragicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Holly Baxter debate Merkel’s offer to Syrian refugees” startat=38] Listen [/audioplayer]Of all the irresponsible decisions taken in recent years by European politicians, few will cause as much human misery as Angela Merkel’s plan to welcome Syrian refugees to Germany. Hailed as enlightened moral leadership, it is in fact the result of panic and muddled thinking. Her pronouncements will lure thousands more into the hands of unscrupulous people-traffickers. Her insistence that the rest of the continent should share the burden will add political instability to the mix. Merkel has made a dire situation worse. On Tuesday last week, Germany declared that any Syrian who reaches the

Thursday

Matthew Parris

The welcome return of the valedictory dispatch

‘All I ever tried to do was hold a mirror up and show you how beautiful you really are. Shine on, you crazy diamond.’ I have just read one of the finest ambassadors’ ‘valedictory’ dispatches ever composed, except it isn’t one: it had to be posted on the internet, and was, last month. What was essentially a sometimes-exasperated love letter to Lebanon will never see the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s printers. The valedictory died in 2006. So Tom Fletcher, who after four years as ambassador in Beirut had come to the end of his posting (‘Unlike your politicians,’ he tells Lebanon, ‘I can’t extend my own term’) had to write

Thursday

Toby Young

Why I still have a deep attachment to the BBC

After I failed my O-levels and decided to leave school, my father suggested I go to Israel to work on a kibbutz. I’m not sure why he thought this would cure me of my self-righteous adolescent narcissism, but it worked. I returned to England determined to go back to school and make something of myself. I very nearly didn’t come back. The first kibbutz I went to was on the Israeli-Lebanese border and about a week after I arrived it was targeted by a group of Palestinian rebels. Katyusha rockets rained down from all sides and the other guest workers and I were ushered into a special air-raid shelter reserved

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Was Netanyahu’s message worth the diplomatic damage it caused?

For weeks before his plane set off for Washington, Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress was exhaustingly analysed here in DC. Did Speaker Boehner adequately notify the White House about the invitation? How angry was the President really about this fait accompli? Were the Republicans using the invite to try to show themselves to be more pro-Israel than their Democrat rivals? Or were certain Democrats talking of no-shows and walk-outs during the speech only in order to show themselves more critical of Israel than the Republicans? By the day of the speech it seemed both sides had need of the fight. Of course Netanyahu had not single-handedly created this

Thursday

Paul Wood

Black flags and Christmas lights: a letter from Beirut

Blue and white Christmas lights twinkle over the shops near my apartment in Beirut’s Christian quarter; pricy boutiques display elaborate nativity scenes. But people are having trouble getting into the festive mood. ‘Do you think the war will come here?’ asks my landlady nervously, not for the first time. There is no rush to battle, no electric charge in the air, just a rather depressed feeling among Lebanese that their country can no longer escape the violence over the border in Syria. The black flag of the so-called Islamic State has appeared after Friday prayers in some mosques in the north. The assumption is that Lebanon will be the next

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Patriotism isn’t uncivilised – it’s what makes civilisation possible

Is it racist to be patriotic? Is patriotism, by definition, small-minded and exclusive? When you strip away the onion layers of sentiment about history and hymns, Shakespeare and lawn clippings, does it have a hateful heart? I ask because, as I’ve written before, I feel patriotic, and until recently I’ve considered this to be a good thing. I felt particularly patriotic at a service in Ravenstonedale, Cumbria, last week. I slid in late and guilty, amid snippy Sunday stares. After the sermon we trooped outside and in the suddenly sunlit graveyard the vicar whipped a trumpet from his cassock and began to play. A pair of starlings began their electric

Thursday

Michael Karam

Why I’ve joined Lebanon’s exodus

In early autumn I was on a train travelling from London to Brighton, on the final leg of a journey that began earlier that day in Beirut, and which was taking me back to live in Britain for the first time in 22 years. It was late Friday afternoon and the man opposite me was droning into his mobile phone. He had not drawn breath since he joined at Clapham Junction except to take a swig from one of three bottles of Black Sheep beer he had lined up on the table. Friday night clearly couldn’t start soon enough. Back then, the Islamic State had just begun to pick at