Lebanon Hope Quotes

As for terror against Israelis, Palestinian Muslim terror emanates from a desire to destroy Israel, not from Israel’s conduct regarding Palestinians, whether occupation, settlements, or checkpoints. One proof is that the greatest amount of Palestinian terror against Israel was unleashed after Israel agreed to give up nearly all of the West Bank to the Palestinians at the end of 2000. Islamist terror against Israel is the result of Muslim, especially Arab Muslim, desires to annihilate the one non-Muslim state in the midst of the Arab world. For most Arab Muslims and for all Islamists, the Middle East is supposed to be under Muslim rule. There is no place for a Christian Lebanon or for a Jewish Israel, no matter what its borders. That Israel is Jewish is all the more an affront to many Muslims. Jews are supposed to have dhimmi status under Muslim rule, and no Muslim should be under Jewish rule.

I think it’s pretty safe to assume that hypersexualiztion will turn into complete desexualisation. The more men pump steroids into their system, the more women pump Botox into theirs, the less they look human at all. Blobs of post-human flesh floating around a phantom city, occasionally bumping into each other and feeling nothing. What was once skin, now a tepid silicone and steroid laden wasteland. The only hope for sex in Lebanon? The death of sex.

this I say,—we must never forget that all the education a man's head can receive, will not save his soul from hell, unless he knows the truths of the Bible. A man may have prodigious learning, and yet never be saved. He may be master of half the languages spoken round the globe. He may be acquainted with the highest and deepest things in heaven and earth. He may have read books till he is like a walking cyclopædia. He may be familiar with the stars of heaven,—the birds of the air,—the beasts of the earth, and the fishes of the sea. He may be able, like Solomon, to "speak of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows on the wall, of beasts also, and fowls, and creeping things, and fishes." (1 King iv. 33.) He may be able to discourse of all the secrets of fire, air, earth, and water. And yet, if he dies ignorant of Bible truths, he dies a miserable man! Chemistry never silenced a guilty conscience. Mathematics never healed a broken heart. All the sciences in the world never smoothed down a dying pillow. No earthly philosophy ever supplied hope in death. No natural theology ever gave peace in the prospect of meeting a holy God. All these things are of the earth, earthy, and can never raise a man above the earth's level. They may enable a man to strut and fret his little season here below with a more dignified gait than his fellow-mortals, but they can never give him wings, and enable him to soar towards heaven. He that has the largest share of them, will find at length that without Bible knowledge he has got no lasting possession. Death will make an end of all his attainments, and after death they will do him no good at all. A man may be a very ignorant man, and yet be saved. He may be unable to read a word, or write a letter. He may know nothing of geography beyond the bounds of his own parish, and be utterly unable to say which is nearest to England, Paris or New York. He may know nothing of arithmetic, and not see any difference between a million and a thousand. He may know nothing of history, not even of his own land, and be quite ignorant whether his country owes most to Semiramis, Boadicea, or Queen Elizabeth. He may know nothing of the affairs of his own times, and be incapable of telling you whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or the Commander-in-Chief, or the Archbishop of Canterbury is managing the national finances. He may know nothing of science, and its discoveries,—and whether Julius Cæsar won his victories with gunpowder, or the apostles had a printing press, or the sun goes round the earth, may be matters about which he has not an idea. And yet if that very man has heard Bible truth with his ears, and believed it with his heart, he knows enough to save his soul. He will be found at last with Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, while his scientific fellow-creature, who has died unconverted, is lost for ever. There is much talk in these days about science and "useful knowledge." But after all a knowledge of the Bible is the one knowledge that is needful and eternally useful. A man may get to heaven without money, learning, health, or friends,—but without Bible knowledge he will never get there at all. A man may have the mightiest of minds, and a memory stored with all that mighty mind can grasp,—and yet, if he does not know the things of the Bible, he will make shipwreck of his soul for ever. Woe! woe! woe to the man who dies in ignorance of the Bible! This is the Book about which I am addressing the readers of these pages to-day. It is no light matter what you do with such a book. It concerns the life of your soul. I summon you,—I charge you to give an honest answer to my question. What are you doing with the Bible? Do you read it? HOW READEST THOU?

Gary admired the lengths the KGB was willing to go to get their way, and he hoped he would have that kind of power someday, because he certainly wouldn’t be afraid to use that kind of power. Terrorism continued all over the world, which also involved many aircraft hijackings. One of those hijackings was the hijacking of Trans World Airlines Flight 847, which was supposed to fly from Cairo, Egypt, to London, England. When the aircraft was flying between Athens and Rome, the plane was hijacked by Shia Muslims from Lebanon. They ended up killing an American, who was a sailor in the U.S. Navy, but they kept the rest of the passengers as hostages for the next two weeks. What everyone remembered about this particular hijacking, was when the pilot was trying to answer questions from a reporter, while he was hanging out the window of the cockpit, and had a gun at his head by one of the hijackers.

consider a young Tunisian man pushing a wooden handcart loaded with fruits and vegetables down a dusty road to a market in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When the man was three, his father died. He supports his family by borrowing money to fill his cart, hoping to earn enough selling the produce to pay off the debt and have a little left over. It’s the same grind every day. But this morning, the police approach the man and say they’re going to take his scales because he has violated some regulation. He knows it’s a lie. They’re shaking him down. But he has no money. A policewoman slaps him and insults his dead father. They take his scales and his cart. The man goes to a town office to complain. He is told the official is busy in a meeting. Humiliated, furious, powerless, the man leaves. He returns with fuel. Outside the town office he douses himself, lights a match, and burns. Only the conclusion of this story is unusual. There are countless poor street vendors in Tunisia and across the Arab world. Police corruption is rife, and humiliations like those inflicted on this man are a daily occurrence. They matter to no one aside from the police and their victims. But this particular humiliation, on December 17, 2010, caused Mohamed Bouazizi, aged twenty-six, to set himself on fire, and Bouazizi’s self-immolation sparked protests. The police responded with typical brutality. The protests spread. Hoping to assuage the public, the dictator of Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, visited Bouazizi in the hospital. Bouazizi died on January 4, 2011. The unrest grew. On January 14, Ben Ali fled to a cushy exile in Saudi Arabia, ending his twenty-three-year kleptocracy. The Arab world watched, stunned. Then protests erupted in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. After three decades in power, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was driven from office. Elsewhere, protests swelled into rebellions, rebellions into civil wars. This was the Arab Spring—and it started with one poor man, no different from countless others, being harassed by police, as so many have been, before and since, with no apparent ripple effects. It is one thing to look backward and sketch a narrative arc, as I did here, connecting Mohamed Bouazizi to all the events that flowed out of his lonely protest. Tom Friedman, like many elite pundits, is skilled at that sort of reconstruction, particularly in the Middle East, which he knows so well, having made his name in journalism as a New York Times correspondent in Lebanon. But could even Tom Friedman, if he had been present that fatal morning, have peered into the future and foreseen the self-immolation, the unrest, the toppling of the Tunisian dictator, and all that followed? Of course not. No one could. Maybe, given how much Friedman knew about the region, he would have mused that poverty and unemployment were high, the number of desperate young people was growing, corruption was rampant, repression was relentless, and therefore Tunisia and other Arab countries were powder kegs waiting to blow. But an observer could have drawn exactly the same conclusion the year before. And the year before that. Indeed, you could have said that about Tunisia, Egypt, and several other countries for decades. They may have been powder kegs but they never blew—until December 17, 2010, when the police pushed that one poor man too far.

Saudi Oger’s Saad Hariri, a dual citizen who also happened to be the prime minister of Lebanon, was struggling to keep the cash flowing too. The Oger business was poorly managed, so it had little cushion for a slowdown in payments. Saad desperately tried to win Mohammed bin Salman’s approval, building an extension to King Salman’s expansive seaside palace in Tangier for Mohammed. And when Mohammed suggested he’d like a more direct passageway in the Royal Court to access the foyer of his cousin Mohammed bin Nayef’s section, Saad himself stayed up through the night with workers to cut through marble and concrete to get the job done. Mohammed thanked him but clearly felt no exchange had taken place. Saad hadn’t won any goodwill.

Since the 1920s, the much-reduced Christian populations have tried various strategies to maintain their existence, but none shows great hopes of success.41 One tactic was the creation of a protected Christian reservation, a state that would be able to defend Christian interests. This separatist goal explains the creation of the nation of Lebanon. After the First World War, with the horrible experience of the Armenians fresh in their minds, the French arbitrarily detached the most Christian sections of Syria as a separate enclave, which achieved independence in 1943 as the state of Lebanon. Though Maronites and other Christian sects initially formed a solid majority, the territory also included substantial Muslim minorities, which grew significantly over time in consequence of their higher birthrates. The lack of representation for poorer groups fostered disaffection and contributed to the bloody civil war of 1975–90. Violence and repression naturally encouraged Lebanese to flee to safer lands, and the fact that better-off Christians were more able to leave contributed still further to the shrinking of the Christian population. Christians today represent at most 40 percent of the nation’s people.

Nearby countries like Lebanon had the opposite problem. Lebanon had plenty of educated would-be professionals. The country’s colonial ties to France and long relationship with the United States meant many of those professionals had the language skills to work with foreign partners. But Lebanon didn’t have cash. Its slow-growing economy provided little opportunity for these graduates to work their way toward prosperity.

To understand why Mohammed kidnapped the leader of Lebanon, it’s necessary to go back a half century, to 1964. That’s when a young Lebanese accountant named Rafic Hariri decided he couldn’t make enough money at home to support his young family. So he moved to Saudi Arabia, where burgeoning oil wealth was funding roads, hospitals, and hotels, and all sorts of companies were springing up to build them. Saudi Arabia in the 1960s had lots of oil and money but not much to show for it on the ground. The kingdom’s population was smaller than that of London. The royal family was intent on using the kingdom’s oil income to build new infrastructure across the country, but few domestic companies could handle big construction projects. And there were few universities to produce graduates who could run such companies.

The new generation of Saudis are not like the old generation. They have no nostalgia for Lebanon,” Yacoubian says. “It was their oasis of freedom.

Women have children every day. No need to get so dramatic about it, Sara-girl.” It’s more responsibility. It’s more money. A lot of it. Most important it’s taking a part of my heart, putting it into another living being and hoping to God I do right by them. Because I know, in the most desperate way, what happens when you fail a child, when you don’t protect them. And I don’t know if I can divide my heart into yet another portion. One for Lebanon. One for Jonas. One for this baby. What would I have left of myself?

Allon’s means was fear. He spread rumors among the Arabs that if they did not leave, they would be slaughtered and their daughters would be raped. As Allon hoped, it was highly effective, and nearly all the Arab villagers in the eastern Galilee fled to Lebanon and Syria.

Over a 20-year period, methane is estimated to have a warming effect on Earth’s atmosphere 84 times that of carbon dioxide. By that metric, the Aliso Canyon leak produced the same amount of global warming as 1,735,404 cars in a full year. During the four months the leak lasted—25 days longer than the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—the leak contributed roughly the same amount of warming as the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by the entire country of Lebanon.