I read this today. It echoes what a number of Lebanese and others are saying. It sounds worryingly familiar. Have we got a capacity to heed the warning?
Britain Is Sleepwalking Into Lebanon.
Lebanon did not fall overnight. It was once the most cosmopolitan, pluralist state in the Arab world. Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East. A functioning democracy. A free press. A Christian majority that built a nation generous enough to welcome those who came. It believed that openness would be met with openness. That tolerance would be reciprocated. That good faith was a universal language. It wasn't. It never is.
The Palestinians arrived after 1948 and in their hundreds of thousands after 1970, expelled from Jordan with their militias intact. The Lebanese state, too timid to enforce its own sovereignty, allowed armed factions to operate as a state within a state. Then Iran exported its revolution westward and Hezbollah was born, funded from Tehran, running its own hospitals, schools, courts and welfare networks. It made the Lebanese state optional for an entire community. Every accommodation encouraged the next demand. Every retreat was read as weakness, because it was.
The civil war that followed lasted fifteen years and killed 150,000 people. But the war was merely the violent expression of something that had already happened. The state had lost its monopoly on violence. Communities had retreated into armed confessional blocs. The centre had hollowed out. Lebanon was already two countries sharing a flag but not a future.
The Christians didn't lose because they were cruel. They lost because they were naive. They believed demographic generosity could be squared with political stability. They believed armed factions could be absorbed into a civic order. Power follows population. Identity hardens under pressure. Every community with a coherent creed will eventually act on its interests. The moral high ground is not a defence. In Lebanon it became a grave marker.
Now look at Britain.
Since 2018, boats have arrived on the Kent coast carrying tens of thousands of men, the overwhelming majority unvetted and undocumented, from Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Eritrea. They are housed and supported at public expense while the state performs the pantomime of processing them. Anyone who raises the subject is accused of racism before the sentence is finished. This is not immigration. It is the progressive dissolution of Britain's right to determine who enters its own territory.
The parallel institutions are already here. Sharia courts operating alongside civil law. Educational environments teaching loyalty to the Ummah rather than to Britain. Areas where policing is negotiation, investigations are quietly dropped, and the state modifies its own behaviour for fear of communal reaction. In Lebanon they called it accommodation. They kept calling it accommodation right up until the checkpoints went up.
The electoral bloc pressure is already here. Candidates selected on the basis of foreign conflicts. Representatives answering to communal leaderships rather than constituents. The institutional failure is already here. The Charity Commission investigated the Islamic Centre of England for three years. Little changed. Universities host vigils for mass murderers and hold nobody accountable. Prevent is applied selectively. Everyone knows it. Nobody says it.
Lebanon did not collapse because its enemies were strong. It collapsed because its institutions were weak. Because it confused tolerance with the abandonment of standards. Because it believed the centre would hold without anyone holding it. Britain is not Lebanon yet. But Lebanon wasn't Lebanon yet, once. It drifted. Demographics shifted. Parallel loyalties hardened. The state lost the nerve to enforce a single standard of law. Bit by bit the centre hollowed out.
We are drifting. The question is whether anyone in authority will admit it. Before the drift becomes a current too strong to swim against.
"Power follows population. Identity hardens under pressure. Every community with a coherent creed will eventually act on its interests."