LBCI and the new mistake of Arab renaissance

Over 200 hundreds years ago the situation in the Levant and the entire Middle East was very bad with an occupation force ruling great lands from Constantinople or like they called it, Istanbul. This Turkish ¨Osman¨ clan didn’t allow people to have normal freedoms in a time when the rest of the nearby world was liberating itself from different kings, regimes and ideologies. At that time, the people of the near Middle East wanted to also liberate their lands and a few pioneers thought it was a good idea to drive through the Arab identity, those were mostly Christians and they had slowly through the years lost their Syriac identity to the Arab one. They thought that by reclaiming the Arab identity they would get help from the overwhelmingly Arabic speaking Middle East. They started political parties, they wrote like never before and they demonstrated against the Turkish rule.

Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian Christians were in the front of this revolution that resulted in liberty for all lands and the establishing of new states, all in the name of Arabism.

Those pioneers could have stopped there and gone back to their roots but most of them didn’t, they continued to drive through the Arabism ideology until it collapsed time after time and resulted in wars. We could see it in many countries, like in Lebanon, Sudan and Israel and its neighbours.

In the 1990:s we saw a change in priorities in many so called Arab countries. The regimes there started to put more efforts on the local national identity instead of the wide vision Arab identity. These new ideologies are easy to see countries like Morocco where the King have ordered to have Berber language education for all state schools. In Jordan they have a campaign that says, Jordan first. In Algeria the president there have many times said clearly that the Arabs have never done anything for us while we always give and give and now we need to think about our own best. In Libya they are turning to their African roots on behalf of the Arab ones. In Lebanon there are voices for acknowledging the Syriac identity of half of the population. In Iraq we have seen a non Arab become president, something that would be impossible some years before. The list can be longer.

After year 2000 the same phenomenon is taking place from the same place and by Christians also. The place is Lebanon and the players are the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, LBCI that is owned by Christians and ruled by Christians. The media has become more and more important and today the LBCI is probably the biggest network in the Middle East and their programs are viewed by millions all around the world. The new trend of ¨Real Life TV¨ has come to the Middle East with LBCI as the leading motor in that. They have done many such shows witch all gather people from all around the so called Arab world and mix them in a way to make them feel as they belong to each other and that they are the same people. All countries make such shows for their citizens but the LBCI make them for the entire region, from Morocco to Iraq including the Gulf with the Levant in the heart. Everybody goes under the name Arabs while they clearly complain sometimes that they don’t even understand each others when they don’t use the classic Arabic from the Universities. Those programs are for example Star Academy, Survivor Bus stop and the latest one witch is the farm or as they call it ¨ al wadi¨. These programs are waking an old bad dream up to let people believe that they are all one good happy Arab people in 22 countries while the truth is far from that.

That lie have cost so many pain in the past and those 22 countries were actually going one by one to start to believe in their self and their own identities that already gathers many different people. 

The truth is that in those 22 countries we have most native citizens being non Arabs. People like the Berbers, Copts, Africans, Kurds, Turkmen, Armenians, Aramaic/Syriac´s with all its subgroups.

It is a crime to all these people to not give them the right to feel proud of their identity and history while they have to take cover in the shadow of the Arab identity. This strikes extra hard on all the Christian minorities that are loosing their roots in the Middle East and who can blame them when they have lost their languages, their true history and their right to form their society the way they like to. Every country of those 22 so called Arab countries should have its own programs bringing together the whole nation and not mixing nations together under one and same name or label, just like in Scandinavia where every nation enjoy those programs while watching their own citizens playing.

So, let the games begin in all real nations and not in fake dream nations that can become nightmare nations.