Thanks to @sararticles for an interesting find. Check out this website raf.mod.uk/careers and click on the video that appears there. Its a recruitment video to get young British men and women to join the Royal Air Force. Here’s a transcript of the video:

On a normal day, I am at my desk. This was not a normal day. Before I knew it, I was flying to Beirut. We had to get British nationals out of the Lebanon. I had to find out who everyone was and get them to safety.

Now it is true that the British military was on hand to evacuate their nationals out of Lebanon in July 2006. The text is not the issue. The problem is the images. Clearly someone has decided to use their artistic talents to exaggerate the scene in Beirut (without a doubt, none of the pictures taken were of Beirut + someone went a little overboard with CGI). As @rayan_b, put it:

just watched it.. am “royally” pissed.

As I had mentioned in the article which appears in today’s Daily Star:

Lebanon’s most recent conflict, the July 2006 war with Israel, helped a whole new age group identify Beirut solely as a disaster zone.

“In my opinion, it provided a younger generation with a reference to continue to use the phrase. After 2006, I have seen it widely used on discussion boards and chat rooms among the younger generation, usually to describe the state of their rooms.”

This Ministry of Defense recruitment ad seems only to prove that point. And now with the riots in London, I am bracing for a myriad of “looks like Beirut” comments, and readers are also picking up on it:

@eltooks:

thinking that Jad (@LebanonNewsURS) might need to be starting a “Looks like London” certificate spree soon. #Tottenham

@de_cachondeo:

@LebanonNewsURS With the rioting that’s happening in London I’m preparing myself for an “it’s like Beirut” comparison any minute!

Though I must report, I haven’t seen a news article comparing London to Beirut yet, but there are some tweets around: