Word: beirutization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Much of the destruction has occurred out of sight of the international media. Before last week, it took little less than an hour to reach Tyre from Beirut, a speedy cruise down the coastal highway past the banana plantations and orange groves that fill the narrow littoral wedged between the Mediterranean sea and the Lebanese mountains. Not any more. After Israel's onslaught against Lebanon began last Wednesday, the southern portion of the country was quickly sealed off after all the bridges crossing the Litani river, which runs across much of southern Lebanon, were destroyed and roads cratered, making them...
...What was happening behind that impenetrable cordon of destruction reached Beirut mainly as rumors. Even reaching the area just north of the Litani was fraught with hazard. Leaflets dropped on Beirut by Israeli aircraft on Monday morning warned Lebanese to avoid traveling along the roads north of Sidon, the seaport midway between Beirut and Tyre. That necessitated an arduous and time-consuming detour high up in the cloud-smothered Chouf mountains, complicated Monday by the choking line of northbound vehicles carrying tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the violence further south...
...night I watch the Lebanese news channels and their footage of bombings, bloodied children and frantic civilians trying to help their countrymen into ambulances. I see the weeping women and scared kids. But I don't see Beirut anymore...
...Back in Hamra, the formerly fashionable part of town that was home to Beirut's famed shopping district in the 1960s, things were quite different. Traffic was subdued but it was still there. Shops were open and people were in the streets going about their business. The owner of a hardware store told me that people were stocking up on batteries. He thought the war had nothing to do with Hizballah or Israel's security. According to him, this was a war for the hearts and minds of tourists. Once Israel destroyed Lebanon's entire infrastructure, that would...
...foreigners and young people who have never experienced war are freaked out. And the Lebanese who lived through the civil war and remember it well are worried, too. I spent two years working for TIME magazine in Baghdad, where the citizenry scurries about in fear of hateful random violence. Beirut is not Baghdad - yet - but it could get that way if this keeps...