But in most conversations with people at the sit-in and protests, economic concerns quickly emerge: Siniora’s government is corrupt, has failed to reduce Lebanon’s crippling $41 billion public debt and has done little to improve people’s lives. Shiites are especially forgotten in the country’s economic planning. Many at the sit-in have been out of work for years, or lost their jobs after the recent war.
“Our country is getting poorer, and Siniora’s government is not talking about it,” says Hadi Mawla, a 22-year-old graphic design student who came from the dahiyeh on the protest’s first day, which drew hundreds of thousands to downtown. “Our standard of living is falling, while other Arab countries are improving. We Lebanese used to make fun of other Arab countries. Now they have great big cities like Dubai. And we’re going to end up like Egypt–with a very poor class, a very rich class and nothing in between.”
Nice to see the crisis being covered beyond the political element — at that dig at Egypt is rather amusing considering that the Egyptian government is always warning that it is afraid it will end up like Lebanon!
Also see: U.S. Readies Security Aid Package To Help Lebanon Counter Hezbollah
This FT article suggests the Siniora govt is pressing international donors for more economic aid – whether to counter HA’s argument that the govt can’t deliver and HA can, or to leverage the harm that HA street protests have done to the economy for money they wanted anyway.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/e2b3a272-91ef-11db-a945-0000779e2340.html
Hey thanks Mubarak , you have made even the lebanese mock us !!! we used to be the top country in the middle east and thanks to you and your looters we have sunken to the depth of the ocean . Once again I thank you
The artical appears to put the whole blame on the Government without attributing any blame on Hizballah and the Shiites for starting a war with Israel which caused an unpseakable amount of destruction and loss of anticipated income from summer tourism and investments. The shiites have no one to blame but themselves for their economic misery.
Has Literary Review always been this bad?
From the December/January issue, a gushing review (no group are as intellectually incestuous as the neocons) of David-Pryce Jones’ latest screed:
“As I write, it is exactly a year since the desolate banlieues of France erupted in an orgy of violence, on a scale which had not been seen for generations. At the time, these riots were blamed on social exclusion. Since then, it has become clear that the rioters are not just ‘immigrants’ or ‘youths’, but are first and foremost Muslims. When they set light to a car, their cry is often: ‘Allahu akhbar!’ (‘Allah is great!’)”
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/johnson_12_06.html
“First and foremost Muslim”?
Are they willfully stupid or just liars?
Beacon – that article was incredible! Especially this idea that French foreign policy has been pro-Arab and anti-Israel. After all it was with French help that the Israelis got the nuclear bomb, and there has been and still is a strong pro-Israel constituency in French political circles, notably among socialists (note S. Royal’s recent trip to Israel.) Part of the right has been pro-Arab only in the sense that it has had business connections with virtually every Arab dictator, usually to act as mediators for big business and the arms trade. There is nothing positive about that kind of pro-Arab attitude. And N. Sarkozy today is fairly pro-Israel, making the two leading presidential candidates more pro-Israel than not.
As for anti-Semitism in France, it is a long tradition — who protected Maurice Papon and other Nazi collaborators for decades? Algerian blue collar immigrants? I find many Frenchmen very often casually anti-Semitic, without having the (partial) excuse of being poor North African immigrants who are angry about Israel/Palestine and their exclusion for the society they live in. France does not have a Muslim problem as much as it has a delinquency problem…
France does not have a Muslim problem as much as it has a delinquency problem…
That has been pretty well established by not only French intelligence [Direction Centrale des Renseignements Généraux (Central Direction of General Intelligence)], but pretty much EVERYONE except maybe the American Right (neoconservatives especially; it’s a pet cause for them, i think).
The Nation? Puh-lease. Does anyone who has any meaningful decision-making authority in the world read The Nation?
(Note that academics and members of the media do not belong in this category. They, instead, spend much of their time wallowing in the comfort of moral righteousness without after having to be held accountable for their views or act upon their written words to actually do something meaningful for this world’s citizens… Criticizing ‘those who do’ serves as a palliative for ‘those who write,’ for some odd reason. )
Why not also quote the National Review or Fox News to give a “balanced,” opposing view? The Nation is as biased and driven by an agenda as any other extremist rag or TV network.
You’re better off quoting the journalists at “Westerberg High” for their views on Lebanon.
As for Lebanon vs. Egypt? Up here in Europe, we are still waiting for the entire Middle East to experience some sort of political/economic revival, join the rest of the world in the 21st century (well, how about the ME putting a foot in the old 20th century to begin with?!), and leave behind the politics of resistance and victimization.
Good luck.
Wow!!
I’m not surprised by the article but it really made me more sad, thanks to Mubarak pple are afraid to end up like Egypt, I can’t be offended from hiss words but Wow!