Stupid Catholics: Yoga is Devil Worship

Just like the Evangelical numskulls of the Southern United States who, year after year, announce the end of the world only to be proven to be simply charlatans; Just like the hallucinating criminals of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State who wage wars against other religions because they are convinced that Islam is superior to the other religious ideologies like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism etc.); The Catholic Church has suddenly decided to wage war against Yoga and declare it a form of Satanic worship, in a direct attack against the religions of the Asian Far East.

No one knows why. There doesn't seem to be a profound ideological issue at stake, nor does yoga appear to be a pillar of the dogmatic beliefs of Hinduism, Buddhism or Jainism. Yoga is simply a method, not a belief. Just like prayer for Catholics is a practice, a method, by which Catholics supposedly convey their desires and wishes to their God. Perhaps one should ban hymn singing and choirs as well, or the eating of bread and the drinking of wine....

All religious practices and rituals are grounded in beliefs that are, most often than not, absolute fantasies from the Stone Age of humanity, but they themselves are not part of the core belief(s) of the religion itself.

So why would the Catholic Church in Rome, followed by its appendages and satellites like the Maronite Church in Lebanon (see below a translation from Arabic of an article appearing in the Lebanon Files online news website at: http://www.lebanonfiles.com/news/1227007), suddenly decide to wage war against Yoga and declare it a form of devil worship? There could be only one real-world (not some bullshit religious) explanation, and that is as follows: In the contest of popularity, monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam), especially the Christian one, are losing. People today are the most educated since time immemorial. People read and access information that 20 or 40 years ago was difficult to find, but which is now available at the tip of their fingers. As people also have begun to cross-fertilize practices, both religious and non-religious, and come up with new ways to remain healthy and fit, yoga has for decades become a standard practice in which people calm their nerves, lose weight, learn to think by meditating and find balance in their stressful daily lives. Few of the practitioners of yoga take a religious stance with the practice. Yoga is like jogging, exercising, going to spa, etc. But the Catholic Church, has decided to demonize yoga because people find yoga more beneficial to them than going to church and uttering meaningless chants in languages that they don't understand (Aramaic, Latin, etc.), led by grownup adults called priests who make a living lying to children and to other naive, credulous, and desperate adults.

The Church is demonizing yoga because it - the Church - wants people to return back to its empty churches on Sundays. It claims that prayer alone, and faith alone, can bring healing and well-being. By diverting people away from Catholic religious practice, yoga is making the church lose fans and the money that comes with them.

As we speak, in this Lebanon that is governed by religious organizations of all kinds, there is an open conflict between the private (i.e. religious) schools and the government.  The government just raised salaries of all kinds of employees, including teachers. As a result, the religious schools (which dominate education in Lebanon) want to raise their tuition fees, and the government is telling them you can't do that. The government does not want to give money to people with one hand and see it taken away by the religious establishment (which does in fact benefit as non-profit entities because it does not pay any taxes). The problem is fundamental in Lebanon. The religious establishments, via the politicians they control, do everything in their power to weaken and undermine the State schools and universities. In Lebanon it is common knowledge that private (i.e. religious) education is far better than public education. But public education is denied any serious funding by religiously-affiliated politicians, just to keep it down and keep the private education sector soaring. In other words, the Christian churches in Lebanon are essentially at the same stage in their evolution as the Catholic Church was in the late 1700s. They had their cake and they ate it too. The French revolution put an end to it, and today, French public education is far better quality than any religious private education because taxpayers' money goes to supporting public secular education. Not yet in Lebanon where we are still in the late Middle Ages.

People around the world understand that the monotheistic religions have been lying, inventing stories and fables, tailoring texts as they please, for the sole purpose of controlling people. Because sex has potentially the ability to liberate people from any attempt at controlling people, all three monotheistic religions have always been interested in dictating strict and repressive sexual practices on their followers. Hence the constant focus on virginity (the virgin conception and the virgin birth), chopping off parts of the sexual anatomy of people, chastity, homosexuality, banning condoms, premarital sex, etc.

So this frontal attack against yoga is one hypocritical way for the Church to admit it is gradually losing ground to secular ways of conducting one's life, be it in seeking health and fitness or in seeking education. The religious establishments in Lebanon are essentially cartels with lots of money and a credulous ignorant population of followers who have yet to accept that the earth is round and not flat, that life is governed by Darwinian selection and not by some magical design by some big zombie in the sky, that the plague is caused by bacteria and poor hygiene and not by a punishing God, etc. etc. etc. But the Lebanese Christians, just like their Muslim compatriots, are a herd of sheep who are brainwashed not to think for themselves.

Below is the translation of the Lebanon Files article. You be the judge of who is the insane criminal and who is the victim in this charade. The name of the heroine of this anti-yoga campaign is a woman by the name of ILDICO ELIA (I wonder who other than the Devil himself could come up with a name like this).
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http://www.lebanonfiles.com/news/1227007

Tuesday 05 September 2017

The media personality Ildico Elia published on her Facebook page the following statement: “The Festival to Evoke Evil Spirits will take place in Beirut in two weeks, and it must be boycotted. Please. It is a Yoga festival”

Elia’s statement follows the announcement by the Nafas association of holding its fourth Beirut Yoga Festival, entitled “Take a Breath”, in the Beirut Hippodrome on 16 September 2017.

Elia followed her first posting with another one which is a prayer from Father Antoine Lattouf that says: “Pray with me, my faithful brothers for the rain to fall on the day of the Beirut Yoga Festival, on 16 September. O Creator of heaven and earth and all that is seen and unseen, Heavenly Father, Powerful Father, creator of earth, sun, and the stars in their orbits, the seasons in their succession, the mover of winds and clouds as they blow, form and change, we ask You in all faith, trust and hope, in the name of your only son, our Lord Jesus Christ, to show your power and your might, to make the rain fall in profusion above the Hippodrome in Beirut on 16 September of this year, in order to completely undermine the festival of the Hindu Devil, Shiva, the “god” of yoga. In doing this, You will show your dominion and declare your might, you the creator, manager, and ruler over the elements. You are the living and only true God, with your only son, Jesus Christ, and your life-giving Holy Spirit, one trinity in its essence, glorified, praised and worshiped for eternity. Amen”. The article also publishes a link to a YouTube video containing the testimony of a former yoga practitioner who has now “seen” the truth!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMBSjsYrWBU&feature=share

F YOU Syria, this is my border

For the first time since the 1960s, the Lebanese Army has reached the borders of its country. Why did it take so long for a country to assert its sovereignty?

One:
Successive enemy regimes of the Syrian Baathist entity (an artificial hodge-podge of hostile religious and ethnic communities cobbled together by the French and the British after World War I) were bent on undermining its smaller, yet democratic, prosperous, and peaceful neighbor Lebanon. While Lebanon saw peaceful transfers of political power between the 1930s and the late 1970s, Syria was beset by instability, bloody military coup d'états and assassinations among the heterogeneous and incompatible ethnic and religious groups. The Baathist doctrine of forcibly imposing an artificial national Arab identity on groups that otherwise claimed religious and/or other national identities (Christians, Sunnis, Alawites, Shiites, Armenians, Circassians, Kurds, Turkmen, Assyrians, Druze, etc.) required an iron-hand dictatorship that eventually succeeded in 1970 with the advent of the Assad dynasty, itself from the minority Alawite community.

Starting immediately after the independence of Lebanon from France in 1943, Syria continuously violated Lebanese sovereignty by invading, claiming territories, killing Lebanese soldiers and gendarmes, dispatching terrorist groups ranging from Palestinian guerillas to Syrian and Arab-Muslim ultra-nationalists and international terror groups like the Reg Brigades of Europe and Japan. Successive Syrian regimes co-opted many Lebanese parties and politicians who played Trojan horses and puppets on their behalf. It all climaxed in the early 1970s when Syria assembled the Palestinian terror groups, Baathist Lebanese proxies, Syrian ultra-nationalist militants, the Sunni leadership and the Lebanese Druze Leader Kamal Jumblatt into a paramilitary group which spent most of the next two decades warring against the Lebanese State and the Lebanese Army, and challenging the political charter (known as the National Pact) that the Lebanese had agreed upon in the 1930s as their political modus vivendi.

The Palestinian-Syrian War against Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s saw the defeat of the Lebanese State and the collapse of the Lebanese Army. In 1990, the last free Lebanese government fell to a final Syrian invasion and takeover.  During the 1980s, the Syrian regime allied itself as well with the newly hatched Islamic theocracy in Iran and together they created the militant Shiite group Hezbollah whose task was to supplant the terrorist Palestinians (who had left in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of 1982) and continue undermining the Lebanese State.

After another decade of Syrian-manned political assassinations from the late 1990s through the mid 2000s, the Syrian army was finally evicted from Lebanon by a concerted uprising by the Lebanese people and an international community that, after supporting the Syrian regime's rape of Lebanon for close to 35 years, now finally understood the toxicity and terrorist nature of the Syrian Assad regime.

To this day, Syria - even as it withdrew its army from the country, and even as it is disintegrating into the plethora of incompatible ethnic and religious groups - continues to try and undermine Lebanon, essentially via groups like Hezbolla, Amal, the Marada, and the Free Patriotic Movement of Lebanese President Michel Aoun whose own ascent to office was in fact engineered by Hezbollah.

Two:
Lebanon itself suffers from constitutive ailments. The historical modern birth of the nation in the 1860s was an achievement against the then-occupying Ottoman Turkish empire. The autonomous Mount Lebanon entity was snatched from the tentacles of the barbaric Turks and began instituting a political model of coexistence and power-sharing between the Christians and the Druze. The semi-independent Mount Lebanon prospered peacefully for 55 years until World War I saw a return of the Ottoman occupation during the 1914-1918 war years. After the defeat of the Ottomans and the vanishing of their empire, the Lebanese Maronite Church saw an opportunity - based on greed and ideological arguments not unlike those of the Zionist movement vis-à-vis Palestine - to expand the borders of Mount Lebanon, estimating it worthwhile to take the risk of absorbing a large Muslim population whose backwardness the Christians of Lebanon could count on to ward off any attempt at a Muslim power grab. Against the advice of successive French governments during the French mandate of the 1920s-1940s, the Maronite Church managed in the end to annex those large Muslim areas and populations from the Syrian entity to the State of Mount Lebanon and create the Greater Lebanon we know today.  To this day, large segments of the Lebanese Muslim population continue to harbor ill-feelings toward the country that is theirs today, namely Lebanon, and express preference for a Syrian and/or Arab identity. At every opportunity they could exploit, Lebanese Muslims, Shiite and Sunnis alike, tried to subvert the Lebanese political system to their own advantage with the ultimate and openly stated objective of annexing Lebanon to Syria.

With the collapse of Syria, and an acknowledgement by the Lebanese Sunnis that Syria's Assad is really their enemy, and that the Syrian Arab identity is no longer an option for their own political survival, Lebanon's Sunnis made an about-face in their political outlook and discovered that Lebanon could be their ultimate national identity. Together with the increasing isolation of Hezbollah as a result of its fighting in the Syrian civil war, these factors weakened the Syrian regime enough to allow those truly patriotic elements of the Lebanese State - primarily the Lebanese Armed Forces - to muster the little strength they now had, with the help of the international community, to begin asserting State sovereignty over Lebanese territories that Syria had long denied it, both in the South along the Israeli border, and also north and east along the Syrian border. Whereas for the past 50 years, no Lebanese soldier was able to set foot along the Syrian-Lebanese or the Israeli-Lebanese border, the victory achieved these past few days by the LAF (Lebanese Armed Forces) against ISIS took the troops to the Syrian-Lebanese border for the first time in as many years.

The victory of the LAF in defeating ISIS debunks the Syrian stooge and Hezbollah-lover President of Lebanon, Michel Aoun, who continuously claims that his own army, from whose ranks he hailed as a former soldier and general, is incapable of defending the country, thus providing the Iranian militia of Hezbollah with the fig leaf to protect its illegal existence as a parallel private and foreign-beholden army along side the Lebanese Army.

What should happen now?

For one, the Lebanese Army must NOT, under any circumstance, be asked to withdraw from the border area. Instead, the LAF must expand their control of the border along the entire length of the Syrian-Lebanese border and all the way to the southern tri-border between Israel, Lebanon and Syria where disputed territories have long provided justifications for both the Syrian Baathist and Israeli Zionist enemies of Lebanon to intervene and undermine the stability of the country. In this task, the LAF are also legally entitled by UN resolution 1701 to assistance from the UNIFIL (UN Interim Force in Lebanon) in securing ALL the country's borders.

This will inevitably cause tensions, if not outright war, between the LAF and Hezbollah since the latter has long used the porous and abandoned border area as a conduit for smuggling weapons, mercenaries and everything else into Lebanon.

Whether President Aoun, whose love affair with Hezbllah has surpassed his pretense to patriotism, chooses to continue supporting the existence of an illegal Iranian militia on his country's soil, remains to be seen. Aoun has essentially allied himself with Hezbollah to secure a path to power. This tactic has worked. But the real question is whether he will use this power to assert the sovereignty of his nation or whether he will remain on the leash of Iran and Syria and their proxies. Again, any volte-face by Aoun against Hezbollah will put his own life in danger. It happened with Rafik Hariri who supported Hezbollah for 15 years, only to be blown to shreds by Hezbollah itself the moment Hariri began charting his own path forward.

Two, this is an opportunity to begin delineating the border between Lebanon and Syria, which the latter has refused to do since the 1940s on the grounds that this would be tantamount to a formal recognition by Syria of the existence of an independent Lebanon. Just as Syria refused for decades to exchange embassies between the two countries. In the 1960s, the late leader Raymond Edde's called repeatedly for the UN to control all of Lebanon's borders. He was met with accusations of treason against the "Arab" cause, and he ultimately was chased out of the country into a Parisian exile where he died in 2001.

A delineation of the Syrian-Lebanese border would settle once for all the lie of the Shebaa Farms now occupied by Israel. The Farms belong to Lebanon, but Syria grabbed them in 1956 after killing two Lebanese gendarmes. Israel then seized them from Syria in the 1967 and 1973 wars. Hezbollah uses this as an argument that its own "resistance" against the Israeli occupation must continue because Lebanese territory is still occupied by Israel. But Syria refuses to officially cede the Farms back to Lebanon, and Israel says that as long as it seized them from Syria, it will return them only to Syria in some hypothetical future negotiations.

This is a momentous time. Some 75 years after its independence, Lebanon has not been able to control its borders and assert itself once and for all as a sovereign nation not beholden to anyone's interests save its own. The liberation of the rugged mountainous border area from Daesh and the access of the Lebanese Armed Forces to the border proper gives the Lebanese State its first opportunity to assert its sovereignty against the ill-will of the Syrian enemy regime and its poodles on the domestic front. Will President Aoun allow his own army to expand this control to the entire border and risk alienating his allies of Hezbollah, Syria and Iran? Or will he remain a puppet in their hands, providing them with the pretexts to continue their meddling and occupation, and their rape of the country's sovereignty?

Holiday thoughts

I have been vacationing around the globe and taking a break from the nauseating scenes of Islamic terrorism, the rise of the neo-Nazi white Protestant supremacists, Catholic militants, and this general return to long abandoned radical Christian ideologies as a reaction to radical Muslim ideologies. I am nauseated because the answer to barbaric Islam is not Christian barbarism, or Jewish barbarism (otherwise known as Zionism), or any other decaying religious trash that has haunted the minds of humanity for so long.

I am hoping that this decline back to religious fundamentalism is one trough, one blip, in the otherwise upward trajectory of human evolution away from blind faiths based on trashy books from the Bronze Age. When Reason shone a light into the darkness and exposed the abject ignorance of religions back a few hundred years ago, it gave humanity hope for a future of equality, democracy, knowledge based on science and facts, and arriving at shared decisions with rational arguments and sound judgment.

Islam's delinquency is that it has not yet separated a "rational" or secular Islam from traditional Islam, just as Christianity and Judaism have done not long ago. "Secular Christians", for example, are the majority in the advanced and civilized countries of Europe. Generations of Europeans whose upbringing respects the positive contributions of Christianity to their societies while shedding the obscurantism and irrational foundation of faith. Today, the Church follows secular laws and rules, while in the past it imposed its religious edicts on everyone and led the West into a millennium of bloodshed, genocides, mayhem and delirious barbarism. There are remnants of this old order hiding in their dark chambers and exploiting Islamic terrorism to gain their own advantage, brandishing fundamentalist Christianity as the answer to Islamic fundamentalism, just as Zionists represent the fundamentalist undercurrent of radical Judaism that aims to genocide the Palestinian people out of existence and reclaim a land that God supposedly gave them thousands of years ago. But the vast majority of Jews, including in Israel proper, are secular people who, truth be told, are caught between their modern outlook and the barbaric foundation of their country over the blood of another people.

The answer to Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism ought to be a forward-looking answer, couched in secular values of freedom of thought and conscience, liberty, democracy, equality of all humans, a respectful balance between our needs as a species and the needs of all other species and the planet. As a species, we are forced to be wardens of the planet because we are a thinking species. That we can imagine a future makes us responsible for the path we chart today. But to do that, we must first rationalize our existence and find first an answer to the question of whether there is a point to our existence. For billions of years, millions of species have come into existence then went extinct. We are no different. I can imagine a day in the future when whichever species dominates on earth, say 10 million years from now, wouldn't even know that there was once a human species. A lesson in humility is what we need, because religions have for far too long taught us that we are a special creation by a capricious god who gave us dominion over everything. Religions have taught us arrogance. Reason teaches us humility: We are now learning our place in this universe, and it is no more a special place than that of any other living species. Yet, we have brains that think, and we must use them as best as we can, for the time our species has on earth.

If Islamic terrorism is teaching us anything it is that not only Islam can spawn fundamentalist, text-literalists and radical exclusionary madmen; ALL religions are capable of it. Christianity did it for a thousand years. Judaism continues to do it today in the form of Zionism. Therefore, our response to Islamic terrorism should be to reinforce all that we have built over the past 200 years, to do more separation of religion from state, more freedoms, more tolerance of our differences, more reliance on reason and facts (as opposed to myths and faith).

Qatar, Israel and Al-Jazeera - قطر وإسرائيل والجزيرة

The ongoing commotion in the Gulf is one huge tempest in a teapot. Of the 13 demands dumped on Qatar by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrein, and the UAE, only one represents the fulcrum of the crisis: Shutting down Al-Jazeera.

Why?

For those of us who know life in the United States, know that there is only one obsession that is central to US policy: Israel. And that is for reasons everyone knows, namely that Israeli hands have a tight grip on the American testicles, and the squeeze on Uncle Sam's gonads typically increases whenever Uncle Sam inches ever so slightly to morality and ethics in its dealing with the Palestinian tragedy and the Zionist crime in Palestine.

Now Al-Jazeera is by far the only media channel (web site, television etc.) that provides genuine objectivity, polite decency, and excellent coverage in depth of all issues it tackles, including but not limited to the Palestinian question. What Al-Jazeera is good at, unlike unlike other Arab news media, is is that it nags at the conscience of the West and its Israeli and Arab appendages not by hurling lies and insults at whoever it criticizes, but by selecting topics - current and historical - for its coverage that are rarely discussed in other forums because they are embarrassing to the West and others: The plight of the native Americans of the United States and Canada, the plight of the Rohingas in Myanmar, the Algerian revolution, the Civil rights movement in the US, and generally the plight of poor, disenfranchised, third world countries and minorities suffering at the hands of greedy corporations and wealthy countries that no one wants to talk about, lest they offend their sources of funding. And prime among these topics is Palestine. Al-Jazeera has been instrumental in providing the average Arab individual and other ordinary people around the world with the information they need to understand, to respond, to mount opinion awareness campaigns...against those who have controlled the information for so long.

So if you have ever spent time in the US, you will notice that ALL, left wing and right wing, media outlets live under the specter of harassment, defunding, and other malignancies if they dare criticize Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. The entire American mindset is controlled by a gigantic construct of lies and historical fallacies that brainwashes American public opinion against the Palestinian struggle for liberation and nationhood. Except, Al-Jazeera. Now, Al-Jazeera is banned in America. Yes, in the country that makes outlandish claims of liberty and freedom of opinion, one television channel is banned because it tells the other sides of so many stories that might offend Zionists, extremist capitalists, right wing radicals, evangelical dinosaurs from the Americans south and so on. For as many years as I can recall, Al-Jazeera was always viewed in America as supporter of terrorism, simply because it supported the Palestinian cause. Which is basically the line propagated nowadays by Zionist Israel and their lobbies and the newspapers they control  to de-legitimize the Palestinian cause by amalgamating it with Islamic terrorism.

Point 1. The sudden imposition of sanctions by the Gulf on Qatar comes immediately after Donald Dumb's visit to Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Point 2. The smartass Donald Dumb's strategy for the Arab Gulf and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to give support to the Sunni Arabs of the Gulf (regardless of the fact that they are all dictators and violators of human rights) by brandishing Iran as the enemy, IN EXCHANGE for the Arab Sunni regimes to force the Palestinians into accepting whatever conditions Israel chooses to impose on them in a solution to Palestine that - if we are to believe the Israelis - will resemble a patchwork of Bantustans that are akin to the reservations in which millions of native American Indians were herded after their uprooting from their ancestral lands by the christianizing, civilizing Anglo-Saxon invaders and colonists.

Point 3. The Sunni Gulf Arab regimes have begun implementing this plan, and the first critical thing to do is to muzzle any opposition to it, and hence to silence Al-Jazeera which has given many sleepless nights to the Zionist system and its control of the media around the world. For years, Israel has launched character assassination campaigns against Al-Jazeera because Israel has been losing the information war in recent years, thanks no less to Al-Jazeera.

It will be interesting to see what Qatar will do. My guess is that Qatar will cede concessions on many of the 13 demands, but will reject any attempt at shutting down Al-Jazeera.

Visitors to Lebanon: Enjoy your safari in the human jungle

Le Monde said it today: Lebanon is a jungle. If you are a visitor this summer to this cesspool, you will likely experience a strange mix of sensations, some of it very close to fatal, some of it in the realm of the unhealthy. You will also notice - if this is your first visit to this disgustingly cheap and annoying self-declared Mediterranean paradise - the superposition of violence, garbage, pollution, low self-esteem camouflaged under a fake Western veneer and expressing itself in all kinds of aggression and violence, and an utterly bigoted ultra-religiosity.

This does make for an interesting visit, to be sure. But this is for the visitors who know they'll go through the "thrills" for only a limited time period. But for the resident aborigines, who themselves will find a million excuses for behaving worse than animals (example: the Lebanese saying "If you are not a wolf, the wolves will devour you"), life here is like a daily safari. You go out of your house every morning not knowing what predator beasts you will encounter, and whether you will come back home alive or in one piece. Within a minute of getting in your car, the adrenaline shoots up in your system, cuss words you did not know you were capable of will hurl themselves out of your mouth, and in a cloud of sandy dust (from all the quarries dissecting the mountainsides), dark smog (from all the diesel fumes oozing out of trucks, buses...), small motorcycles weaving in and out of every hole left by traffic at standstill, heat from the dry summer and the absence of any greenery in the city....you make your way to your destination, considering yourself lucky to have made it home in one piece. Even if you decide to walk, rather than ride or drive a vehicle, there are no sidewalks to speak of. The few sidewalks out there are small, planted with trees, and serve as parking spots for more and more bigger and bigger cars that the native beasts ostentatiously drive to scare off the other beasts.

Lebanon is not a country. Many people will say it. There is no system of any kind. Any semblance of a systematic approach to humans living together is the result of self-forming systems, rather than deliberate well-thought of plans coming out of reasonable rational human brains. It is self-organized chaos, which is really what Darwinian jungles are.

Lebanon is a like a zoo that has no managers or handlers. All the humans are caged in. There are 18 different cages labeled religious sects, and humans are born and stay in their parents' cages. Then they are generally left to their own devices. There are many schools in the zoo, and their function is not to educate people into civility, civilization, culture, science and the like. If they did, then the products of these schools will not behave like animals. But they do. Generally, education is a key to leaving the zoo. Lebanon is a factory of students whose education is intended to send them overseas where people do not live in zoos and cages. Once overseas, they recover their decent human character, start making money to send back to the zoo. The vast majority of them never return to the zoo, even though the Foreign Affairs Minister keeps inviting them back. But why leave places of decency, civility, humility, systematized human communal living with rules and laws, to come back to lawlessness, indecency, corruption, constant aggression and violence?

Laboratory tests show that animals in cages where they experience crowdedness, hunger, lack of basic amenities, dwindling space and territory, ... begin to display of outward aggression and abnormal obsessive, compulsive, self-destructive behavior.

Welcome to Lebanon this summer. Enjoy the thrills of living dangerously. If I were to give you a piece of advice, it would be NOT TO COME TO LEBANON. For two reasons. One, you are taking major risks to your health and life. Two, by coming and spending money in the zoo, you encourage the illusory permanence of the zoo. You make it survive longer than it should. You will be feeding the very beasts that make this place look like a zoo. Please starve the beasts. Don't feed them. Don't spend money here because it all goes to the alpha beasts that make this place the hell on earth that it is. Instead, by starving them, you help us get rid of them. 

ممنوع نقل النفوس في لبنان: الاقطاع الطائفي حسب جبران باسيل

لم يكفِ الذبح والتهجير الذي تسببت به الأحزاب المسيحية التي تدعي الدفاع عن مسيحيي لبنان في السبعينات والثمانينات، فاليوم تهم تلك الأحزاب بمنع السكان المسيحيين من نقل نفوسهم من مكان ولادة أجدادهم في القرن التاسع عشر إلى مكان حياتهم اليوم. هذه حنكة من العبقري جبران باسيل الذي يحاول بشتى الوسائل قلب المعادلة الديموغرافية إلى صالح المسيحيين بعد أن نكستها الحروب الإسلامية (من أصدقاء وحلفاء باسيل لا غير) والفلسطينية (الذي يدافع باسيل ببسالة عن قضيتهم) على المسيحيين منذ عقود.

أنا اليوم أسكن في صربا في ساحل كسروان، بعد أن تم تهجير أجدادي من شرق صيدا منذ ما يفارب 45 عاماً. تزوجت وأنجبت الأولاد الذين لا يعرفون شيئاً عن قريتي الأصلية في شرق صيدا. يريد جبران باسيل أن أنتخب في شرق صيدا لمخاتير وبلديات ونواب لا يخدمونني بشيء سوى أنهم يمثلونني كمسيحي. فهم لا يخدمونني ولا يمثلونني من حيث حياتي اليومية من كهرباء ومياه وطرقات وما إلى هناك من شؤون الحياة اليومية، إذ أن مخاتير وبلديات ونواب ساحل كسروان هم الذين يفترض بهم أن يقدموا لي الخدمات ولكن لا يمكنني التصويت لهم إذا حصل جبران باسيل - القديس جان دارك الذكر - المدافع الأول عن حقوق المسيجيين ضد الطغاة المسلمين الذين يشاركهم في الحكومة اللبنانية.  فحسب العبقري باسيل، المعيار الأساسي والأول لل"ديموقراطية" اللبنانية هو ليس مسؤولية ممثلي الشعب تجاه شعبهم، بل الطائفة التي ينتمي إليها أفراد هذا الشعب . فإن باسيل الذي يدعي العلمانية والطموح للدولة المدنية يمعن في قتل أي بذرة من التحول والتقدم والتطور نحو هكذا دولة لأنه يريد ترسيخ الطائفية بإجبار المواطن اللبناني على البقاء في مناطق سوف يتعرض لها - إذا نظرنا إلى تاريخ لبنان - إلى مذابح وحروب وتهجير في المستقبل القريب والبعيد. يطلب باسيل من المسيحيين في لبنان أن يكونوا كبش المحرقة في الحرب الطائفية والاقتتال الطائفي التي لا بد أن تشتعل يوماً في هذا البلد الذي يرتقي بالهوية الطائفية فوق أي هويات أخرى ومنها الهوية اللبنانية المحضة المجردة من أي صبغة طائفية تعود جذورها إلى عصور الجاهلية والعصر البرونزي نعم هكذا يكون التقدم في لبنان حسب جبران باسيل: بالرجوع إلى الوراء!!!    ر.

فكيف تكون الديموقراطية إذا أنتخبتُ ممثلين لا يمثلونني؟ كيف تكون هذه الدولة العريقة، الوارثة للعفن العثماني والفساد الفرنسي، في خدمتي أنا المواطن إذا لا يمكنني أن أسائل من يدير شؤون حياتي اليومية في الانتخابات القادمة؟ لأن هذا ما يريده البطل باسيل لكي يحافظ على الوجود المسيحي في مناطق يسيطر عليها المسلمون والأسلاميين وكل هؤلاء الذين يهمهم تحرير فلسطين قبل تحرير المواطن اللبناني من الطغيان الطائفي والقبائلي والعائلي والأقطاعي؟ 

 

Lebanon's "Democracy" Crisis: The Token Christians

Can you have a democracy when the constitution requires a 30% minority to pretend to be 50% of the population?

Can you have a democracy when people's religious identity prevails over their national identity?

Can you have a democracy when each of the 18 constituent religious communities is more like a concentration camp ruled by un-elected God-appointed religious tyrants, and in which a citizen is born and brainwashed to fear and hate the other 17 communities?

Those have been the eternal questions that the lemon Republic of Lebanon has been trying to answer for close to 200 years, and has so far failed as it revolves from one vicious cycle to another. As soon as a generation tires of warfare and massacres and finds a haphazard ill-conceived solution, the next generation raises the same questions and challenges the previous solution, a crisis erupts, a civil war ensues with its package of massacres, foreign interventions, killings, kidnappings etc...until this new generation, in turn, tires of the killing and cooks up yet another ill-conceived solution that everyone knows is a temporary patch, and the cycle repeats itself.

Today's electoral law stalemate is precisely an illustration of that cycle. The question is: How do you configure an electoral law that produces a truly representative body (parliament) by asking the Christians (30% of the population) to pretend to be 50% of the population and elect 50% of the representatives, and ask the Muslims (70% of the population) to pretend to be 50% of the population and elect 50% of the representatives? Obviously, the math is not there. Democracy is by definition a blind exercise of rational numerical majorities and minorities... By definition and by every measure of reason, a 30% minority of the population cannot win in elections against a 70% majority. But the Lebanese, in their "genius", are supposedly working hard to disprove this logic.

The Lebanese Muslims say they agree to give the Christians the fake 50% the latter demand, because apparently the Christians are a token lure that draws tourists and investors seeking money, alcohol and women, and thus contribute to giving a cheap imitation of an "advanced Westernized" image of the country, in contrast to the Muslims who are hemmed in by their religion against money, alcohol and women. So, without the Christians, Lebanon would cease to exist as we know it. So the Muslims want the token Christians and are willing to give them token, but not real, attributes of power, and even as they agree to the minority Christians acting as if they were 50% of the population, the Muslims do everything in their power to scuttle any mechanism that grants the Christians real power.

Right now, the Muslims agree that the Christians elect only 30% of their representatives, since the Christians are 30% of the population, but insist (the Muslims) on electing the remaining 20% of the Christian representatives, in addition to their own 50% Muslim representatives. The question is, how truly representative is a Christian member of parliament who is elected by Muslim voters? It may not matter in a a secular democracy, but in a sectarian system like the Lebanese, this is the crux of the issue. What is the point, say the Christians, of giving us 50% of parliament by having Muslims elect 20% of our representatives?

And this is where we stand right now. The fundamental question, however, is: Does it make a difference who is sitting in parliament if that very parliament has never been able to build a decent road, provide a decent electrical or Internet grid, deliver drinking water, eliminate rampant corruption and grand theft of public funds, stop the rape of the environment, etc.? Lebanon is a genuine Third World gem of pollution, garbage everywhere, a driving hellhole, a monstrosity of incompetent dysfunction governance... So does it really matter if the Muslims elect 20% of the Christian MPs who are, just like every other MP, as corrupt and incompetent as the next MP? Do I care if this or that MP is circumcised, or if he fasts on Lent or during Ramadan, if he worships the Messiah of the Mahdi, .... Why is it that people's religion matters so much in our perception of things, when the practicalities of governance are so abysmal to begin with?

And this is where the "reform"-minded President Michel Aoun and his acolytes come in. They are trying hard to raise the Christian numbers by begging really skeptical immigrants who themselves (or their parents or grandparents) fled the cesspool long time ago, to seek to obtain citizenship (so they can vote). Reform in the mind of Aoun and Bassil is not a forward-looking reform of a bad system, but rather a re-entrenchment backward into the very ills that plague this country: Plunge yet again a new dagger into the religious chasms that have been tormenting this country for decades.

And the message to all so-called "Christians" who are falling back into archaic religious identities in reaction to Muslim fundamentalism: You do not fight a Muslim Daesh by resuscitating the Christian Daesh of old. We must not repeat the crime of Zionism which resurrected archaic religious arguments that have become a license for genocide and religious terror. We must move out and away of the religious concentration camps in which humans have been herded by centuries of ignorance and backwardness from the Bronze Age.

طحلونا بالرئيس القوي - طلع متلو متل اسلافو

سنتان ونصف السنة أصرّ عون وأعوانه الأبطال أنه هو الوحيد الرئيس "القوي" الذي سوف يشيل الزير من البير.

ستة أشهر منذ توليه الحكم والرئيس "القوي" متل الرجل العجوز والمريض الذي يقول الكثير ويعمل القليل.

صرّح البارحة الرئيس "القوي" أنه سوف سوف يلتزم بالدستور ولن يقاوم السارقين والاقطاعيين والزعران والمافيات والممدين لأنفسهم، إذ أنه يفضل الوضع القائم (الذي قال هو بنفسه الكثير عنه منذ عقود الحروب والاحتلالات والنفي ....) على الفراغ. أي، يمعنى آخر أن عون مبسوط بجلوسه على كرسي الفخامة لدرجة أنه لن يقف بوجه السارقين والاقطاعيين والزعران والمافيات والممدين لأنفسهم، ولن يخاطر بأن تُزال مؤخرته عن هذا الكرسي لكسب أي شيء لشعب لبنان "العظيم".

ما في بهدلة أكتر من هيك. رئيس الجمهورية المتحالف مع منطمة تعتبرها الاكثرية الساحقة من العالم العربي بأنها ارهابية، لن يفعل شيئاً لشعبه المنكوب عدا عن السماح لأعدائه السابقين بالتجديد لأنفسهم ولرذيلتهم وإمعانهم بتحقير هذا الشعب وسلبه من كل ما لديه من ماديات ومعنويات. 

أكرر: يا شعب لبنان الحمير، وليس يا شعب لبنان العظيم. الحمرنة ما فيها عظمة.

Visit Lebanon 2017...And Become the Next Victim of Political and Security Militias

Lebanon's Tourism Minister has just launched his "Visit Lebanon 2017" campaign aiming at promoting the tourism sector, despite:
- the bad roads
- the rationing of electricity
- the lack of drinking water
- the pilfering and squandering of public funds
- the rampant corruption
- the culture of violence
- the theft of public seafront property by politicians and their cronies, and
- basically a dysfunctional country infected by tribalism, sectarianism, religious intolerance, systemic incompetence and a dysfunctional political system (it took 2.5 years to elect a president, and now a 4 year old stalemate in which parliament has renewed its own mandate three times because the parliamentarians cannot agree on a new electoral law...).

Watch what happened to an ordinary motorist at the hands of some politician's militias, as he drove on the Beirut-Jounieh highway, in what is considered the "safe" Christian heartland of Lebanon (the information is taken from the Arabic language "Lebanon Files" website):

On Saturday May 20, in Zouk Mikael on the highway toward Beirut, there was a convoy of ten 4-wheel drive vehicles belonging to a politician, a diplomat, or some security official. As is typically the case, these convoys push people out of the way by yelling, honking, sirens wailing, and weapons brandished from car windows. We are in Lebanon, and we won't change, and the country won't evolve such that a prime minister, MP, minister, or ambassador drive around like the rest of us. Perhaps, those ruling this country have forgotten that they are of the people, that they are employees of the Lebanese people, that they get their salaries from the Lebanese people, and ultimately they are our servants.

As the convoy crossed the Dog River area en route to Beirut with all the commotion of the honking, yelling etc. the driver of a white Land Rover Discovery failed to comply with the convoy's demands that he opens the way, even after hearing the yelling of "move over, you animal". Two cars then separated from the convoy in the Dbayyieh area before the Royal bridge, one Toyota Patrol and one Toyota Prado (as seen in the pictures), and blocked and encircled the Land Rover. Men from these two cars stepped out, went to the Land Rover's driver, opened the driver's door with their guns out, savagely hit the driver, pulled him out of the car, dragged him to the Toyota Patrol where he was shoved in the trunk. One of the men from the convoy finally drove off the Land Rover to merge again with the convoy.

This is not fighting terrorism. This is the daily brutal bullying of ordinary citizens by the political class.

So before you decide to listen to the Lebanese Tourism Minister and "Visit Lebanon 2017", ask yourself the question: Who will protect me against such violence and brutality? Especially if you are a foreigner who is used to civility and civilized behavior. Perhaps the Lebanese are used to being treated like animals, and they know the rules. But if you are a foreigner and have no idea what to do in such instances, can you imagine what will happen to you if you are caught in an incident like this?

DO YOU WANT TO BE THE VICTIM OF THE RAMPANT BRUTALITY IN LEBANON? If yes, then please by all means come "Visit Lebanon 2017".

[All photos courtesy of Lebanonfiles.com]

Which Three Arab Leaders were NOT invited to the Riyadh Summit with Donald Trump?

President Michel Aoun of Lebanon, and.....
Bashar Al-Assad of Syria, and...
Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan.

So you see what Aoun's alliance with Hezbollah and Iran is doing to him?

It is putting him on an equal footing with the Syrian war criminal and butcher Assad, and the Sudanese war criminal and butcher Bashir.

Great Job, Gebran Bassil.

Michel Temer: The Proud Corruption Export of Lebanon to Brazil

This is the current president of Brazil. He is the descendant of Lebanese Emigrés. From their country of origin, steeped in corruption and malfeasance - the Lebanese proudly call it their "genius" - Mr. Temer's parents took the corruption genes with them and seeded them in the fertile land of Brazil.


Read about the latest corruption exploits by Mr. Temer:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazils-temer-scandal-roils-markets-prompts-impeachment-talk-1495129224

Mr. Temer, like the idiot Donald Trump in Washington DC's White House, is a conservative. He is a member of the established order that allows him to commit any crime he wishes because God, his child-molesting Church, the Vatican, the Order of the Knights of Malta, the Jesuits, and their armies of priests and nuns, are obviously on his side.  And so, the deeply devout religious Lebanese, with their patriarchs and muftis, saints and mullahs, mahdis and messiahs, love Mr. Temer. Not only is he a descendant of Lebanese emigrés, but Minister Gebran Bassil wants to grant him and his ilk the Lebanese citizenship because he, Mr. Temer, has completed the proud Lebanese corruption circle.

As he is about to be impeached, Mr. Temer has mustered the testosterone in his gonads and invoked God's justice to state that he will not step down. The man wasn't even elected to the presidency; he was the vice-president and he inherited the top post from Dilma Roussef, his former boss Brazilian president who was also impeached and kicked out of office for corruption. Mr. Temer even went as far as to betray Roussef and speed up her demise in order to secure the presidency for himself. Now it is his turn. He was caught with his pants down.

What is it with conservative dinosaurs who think they are above the law and better than the ordinary citizens of their countries?

Iran today is having presidential elections and the battle is between incumbent "moderate" Rohani (a mullah, of course), and an avowed conservative mullah, of course, Seyyed Ebrahim Raisos-Sadati, commonly known as Ebrahim Raisi, who has always campaigned on a platform of conservative values (strict enforcement of the enslavement of women, living simply, anti-western consumer society, etc.), yet he is said to have secured himself immense wealth from a charity organization he was appointed to run by the Ayatollah. Not to forget, but Raisi was the Iranian regime’s General Prosecutor responsible for the death of thousands of political prisoners in the so-called "1988 massacre" of political prisoners (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_executions_of_Iranian_political_prisoners).

But God and his armies are on the side of the wealthy, corrupt, and unethical people like Temer, Trump, Raisi and others. We, the ordinary people, should not question the judgment of God. He has ordained these people to rule over our lives, and so must submit and surrender نسلّم for happiness, they tell us, is not of this world and we should not look for it in the here and now. We should wait to die, often at the hands of God's appointees, and find happiness in the afterlife. 

More Trump Backdowns

Donald Dumb continues to renege on his campaign promises. Hopefully, the angry Iowa pig farmers, disaffected steel workers in Pittsburgh, unemployed miners of the upper Midwest, disgruntled Idaho potato farmers, upset Maine lumberjacks and lobster fishermen, evangelical numskulls from the Bible belt - all of them white on their way to extinction - and other assorted idiots from the American boonies who elected this imbecile to the Out House are finally realizing that for Donald Dumb:

- Islam is a religion of peace
Contrary to his Macho claims during the campaign that he will call Islam for what it is, the imbecile-in-chief is flying to Saudi Arabia this weekend to kiss ass to the Saudis and call Islam a moderate religion. Imagine! The first foreign trip of this call-it-by-its-name "Islamic Terrorism" idiot is to the mother of all Islamic Terrorism countries, Saudi Arabia. Donald Dumb will bow, greet, and chum up to the grandest exporters of Islamic terrorism, the purveyors of the September 11 attacks, the founders and funders of all Islamic schools aqnd mosques in the West. Can someone tell me how is that more "patriotic" or "American" than Obama's shunning of the Saudi monsters?

- Yes to the nuclear deal with Iran, and yes to the lifting of sanctions on Iran
Contrary to his assertions and ballsy claims that he will strike the deal and re-impose sanctions on Iran, the liar-in-chief said yesterday that he will go along with the Obama Administration's nuclear deal with Iran and will not seek to re-impose sanctions on it.

- No, Donald Dumb will NOT be moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as he promised during his campaign, and worse yet, just today he declared that the Wailing Wall (also known as the Nagging Wall) is not in Israel, but in the West Bank, meaning he recognizes Israel as a Zionist Fascist occupying power bent on stealing another people's land and country for no other reason than archaic pretexts from the Bronze Age, just as their Islamic counterparts do all over the world. Israel is essentially the Jewish equivalent of the Islamic State, aiming to resurrect a long-dead religious rule from the Stone Age of humanity. Just as their Muslim counterparts claim the Koran to do, Zionists claim that "God is on their side"; He told them so. Just read the Bible.

- Yes to NAFTA
Contrary to his claims that he will abrogate NAFTA, the idiot-in-chief will be hard-pressed to try and touch this market because it will kill the economy. His rejection of the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) is beginning to isolate the US from its potential partners in the Asia-Pacific, so the numskull-in-chief will not touch the only market left for the US. Europe will soon smash the UK which decided also on isolating itself. Watch the US too stay out.

Protection Tariffs
- He made good on imposing tariffs on Canadian lumber. Now watch as home construction costs skyrocket. I thought you believed in the free market. But American lumber, like American steel wants Uncle Sam to protect them, they are all hypocrites. They cannot compete in the free market, so they come and hid under Uncle Sam's skirt.

NATO
- Contrary to his claims that NATO is obsolete, the Dumb-in-Chief is only begging Europeans to pay more to NATO. He is not touching NATO.

North Korea
- Donald Dumb has drawn several red lines. Yet the North Korean dictator keeps rubbing America's nose by launching missile after missile. Where is the "manly" Donald Dumb? What's he doing with Kim-Jong Eun? Nothing. Well, he feels sympathy for him. He thinks Eun was ill-served by inheriting the dictatorship from his father and grandfather, which deserves Donald Dumb's pity.

Better than all of this, Donald Dumb is truly Russia's lapdog. Putin is having a great time watching the Fool-in-Chief make a mockery of the United States. Donald Dumb loves dictators. They all have big balls and small brains like he does. Egypt's Al-Sissi, the Phillipines' Duterte.... they all are "fantastic" guys who get invited to the Out House in DC.

The man is either a pathological idiot - something I have always said - with nary a few neurons somewhere in the wilderness of his skull left to make us hope that there is some kind of a learning curve. Maybe the imbecile is learning on the job, and perhaps by the end of his term he might become 10% of what Obama was. It's just that the retards of the American south and hinterland who elected him are going to be very very disappointed. He gave them false hopes, and they believed him. They refused intelligent educated leadership and instead chose illiterate fools who gave them all the words of a long-gone nostalgic past and not one ounce of brutal realism. The ignorant American white folks are on their way to extinction anyway. Donald Dumb was selling them hot air and they gulped it like the flat tires they all are. I am glad the reckoning is coming sooner than expected. Wake up. Come to the 21st century. Y'all are old dogs, and it'll be tough learning new tricks. But hey, this is the market economy you love. It spit you out a long time ago. Live with it. Show us you can compete like "real men" without your government mommy's protection. What a bunch of bigoted dinosaurs.

My Sri Lankan is from Ethiopia

"My Sri Lankan is from Ehtiopia" "السري لنكية تبعيتي من اثيوبيا"

This is how a Lebanese woman describes her maid. This means that the word "maid" has now been replaced in the Lebanese dictionary by the word "Sri Lankan", just as a paper tissue was eventually replaced by Kleenex.

There are, of course, a number of words that people can use in the Lebanese language for "maid". We have "صانعة" (Saan3a, which literally means "maker", as in homemaker) but this has become politically incorrect. The politically correct word would be "خادمة" which means "servant".

But maids are generally seen as lower human creatures by the Lebanese, especially those Lebanese women who have money or who recently "arrived" into money (nouveaux riches) by the traditional enrichment processes of thievery, hoodwinking, corruption, and so on. The Lebanese have one goal in life: to show the other Lebanese that they have made it, regardless of whether this brings them happiness or not. Everything the average Lebanese does is geared to proving to others that he or she is superior to the scum around them, i.e. everyone else. Solipsism is a hallmark of the Lebanese psyche: I am the center of the world and I don't care about anyone else or anything else but the aggrandizement of myself. Not very Christian or Moslem you might think, tough the Lebanese claim to be devout (and in times of war, fanatic) religious believers.

So how do you go about demonstrating to others that you have made it, that you have succeeded, and that you are better then them? You just have to shove it down their throats by displaying every possible symbol of cheap low grade stupid success. Now, since Lebanese society is a repressed society, lacking genuine social communication between citizens, the only available venue for the Lebanese to communicate is the street, the roads, and hence one's outward appearance. What things about yourself can you project to others without having to talk to them? Basically things like your car, your behavior on the road, your clothes and other accoutrements. This is really at the foundation of social behavior in Lebanon. In other countries people go about their business searching for happiness regardless of what others might think of you or your appearance. In Lebanon, it is the complete opposite: Every action or projection of one's appearance is destined to communicate to others what you want them to think about you. It matters a whole lot to the Lebanese individual what others think of you.

That is why Lebanese project themselves for example by their cars: Big cars, scary looking cars, noisy cars, dark shaded car windows, car plates with 3, 4 or 5 digit numbers, cars without plates... All these features aim to tell others on the road that you are important and that they should be afraid of you. If the car is big, for example, it means that you have money. If the car is noisy, the owner is begging you to notice him. Dark shaded windows, low digit car plates... tell the others that you have connections (because only people with connections can get these plates... the lower the number the more important you'll appear to others).

The manner of driving on the road is also intended to project aggression and instill fear in the other drivers. Stopping in the middle of the street to talk to a buddy tells those behind you that you don;t give a fuck about them and you can get away with it. Double parking, tailgating, flashing headlights... all driving conduct that is considered dangerous in civilized countries is the standard here. Driving dangerously like a maniac projects an image that you are above the law, in addition to the obvious demonstration that you are basically an idiot who will risk his own life ad the lives of others to make sure they get the message of your importance in this world.

Maids in Lebanon are like cars. They are status symbols. If you have two maids, you've hit the jackpot of showing your neighbors and those around you how great and rich you are. You could be deep in debt, but it is a price you are willing to pay to appear important. Because of this greatness you want to project, the maid will always sit in the back seat even if the passenger seat is empty because you must prove to others that you are of another social class than the maid. The maid will never sit at the table with your family for lunch, just as maids are forbidden from taking a dip in the pool or the ocean when accompanying their masters to the fancy beach resort. Maids must wear the "maid uniform", regardless of whether she actually needs to wear one, because, again, this is to demonstrate to others that she is not part of your family or your caste, even though she is scrubbing your shit day in and day out.

Maids in Lebanon come from very poor backgrounds in very poor countries like Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, African countries like Togo or Ghana or others. They endure tremendous hardship (abuse of all kind, withholding of their papers, and abysmal salaries...) just to save a couple of thousands of dollars after 3 years of work.

So, you see how the ignorance of the Lebanese makes them say things like "My Sri Lankan is from Ethiopia". What an insult to the country of Sri Lanka and its people when ignorant Lebanese make assumptions about who they are. Ignorance breeds racism, condescension, arrogance... A Lebanese will feel inferior to, and kiss the ass of, a drunken toothless blond blue eyed taxi driver from England, but will feel superior to a smart highly intelligent but dark Sri Lankan PhD in nuclear physics. That is the gist of Lebanese culture, and by extension the culture of Arabs in general. They are so full of themselves because they believe that some thousands of years ago they made one pathetic contribution to humanity, and that is license enough to wallow in modern ignorance and depravity. For the Lebanese, they monopolize the merit for the invention of the phonetic alphabet, though arguably their Phoenician ancestors may or may not have lived in today's Lebanon or they may or may not have borrowed the invention from someone else, and even if the Phoenicians did invent the alphabet, that was thousands of years ago, and it is not a free voucher for today's arrogance for the Lebanese.  Arabs wallow in the glory of the Muslim Conquest of the 7th and 8th centuries in which they invaded and forcibly converted people to Islam, then established a successful empire (like so many other peoples and empires) for a couple of hundred years before falling back into the abject ignorance and backwardness from which they came. To this day, the Arabs claim that this ancient glory remains extant and they can milk it ad libitum to claim some respectability in today's world. Yet, in today's world, Lebanon is a mess of a country, and the Arab world is also a mess of two dozen countries.

Humility and modesty are not a feature of the Lebanese character. That may be the reason why this country is an ungovernable mess. When every individual feels superior to everything around him or her, to his fellow citizens, to the very foundations that are necessary to build a society of civilized people, he or she believes that they are above the law. Some argue that the absence of deterrence, of the enforcement of the laws by draconian means, makes the Lebanese the way they are, and unless some benign dictator can some day instill fear and eradicate the arrogance out of people like that, and force them to abide by the law, for a couple of generations, the country will remain the mess that it is today.

Aoun Excluded from Saudi Muslim Summit with Trump

Pro-Iran, pro-Hezbollah Lebanese President Michel Aoun was NOT invited to the Muslim-American summit to be held this May 20-21 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Instead, his Prime Minister Saad Hariri was invited to the summit which Donald Trump will be attending.

As the text below of the news report from Breitbart, Saad Hariri's name is not even mentioned, as is typically the case with countries like Lebanon that American news media d not consider significant, although Lebanon is an incubator of many of the headaches that the West and the US in particular face.

One possible reason behind not inviting Aoun is as follows:
- Trump is looking to make a deal with the Sunni Muslims(Arabs and otherwise, led by Saudi Arabia) in which he will overturn former President Obama overtures to Shiite Iran, and initiate a new rapprochement with the Sunnis aiming at isolating Iran and curbing its nefarious influence over every Shiite minority across the Middle East.
- However, whereas in the past the love affair between US Republicans and the Sunni Arabs was lubricated by lots of oil, this time around Trump has another trick in his bag to offer the Sunni Saudis: In exchange for beating up on Iran and protecting you from it, I want you Sunnis to force the Palestinians to accept a peace settlement with the Israelis.
- Which means that in Lebanon, Hezbollah stands to lose big time. As the war in Syria is beginning to fade into a partitioned Syria, Hezbollah is beginning a withdrawal from the Syrian-Lebanese border where it had been fighting alongside the Assad regime. Just today, Hezbollah relinquished several positions on the Anti-Lebanon mountain chain and handed them over to the Lebanese Army.
- This "re-positioning" by Hezbollah may be due to the ethnic demographic consolidations that have been taking place in Syria, whereby pockets of Shiite populations in largely Sunni areas have been transferred to Shiite areas, and vice-versa. The population in the area from which Hezbollah has withdrawn is now homogeneously Shiite, both on the Lebanese and on the Syrian sides of the border, and Hezbollah hands it over to the Lebanese army for mere policing (not fighting). Moreover, if Hezbollah is anticipating a major war with Israel, it will claim to have no presence in those areas, leaving the Lebanese army to confront a potential Israeli assault.
- Further implications are that Hezbollah knows it will have to divert its attention back to fighting Israel, as the Syrian revolution was essentially a distraction from this essential objective assigned to it by the Islamic theocracy in Tehran.
- Therefore, as he is the paramount ally of Hezbollah and Iran, Lebanese president Michel Aoun would b a persona non grata at the Trump-Saudi summit. If he were to attend these meetings, Aoun would become privy to information he may pass on to Hezbollah and Iran.
- Taken altogether, these elements point to a waning of the war of Syria, and a resumption of hostilities along the Lebanese-Israeli border. Israel continues to seethe at its incompetence at defeating Hezbollah in 2006, and the ongoing redrawing of Syria's borders is a golden opportunity for Israel to cement its takeover of the Golan, grab more land if possible in both Lebanon and Syria, and strike a deadly blow to Hezbollah. In essence, the Trump-Israeli plan right now is to eliminate the threat to Israel first, and to the Sunni Arabs second, posed by Iran and its tentacles like Hezbollah, the Houthis and others. This time, a war in the Lebanese South will likely be hugely more hellish than 2006, and Israel would probably seize the opportunity to eliminate any Shiite presence in Lebanon and Syria along its borders.
- There are some who argue that Aoun has finally made peace with the Americans after decades of mutual hostility, and that he is now coordinating secretly with the Americans. His rapprochement with the Sunnis (via Saad Hariri) allowed him to be elected president after years of stalemate, and his "uninvite" to the Sunni-American summit is in coordination with the Saudis and the Americans.

We are witnessing a reshuffling of the post World War I order in the Near East. The emergence of a Kurdish State in northern Syria adjoining the Kurdish State in northern Iraq would repair the harm done to the Kurdish people in 1920, the creation of an Alawite State along the Syrian Mediterranean coast would in fact bring to fruition the French plan to actually establish such a state back in 1920, the Druse of Syria, Lebanon  and Israel would see their own state created as a buffer shielding Israel from any Shiites further north, and Lebanon would rediscover what the Maronite Church had always wanted Greater Lebanon to be: A Christian homeland. The remainder of Syria, essentially the desert areas inhabited by the Sunni Arabs would in due time merge with Jordan or the Sunni middle of Iraq.

So, from North to South:
- Kurdish State - Kurdistan
- Alawite State - "useful" Syria
- Christian State - Lebanon
- Druse State - Drusistan
- Jewish State - Israel

with the hinterland belonging to the Sunni Arabs. Back in the 1920s, when the borders of the Near East were drawn up, the West greatly favored the Arab nationalists and granted them lands that were never theirs, crushing in the process many minorities living in this northern periphery of the Arabian peninsula. Now that those nationalists have regressed back to Muslim fundamentalists, the West wants to re-institute these minorities as nation-state buffers between Europe and the Arab Sunni hinterland.
This is perhaps not a plan that should be leaked to Michel Aoun, unless he is in collusion with it.



[From Breitbart News]

RIYADH (AFP) – King Abdullah II of Jordan, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Niger’s Mahamadou Issoufou are among leaders invited by Saudi King Salman for a summit with US President Donald Trump.

The Arab-Islamic-American Summit will be among a series of talks expected to be held in Riyadh on May 20-21, Saudi officials said.
Trump has frequently been accused of fuelling Islamophobia but aides described his decision to visit Saudi Arabia as an effort to reset relations with the Muslim world.
There will also be a separate meeting between monarchs of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council and Trump, as well as bilateral talks between the Saudi and US leaders, Riyadh’s Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir has said.
In addition to heads of state from Jordan, Algeria and Niger, the official Saudi Press Agency reported that Salman asked Yemeni President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and Morocco’s King Mohammed VI to attend.
The leaders of Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq and Tunisia have also received invitations, the Arab News daily reported on Wednesday.
Saudi Arabia — which is home to Islam’s holiest sites — will be Trump’s first foreign stop since becoming president in January.
“It is a clear message to the world that the United States and the Arab and Islamic countries can form a partnership,” Jubeir said in Washington, according to SPA.
“We believe that it will strengthen cooperation between the United States and Arab and Islamic countries in the fight against terrorism and extremism, and the visit will have enormous benefits for the region and the world.”
The Saudis have found a more favourable ear in Washington under Trump, who has echoed their concerns about Iran’s influence in the region.

Rape of Lebanon's Beaches by Racist Upper Class Snobs

Beach Resort Owners: Trespassers and Upper Class Racist Snobs!
Thursday 11 May 2017 - Viviane Akiki
[Translated from Al-Akhbar: http://www.al-akhbar.com/node/276990]

It was not enough for the owners of "C Flow", a beach resort in Byblos, that they engage in class discrimination after trespassing and confiscating public land, by publishing an advertisement inviting students of private universities to enter the resort free of charge, which excludes students of state-owned Lebanese University, but they claimed in a call with Al-Akhbar that this offer is based on commercial agreements concluded with private universities in exchange for the latter to hold their graduation ceremonies at the C Flow resort, something the universities categorically denied when asked about such agreements.

In the view of the resort owners, and as the advertisement's subtext as published on the Byblos resort's Facebook page, expresses, "the seafront is not public property, and it is not an acquired right. It is a privilege to be enjoyed exclusively by those with money." It informs the students of the wealthiest and most expensive private universities in Lebanon that they can benefit from free admission to the resort throughout the summer season.

The advertisement almost went unnoticed, just like many advertisements that expose the vertically stratified class structure in Lebanese society, were it not for the uproar it caused by its exclusion of Lebanese University students who are the largest contingent of Lebanon's students, many of whom are from families with modest means. Yet, this class discrimination is the foundation of all private resorts in Lebanon: they have raped Lebanese beaches, trespassed over public property, and imposed high payola fees [money paid to somebody for helping you make an illegal profit] to ensure that only upper class snobs enter, not to mention their long history of racism against marginalized segments of society such as the domestic workers (foreign maids) who continue to be denied, according to the backward racist Lebanese model, swimming in the same pools and the same ocean as their Lebanese masters who bring them along to these resorts.

Resort Owner: This is my House

The owner of C Flow, Alain Mattar, says "This advertisement if the product of agreements signed by the resort with a number of private universities". He tells Al-Akhbar that "there are 16 beneficiary universities, which means there are other private universities that are not benefiting from the offer in addition to Lebanese University. We are not targeting Lebanese University or its students who should complain to their administration for failing to sign similar agreements [with us]".

Mr. Mattar, the nephew of Maronite Bishop Boulos Mattar, says, "The resort is my house and I have the right to admit whomever I wish", adding, "we began by concluding agreements with the universities three years ago, in which they hold their graduation ceremonies with us in exchange for summer-long free admission for their students. We began with 7 universities, then last year we had 12 universities, and this year we have 16 universities. This is part of doing business, and as such it has nothing to do with class discrimination or racism." Even so," adds Mattar, "This resort is my house and I have the right to admit to it whomever I wish," ignoring the fact that his resort is built on property owned by the Maronite Church which itself occupies public property owned by the Lebanese people on the beach, like other resorts, and therefore whatever Mr. Mattar considers as his house is the usurped right of the Lebanese people, a right that denies them access free and unhindered access to the beach.

The Universities Respond: We Don't Know Anything!

The attempts by the resort owner to justify his discrimination against Lebanese University students under the guise of "doing business" and "concluding commercial agreements" is blatantly denied by the very universities whose names are mentioned in the advertisement. In a call placed by Al-Akhbar with the media official at Lebanese American University (LAU), Christian Oussi, the latter says, "graduation ceremonies for our students are held at the university, and we do not conclude any such agreements with touristic resorts. We have not heard anything about this affair until now." This same information was confirmed by the Department of Student Affairs at LAU, indicating "there are no agreements or contracts with the resort in question". This is also corroborated by Therese Meraab, the head of the Department of Student Affairs at American University of Beirut (AUB), who told Al-Akhbar "There are no advertisement or commercial agreements with the resort in question, and we have nothing to do with this matter."

We are therefore faced with a blatant insolence with serious social consequences, whereby a special class of people with lots of money and connections feels excessively powerful, in collusion with State administrations and agencies and with sectarian religious institutions, to be entitled to usurp people's rights and property, in addition to be able to vent their class and racist discriminatory social diseases and protect their interests and ensure their survival, while the State plays deaf and protects these interests. Al-Akhbar tried to contact the concerned ministries, but to no avail.

The Tourism Ministry, which has oversight authority over these resorts and is responsible for monitoring any conduct that is counter to applicable standards, refrained from replying to our request. So did the Economy Ministry which is supposed to fight any monopoly over certain commodities (the beach) by a certain group (the affluent class), and the Public Works and Transportation Ministry which is considered the direct guardian over these usurped seafront public properties.

Boycott them!

But what about Lebanese University and its stance on the discrimination against its students? The University President, Fouad Ayoub, who is known for his opposition to class discrimination, refused to discuss the matter and asked that the students be polled on the matter.

Legally, discrimination is a criminal offense punishable under the Penal Code. Typically, preferential offers targeting specific groups cover all those included in these groups. For example, weekly evening Happy Hours that offer free entry or reduced fees are open to anyone at specific times of the day, or Ladies Nights where young women are admitted free of charge without discrimination on the basis of their social status. 

The President of the Lebanese Center for Human Rights, Wadih Al-Asmar, says, "There is clear discrimination against Lebanese University students, since the advertisement mentions only the largest and wealthiest private universities, and the offer is not extended to students of other universities," adding, "usually, when preferential treatment is extended, it is done within specific terms and conditions in which the criterion is geographic or age-related, as for example for university students within the vicinity of the facility, which is not the case here because the resort is in Byblos and the universities targeted are distributed in remote areas of Lebanon. If indeed the resort has concluded deals with the universities, why doesn't it publish them?Why didn't it make a similar agreement with Lebanese University? What the resort owner is doing falls within commercial pratices, but even commerce has standards and laws against monopoly and discrimination."

So what are the options for confronting this practice? Al-Asmar says, "The legal response is possible because the Penal Code prohibits all forms of discrimination, but this is a long process. The fastest solution is boycott. Just as they claim it is within their right to make offers to whomever they wish, all those who reject all forms of discrimination are equally free to boycott these institutions".