Beirut- another tragedy for this Phoenix-like city to overcome

My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Beirut and Lebanon after the catastrophic chemical explosions in the city's port that killed and injured so many and destroyed whole neighbourhoods and the homes of over 200,000.

I have a special affinity with Beirut where I have worked on a number of occasions. I have found it to be the most diverse modern cosmopolitan city in the Middle East. It has been positioned at the crossroads of the world for thousands of years, serving as home to ancient Christian and Muslim communities and has for over 100 years provided sanctuary to Armenian, Palestinian and Syrian refugees escaping from oppression and death

I have seen the two sides of this very special city. For I have worked in its overcrowded Palestinian refugee camps where I witnessed goodness overcoming adversity, whilst I've often walked along Beirut's wide beautiful seafront promenade and enjoyed its cafe culture with male and female work colleagues.

Though the city has long suffered from wars, invasions, ethnic/religious violence and corruption, nevertheless it has always Phoenix-like rose up from the ashes to begin anew.

Over the last few years I have admired how young female and male Lebanese campaigners from both Christian and Muslim traditions have together taken to its city streets in their tens of thousands demanding an end to corruption, mismanagement and nepotism.
Due to these endemic problems, the destruction yesterday means the country is facing a huge humanitarian crisis. We need to send support immediately. Hopefully we can find out soon the NGOs that we can send funds too. Probably the Lebanese Red Cross and Lebanese Red Crescent would be recommended.

Aleppo: Lessons from Beirut.

The two photographs above are not some of those being shown a lot recently of Aleppo past (beautiful) and present (ruins). Rather they show Beirut as it is now (top) and as it was (bottom).

The horrors being endured by the peoples of the Middle East seems to be only getting worse. In the last days of 2016 and the first days of 2017, bombings of civilian areas, massacres of unarmed men. women and children as well as forced population movements continue unabated.  Yemen, Iraq and Syria are turning into wastelands. The scenes on our television screens of Aleppo showing miles and miles of streetscapes lying in ruins are reminiscent of Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden at the end of World War Two. We have all seen the photographs of Aleppo then (glorious) and now (desolation). These images could also come from other Syrian cities – Homs, Deir ez-Zor, Daraa…
Promises of a better future and a return to the normality before the men with their guns, tanks and bombs came seem to be an impossible dream.
But there is hope that this nightmare will end.

Only ten years ago, Beirut was synonymous with death and destruction. Once known as the Paris of the East, civil wars and military invasions from 1975 onwards reduced the Lebanese capital to rubble. Armed militias, military checkpoints, air bombings, kidnappings, sectarian killings, religious conflicts and foreign occupations transformed the city and countryside into a nightmare world reminiscent of scenes from the film Mad Max
A few months ago, I travelled to Lebanon to teach coding to Palestinian and Syrian  refugee teachers as well as to students in Lebanese schools.  In a country of only 4+ million citizens, there are over 2 million refugees mainly from Syria. This is a putting a huge strain on an already fragile Lebanese society. A national political deadlock of 29 months was only ended in November when the post of Presidency was finally filled. Mounds of waste were highly visible on inter city roadsides and in front of major buildings as a result of what many Lebanese say is due to endemic political corruption. The garbage crisis is so bad that there is a fear that it could contaminate the whole of the Mediterranean Sea.
Yet is spite of the past and present problems, Lebanon still inspires me and fills me with grounds for optimism.
The capital city is being rebuilt. Hotels are welcoming foreign tourists. Couples kiss, hold hands and share romantic moments together in public places. Families cycle along the seafront. Unaccompanied women drive cars, walk the streets, socialise together. The cafes and bars are full of young people. The streets around the American university are awash with students of both sexes and of different cultures. Mosques and churches exist in relative proximity. Public museums, galleries and hotels welcome visitors. No other country has done more to welcome refugees than Lebanon.
All of this takes places in what was until very recently a brutal urban battleground. Of course this is not to ignore the serious social problems that still exist. Women complain of experiencing sexual harassment on the streets; the refugees often live in cramped poor neighbourhoods; corruption and political patronage are talked about openly; and the urban geography is based along religious and ethnic lines.

But the most important thing is that Druze, Christian, Shia, Sunni, atheist, Armenian are living and mingling in the same city with lines slowly blurring as time moves on.
In spite of the fragility of Beirut society, it offers a possibility of a return to the past for the Middle East. For this region that was the cradle of civilisation never belonged to one faith, one people or one ideology. For thousands of years its cities were always mixed, always cosmopolitan.
I sincerely hope to be given the opportunity to once again work in Lebanon as part of the ambitious and highly beneficial 'Refugee Code Week' learning initiative.

Muslim & Christian Places of Worship side by side in the Holy Land (Jordan)

Photograph is a composite of two images that I took whilst working in Jordan a few months ago. It shows the Al Bishara Christian Coptic Church and the King Abdullah 1 Mosque which lie adjacent to each other on Abdali Street in central Amman. It represents physical proof, in a time of almost unprecedented levels of human suffering, ethnic cleansing and religious conflict in the Middle East, that Christians, Muslims, Jews and other faiths can co-exist peacefully in this region. The Holy Land (Jordan, Israel, Palestine) , the Levant and Mesopotamia belong to all its inhabitants no matter what their faith, culture or social class are.

I was given the opportunity this year to take on the role of a master mentor in an ambitious coding educational initiative known as Refugee Code Week(RCW). Led by the German software company SAP, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) and our very own Galway Education Centre(GEC), this ambitious programme aims to help play a role in overcoming the unemployment, despair, loss of education, forced mass emigration and social/economic/nation meltdown that has accompanied the refugee crisis in the Middle East by starting the process of equipping participants in refugee camps as well as in the schools and colleges of hosted countries with much needed coding learning skills. RCW will continue in 2017 and beyond.
My work has allowed me to teach in Syrian and Palestinian refugee camps as well as in schools, universities, community centres across Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Turkey.

I have witnessed at first hand the best of humanity- the UNHCR workers, the refugee camp residents volunteer, the SAP/GEC team and the Syrians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Jordanians and other nationalities who give so much to help others. These ordinary everyday people are the unsung heroes of our time.

I have walked with many of my newfound Middle Eastern friends through the streets of Amman, Beirut, Sidon, Istanbul, Cairo and Nabatieh

My earnest wish is to witness the dismantling of the refugee camps that I work in as its residents return home and to some day walk together with the same people through the streets of Aleppo, Dara'a, Palmyra, Raqqa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Mosul.
May I extend my best wishes to these friends during Christmas, a time associated with a message of a future peace and good will to all men and women.

Europe must Expose the Lie of Israel's Terrorism Disguised as a Defence of 'Western' Values

Lebanese & Palestinian Flags proudly fly over Galway City during a recent anti-war protest

Below is the text of a letter that I wrote that appeared in this week's 'Galway Advertiser', one of Ireland's best & most popular weekly newspapers

Time for the Israeli Myth to be Shattered

Dear Editor,
In light of recent events in Lebanon and Gaza, is it not time now for Europe to finally expose the lie that Israel is a beacon of democracy and freedom in an unstable totalitarian Middle East? In fact it is the very country that has created the regional instability in its never-ending wars of aggression that represents such a growing threat to world peace. Europe has consistently supported or acquiesced in its deliberate humiliation of the Arab peoples. Continuing failure by Israel to implement a string of UN resolutions and to secretively build a large nuclear arsenal has gone unpunished by the European Union.

Israel was created in the aftermath of World War Two largely due to the efforts of a guilt-ridden Europe shocked by the 6million Jews exterminated on its soil in the Holocaust.
Parts of the British-controlled Palestine were to become a homeland for the survivors of the death camps and would go some way in acting as a form of redemption for the thousand years of oppression suffered by Jews at the hands of Christian Europe. But right from its inception it metamorphosed into an expansionist, racist, militaristic state that has taken on so many aspects of the ideology of the Jews’ former Nazi oppressors.
In 1948, its military terrorised hundreds of thousands of the indigenous Palestinian natives to flee from their United Nations-designated lands into neighbouring countries where they and their descendents still live today in squalid refugee camps. These peoples are still denied the right of return. In 1967, the Israelis repeated a similar process by invading the remainder of Palestine.
Armed and financed by the United States, successive governments have encouraged hundreds of thousands of foreigners to colonise the lands of the Arab population. This process followed a similar path to the Nazi policy and plans for Poland in 1939-‘41: the best lands were given to racially or religiously-aligned settlers; the raw materials and main sources of water requisitioned; the natives confined to isolated apartheid-style Bantustans with all borders and main roads through the newly conquered territories controlled by the military. Gaza is no more than a large concentration camp completely surrounded by a perimeter fence with its air and seaways controlled by the Israelis. With the continued construction of a massive wall on Arab lands, the West Bank will soon follow suit. A whole people imprisoned in their own homeland.
Today, the famed biblical Jordan River is reduced to a trickle as the Israelis siphon off its waters to supply its own farms and cities. As with Nazi Poland, the occupying power sees the primary role of the governing councils of these glorified ghettos and camps is to ensure that the inmates do not undertake aggressive actions against the occupier. In classic racist parlance, the Israeli state warns that the whole population will suffer collective punishment for any individual attack on their soldiers or settlers. When the downtrodden rebel, the Israelis immediately implement a draconian 'Iron Fist' policy; until a few years ago, the family homes of young stone throwers were bulldozed to the ground. Today the offices of the democratically elected Palestinian Authority are demolished and its politicians imprisoned. When a Hezbollah unit recently kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and demanded a prisoner swap from some of the over 10,000 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners held in Israel, the response was to refuse negotiation and to publicly promise to send Lebanon back 20 years in time by a massive bombing campaign with the proviso that Israel considers all inhabitants in south Lebanon to be legitimate targets.

Furthermore, the need for the West to secure cheap oil supplies by invading Iraq, by supporting repressive Arab regimes and by ostracising democratically elected governments in the region has only increased awareness amongst ordinary Arabs that Europe and the United States are the enemy. Anti-western fundamentalism is understandably on the rise. It says a lot that if Osama Bin Laden was allowed to run in a free and fair election tomorrow in his native Saudi Arabia, he would win by a landslide.

The source of the cancer in the Middle East is Israeli expansionism. Europe should at the very least now impose a total economic embargo on the country and demand its compliance with UN Resolution 242 and begin a complete withdrawal to its pre-1967 boundaries.

Yours sincerely,

Brendan Smith
bspeedie@eircom.net