It was over 20 years ago now when I spent a few weeks in Lebanon.
Awesome potential, thwarted by political and religious strife.
Lebanon was once called the Europe of the Middle East.
Christians built a country that, in just a few years, became the hospital of the region, the bank of the region, a place where people came to witness what modernity and progress looked like.
When the Crown Prince of Dubai visited Lebanon as a child, he later wrote in his memoirs that he told his father, “One day I want to make Dubai like Beirut.”
Israel’s Ministry of Tourism once sent a delegation to New York to hire an ad agency to help market Tel Aviv as “the next Beirut.”
So what happened?
Palestinian militias, backed by Arab regimes, hijacked Lebanon under the banners of “liberation,” “resistance,” and “Arab brotherhood,” turning it into a launchpad against Israel.
From 1975 to 1990, Lebanon was ravaged by civil war. Christians tried to defend the country they built, but Lebanese Muslims aligned with the PLO and welcomed Arafat’s fighters.
Today, forty years later, Lebanon is a failed state, without basic services, without sovereignty, without a future.
The Europe of the Middle East was destroyed in the name of the so-called Palestinian cause.
And now, the real Europe is heading in the same direction.
By siding with the same manufactured cause, by submitting to the seductive language of resistance and liberation, by welcoming the lovers of death, Europe is sealing its own fate.
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