“I’m leaving because I’m disgusted with you,” boldly declared Wassim Oraby, after 11 years of being one of the most recognizable of the state-run Télé Liban’s news anchors and reporters.
Just like he would on any other workday in the past decade, on Saturday, Wassim Oraby presented the news bulletin, only to deliver a last-minute surprise to the news station’s audience.
“At the end of this bulletin, as Fayrouz says: ‘In the end, there’s an end,’ this was the last bulletin in which I appear to you after 11 years of my appearances on this national station,” he said.
“[For] 11 years, I was covering events, most of which were unfortunately sad; all of them impressed in my memory like in many others’: explosions, assassinations, attacks on the borders in the south, Beqaa; internal wars, and everything in-between these stops.”
Oraby went on to note that he was not leaving the public news station because he was being dismissed, but because, “I can no longer stay in a land that is a graveyard of dreams.”
He added that he was “leaving this land” not because he could not find a job opportunity; he affirmed that he actually had several options to work.
Instead, “I’m leaving because I’m disgusted with you, or rather because I have not found a country. You made it according to your size,” the news anchor said, addressing Lebanon’s politicians.
In the end, Oraby thanked all those who supported him, even extending his thanks to those who did not support him, “because indeed they both make me stronger,” he said.
Oraby hoped that “for all those who are gone, we’ll have a homeland again, where we return to live in dignity and not humiliation; where we return not as ashes to just be buried in it.”
