A Lebanese Speaker on Demographic Change and Palestinian Refugees

I was born and raised in Lebanon, which used to be the only majority

Christian

country in the Middle East. We were open-minded, we were fair, we

were tolerant, we were multicultural.

We prided ourselves on our multiculturalism.

We had open border policy. We welcomed everyone to come to our

country because we wanted to share with them the Westernization which we had

created in the heart of the Arabic world.

Muslims used to send their children to study in our universities because

we had built the best universities in the Arabic world.

They graduated and worked in our economy because we had built the best

economy in the Middle East, even though we did not have any oil.

Beirut became Paris of the Middle East, the banking capital of the Middle

East. In nineteen sixty-five, National Geographic

magazine had on its front cover, Lebanon,

Eden of the Middle East.

Unfortunately,

all this began to change as the years went by.

See, we got our independence in the early

forties, but by the sixties

and seventies, the Christians had become the minority,

and

the Muslims had become the majority in Lebanon.

And as the Islamic, um, population grew in the

country, the country became less and less tolerant because

they started pushing for more rights that were not compatible

with our, with our Judeo-Christian value system

that we had created.

And that's when the problems started.

The problem was contained until the influx of the Palestinians out of

Jordan in nineteen seventy when Lebanon brought them in because we

already

had refugee camps. Actually, at that time, Lebanon was the

only country in the Middle East to accept the third wave of Palestinians into

Lebanon. The majority of them were Muslims.

They put their heads together with the Muslims in Lebanon and declared

jihad on the Christians. What they wanted to do is create a

base from which to fight Israel, kill the Jews, and

throw them into the sea. Something they tried to do in

Jordan. Yes, Arafat and the Palestinians tried to do in

Jordan, but they

failed because of the dictatorship of the king.

Yet they were able to come to Lebanon, use our open-mindedness, our

fairness, our tolerance, our multiculturalism, and our

democracy to topple our democracy.