News Right Now: Crumbling Foundations

Welcome to today's episode, ‘Crumbling Foundations'

A massive explosion devastated the port city of Beirut on Tuesday 4th August. As of the10th of August, 200 people were confirmed dead, and at least 6,000 injured, leaving hundreds of people homeless and missing, as thousands of homes were reduced to rubble. The huge blast caused damage up to 10km away and was felt in Cyprus, 160km away. The explosion which ripped through the city, ranks second only to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima 75 years ago, and it produced seismic waves equal to a magnitude of a 4.5 Richter scale earthquake.

As the true numbers of lives affected continues to rise, the city has been affected in unimaginable ways. Hundreds are still trapped under the rubble and families are frantically searching for loved ones, often using social media to report the missing. Hospitals have been destroyed, the emergency services are under severe pressure, and residents of Beirut now face even less access to essential health care services - which were already struggling to cope with the Covid pandemic and lack of investment overall.

Likewise, people now face even more food scarcity and a further hike in prices, as the port was not only the primary route for food imports, but was a place where much of the city’s food was kept stored. Also many will have lost jobs and their means of income, posing a very serious threat of abject poverty for many families... and childrens’ education will be severely affected if schools cannot reopen for months. The explosion itself colossal and mushroom shaped, was quickly followed by another. Both were apparently caused by the 2,750 tonnes of highly combustible ammonium nitrate which had been carelessly stored in a portside warehouse.

The nitrate is said to have been ignited by the heat from a fire nearby... and although details are sketchy, it's widely thought that explosives belonging to Hezbollah, which enjoys close ties to Lebanon’s government, were also stored alongside or very close to the large stockpile of chemicals. The sheer incompetence of a government that would store huge quantities of combustible chemicals and explosives in the heart of a busy port and city of nearly 7 million people is beyond comprehension... and it illustrates perfectly, the disastrous management of the ruling party and lack of accountable governance. When we examine the context of Lebanon’s long history of corruption we find the country’s governors and banking elite, have insidiously allowed for the drastic fall in its currency last year to 4,000 Lira to the dollar from previous years of 1,500 Lira to the dollar.

The country’s fiscal policy has itself been to weaken the Lira against the dollar by maintaining the state treasury in dollars, at the expense of its citizens who are forced to contend with an ever weakening Lira... this in turn encourages investors to place money in banks rather than markets - and so continues the sordid cycle of impoverishment of the people and the strengthening of the elite. Also, the Lebanese government has continued the mismanagement of the nation's economy and hoped for a quick fix by taking millions of dollars in loans and grants from the WB, rather than invest in creating the means for stability and long term progress using the ambition of its own people and its own natural resources. Proving that this endemic corruption has been perpetuated by the ruling elite who’s so-called democratic elections have really only been a way of reproducing the flawed Capitalist system itself.

It is this corrupt mindset of greed, negligence and unforgivable mismanagement that makes Lebanon’s government directly responsible for this disaster in which so many innocents have suffered. In typical colonial style, France’s President Macron has been quick to descend upon the chaos, no doubt believing himself to be the guardian of Lebanon given the French mandate after WW1 until independence in 1943.

He toured the devastated areas offering ‘support’, even saying to a woman “we are not here for your government, we are here for you”. Macron also said he’d return in September; calling on leaders to reach a social pact with the country's population saying “the current system no longer has the trust of the people”, and promising a plan to support Lebanon’s education system devastated by the nation's economic crisis and Covid pandemic.
So much for independence, the irony of Macron preaching to the people against the very government that willingly facilitates his regional and economic goals, is a pathetic indictment of the utter subservience of Lebanese President Michel Aoun and his entire cabinet to their French colonial masters.

Lebanon’s condition is no different to it’s neighbouring Syria and indeed all of the Muslim countries. Under the guise of independence it has been politically and economically occupied for decades, by global institutions acting on behalf of their original colonizers falling prey to the the agendas and projects of those whose goal continues to wish an end to any semblance of Muslim unity and strength. It is a plain and simple fact - irrefutable to anyone that it can only be the return of the promised, second, rightly guided Khilafah upon the way of the Prophethood, that will have the political will, and military clout to take on the disingenuous global systems and politicians that are nothing but a scourge upon the earth... Finally, returning autonomy and security to the Levant, and the whole of the Muslim world.

Jazak Allahu Khayran for Joining Us!

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