Bassil said, during a Ramadan iftar in the city of Byblos: “We hope to combine in the Lebanese system political, defensive and monetary centralization on the one hand, and administrative and financial decentralization on the other hand, and this is the core of the Lebanese unity and has nothing to do with fragmentation.”
He added, “When we completed the document of understanding, the defense strategy that protects and defends Lebanon was an essential pillar in it, because we were convinced that the Lebanese army and the resistance had proven that they were capable of liberating and protecting Lebanon,” noting that “today we do not need anyone from outside to liberate our land.” Or he defends us, because there are stages in our history that we must have learned from and not repeat.
Bassil continued, saying: “With complete realism and without bidding, we say that if we did not have the ability to defend our country, perhaps someone could have theorized for other solutions… But after we have proven our ability, why do we accept that missiles are launched from our land of non-Lebanese origin, and why return to
Days passed and were buried, and we should have learned from them?”
Bassil asked: “Have we not learned since 1948 about the issue of the Palestinian refugees who were deprived of their homeland and tortured, and what caused us this matter of problems, so that we go back in 2011 and repeat the experiences with the Syrian displacement and refrain from standing together to contain our Syrian brothers out of the door of humanity and Arabism, but to say that Lebanon cannot tolerate economic displacement?”, stressing that “our position on the issue of Syrian displacement is neither racist nor sectarian, but rather patriotic… So shall we listen to the international community, even at the expense of our country?”
Basil also affirmed that “we are a unitary movement and we want the unity of Lebanon. We cannot live outside this unity, and we always strive for that, no matter how they distort our truth and our words, but the nature of our movement is the nature of our country.”
