Miss Ibtihaj Kaddoura's Address

Lebanon has bidden farewell to a hateful era, and here it is welcoming a new dawn: national consciousness raises up its sons alive, men and women, and patriotism prevails and leads, making of Lebanon a sacred homeland and a glorified entity for which souls and spirits are the ransom.

I stood upon the threshold of the new life, looking back at the recent past and gazing toward the awaited future. I saw Lebanon, having passed through the stages of danger and overcome difficulties and obstacles, celebrating in commemoration of certain memories and occasions. I stood asking myself: what am I to do on your feast day, O Lebanon, and what can I offer you as a feast-day gift, when I am your own possession, O my homeland? I have nothing but hope and good wishes — accept them from me, and let sincerity and devotion suffice me. As for the hope and the wishes, I share them with the sons of my homeland — are they not the first to every noble deed, adopting every idea that carries good to Lebanon?

Our feasts have multiplied and our joys grown numerous — may God make all our days happiness. Yet it must be said that we keep feast for the memory of independence time and again, and keep feast for liberation time and again. Would it not be more fitting for us to celebrate independence on that immortal anniversary — the day our three great chiefs called out to one another and made a covenant to liberate Lebanon; the day they took light from the light of freedom and the daring leap was made; the day the Mandate was cast off, the day our free heroes tore up the deed of bondage — and they got what they willed, and we came to have a homeland, a flag, and an entity.

And is the evacuation, honored fellow citizens, anything other than the carrying out of what the heroes of independence and the defenders of the homeland ordained and imposed? The evacuation of the foreigner from our land is a matter settled beyond dispute, a right that justice and equity recorded for us. But there is an evacuation that must be spoken of, and that is the evacuation of obscurity and ambiguity from among the sons of the homeland, that they may work together in its service and in defense of its dignity. It is the evacuation of quarrels and delusions; it is the coming to know the truth, so that harmony may be complete among all the bodies — and all of them are sons of Lebanon, all united in the love of Lebanon. I do not say that all the parties should be melted down in a single crucible, for that is far from realization, hard to attain — indeed, not possible at all. The parties make contact easy among all the sons of the country; they are an organizing and a directing of national consciousness and of the patriotic struggle, and every party has a warrant that supplies it with guidance and leads it in its own direction toward what is right. But what pains woman is the jostling and the strife between the parties; it weighs upon woman, this estrangement and discord among the youth of Lebanon; it makes woman's heart bleed that two bands of brothers should fight each other. Would that each one of them thought that the other is a son of Lebanon — why then do they quarrel, when the heart of each is full of faith?

So woman appeals to you today, in the name of the homeland, for the evacuation of enmity and dissension. This is the evacuation; this is the feast that belongs to it; and this is the way to glory, to the heights. Think, then, of unifying your aims to build the future, and cooperate in laying down a program of work to reach the single goal, though the roads differ and the names be many. The foreigner has evacuated from among us — do not create a foreigner out of our own. There remain among us no strangers and no intruders: we are all sons of Lebanon, and the word between us is one and the same.