The Day I Realized That My Lebanon Is No More
Lebanon is not mine anymore. I always realized that day was coming. In fact most Westernized Lebanese thought so.
I could see it. The misery, the poverty, the inequality. It was bound to explode. Hezbollah was born amidst desperate people and with its mix of preaching, charity and military victories against a supposedly unbeatable foe, it gave meaning to their lives.
More than a million people support Hezbollah and idolize its leader Hassan Nasrallah and Israeli bombs today only reinforce the Party of God's grasp on its community.
After this crisis, Hezbollah and its allies will rule. And in anticipation I am trying to cut all ties to the Lebanon that I gave 13 years of my life for while others emigrated at the first opportunity that came up.
I believed, but not anymore. Now it is Hezbollah's turn to impose its Lebanon and I do not want to be a part of it. I lived war and refuge from 1975 till 1990 and I do not want to do it anymore.
I want to axe my ties to Lebanon.
I want the best for my children and Lebanon is not it and will never be.
Therefore, my wife and I have started looking for a school that will accept our children come September, and I am looking for a job, any job. I can be a pretty good waiter or janitor. I have the skills.
I guess Walid Jumblat, the Druze leader, was right when he said that he preferred to be a garbage collector in New York than a political leader in Lebanon. (But I do not think that he has the skills, after all he is a Bey).
A friend of mine suggested today that I become a banker, a rich and respectable one. But I like being a journalist and I like covering troubled spots as a foreign correspondent but not as a victim.
Therefore if any of you out there has a job offer please send it my way. (What a cheap way of exploiting my blog! What comes next? Advertising!)
I could see it. The misery, the poverty, the inequality. It was bound to explode. Hezbollah was born amidst desperate people and with its mix of preaching, charity and military victories against a supposedly unbeatable foe, it gave meaning to their lives.
More than a million people support Hezbollah and idolize its leader Hassan Nasrallah and Israeli bombs today only reinforce the Party of God's grasp on its community.
After this crisis, Hezbollah and its allies will rule. And in anticipation I am trying to cut all ties to the Lebanon that I gave 13 years of my life for while others emigrated at the first opportunity that came up.
I believed, but not anymore. Now it is Hezbollah's turn to impose its Lebanon and I do not want to be a part of it. I lived war and refuge from 1975 till 1990 and I do not want to do it anymore.
I want to axe my ties to Lebanon.
I want the best for my children and Lebanon is not it and will never be.
Therefore, my wife and I have started looking for a school that will accept our children come September, and I am looking for a job, any job. I can be a pretty good waiter or janitor. I have the skills.
I guess Walid Jumblat, the Druze leader, was right when he said that he preferred to be a garbage collector in New York than a political leader in Lebanon. (But I do not think that he has the skills, after all he is a Bey).
A friend of mine suggested today that I become a banker, a rich and respectable one. But I like being a journalist and I like covering troubled spots as a foreign correspondent but not as a victim.
Therefore if any of you out there has a job offer please send it my way. (What a cheap way of exploiting my blog! What comes next? Advertising!)
posted by zadigvoltaire at 1:56 AM
30 Comments:
I'm sorry I can't help you with getting a job. It's impossible for me to grasp the misery that is being rained down (literally) on the citizens of Lebanon. I'm hoping that you and your family will find a safer haven away from this madness. I was browsing the Lebanese online newspapers and read an article about how the Israel Air Force is destroying the communications infrastructure, so I searched for blogs to see if you guys are still wired up. Bil, Aurora, Colorado
i hope you're wrong when you say your lebanon is no more but i fear you may be right. that something like this might emerge from the israeli attacks is one of the reasons i am so against them.
israel claims (and rightly so) the fact that there's so many nations and groups whose stated goal is to destroy israel is evidence that they have bad intentions and pose a threat. yet the chief of the israeli army promised to do just that to lebanon when he promised to turn the clock back 20 years there.
and they're considered a "civilized" nation!
You say you're 'westernized', you’re not. You people are apathetic and fatalistic Middle Easterners with a veneer of some of the superficial characteristics of western secular democratic culture, namely the social freedom and license to pursue your own happiness.
What you don't understand is that those freedoms were purchased in blood by real westerners in wars so catastrophic they make the Middle East look like a playground. We crushed our barbarians, burned their cities, slaughtered them like cattle until they utterly submitted to us. The Nazis barely had a building left standing when Hitler committed suicide.
Now the barbarians and fascists are coming to enslave Lebanon again, what do the so-called ‘westernized' Lebanese do? Throw up their hands, complain and leave. You people are fit to be nothing but slaves, the Islamic fascists will indeed own you.
Barbarians need to be killed. Slaughtered, wiped out. It’s you or them, you have made your decision, and you’re going to run away.
Pathetic. I almost admire Hezb’allah more than you, I definitely admire the Israelis a hundred times more than either of you.
Good luck and Gods speed
I don't blame you at all. Go, leave, make a life for yourself and try to be happy. Love your children, and be well.
anonymous said:
"
Pathetic. I almost admire Hezb’allah more than you, I definitely admire the Israelis a hundred times more than either of you"
i am israeli, and i'm shame to see what you wrote.(anonymous).
don't ever judge someone, until you are in his shoes...
zadig did the most humen thing to do... he couldn't save his country so he saved his family. and i admire him for that decision. it's very easy to through all those heroic secrifise stuff... a normal person don't want to die or to secrefise his family. he was brave to leave all his property, lovers and land for that cause. he wasn't passive, he acted. and it's not easy to start all over again in a forign country and with children.
zadig - it hearts to read your hate to the israelis, but i can understand your pain.
i wish you to find a good job realy soon and sucsses in your new life.
jasmine-israel.
OK, let the moonbats do what they do best - spread hate and be otherwise useless.
If you look for a job, you need resume, or CV. Just google "resume". Post it on your blog, get as much feedback as you can.
Work several hours a day on perfecting your resume, and discovering your skills. Look through job sites (google "recruitment" in your country of choice), look through all the jobs, check those you can do, check what they ask for, think if you have a chance. Looking for work is a full-time work.
Try to open your mind and see the people the way they truly are. Join the country you are moving to, not your ethnic community in this country. One of the greatest jazzmen was launched by a joiont venture between a Turkish and and a Jewish men, eBay was create by a guy from India and an American bourn etc. At the same time the most desperate life is in ethnic communities, especially from the Middle East.
And please, ignore those moonbats who want you to hate Jews and Americans rather then build your life and your family. They are not the people who want you to succeed.
I wish you the best and i am sorry Lebanon is being destroyed. I wish the Hizbollah was out of your country. One thing that heartened me as a American was to see Israelis posting to you. both sides have felt pain but Lebanon shouldnot be destroyed. IDF did not need to bomb a hospital,I dont care who was running it.
I wish you the best.
Take care.
Mary- American
come to America, you can get a job because there are plenty available.
p.s
and Israel has a right to defend itself.
i am a product of many ethnic backgrounds-turkish,spanish,french,and native american.
everyone is in the HUMAN race.
You are wrong about Lebanon being destroyed. Nature has a lesson for you: when forests are so clogged with debris that it begins to choke on itself, a fire comes along a destroys everything. Or so it seems.
With all the crap destroyed, that forest can come back even stronger with more bio-diversity and healthy growth of new plants. In fact, some trees require a fire to reproduce.
With the dead feces of Hezbollah removed, the strongest impediment to Lebanon's future economic growth will be removed. A stable, democratic Lebanon will attract investment and become a civilized member of the world.
Who knows, someday you may even become trading partners with Israel and attach yourself to the greatest economic engine in the Middle East.
So don't cry for Lebanon; rejoice at the purging of a foul infection within. Soon you will be recovering from a past illness. The medicine may seem harsh now, but you will appreciate it later.
Bernie, Eran:
Lebanon is being demolished as a nation by the Israeli army. Which is the greater evil for Lebanon right now: Hezbollah or the Israeli bombing? None of the discussion about this invasion has ever considered that there might be another way to disarm or dissolve Hezbollah. Israel has written itself two blank cheques in the eyes of American public opinion: the "right to defend itself" and "war on terror". Coincidentally or not, these were behind the invasion of Iraq. And look what a mess that has turned into. The difference is that America has not known war on its land since when, the American Civil War? Its people see war as a distant strategic conflict. They have never been kept awake by bombers or missiles. They have never walked to work for fear of public transport being bombed. They have never had to identify children in bombed schools. They remind me of the line from the Pink Floyd song: "'Forward', they cried from the rear, and the front line died".
Meanwhile, rocket attacks on Israel have increased and the seeds of greater discontent are being sown with every bomb that falls. It could well be that Israel is creating the seeds of a darker, more radical Lebanon. How could this not be given the nature and scale of the bombings? On a personal note, I have not been so shocked by violence like this since 9/11. Even the comments on this website have been repeating, basically: "You deserve it". So Israel is organising punishment on a massive scale. Is punishment a valid military objective? Or is it not rather a political objective - one that can only lead to further anger and polarisation. If the middle classes and entrepreneurs do leave Lebanon, what will Israel have to the north (and on its conscience - not that this is something which Israel as a nation seems to burden itself with).
I speak often of Lebanon here. But of course it is not normal or acceptable that rocket shells fall on villages in northern Israel. That situation cannot continue.
Is Lebanon the "collatoral damage" for a good night's sleep in Haifa? Look again at the word disproportionate in the dictionary.
It isn't today that you lost Lebanon. You lost it long ago, when you accepted Hezbollah lies that terrorism rises from misery and poverty. The truth is precisely the opposite: terrorism rises from demented ideology and creates misery and poverty. The day you decided to appease their lies is the day you abandoned Lebanon to them and lost it.
be strong,be humen & all your enemies will cries blow you.
in the Middle East you need to be better then that, i wish you a good life & i'm more than sure that you will back to Lebanon in a mounth from now & you will see that nothing was really change exept that the Hezbollah is not so strong as before. be stronger then they Lebanon is more yours then they.take care & who knows someday we will see you enjoy from the butey of our country.
Here is a reply to a Lebanese Israeli hater Ms. Dove:
Limits
So by all means join in the hatred Ms. Dove. Unfortunately your hatred does not merit the attention that the hatred of Hizbollah does.
You have no rockets.
I totally agree with the "nature" explanation. Let's try this: Get out some decent people from Lebanon, nuke the whole damn place to ashes, then get those people back and build a country again. Better, apply this to the whole muslim Middle East. THAT would be a good idea.
I personally do not like the perspective, but after seeing those ingrates whine and kill people that has been trying to help them everywhere, I'm beggining to doubt if the humanity can afford keeping one single muslim alive. It's either us or them. And I DO know where my loyalties lie.
For all the rest, zadigvoltaire, I'm sorry you have to find yourself in this position, and I'm sorry I can't help you more directly. Although I don't like to say that, I would recommend you to emigrate somewhere else. This is only the first battle in a much bigger war that is coming faster you can imagine, and you don't want to be caught in the middle.
Dear Zadigvoltaire,
I am very embarrassed by some of the idiotic postings on your sad and poetic blog. Please be aware that a small and noisy minority of Americans are like that. Ignore them.
Unfortunately it is all too easy for an anonymous fool to suggest 'nuking' another country when he has had no experience of war himself. Look at our leaders.
But this too shall pass. I hope that you are able to return to Lebanon eventually. In the meantime I hope that you are able to work as a newsreporter in the USA rather than a janitor. Why not contact Pacifica Radio and see if they could use a Middle EAstern commentator?
I apologize for not being able to offer you a job myself.
My sympathies are with the innocent people of Lebanon. They did not deserve this horror.
I just wished Israel was right and these attacks would make Hezbollah weaker. It's hard to see innocent people dying, but if it was for a brighter future, it could be "worth" it...
(Don't get too shocked! For example, the D Day's bombings killed thousands of innocent French citizens, but it was necessary and, in the aftermath, worth it.)
But unfortunately I don't think this is the case. The Hezbollah will get stronger, both because people oposing it are leaving Lebanon and because many side by it as the lesser harm.
This is a fucked up situation.
In the big picture I support Israel. But I wonder if these particular bombings are not more dictated on the government's need to show its citizens that they are not passive, while on the same time sending a message to Iran and Syria, than on actually addressing the Hezbollah threat.
This might be a detail, where the bombings offer thousands of more gruesome ones per day. But it is revealing of the hypocrisy coming from Tel Aviv concerning civilian targets and infrastructure. We all read about the TV masts that were blasted a day or two ago. I assumed - naively - that Israel's intelligence had decided to take out a Hezbollah propaganda outlet. Unforunately, this is not the case. Here is an extract from a news item from the Beirut's independent Daily Star:
"President George W. Bush has stated that while he has no problem with the Jewish state's ravaging of Lebanon, he would like to make sure that the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora survives. The premise of Bush's theorem is typically cloudy, especially since there will be precious little for anyone to govern when this is all over, but also because the broadcasting targets have included FTV and LBC. FTV is affiliated with the Future Movement, the same Sunni organization whose MPs form the core of Siniora's support in Parliament. As for LBC, it is a staunch ally of the Christian politicians who joined the Future Movement to form the March 14 Forces whose very purpose has been to tilt Lebanon away from its former Syrian masters and seek accommodation with the United States. Targeting them necessarily reduces the ability of Siniora and his allies to make a variety of points that need very badly to be made about the national interest."
So again the questions has to be asked: is Israel attacking Hezbollah or systematically vandalising a country, even to the point where the result will be increased radicalisam across its northern border? Please, can someone find a logic behind this destruction that is not willful economic warfare?
Sir Sefirot said...
Get out some decent people from Lebanon, nuke the whole damn place to ashes, then get those people back and build a country again
---
Shame on you Sefirot, Shame on you.
Zadig-
You have to be one of 9 people in Lebanon that actually have a grip on reality.
The tragedy that is Lebanon today started a long time ago.
When Arafat replaced the Lebanese ideology of sensibility with the ideology of ITBACH AL YAHUD! the rest was inevitable.
If there is such a thing as a literal armaggedon, he will have been the anti christ.
It is ironic how much Lebanon and Israel have in common- each was created as a haven for persecuted people- and ever since, there has been a deliberate effort to keep them apart.
En verite, plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme.
What is happening to Lebanon is so painful. Lunacy on both sides seems to be the order of the day. I can only hope that there is a school that will accept your child, and, should you come to America, your story will continue.
Shalom, Salaam, Peace
BTW if you are thinking of Pacifica it would help if your politics leaned towards communism and support of mis-understood jihadists.
They don't care much for capitalists or Israel. Plus you would have to deal with the periodic purges so typical of the left.
If that is your cup of tea go for it. America is a very big country with room for all kinds of strangeness and failed ideologies. And even I would welcome you. Perhaps after experiencing America it would influence your thinking.
And think of the benefits. You would get to meet some real Republican war mongers. You could even oppose them in a place where it might do some "good".
Stay if you want. Go if you want. If something is important to you, you will fight for it and support those people who are defending your country against aggression. The world is a Darwinian jungle. Nearly all people are basically out for themselves while pretending to be religious. G-d can decide which group is most moral but wherever you decide to live, you should learn to support those who are trying to repel those attacking your country and grabbing your land as we speak. Perhaps you can move to Greenland. I don't think anyone wants to live there, so you hang out in your igloo with no worries.
Dear, I guess you and the other westernised Lebanese - no, not just lebanese but all westernised Muslims - are living in a world of fools.
Those that think that the US and its allies, mostly the west, could be our friends are living in a mirage; for even the most weakest of you who believes in the Holy Quran should know that Allah has clearly said that "these Jews and Christians can never be your friends even if you take up their faith".
What I dont understand from my little-knowing and west-priding brethren is their expectations from the West to help them out of crises' in which they have pushed themselves. It are groups like the Hizbollah and Hamas that will always come to your rescue. Mark my words on that!
Dear, your should take pride in the Lebanon that grows up from the ashes of this tormenting war that the Jews has imposed on us all. For whatever you do, the Jews and Christians will never leave you in peace. Not me but God has said that and human history is very much a proof to this claim.
Why does it looks like the anonymous from 20:16 assumes ZadigVoltaire is a Muslim? Or does he simply equates Lebanese = Muslim? If he does, then it's easy to understand a lot more about the problems in Lebanon...
I wish you and your family the best.
Its a back long start
Witch People Most People Never Noticed and manny others still not ,and refuse to.
while we get closer and faster to this closeness.
speaking of lebanon , israel , iraq and bla bla daily human foolishness.
what abt earth nature living creatures and a race once called humans ?
what abt gun powder buildings highways and roads?
i somtime think abt space will there ever be space on earth ?
or a lil quiet place to watch peace that god gave?
if it was god or none of god exists we are breaking all rules u can imagine living and behaving on this planet in abizzar way
we are ending ourlives by not making war or killing its by destroying the things that keep us alive
i dont give a damn abt countries or politicians cause these stuff never existed in our books or in our nature or instincts.
or maybe im a marcian or somone who needs therapy..
a guy who is looking for a job to survive
ppl who are starving to death
arent those ppl starving cause of others?
what are jobs?
what is monney?
cause we sell out flowers we never see nature ones
there are no lemon trees around much cause we buy lemon
ppl die causeof monney being a gay is a monney proble specialy a whore.and everyone thinks hes more educated and more talented than his other mate
since when there is borders visas or passports u are borne in this and ur used on bizzar ways witch u never find exept whats right bizzar
im not changing the world im just laughing at you all cause ur all gona die and that dose not mean that i aint
Nursery of landscaping trees, reforestoration sesdlings, native plants and native shrubs for habitat restoration and wetlands mitigation.
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