Wealth & Money Quote by Abu Bakar Bashir

It’s an accusation built to shame elites by casting indifference as complicity. Bashir frames Arab leadership not as merely ineffective but as morally hollow: petro-wealth becomes a bribe that buys silence while a nearby country burns. The line’s engine is contrast. “Destroyed right next to them” shrinks geography into a moral test they’re failing in real time; “making money” reduces statecraft to petty greed. The choice of “turn the other way” is bluntly visual, a body-language indictment that suggests leaders are actively averting their gaze, not simply constrained by diplomacy.

The subtext is strategic: outrage is being aimed less at Lebanon’s attackers than at the region’s power brokers who, in this telling, have the resources to intervene but prefer stability for markets, alliances, and regime security. “Calculations” is doing heavy work here. It implies a cold ledger of costs and benefits, a politics of spreadsheets that treats civilian death as an externality. By positioning Lebanon’s suffering as “right next to them,” Bashir also gestures to a broader argument common in Islamist and anti-establishment rhetoric: that Arab states have become custodians of Western energy interests and their own palaces, not guardians of a shared Arab or Muslim public.

Context matters because Bashir’s voice is not neutral. As an activist known for hardline politics, he’s not simply diagnosing hypocrisy; he’s recruiting anger. The moral framing converts geopolitical paralysis into a betrayal narrative, designed to delegitimize incumbent regimes and imply that only a different kind of leadership - less transactional, more ideologically committed - would treat neighboring bloodshed as non-negotiable.