As we get within days of the 250th anniversary of the start of one of the greatest revolutions in human history, it’s easy to forget another date which memorialises when something great fell apart in the lifetimes of many of us:

As John Hinderaker of Powerline writes, before 1975 Beirut was known as “The Paris of The Middle East”, which sounds crazy to my ears after half a century of watching a war of all-against-all, especially at its height in the 1970’s and 80’s. But apparently it was an accurate take on those earlier times, even as the following sounds even more incredible:

That is what Beirut was called when I was in law school in the early 1970s. Some New York law firms had Beirut offices. It was considered a great posting for a young lawyer. 

He wonders what happened but that’s surely a rhetorical question:

  1. In 1970 Palestinian “refugees” try to overthrow the government (including trying to kill the Royal Family) of Jordan, the nation that had sheltered them after 1967, in what became known as Black September. But the Jordanians win.
  2. The Palestinians escape to the Christian-majority nation of Lebanon and five years later…

They would go on to be booted out of Egypt after Saddat’s assassination in 1981, given their close ties to the Islamic Jihadists who did the deed, Kuwait in 1991 after its people regained their nation in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army being smashed by the US and allies in Desert Storm (Palestinians in Kuwait had welcomed the invaders with open arms in 1990).

Basically everybody in the region hates the Palestinians because wherever they go they do nothing but smash and destroy, even those who tried to help them:

They are rightfully regarded — see above — by Arab lands as troublemakers, an irredeemable burden, and most Arab nations outright deny any path to citizenship for Palestinians, with a shockingly large percentage of Islamic nations denying basic civil rights to Palestinians inside their borders.