Spare a thought for Lebanese Australians

It was an overweight, middle-aged Syrian immigrant called Ahmed El-Ahmed who disarmed one of the ‘ISIS-inspired’ gunmen who carried out the Bondi Beach shooting. Suddenly, the media, always on the lookout for a bearded, Koran-clutching bogeyman, was in uncharted territory. 'Good Muslim tackles bad Muslim'? That’s not how it's meant to go down.

But even with Mr Al-Ahmed’s heroics, Australia’s sizeable Arab community, especially and close knit Lebanese diaspora, must have let out a collective groan.

The Lebanese have been in Australia since the late 19th century but most arrived in the 1970s and 80s, during the Lebanese civil war. Despite this, the Lebanese have, by and large, made a reputation for entrepreneurship; strong family and community ties and general all round integration as well as high profile roles in public life, the arts, business, entertainment and sport

But they have also had to live with being a people, rightly or wrongly associated with a region that has given the world the  Iranian revolution, 9/11, Iraq, Gaza and the rise of ISIS, creating a social burden for those living in a predominantly ‘white’ society. It is easy to see how Sunday’s shooting, which has been officially declared a terrorist incident, must have brought with it a weary sense of déjà vu for the ‘Lebo’ community.

Elsewhere, the rest of the world reacted to the incident with the usual outrage and paranoia-filled predictions that Islam will be the death of civilised society (I actually think AI will get us first, but hey, who knows?).

Indeed, one headline, in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, read “The West could end up like Lebanon: Islamist terrorism is tearing the fabric of our societies apart”.

The article was not really about Lebanon at all. It was a fear mongering rant about how France’s Muslim population is once again poised to carry out what US President Donald Trump calls ‘civilisational erasure’. To back up this wild claim, the article’s author, Gavin Mortimer, posited that French politicians are worried their country is heading in the same doomed-filled direction as Lebanon was in 1975.  

France, he said, was threatened by ‘Lebanonization’, a phrase first used by the former Israeli President Shimon Peres in 1983 to describe the ‘process of a prosperous, developed, politically stable country descending into a civil war or becoming a failed state’. It has since been used to describe the collapse of Iraq; the breakdown of the former Yugoslavia; what could have happened in North-West Pakistan’s border region and what China might do to Taiwan. Basically it’s shorthand for sudden and catastrophic collapse.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with the premise, but here Mortimer was being ultra cynical, using lazy and false assumptions that Lebanon fell apart in 1975 because of Islamist terrorism to make his theory stick.

He writes: “Once a prosperous and ethnically harmonious country, Lebanon’s sectarian tensions intensified when Palestinians settled in large numbers in the late 1960s and by the 1970s the country became Muslim-majority. A 15-year civil war erupted in 1975 and today one in three people live in poverty.”

There’s quite a lot to unpack there. In describing the Palestinians who ‘settled’ in Lebanon, Mortimer makes no distinction between either refugees expelled from Israel in 1948 or the largely secular PLO and the Islamist Hamas. They are all simply Palestinians. He also lumps all ‘Muslims’ together, forgetting that, to understand Lebanon (and indeed the region), one has to make another distinction, this time between Sunnis and Shia Muslims. His remark about Lebanon now being ethnically inharmonious doesn’t even merit a reply.

But the sad fact is that the rest of the world doesn’t really care. This is why Mortimer can gloss over the nuances of Lebanese society and regional history to serve up a one-size-fits-all explanation of a deeply complex country.

Better this clumsy analogy than simply asking his readers to consider that maybe, just maybe, the reason Jews are suddenly being murdered in New York, Manchester and Sydney might have something to do with the deaths of 75,000 Palestinians since 2023.

But back to ‘Lebanonization’. It’s not really fair. Surely another definition could be ‘the process of a prosperous, developed, politically stable country overcoming civil war, occupation, economic collapse and chronic political instability and still be on its feet defiant when other nations would be on the canvas.’

That’s certainly what the Lebanese Australian community would like you to think.