As has always been the case throughout the long Lebanese War of the past 4 decades or so, the recent Israeli incursions and attacks on weapons depot sites in Damascus, which it justifies by saying that these "arms potentially could end up in Hezbollah's hands," always raise unsettling questions about Israel's real intentions.
I am not one to immediately jump at conspiracy theories, but the Syrian-Israeli "partnership" has sustained hard times, has endured, and has kept peace on the Golan for 4 decades despite the fact that these two parties are sworn enemies on the surface or in theory. Israeli officials - who know that Syria is financing, arming and supporting all of Israel's other little enemies, from Hamas to Hezbollah and all the rogue Palestinian guerilla movements.... - have stated on many occasions that they prefer the Assad regime to any other alternative in Damascus because, apparently, Assad is more trustworthy, keeps his word, abides by agreements, is more amenable to a deal with Israel, etc... Yet 40 years of warfare in lebanon and the Palestinian territories, the hundreds of thousands of dead, the suicide bombings, the wars with Hezbollah, the occupations of lands and peoples, the proxy militias, the export of terrorism, the Iranian beachhead on the Mediterranean right at Israel's border, the hijackings, kidnappings, assassinations, etc... do not seem like a good price to pay for maintaining quiet on the Golan. Yet, this is what it all seems to be.
Now, assuming this theory has some traction, it implies that Israel will act in such a way as to protect or preserve the political order as has existed in Syria and Lebanon, for fear of a worse order should the Assad regime fall and, a fundamentalist Sunni government takes over in Damascus. In that same vein, one can view the recent attacks by Israel against Damascus-based weapons depot headed for Hezbollah in Lebanon as consistent with the consiparcy theory. Here's how:
By launching these strikes at a time when the US is beginning to edge close to some kind of increased intervention against Assad (e.g. by supplying lethal weapons to the Syrian opposition), Israel undermines the trajectory that such a policy might lead to. On one hand, it gives Assad some fresh breathing air to scream bloody murder, pose as the anti-Zionist enemy par excellence, rally the herd of Arab/Muslim nationalists around the regime, claim to be the victim of Zionist aggression, all of which turn the table on the equation inside Syria, namely that the Assad regime's enemies inside Syria (i.e the Syrian rebels) are friends of Israel, or at least are in the same trenches as Israel. Damascus and by extension Tehran regain a higher moral ground around the Arab and Muslim worlds, and so on and so forth.
However, just as this policy - still assumed under my conspiracy theory that Israel wants to protect the Assad regime - has kept peace on the Golan but wrecked havoc around the region and the world, its continuation is bound to perpetutate the violence and push peace even further back. In fact, if ISrael's fears are about some weapons falling into Hezbollah's hands, then let us consider whose hands these weapons might have stayed with if not with Hezbollah:
- The Syrian regime itself. That would be acceptable (under the conspiracy theory) because Damascus has always had these weapons and has never used them against Israel. BUT, everyone knows that Syria has been transferring similar weapons to hezbollah for 30 years across the porous Lebanese border, and ISrael has rarely, if ever, attacked such convoys or made a serious attempt at curtialing such a transfer. In other words, to allow the Syrian regime to hold on to these weapons is no guarantee of any sort for Israel that these weapons will not end up in hezbollah's hands.
- The Syrian opposition. Too many groups, ranging from the amicable perhaps to the hostile vis-a-vis Israel. Worst case scenario: These weapons might end up in the hands of Al-Qaeda affiliates or some other radical group with hatred toward Israel and with the potential of one day using them against Israel. But in such a case, these groups were the operatives of the Syrian regime for decades in the spread of terror in the region, and the fact that they split with the regime at the onset of the Syrian revolution does not change anything, because the Syrian regime could have at any other time provided these weapons to these operatives. Unless one invokes the conspiracy theory, namely that as long as the Assad regime has custody of these weapons, it will NEVER transfer them because it is in collusion with the Israelis and has given assurances to the Israelis that they will never allow these weapons to be used against Israel. Now that the Syrian regime is about to collapse, the deal between Assad and the Israelis is off, and Israel is cleaning house before it is too late.
- Hezbollah and other Iranian groups. These seem to be the immediate target of the interdiction attack. But aqgain Syria has been transferring weapons to Hezbollah for three decades and ferrying all kinds of dangerous missiles and drones from Iran to the South Lebanon-based terror organization. Sooner or later, in any hypothetical confrontation between Israel and Syria, the latter would not hesitate one second from handing these weapons to Hezbollah. So, it seems like a resonable argument for Israel to attack these weapons, just in case. But wait: Why hasn't Israel attacked these sites a month ago, 6 months ago, a year ago, 5 years ago...? Why now? Has the threat only now become a threat? The answer is Yes, because under the deal between Assad and the Israelis, only a certain level of armament is allowed to be transferred to Hezbollah, and these weapons cross the threshold of the deal between Israel and Assad.
The tightrope walking in all of this is mind bloggling, but the only one thing that is for certain is that the Assad regime has never attacked Israel in 40 years since the signing of the armistice on the Golan in 1974. Not one bullet was ever fired across the demarcation line, not by Israel, and certainly not by Syria, although both sides have engaged in bloody, mass-murder scale wars in Lebanon and in the Palestinian territories, with invasions and occupations, and all kinds of human rights abuses against Lebanese and Palestinians. Not once did the Syrian army during its 35 years of occupation of Lebanon seriously engaged the Israeli army's repeated invasions of Lebanon, event though Damascus always claimed to be in Lebanon to defend it against "Israeli aggression". Not once did Israel attack Syria proper in 40 years, even though Israel knew full well that Damascus was the mother of all terrorist groups operating from Lebanon and Palestine against Israel. Neither side ever violated the mutual red lines they drew for one another in the long torment they imposed on Lebanon.
The laundry list is too long to list here to buttress the conspiracy theory... but this reminds me of something Kurt Vonnegut once said about situations like these: It's as though you are at a party with lots of beautiful people, but there is a stench wafting around. Everyone smells it, but everyone ignores it, because to do otherwise would ruin the atmosphere. Tolerate a little foulness just to keep the party going. This is how best I can summarize the strange bedfellows that Israel and the Syrian regime have been over 4 decades, and the party they both enjoyed while the stench of the torment of Lebanon and the agony of Palestine went on and on and on....
Hanibaal
Monday, May 6, 2013
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Boston and the Tsarnaev Brothers
There is nothing new to the story behind this newest Islamic terrorism episode. Boston is the latest victim of the deep scarring that Islam leaves in the brains of impressionable people.
Consider the fact that the two young men were practically well-assimilated American immigrants: They came to the country as young boys, went to school and college, had family and friends.... The fact that Islam as an ideology can twist such people to the point where they are capable of committing acts of untold violence against their own community is sufficient evidence of the constitutive, built-in, evil that is in that ideology. No other religion in our time is capable of such a transformation.
There is a lot of violence out there. People will argue that Americans bombing places around the world with remote technology is a similar act of cowardice, when you kill people without taking any risk to your own life. Some will argue that governments and regimes exact the same violence, sometimes on their own people. Some will say that rebels, freedom-fighters, and such revolutionaries justify violence in the name of a greater cause: Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s; Vietnam; Palestinians and Israelis; etc...
But there is something more sinister in the fact that - just as it was in the London subway bombings - young people who were born into a culture or a country, who were well assimilated, who had no obvious benefit from acts of violence (as would be the liberation of a country from an occupier or the lifting of an oppression,....), could suddenly be made to believe that slaughtering other innocent bystanders with their own hands would achieve some advantage to a religious ideology from the Stone Age of humanity.
Let us assume that for the Tsarnaev brothers everything went well, namely that they were not caught and, for the sake of argument, managed to kill and maim many more people in the Boston Marathon bombings, and that they went on to live normal lives. WHAT WOULD THE BENEFIT BE FROM SUCH AN ACTION? To themselves, to Islam, to Chechnya ??? There is no room for the revenge argument here. Revenge against Americans who are battling other Muslim fighters in Afghanistan or some other place? Perhaps, if the solidarity between Muslims is such that it transcends national boundaries.But this solidarity is a fallacy. It doesn't exist. Just look at how Muslims are killing one another in every other country: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan.... everywhere there are Muslim minorities under a Muslim majority (e.g. Shiite and Sunni), the killing goes on. Revenge by Chechens should be directed at Russia and Russians who - in the narrative of the Muslim Caucasus natives - occupy their countries of Dagestan, Chechnya, Ossetia, Abkhazia.... But revenge against Americans, against their own city, it just does not make sense, unless one invokes a deeply troubled narrative inside of Islam itself.
The culprit in this whole affair is ISLAM itself. The evil is in the claims that Islam makes and brainwahes its people to believe in. The evil is in the self-declared exclusivity of Islam, the very definition of Islam as the rejection of Judaism and Christianity.
Read the FATIHA of the Kuran, and witness with your own eyes how, in this very first page of the fucking Holy Toilet Paper of Islam, the writer attacks Jews and Christians as, respectively, those who "earned God's wrath" (Al Maghdoobi Alayhum), and those who "went astray" (Al-Daalleen). Islam is a religion of violence and will remain so, until it declares to the world and to itself - just like the other monotheistic pieces of garbage have done long ago - that it is NOT LITERAL. It is a metaphor of the human experience based on people knew several thousands of years ago. That it should no longer be believed literally..... That it is a piece of antique garbage, just like Christianity and Judaism.
Until Islam matures like the other two moniotheistic cults, the world will continue to witness acts of insanity and stupidity similar to the Boston Marathon bombings.
Hanibaal
Consider the fact that the two young men were practically well-assimilated American immigrants: They came to the country as young boys, went to school and college, had family and friends.... The fact that Islam as an ideology can twist such people to the point where they are capable of committing acts of untold violence against their own community is sufficient evidence of the constitutive, built-in, evil that is in that ideology. No other religion in our time is capable of such a transformation.
There is a lot of violence out there. People will argue that Americans bombing places around the world with remote technology is a similar act of cowardice, when you kill people without taking any risk to your own life. Some will argue that governments and regimes exact the same violence, sometimes on their own people. Some will say that rebels, freedom-fighters, and such revolutionaries justify violence in the name of a greater cause: Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s; Vietnam; Palestinians and Israelis; etc...
But there is something more sinister in the fact that - just as it was in the London subway bombings - young people who were born into a culture or a country, who were well assimilated, who had no obvious benefit from acts of violence (as would be the liberation of a country from an occupier or the lifting of an oppression,....), could suddenly be made to believe that slaughtering other innocent bystanders with their own hands would achieve some advantage to a religious ideology from the Stone Age of humanity.
Let us assume that for the Tsarnaev brothers everything went well, namely that they were not caught and, for the sake of argument, managed to kill and maim many more people in the Boston Marathon bombings, and that they went on to live normal lives. WHAT WOULD THE BENEFIT BE FROM SUCH AN ACTION? To themselves, to Islam, to Chechnya ??? There is no room for the revenge argument here. Revenge against Americans who are battling other Muslim fighters in Afghanistan or some other place? Perhaps, if the solidarity between Muslims is such that it transcends national boundaries.But this solidarity is a fallacy. It doesn't exist. Just look at how Muslims are killing one another in every other country: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan.... everywhere there are Muslim minorities under a Muslim majority (e.g. Shiite and Sunni), the killing goes on. Revenge by Chechens should be directed at Russia and Russians who - in the narrative of the Muslim Caucasus natives - occupy their countries of Dagestan, Chechnya, Ossetia, Abkhazia.... But revenge against Americans, against their own city, it just does not make sense, unless one invokes a deeply troubled narrative inside of Islam itself.
The culprit in this whole affair is ISLAM itself. The evil is in the claims that Islam makes and brainwahes its people to believe in. The evil is in the self-declared exclusivity of Islam, the very definition of Islam as the rejection of Judaism and Christianity.
Read the FATIHA of the Kuran, and witness with your own eyes how, in this very first page of the fucking Holy Toilet Paper of Islam, the writer attacks Jews and Christians as, respectively, those who "earned God's wrath" (Al Maghdoobi Alayhum), and those who "went astray" (Al-Daalleen). Islam is a religion of violence and will remain so, until it declares to the world and to itself - just like the other monotheistic pieces of garbage have done long ago - that it is NOT LITERAL. It is a metaphor of the human experience based on people knew several thousands of years ago. That it should no longer be believed literally..... That it is a piece of antique garbage, just like Christianity and Judaism.
Until Islam matures like the other two moniotheistic cults, the world will continue to witness acts of insanity and stupidity similar to the Boston Marathon bombings.
Hanibaal
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
THE FICTION OF GOD
There were smart people long time ago, much smarter that the millions of idiots out there who believe in religious fictions today.
This is how Epicurus, the Greek Philosopher (BC 341-270), summed up the fiction of the existence of God:
- If God is willing, but not able to prevent evil, then he is IMPOTENT
- If God is able but not willing to prevent evil, then he is MALEVOLENT
- If God is both able and willing, then why is there evil in the world?
- If God is neither able nor willing, then why do we call him God?
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
New F*&king Pope? So What?
The octagenarian cardinals who supposedly have never touched a woman and have never masturbated (all lies, of course, but that's the theory), are about to elect another octagenerian who might have had a "formidable" career so far, but who, once elected, becomes a senile hunchback who can barely lift his head to bless the faithful with a vague sign of the stupid cross.... and for years and decades therefater, that will be the image we will have of the Pope.
The fact is that Popes don't matter anymore. They used to matter when they had political power, when they had States across Italy and France, when they funded missionary expeditions to subjugate blacks, asians, american indians, and others forcibly into the fucking faith... They used to have power when they brought down kings and massed armies across borders....
But that is all gone now. The Church is now a relic of humanity's archaic past and defunct beliefs. The Church has become just like the English monarchy: A freak show for tourists who love stupid pagentry that God himself would find disgusting. The Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the industrial and scientific revolutions, the French and American revolutions, the discovery of the new world,...all of these have revealed to mankind the aboslute idiocy of religious beliefs, esepcially those of the three criminal monotheistic cults of Judaism, Christianity and Islam with all their genocidal barbaric tendencies.
Except for some schools and hospitals, the Catholic Church - like all religious organizations - has become an obstacle to the development and emancipation of people. By compelling their faithful to listen and never complain, religious organizations create a mass of people who are more likely to succumb to dictatorial political regimes and never rebel. To challenge existing dogma is a sin, and so it is to challenge the political order. Just look at Lebanon:
The reason why the Lebanese accept to live like animals under archaic feudal socio-political systems, and be led to massacres and pogroms every generation or so, and never rebel to free themselves from their predicament, is because of the religious underpinning of everything in Lebanon. The religious identities of the country's constitutive elements trump the national identity and trap the members of every community inside an intellectual ghetto. Nothing will improve in Lebanon as long as we define ourselves first by our religions. In order to be Lebanese, you have to first be defined as a Sunni, a druse, a Maronite, an Orthodox, etc.. You cannot be Lebanese without a religious identity.
So, as I watch the media crawl like dogs around the Vatican waiting for the next senile octagenerian to be elected, I wonder what is the relevance of this? Nothing in the election itself, and nothing in the inner dynamics of the church has any relevance whatsoever to my life, to my concerns, to my fears, to my hopes and aspirations. Only idiots think that their lives somehow will improve because some old man will soon get a new hat, new shoes, etc... Idiots because they first believe in the myths and crappy primitive stories of splitting oceans, virgin births, immaculae conceptions, rising to heaven on winged horses, chosen people and such other inanities from the Stone Age. Idiots second because they believe that this has any relevance to their lives.
The sexual abuse and rape of children by priests. The hyporcisy of bishops and patriarchs of hiding the truth and protecting criminal priests. The hyprocrisy of adhering to asexual lives on the surface while engaging in all manner of sexual conduct with women, men, children, and with themselves by masturbating... all sins according to church law. If anyone remains blind enough to reject these facts, then they deserve these criminal religions as theirs.
I reject any authority by any religious cult of any brand it might be: From the Sunni Mufti to the Druze Sheikh al-Akl to the MAronite PAtriarch..... all of them run financial political empires first and foremost. They will resist any attempt at change because they will lose power and money. Anything that makes people's lives easier will clash with the grip on power that religious organizations have over these lives.
Sooner or later, the edifice will crumble because injustice and stupidity cannot last forever. The Lebanese are an educated bunch; they have traveled the world during their 40 year exile by war from a dysfunctional, cruel, corrupt country; they know now how much better life is in all the other civilized countries they have lived in, and they know that the solution is to remove the stranglehold of religions and religious cults, and they know that these cults will resist change..... The Lebanese are no longer the herd of imbecile villagers... they are no longer stupid. Therefore, injustice cannot last forever. The younger generation of Lebanese have not lived the ealy years of the war and do not understand why things should continue to be as bad as they are. One day, the wheels of change will turn and Lebanon will see upheavals in its social and politcal and religious status quo, and it won't be nice. Just like Egypt and elsewhere, the next war in Lebanon will not be between religious sects. It will be between modernizers and reformers on one side, and the fuedal-religious establishment on the other.
So, to the cardinals inside the fucking conclave: You can all go fuck yourselves and fuck the new pope you will elect. I don't give a damn. I am a free human being. Free from your chains. Free from your brainwashing. Free from your stupidity. I am an autonomous being that has no allegiance to anyone or to any god or to any prophet and such other fuckers invented by you. My only allegiance is to my conscience and my dignity as a human being. I was never lost to be saved by fucking Jesus. I never committed an original sin to need salvation. I do not need an explanation for my existence. I have no need for the metaphysical or the sipritual because neither of these dimensions do actually exist. They are inventions of overexcited sorcerers from our ancient past that some of us insist on dragging - against all reason - into our enlightened age. I do not need Moses or Jesus or Mary or Mohammad or any of their saints, prophets, disciples, mahdis, or whatever other titles primitive men have invented... And so, I don;t need their Pope, much as I don;t need a Messiah or a Caliph....
Hanibaal
The fact is that Popes don't matter anymore. They used to matter when they had political power, when they had States across Italy and France, when they funded missionary expeditions to subjugate blacks, asians, american indians, and others forcibly into the fucking faith... They used to have power when they brought down kings and massed armies across borders....
But that is all gone now. The Church is now a relic of humanity's archaic past and defunct beliefs. The Church has become just like the English monarchy: A freak show for tourists who love stupid pagentry that God himself would find disgusting. The Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the industrial and scientific revolutions, the French and American revolutions, the discovery of the new world,...all of these have revealed to mankind the aboslute idiocy of religious beliefs, esepcially those of the three criminal monotheistic cults of Judaism, Christianity and Islam with all their genocidal barbaric tendencies.
Except for some schools and hospitals, the Catholic Church - like all religious organizations - has become an obstacle to the development and emancipation of people. By compelling their faithful to listen and never complain, religious organizations create a mass of people who are more likely to succumb to dictatorial political regimes and never rebel. To challenge existing dogma is a sin, and so it is to challenge the political order. Just look at Lebanon:
The reason why the Lebanese accept to live like animals under archaic feudal socio-political systems, and be led to massacres and pogroms every generation or so, and never rebel to free themselves from their predicament, is because of the religious underpinning of everything in Lebanon. The religious identities of the country's constitutive elements trump the national identity and trap the members of every community inside an intellectual ghetto. Nothing will improve in Lebanon as long as we define ourselves first by our religions. In order to be Lebanese, you have to first be defined as a Sunni, a druse, a Maronite, an Orthodox, etc.. You cannot be Lebanese without a religious identity.
So, as I watch the media crawl like dogs around the Vatican waiting for the next senile octagenerian to be elected, I wonder what is the relevance of this? Nothing in the election itself, and nothing in the inner dynamics of the church has any relevance whatsoever to my life, to my concerns, to my fears, to my hopes and aspirations. Only idiots think that their lives somehow will improve because some old man will soon get a new hat, new shoes, etc... Idiots because they first believe in the myths and crappy primitive stories of splitting oceans, virgin births, immaculae conceptions, rising to heaven on winged horses, chosen people and such other inanities from the Stone Age. Idiots second because they believe that this has any relevance to their lives.
The sexual abuse and rape of children by priests. The hyporcisy of bishops and patriarchs of hiding the truth and protecting criminal priests. The hyprocrisy of adhering to asexual lives on the surface while engaging in all manner of sexual conduct with women, men, children, and with themselves by masturbating... all sins according to church law. If anyone remains blind enough to reject these facts, then they deserve these criminal religions as theirs.
I reject any authority by any religious cult of any brand it might be: From the Sunni Mufti to the Druze Sheikh al-Akl to the MAronite PAtriarch..... all of them run financial political empires first and foremost. They will resist any attempt at change because they will lose power and money. Anything that makes people's lives easier will clash with the grip on power that religious organizations have over these lives.
Sooner or later, the edifice will crumble because injustice and stupidity cannot last forever. The Lebanese are an educated bunch; they have traveled the world during their 40 year exile by war from a dysfunctional, cruel, corrupt country; they know now how much better life is in all the other civilized countries they have lived in, and they know that the solution is to remove the stranglehold of religions and religious cults, and they know that these cults will resist change..... The Lebanese are no longer the herd of imbecile villagers... they are no longer stupid. Therefore, injustice cannot last forever. The younger generation of Lebanese have not lived the ealy years of the war and do not understand why things should continue to be as bad as they are. One day, the wheels of change will turn and Lebanon will see upheavals in its social and politcal and religious status quo, and it won't be nice. Just like Egypt and elsewhere, the next war in Lebanon will not be between religious sects. It will be between modernizers and reformers on one side, and the fuedal-religious establishment on the other.
So, to the cardinals inside the fucking conclave: You can all go fuck yourselves and fuck the new pope you will elect. I don't give a damn. I am a free human being. Free from your chains. Free from your brainwashing. Free from your stupidity. I am an autonomous being that has no allegiance to anyone or to any god or to any prophet and such other fuckers invented by you. My only allegiance is to my conscience and my dignity as a human being. I was never lost to be saved by fucking Jesus. I never committed an original sin to need salvation. I do not need an explanation for my existence. I have no need for the metaphysical or the sipritual because neither of these dimensions do actually exist. They are inventions of overexcited sorcerers from our ancient past that some of us insist on dragging - against all reason - into our enlightened age. I do not need Moses or Jesus or Mary or Mohammad or any of their saints, prophets, disciples, mahdis, or whatever other titles primitive men have invented... And so, I don;t need their Pope, much as I don;t need a Messiah or a Caliph....
Hanibaal
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Malla Balad Bahdalé
How can you tell a primitive backward country? It's very simple. It is NOT the fact that politicians are constantly fighting and arguing... this is normal. It is WHAT they argue and fight about.
Let us compare the big cesspool of individualism, consumerism, stupidity, racism, religious intolerance and ignorance called the UNITED STATES, with the small cesspool of individualism, consumerism, stupidity, religious intolerance and ignorance called LEBANON.
Everything you see in the US, you'll see in Lebanon: Poverty, stupid religious beliefs, ignorance of other cultures, racism, happiness found by consuming the latest flashy car, the sleaziest gadget, and looking good so the neighbors have proof of your success..... That is why the emigrant Lebanese who leave this country to go to America succeed very well. Nothing really changes for them. They generally settle in a community surrounding themselves by like-minded idiots; they rarely venture outside their communities to befriend people from other cultures and backgrounds; the Christians go to the local Maronite, Melkite, or Orthodox church or, for the Muslims, the local mosque, and these places of religious intolerance become their social lives. The Lebanese, as idiots as they are, look down with contempt and racism at all the other races and cultures - except the dominat white anglo-saxon one because they are used to kissing the ass of those more powerful than them; it's a survival instinct. Lebanese immigrants in the US see blacks, asians, hispanics and others with utter contempt as though they themselves hail from a superior race and all these other people were scummy worms crawling out of the earth. What they don't realize is that the white anglo-saxon protestants look down on them - the Lebanese - as the last scum on the earth as well. And so it goes.
You should also look at how Lebanese immigrants, who do everything under the table to cheat the US government like they do in Lebanon, treat their own fellow Lebanese whom they hire as employees: just like indentured slaves: underpaid, no benefits, work them weekdays ane weekends, no vacations..... And the employee will not disclose this situation to the authorities because he/she is happy making money under the table and not paying taxes. Gas stations, bakeries, "Middle East" or "Mediteranean" restaurants (the Lebanese are ashamed and afraid of calling their restaurants "Lebanese" because they fear they might lose business if their stupid clients found out they were "Arabs" or "Lebanese" (thanks largely to Hezbollah's runining the otherwise good reputation that the earlier Christian Lebanese immigrants built).
In other words, the two cultures, despite the superficial differences, are fundamentally alike. So, to go back to my introduction. Why is it then that, despite those similarities, I still find Lebanon a primitive and backward country? Because if you watch the political stage right now in both countries, you'll find the following:
- In the US, politicians are fighting over the budget deficit. It's a bitter and vicious battle in every way possible, except for one thing: US politicians NEVER fight over the process of government, they never fight over the RULES, over the LAW. Everyone knows what the rules and the laws are, and they just fight over substance and principles, but never fight over the operations of government. Why? Because in this sense Westerners and Americans in particular have constitutions and laws that they respect. Once it is written, you stop arguing and figthting over it every fucking day and at every turn. Maybe every generation or so there is enough critical mass to change one aspect or one article of the constitution or the law... but most years and decades go by without any political fights over HOW to run elections, or HOW to vote over the budget, etc....
- In Lebanon, on the other hand, the fights are never over ideas or principles; they are always about PROCESS. Nothing fundamentally changes in Lebanon in the established principles: All the religious bosses have their comfortable grip on their communities, all the religious orders and schools are raking money from exorbitant tuitions (absent a decent central government), the politicians are all beholden to the religious dinosaurs and engage in every corruption they can get their hands on, protected by the fact that they are the political representattives of the religious dinosaurs, and a life of corruption and dysfunctionality goes on unchallenged for decades and decades, intermittently separated by civil wars, massacres and killings when the religious dinosaurs disagree with one another.... The political fights in Lebanon are ALWAYS about PROCESS: The rules as written in the law and the constitution are constantly being challenged and changed and amended to suit the moment or the criminal in charge. Laws are changed for example for only a window of 24 hours to allow for a politician to purchase a track of public land on the ocean front so he can build his casino or hotel or resort right smack on property owned by the public. Right now, like they do at the elections charade every 4 years, the politicians are fighting over WHICH ELECTORAL LAW to use for the upcoming May 2013 elections. Think about it, we are 2 months aways from the constitutionally mandated elections, and the politicians are debating HOW TO RUN THE ELECTIONS, whether to use the 1960 elections law, or the 1994 elections law, or the Orthodox law, or the Shiite law and on and on... The politicians are NOT fighting over how to convince the electorate to vote for them because they take their electorates for granted. The idiot Lebanese will vote like sheep for the religious fucker that represent them. So if you are an Orthodox idiot from the cave-dwelling brutes of Bteghrine, you will vote for a criminal from the Murr clan regardless of what political program he may have. In fact, he will generally run unchallenged. Similarly, if you are a Shiite fucker from anywhere in Lebanon, you live under the stranglehold of the terror empire of Hezbollah, and you vote without thinking to any representative of Hezbollah they run for you... If you are Maronite retarded peasant from the Metn and Kesrwan you will vote for any idiot from the Gemayel tribe or the Aoun farm regardless of any political program they may have. And the Druse and the Sunnis, no need to repeat the litany... same thing. Jumblatt for the Druse and Hariri for the Sunnis, and the charade is repeated every 4 years at elections time.
That is why, my friends, despite the similarities between the two countries, Lebanon remains a primitive backward country because the written law and the constitution have no value whatsoever, and they are constantly been changed and amended to suit the current jostling of the politicians with complete disregard for the future or long term stability of the country, and in a complete vacuum of ideas and principles that might take the country out of the excrement of the past 50 years of wars, strife, and massacres. The US meanwhile remains a huge disgusting place of materialism where people are herded like "consuming" sheep whose existence is defined from birth to death by how much money they will make and how much of it they will spend buying stuff they don't need from companies that get richer and richer while people get poorer and poorer. Lebanon will remain this tiny asshole of a disgusting country where people are herded and held captive into religious enclaves like sheep led to the slaughter every 20-30 years in religious massacres, and whose lives are defined fom birth to death by which fucking god and which fucking prophet and which fucking saint or mahdi or sheikh or priest they should follow, regardless of whether they have food on their tables or have any stake at all in their future.
Thank you for your attention to this depressing view of things. Unfortunately it is our reality, and no amount of stupid طرب or silly programs on Lebanese TV (which are really disgusting clones of stupid American TV shows) or other entertainement will change that reality. Until we meet at the next religious massacre or bombing or civil war...I have to run switch the generator on (the government-provided 8 hours of electricity per day just went dead), I then have to drive 10 miles up the hills to fill my plastic jerrycans with water from a source which I suspect is as polluted as the water provide once a week by the government, I also have to hurry before the very slow Internet (for which I am paying a lot of money) dies on me....
Sincerely,
Hanibaal Atheos
Let us compare the big cesspool of individualism, consumerism, stupidity, racism, religious intolerance and ignorance called the UNITED STATES, with the small cesspool of individualism, consumerism, stupidity, religious intolerance and ignorance called LEBANON.
Everything you see in the US, you'll see in Lebanon: Poverty, stupid religious beliefs, ignorance of other cultures, racism, happiness found by consuming the latest flashy car, the sleaziest gadget, and looking good so the neighbors have proof of your success..... That is why the emigrant Lebanese who leave this country to go to America succeed very well. Nothing really changes for them. They generally settle in a community surrounding themselves by like-minded idiots; they rarely venture outside their communities to befriend people from other cultures and backgrounds; the Christians go to the local Maronite, Melkite, or Orthodox church or, for the Muslims, the local mosque, and these places of religious intolerance become their social lives. The Lebanese, as idiots as they are, look down with contempt and racism at all the other races and cultures - except the dominat white anglo-saxon one because they are used to kissing the ass of those more powerful than them; it's a survival instinct. Lebanese immigrants in the US see blacks, asians, hispanics and others with utter contempt as though they themselves hail from a superior race and all these other people were scummy worms crawling out of the earth. What they don't realize is that the white anglo-saxon protestants look down on them - the Lebanese - as the last scum on the earth as well. And so it goes.
You should also look at how Lebanese immigrants, who do everything under the table to cheat the US government like they do in Lebanon, treat their own fellow Lebanese whom they hire as employees: just like indentured slaves: underpaid, no benefits, work them weekdays ane weekends, no vacations..... And the employee will not disclose this situation to the authorities because he/she is happy making money under the table and not paying taxes. Gas stations, bakeries, "Middle East" or "Mediteranean" restaurants (the Lebanese are ashamed and afraid of calling their restaurants "Lebanese" because they fear they might lose business if their stupid clients found out they were "Arabs" or "Lebanese" (thanks largely to Hezbollah's runining the otherwise good reputation that the earlier Christian Lebanese immigrants built).
In other words, the two cultures, despite the superficial differences, are fundamentally alike. So, to go back to my introduction. Why is it then that, despite those similarities, I still find Lebanon a primitive and backward country? Because if you watch the political stage right now in both countries, you'll find the following:
- In the US, politicians are fighting over the budget deficit. It's a bitter and vicious battle in every way possible, except for one thing: US politicians NEVER fight over the process of government, they never fight over the RULES, over the LAW. Everyone knows what the rules and the laws are, and they just fight over substance and principles, but never fight over the operations of government. Why? Because in this sense Westerners and Americans in particular have constitutions and laws that they respect. Once it is written, you stop arguing and figthting over it every fucking day and at every turn. Maybe every generation or so there is enough critical mass to change one aspect or one article of the constitution or the law... but most years and decades go by without any political fights over HOW to run elections, or HOW to vote over the budget, etc....
- In Lebanon, on the other hand, the fights are never over ideas or principles; they are always about PROCESS. Nothing fundamentally changes in Lebanon in the established principles: All the religious bosses have their comfortable grip on their communities, all the religious orders and schools are raking money from exorbitant tuitions (absent a decent central government), the politicians are all beholden to the religious dinosaurs and engage in every corruption they can get their hands on, protected by the fact that they are the political representattives of the religious dinosaurs, and a life of corruption and dysfunctionality goes on unchallenged for decades and decades, intermittently separated by civil wars, massacres and killings when the religious dinosaurs disagree with one another.... The political fights in Lebanon are ALWAYS about PROCESS: The rules as written in the law and the constitution are constantly being challenged and changed and amended to suit the moment or the criminal in charge. Laws are changed for example for only a window of 24 hours to allow for a politician to purchase a track of public land on the ocean front so he can build his casino or hotel or resort right smack on property owned by the public. Right now, like they do at the elections charade every 4 years, the politicians are fighting over WHICH ELECTORAL LAW to use for the upcoming May 2013 elections. Think about it, we are 2 months aways from the constitutionally mandated elections, and the politicians are debating HOW TO RUN THE ELECTIONS, whether to use the 1960 elections law, or the 1994 elections law, or the Orthodox law, or the Shiite law and on and on... The politicians are NOT fighting over how to convince the electorate to vote for them because they take their electorates for granted. The idiot Lebanese will vote like sheep for the religious fucker that represent them. So if you are an Orthodox idiot from the cave-dwelling brutes of Bteghrine, you will vote for a criminal from the Murr clan regardless of what political program he may have. In fact, he will generally run unchallenged. Similarly, if you are a Shiite fucker from anywhere in Lebanon, you live under the stranglehold of the terror empire of Hezbollah, and you vote without thinking to any representative of Hezbollah they run for you... If you are Maronite retarded peasant from the Metn and Kesrwan you will vote for any idiot from the Gemayel tribe or the Aoun farm regardless of any political program they may have. And the Druse and the Sunnis, no need to repeat the litany... same thing. Jumblatt for the Druse and Hariri for the Sunnis, and the charade is repeated every 4 years at elections time.
That is why, my friends, despite the similarities between the two countries, Lebanon remains a primitive backward country because the written law and the constitution have no value whatsoever, and they are constantly been changed and amended to suit the current jostling of the politicians with complete disregard for the future or long term stability of the country, and in a complete vacuum of ideas and principles that might take the country out of the excrement of the past 50 years of wars, strife, and massacres. The US meanwhile remains a huge disgusting place of materialism where people are herded like "consuming" sheep whose existence is defined from birth to death by how much money they will make and how much of it they will spend buying stuff they don't need from companies that get richer and richer while people get poorer and poorer. Lebanon will remain this tiny asshole of a disgusting country where people are herded and held captive into religious enclaves like sheep led to the slaughter every 20-30 years in religious massacres, and whose lives are defined fom birth to death by which fucking god and which fucking prophet and which fucking saint or mahdi or sheikh or priest they should follow, regardless of whether they have food on their tables or have any stake at all in their future.
Thank you for your attention to this depressing view of things. Unfortunately it is our reality, and no amount of stupid طرب or silly programs on Lebanese TV (which are really disgusting clones of stupid American TV shows) or other entertainement will change that reality. Until we meet at the next religious massacre or bombing or civil war...I have to run switch the generator on (the government-provided 8 hours of electricity per day just went dead), I then have to drive 10 miles up the hills to fill my plastic jerrycans with water from a source which I suspect is as polluted as the water provide once a week by the government, I also have to hurry before the very slow Internet (for which I am paying a lot of money) dies on me....
Sincerely,
Hanibaal Atheos
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
The Failure of Muslim Lebanon
The Islamic Republic of Lebanon has become desgusting and boring to watch. Everything in it is now ruled by Muslim barbarians, some wearing their turbans but others wearing sharp suits with businesses in the US no less. Because of the transfer of power that has occurred in the past 40 so years from a Christian dominance to a Muslim one, Lebanon has been transformed from a jewel of tourism, tolerance, openness and liberalism to a cesspool of backwardness and Stone Age religious barbarism. This slide from civilization to barbarity was ushered by the rebellion of the Lebanese Sunnis against the State in the 1960s and 1970s, using for fighters the Palestinians of Yasser Arafat and the Druse barbarian mercenaries of Kamal and Walid Jumblatt, to gut down the state and its institutions, culminating in the Taif Agreement that castrated the Christians into their proper place as Dhimmis living off the benevolence of the ruling Muslims.
As a result, Lebanon is today stuck in the muck of religion, feudalism, and mercenary politics that only barbaric Islam can devise, as we see everywhere Islam is the ruling ideology, even in so-called secular Turkey where you will be asked at airports to remove crosses and other religious symbols seen as offensive to Islam. And we are talking about Turkey, European Turkey, the Turkey that was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. We are not talking about Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Malaysia and such other toilets with flourishing Sharia Law.
And today, after the Muslims decimated everything that Christian Lebanon did to elevate the country between the 1920s and the 1960s to a respectable, civilized, prosperous, modern, mutlicultural oasis, the Muslism today continue to ransack the country for every last bit of decency in it. And to add insult to injury, the so-called enlightened Muslims - the Hariri brand of shiny urban Sunnis - claim they and their fat pig leader, feu Rafik Hariri and his billionaire progeny Saad are the ones to have saved and rebuilt Lebanon. With a few refurbished buildings in the downtown that this asshole pilfered from their rightful owners, he also built himself a gigantic fucking Mosque right next to the historic Christian Cathedral as if to spite the Christians and enshrine the switch to a Muslim Lebanon.
For not only did the Muslims of Lebanon claim the ascendancy, but they also are fighting their own barabric wars between Sunnis and Shiites as if to dig the final nail in the coffin of the pathertic religious republic they lord over. And in the process, they are now attacking the Lebanese army, the only remaining institution that has a chance at salvaging the few remaining pieces of the country. Even this otherwise mediocre Lebanese army is today the target of Hariri and his fundamentalist Salafists, thus joining every other jackass from every fundamentalist barbarian outlaw terrorist organization claiming allegiance only to God in desecrating the only multireligious institution in the country.
We all know about Hezbollah's curriculum vitae: Founded by Iran's Pasdaran, it continues its breach of the Taif Agreement by its very extant existence as an illegal paramilitary militia commanded by God and His Deputy in the shantytown of Dahiyeh - the mongrel Hassan Nasrallah - and let us not forget its terrorist network that began its infamous history by kidnapping every westerner in town, by bombing every western embassy and every foreign peacekeeping force, by hijacking a few planes, and by assassinating every other politician, and attacking Jewish targets abroad (Argentina, Bulgaria, etc), dragging Lebanon into devastating wars with Israel just to prove to its paymaster Iran that it is worth the money spent on it....
And now, the Lebanese have to watch the disgusting Sunni barbarians called Salafists and their assorted bearded unmustachioed neanderthals rise to prominence, attack isolated soldiers of the army, bash their skulls with axes, and then have the audacity to appear on television and blamer the army.
I am no religious person, and I hate Christianity as much as I do Islam and Judaism and every stupid cult. But there is no denying the fact that Lebanon in particular, and every other country in general, has a chance to escape the religious cesspool under a Christian dominance than under a Muslim one. The only chance that Lebanon had to secularize like any other civilized country was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but that chance is now gone because under the barbaric Muslims of Hariri and Nasrallah we are headed further back into the Dark Ages of Salafism, both the Sunni brand the Shiite one.
Nothing will make Lebanon a modern covilized country without a demented drive by its young educated people to a secular revolution. A revolution against religions of all sorts. A revolution against the barbarian tyrants - Patriarchs and Muftis and such - who hold us captive in their little enclaves of privileges and wealth while we all struggle with every fiber of our beings and for every little crumb of decent dignity. We have to struggle to go to work. We have to struggle for water. We have to struggle for electricity. We have to struggle with the highest cell phone and internet rates in the world. We have to struggle through asphyxiating pollution....
These are the things we should be fighting for. We should not fight over Hassan and Saad, Michel and Amine, and their children and their political farms. We should be fighting and demanding our basic rights to be truly free from them, free from the fear they have instilled in us, free from their religious myths, free from their religious marriages and religious divorces in which they pilfer us of the little bit of human dignity left in us. This is how it is in truly democractic countries: The human being stands above all other considerations: Above God, above Jesus, above Mohammad, above Moses and Abraham, above priests, sheikhs, muftis, bishops, rabbis, and every fucking title they have invented for themselves, above every politician whether he was born in a shack or in castle in Moukhtara or Bickfaya.....Until the Lebanese understand this fundamental concept, their country is not a democracy and they are not free.
Hanibaal
As a result, Lebanon is today stuck in the muck of religion, feudalism, and mercenary politics that only barbaric Islam can devise, as we see everywhere Islam is the ruling ideology, even in so-called secular Turkey where you will be asked at airports to remove crosses and other religious symbols seen as offensive to Islam. And we are talking about Turkey, European Turkey, the Turkey that was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. We are not talking about Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Malaysia and such other toilets with flourishing Sharia Law.
And today, after the Muslims decimated everything that Christian Lebanon did to elevate the country between the 1920s and the 1960s to a respectable, civilized, prosperous, modern, mutlicultural oasis, the Muslism today continue to ransack the country for every last bit of decency in it. And to add insult to injury, the so-called enlightened Muslims - the Hariri brand of shiny urban Sunnis - claim they and their fat pig leader, feu Rafik Hariri and his billionaire progeny Saad are the ones to have saved and rebuilt Lebanon. With a few refurbished buildings in the downtown that this asshole pilfered from their rightful owners, he also built himself a gigantic fucking Mosque right next to the historic Christian Cathedral as if to spite the Christians and enshrine the switch to a Muslim Lebanon.
For not only did the Muslims of Lebanon claim the ascendancy, but they also are fighting their own barabric wars between Sunnis and Shiites as if to dig the final nail in the coffin of the pathertic religious republic they lord over. And in the process, they are now attacking the Lebanese army, the only remaining institution that has a chance at salvaging the few remaining pieces of the country. Even this otherwise mediocre Lebanese army is today the target of Hariri and his fundamentalist Salafists, thus joining every other jackass from every fundamentalist barbarian outlaw terrorist organization claiming allegiance only to God in desecrating the only multireligious institution in the country.
We all know about Hezbollah's curriculum vitae: Founded by Iran's Pasdaran, it continues its breach of the Taif Agreement by its very extant existence as an illegal paramilitary militia commanded by God and His Deputy in the shantytown of Dahiyeh - the mongrel Hassan Nasrallah - and let us not forget its terrorist network that began its infamous history by kidnapping every westerner in town, by bombing every western embassy and every foreign peacekeeping force, by hijacking a few planes, and by assassinating every other politician, and attacking Jewish targets abroad (Argentina, Bulgaria, etc), dragging Lebanon into devastating wars with Israel just to prove to its paymaster Iran that it is worth the money spent on it....
And now, the Lebanese have to watch the disgusting Sunni barbarians called Salafists and their assorted bearded unmustachioed neanderthals rise to prominence, attack isolated soldiers of the army, bash their skulls with axes, and then have the audacity to appear on television and blamer the army.
I am no religious person, and I hate Christianity as much as I do Islam and Judaism and every stupid cult. But there is no denying the fact that Lebanon in particular, and every other country in general, has a chance to escape the religious cesspool under a Christian dominance than under a Muslim one. The only chance that Lebanon had to secularize like any other civilized country was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but that chance is now gone because under the barbaric Muslims of Hariri and Nasrallah we are headed further back into the Dark Ages of Salafism, both the Sunni brand the Shiite one.
Nothing will make Lebanon a modern covilized country without a demented drive by its young educated people to a secular revolution. A revolution against religions of all sorts. A revolution against the barbarian tyrants - Patriarchs and Muftis and such - who hold us captive in their little enclaves of privileges and wealth while we all struggle with every fiber of our beings and for every little crumb of decent dignity. We have to struggle to go to work. We have to struggle for water. We have to struggle for electricity. We have to struggle with the highest cell phone and internet rates in the world. We have to struggle through asphyxiating pollution....
These are the things we should be fighting for. We should not fight over Hassan and Saad, Michel and Amine, and their children and their political farms. We should be fighting and demanding our basic rights to be truly free from them, free from the fear they have instilled in us, free from their religious myths, free from their religious marriages and religious divorces in which they pilfer us of the little bit of human dignity left in us. This is how it is in truly democractic countries: The human being stands above all other considerations: Above God, above Jesus, above Mohammad, above Moses and Abraham, above priests, sheikhs, muftis, bishops, rabbis, and every fucking title they have invented for themselves, above every politician whether he was born in a shack or in castle in Moukhtara or Bickfaya.....Until the Lebanese understand this fundamental concept, their country is not a democracy and they are not free.
Hanibaal
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
المفتي راس أيري قباني بدأ العدالعكسي في الحرب بين التقدم والتمدن من جهة والجهالة الدينية الرجعية من جهة أخرى. ال
المفتي قباني حس بالسخن - متلو متل البطاركة والمطارنة والشيوخ والأسياد وما إلى هنالك من الخنازير والبجم والدينوزورات القابلة على الإنقراض. حربهم ضد الزواج المدني هي حرب الجاهلين والمجرمين بإسم الدين على العناصر المتمدنة والمثقفة في المجتمع اللبناني التي تعبت من حروبهم ومجازرهم وطائفيتهم وولعهم بالسيطرة على حياتنا.
أرفض الدين وارفض الله واكفر بكل الأديان وبكل الطوائف وبكل الانبياء وابناء الله وامهات الله والقديسين والمهديين و و و .... كلهم.
فليرحلوا إلى جهنم، هم وفتاويهم ومواعظهم المليئة بالكراهية والأحقاد المنقولة من غياهب الدهور ومجاهل العصور البربرية.
فليرحلوا ويحلوا عن طيزنا ويخلونا نعيش متل ما بدنا، ومش متل ما بدّن هني.
خلص. طفح الكيل وطلع دينّا منهم ومن الخرى تبعهم.
إلى الثورة أيها اللبنانوين واللبنانيات ضدهم. حرقوا البلد وقتلونا وهجرونا وما زالوا يتدخلوا في أصغر تفاصيل من حياتنا.
هدفهم السيطرة والمحافظة على مواقعهم المالية والسياسية، ونحن الشعب اللبناني العادي آخر همومهم.
كس أم الإسلام والمسيحية واليهودية
كس ام ألله ومحمد والمسيح وموسى
كس أم كل الرسل والأصحاب والأنبياء والقديسين
كس أم الطائفية والرجعية والبربرية والسلفية والشعوذات الدينية المتخلفة على أشكالها
وايري بكل واحد متل قباني بيوقف ضد تحرر الشعب الببناني من مخالب رجال الدين والطوائف الدينية والمنظمات الدينية
أنا لبناني اولاً واخيراً، وعندي هويتين بس: هويتي اللبنانية وهويتي الإنسانية
أنا خلقت إنسان ولبناني قبل ما أخلق مسيحي او مسلم. التربية الدينية للي بغسلولنا دماغنا فيها هي اللي بتفرقنا وبتبعدنا عن بعضنا وبتجرّنا إلى حروب دينية وطائفية وهمجية واهلية.
خلص. إنتهى العهد البربري القديم وإجا وقت العهد المتنور الجديد.
هانيبعل
Sunday, January 6, 2013
JESUS is a Anti-Lebanese RACIST SOB
Below is the reason why I abandoned my Christian faith long time ago. Not that I will embrace any other religion, because they are all trash and garbage from humanity's ancient past, especially the three so-called "montheistic" religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The fact that they pretend to worship one god does not make them any better than any other religion that worhips two, three or a thousand gods. The entire construct of religion is this human need to explain the world with stories, and is therefore no longer needed now that we understand how to explain the world with reason and science.
The particular story below is straight from the Gospels: It is about how Jesus refused to heal a Phoenician woman during a visit he made to Saida and Sour - because he says he did not come for the Lebanese he called "dogs", but only for the Jewish "masters" of these Lebanese dogs. If one takes the story for what it reallys says, without any convoluted acrobatics about what he might have "really" meant, one cannot but conclude that Jesus, like many fucking Jewish settlers of our time, was a racist son-of-a-bitch Jewish supremacist who wanted to continue the long-standing fallacy of a "chosen people". Worst than that is the attitude of the Phoenician bitch: Sure, she answers the SOB son of God, I am a dog to you Jewish master, as long as you heal my daughter, and that is precisely who, we the Lebanese, continue to be: We open our legs to anyone with a few dollars. Other than that, nothing matters: Dignity, principles...who cares?
Again, I am rejecting Jesus because he was a chauvinist Jewish pig who expressed his Jewish superiority over my Phoenician-Lebanese identity. This does not mean that I am now a fan of fucking Christianity or of fucking Islam, because both of these religions were a reaction to the first piece of trash called Judaism. Even Mohammad, the so-called "Last of the Prophets" who ascended to heaven on a winged horse (yeah, right!), was half-Jewish, half-animist, before he invented his brand of junkyard monotheism. All three religions are the scourge of humanity, having caused so many genocides, crimes, wars, conquests and utter mayhem, pillage and plunder in the name of God, Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Mohammad, etc,....
The Lebanese Christians should, in particular, note that their own national identity - as Phoenicians - was abolished when they became Christians. Their own national language - Aramaic - is today a dead language because of Christianity first, and Islam second. Today - as I discuss in my previous post - the Lebanese have no national identity. It means nothing to be a Lebanese. As Lebanese, we are first Christians or Muslims, we speak the language of our invaders the Muslim Arabs, we are divided and have no idea who we are as a people and what is our place in the world. We live "PENDING" lives, waiting for the entire world to tell us what to do, when to do it, and how to do it: Arabs, Europeans, Americans.... they all know our interest better than we do.
Unless we rebel against our religions, our churches, our feudal bosses, and this entire primtive socio-political construct we call the Lebanese system, we are doomed to live eternally shoddy lives. Right now, we have been living such a shoddy and decrepit life since 1970... That's 40 years, two generations, and what have we got in return? The same criminals rule our political lives. The same criminals rule our religious lives. Our women continue to live like cattle. Our children continue to emigrate. The country is running out of air from the pollution, out of space from the cars and a fatal mecantilism and consumerism. We are ashamed of our traditions, and we crawl on our knees in our desperate attempts to imitate others in what we eat, what we drink, what we drive, how we think. I told you, we have no identity. We don;t know who we are. We are the perfect prostitute: Holy and Pure and Virgin on one side. Filthy, Slutty and Whorish on the other. Ahlan wa sahlan to anyone who will throw a few dollars in our face. Pathetic. Fuck this country for what it has become, and fuck Jesus the Jewish racist son-of-a-bitch
Hanibaal
_____________________________________________
21 En quittant cet endroit, Jésus se rendit dans la région de Tyr et de Sidon. 22 Et une femme cananéenne, qui venait de ces quartiers, s'écria, et lui dit: Seigneur, fils de David! aie pitié de moi! ma fille est misérablement tourmentée par le démon. 23 Mais il ne lui répondit rien. Et ses disciples, s'étant approchés, le prièrent, en disant: Renvoie-la, car elle crie après nous. 24 Et il répondit: Je ne suis envoyé qu'aux brebis perdues de la maison d'Israël. 25 Mais elle vint, et se prosterna, en disant: Seigneur! aide-moi. 26 Il lui répondit: Il n'est pas juste de prendre le pain des enfants pour le jeter aux chiens. 27 Mais elle dit: Il est vrai, Seigneur! cependant les chiens mangent des miettes qui tombent de la table de leurs maîtres. 28 Alors Jésus, répondant, lui dit: O femme! ta foi est grande; qu'il te soit fait comme tu le désires. Et à cette heure même sa fille fut guérie.
24 Jésus partit de là et se rendit dans la région de Tyr. Il entra dans une maison; il ne voulait pas qu'on sache qu'il était là, mais il ne put cacher sa présence. 25 En effet, à peine était-il arrivé, qu'une femme, qui avait entendu parler de lui et dont la fillette était sous l'emprise d'un esprit mauvais, vint se jeter à ses pieds. 26 C'était une femme païenne, originaire de Syro-Phénicie. Elle le supplia de chasser le démon qui tourmentait sa fille. 27 Jésus lui dit: Laisse d'abord se rassasier les enfants de la maison. Car il ne serait pas convenable de prendre le pain des enfants pour le jeter aux chiens. 28 Sans doute, Seigneur, reprit-elle, mais les chiens qui sont sous la table mangent les miettes que laissent tomber les enfants. 29 Et Jésus de répondre: A cause de cette parole, va, retourne chez toi, le démon vient de sortir de ta fille. 30 Elle rentra chez elle et trouva son enfant couchée sur le lit: le démon était parti.
The particular story below is straight from the Gospels: It is about how Jesus refused to heal a Phoenician woman during a visit he made to Saida and Sour - because he says he did not come for the Lebanese he called "dogs", but only for the Jewish "masters" of these Lebanese dogs. If one takes the story for what it reallys says, without any convoluted acrobatics about what he might have "really" meant, one cannot but conclude that Jesus, like many fucking Jewish settlers of our time, was a racist son-of-a-bitch Jewish supremacist who wanted to continue the long-standing fallacy of a "chosen people". Worst than that is the attitude of the Phoenician bitch: Sure, she answers the SOB son of God, I am a dog to you Jewish master, as long as you heal my daughter, and that is precisely who, we the Lebanese, continue to be: We open our legs to anyone with a few dollars. Other than that, nothing matters: Dignity, principles...who cares?
Again, I am rejecting Jesus because he was a chauvinist Jewish pig who expressed his Jewish superiority over my Phoenician-Lebanese identity. This does not mean that I am now a fan of fucking Christianity or of fucking Islam, because both of these religions were a reaction to the first piece of trash called Judaism. Even Mohammad, the so-called "Last of the Prophets" who ascended to heaven on a winged horse (yeah, right!), was half-Jewish, half-animist, before he invented his brand of junkyard monotheism. All three religions are the scourge of humanity, having caused so many genocides, crimes, wars, conquests and utter mayhem, pillage and plunder in the name of God, Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Mohammad, etc,....
The Lebanese Christians should, in particular, note that their own national identity - as Phoenicians - was abolished when they became Christians. Their own national language - Aramaic - is today a dead language because of Christianity first, and Islam second. Today - as I discuss in my previous post - the Lebanese have no national identity. It means nothing to be a Lebanese. As Lebanese, we are first Christians or Muslims, we speak the language of our invaders the Muslim Arabs, we are divided and have no idea who we are as a people and what is our place in the world. We live "PENDING" lives, waiting for the entire world to tell us what to do, when to do it, and how to do it: Arabs, Europeans, Americans.... they all know our interest better than we do.
Unless we rebel against our religions, our churches, our feudal bosses, and this entire primtive socio-political construct we call the Lebanese system, we are doomed to live eternally shoddy lives. Right now, we have been living such a shoddy and decrepit life since 1970... That's 40 years, two generations, and what have we got in return? The same criminals rule our political lives. The same criminals rule our religious lives. Our women continue to live like cattle. Our children continue to emigrate. The country is running out of air from the pollution, out of space from the cars and a fatal mecantilism and consumerism. We are ashamed of our traditions, and we crawl on our knees in our desperate attempts to imitate others in what we eat, what we drink, what we drive, how we think. I told you, we have no identity. We don;t know who we are. We are the perfect prostitute: Holy and Pure and Virgin on one side. Filthy, Slutty and Whorish on the other. Ahlan wa sahlan to anyone who will throw a few dollars in our face. Pathetic. Fuck this country for what it has become, and fuck Jesus the Jewish racist son-of-a-bitch
Hanibaal
_____________________________________________
Matthew – Matthieu – متّى - 15:21-28
21 Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.23 But he answered her not a word. And his disciples came and besought him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth after us.24 But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.25 Then came she and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me.26 But he answered and said, It is not right to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs. 27 And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table.28 Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her daughter was made whole from that very hour.21 En quittant cet endroit, Jésus se rendit dans la région de Tyr et de Sidon. 22 Et une femme cananéenne, qui venait de ces quartiers, s'écria, et lui dit: Seigneur, fils de David! aie pitié de moi! ma fille est misérablement tourmentée par le démon. 23 Mais il ne lui répondit rien. Et ses disciples, s'étant approchés, le prièrent, en disant: Renvoie-la, car elle crie après nous. 24 Et il répondit: Je ne suis envoyé qu'aux brebis perdues de la maison d'Israël. 25 Mais elle vint, et se prosterna, en disant: Seigneur! aide-moi. 26 Il lui répondit: Il n'est pas juste de prendre le pain des enfants pour le jeter aux chiens. 27 Mais elle dit: Il est vrai, Seigneur! cependant les chiens mangent des miettes qui tombent de la table de leurs maîtres. 28 Alors Jésus, répondant, lui dit: O femme! ta foi est grande; qu'il te soit fait comme tu le désires. Et à cette heure même sa fille fut guérie.
21ثُمَّ خَرَجَ يَسُوعُ مِنْ
هُنَاكَ وَانْصَرَفَ إِلَى نَوَاحِي صُورَ وَصَيْدَا. 22وَإِذَا
امْرَأَةٌ كَنْعَانِيَّةٌ خَارِجَةٌ مِنْ تِلْكَ التُّخُومِ صَرَخَتْ إِلَيْهِ
قَائِلَةً:«ارْحَمْنِي، يَا سَيِّدُ، يَا ابْنَ دَاوُدَ! اِبْنَتِي مَجْنُونَةٌ
جِدًّا». 23فَلَمْ يُجِبْهَا بِكَلِمَةٍ. فَتَقَدَّمَ تَلاَمِيذُهُ
وَطَلَبُوا إِلَيْهِ قَائِلِينَ:«اصْرِفْهَا، لأَنَّهَا تَصِيحُ وَرَاءَنَا!» 24فَأَجَابَ
وَقَالَ:«لَمْ أُرْسَلْ إِلاَّ إِلَى خِرَافِ بَيْتِ إِسْرَائِيلَ الضَّالَّةِ». 25فَأَتَتْ
وَسَجَدَتْ لَهُ قَائِلَةً:«يَا سَيِّدُ، أَعِنِّي!» 26فَأَجَابَ
وَقَالَ:«لَيْسَ حَسَنًا أَنْ يُؤْخَذَ خُبْزُ الْبَنِينَ وَيُطْرَحَ لِلْكِلاَب».
27فَقَالَتْ:«نَعَمْ، يَا سَيِّدُ! وَالْكِلاَبُ أَيْضًا تَأْكُلُ مِنَ
الْفُتَاتِ الَّذِي يَسْقُطُ مِنْ مَائِدَةِ أَرْبَابِهَا!». 28حِينَئِذٍ
أَجَابَ يَسُوعُ وَقَالَ لَهَا: «يَا امْرَأَةُ، عَظِيمٌ إِيمَانُكِ! لِيَكُنْ
لَكِ كَمَا تُرِيدِينَ». فَشُفِيَتِ ابْنَتُهَا مِنْ تِلْكَ السَّاعَةِ.
Mark – Marc – مرقس - 7: 24-30
24 Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. 25 In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an impure spirit came and fell at his feet. 26 The woman was a Greek, a Syro-Phoenician by birth. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter. 27 But Jesus said unto her “Let the children eat first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” 28 “But Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 29 Then he told her, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.” 30 She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.24 Jésus partit de là et se rendit dans la région de Tyr. Il entra dans une maison; il ne voulait pas qu'on sache qu'il était là, mais il ne put cacher sa présence. 25 En effet, à peine était-il arrivé, qu'une femme, qui avait entendu parler de lui et dont la fillette était sous l'emprise d'un esprit mauvais, vint se jeter à ses pieds. 26 C'était une femme païenne, originaire de Syro-Phénicie. Elle le supplia de chasser le démon qui tourmentait sa fille. 27 Jésus lui dit: Laisse d'abord se rassasier les enfants de la maison. Car il ne serait pas convenable de prendre le pain des enfants pour le jeter aux chiens. 28 Sans doute, Seigneur, reprit-elle, mais les chiens qui sont sous la table mangent les miettes que laissent tomber les enfants. 29 Et Jésus de répondre: A cause de cette parole, va, retourne chez toi, le démon vient de sortir de ta fille. 30 Elle rentra chez elle et trouva son enfant couchée sur le lit: le démon était parti.
24ثُمَّ قَامَ مِنْ هُنَاكَ وَمَضَى
إِلَى تُخُومِ صُورََ، وَدَخَلَ بَيْتًا وَهُوَ يُرِيدُ أَنْ لاَ يَعْلَمَ أَحَدٌ،
فَلَمْ يَقْدِرْ أَنْ يَخْتَفِيَ، 25لأَنَّ امْرَأَةً كَانَ
بِابْنَتِهَا رُوحٌ نَجِسٌ سَمِعَتْ بِهِ، فَأَتَتْ وَخَرَّتْ عِنْدَ قَدَمَيْهِ. 26وَكَانَتْ
الامْرَأَةُ أُمَمِيَّةً، وَفِي جِنْسِهَا فِينِيقِيَّةً سُورِيَّةً. فَسَأَلَتْهُ
أَنْ يُخْرِجَ الشَّيْطَانَ مِنِ ابْنَتِهَا. 27وَأَمَّا يَسُوعُ
فَقَالَ لَهَا:«دَعِي الْبَنِينَ أَوَّلاً يَشْبَعُونَ، لأَنَّهُ لَيْسَ حَسَنًا
أَنْ يُؤْخَذَ خُبْزُ الْبَنِينَ وَيُطْرَحَ لِلْكِلاَبِ». 28فَأَجَابَتْ
وَقَالَتْ لَهُ:«نَعَمْ، يَا سَيِّدُ! وَالْكِلاَبُ أَيْضًا تَحْتَ الْمَائِدَةِ
تَأْكُلُ مِنْ فُتَاتِ الْبَنِينَ!». 29فَقَالَ لَهَا:«لأَجْلِ هذِهِ
الْكَلِمَةِ، اذْهَبِي. قَدْ خَرَجَ الشَّيْطَانُ مِنِ ابْنَتِكِ». 30فَذَهَبَتْ
إِلَى بَيْتِهَا وَوَجَدَتِ الشَّيْطَانَ قَدْ خَرَجَ، وَالابْنَةَ مَطْرُوحَةً
عَلَى الْفِرَاشِ.
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
A Tale of Two Lebanons
No one will deny the fact that there are two Lebanons. There is a Christian
Lebanon and there is a Muslim Lebanon. Historically, the entity we call Lebanon
today went through several shifts over time that included, for the purposes of
this commentary, the Phoenician phase, which was then replaced by the
Greek-Hellenic phase and its heir to Mediterranean power, the Roman Empire,
followed by a Christian phase (after Constantine declared Christianity the
empire's official religion), and finally a Muslim phase after the Arab-Islamic
conquest and its subsidiaries (Mameluks, Ottoman Turks), leading to the birth
of modern Lebanon a little more than a century ago.
Prior to the Greek-Roman Empire, Phoenician Lebanon was an assortment of powerful city-states (Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, Tripoli, etc.) whose unity and disunity ebbed and flowed according to the occupying power of the moment. Under the Greeks (Alexander the Great circa 330 BC), then the Romans (circa 64 BC), the cities maintained their separate local identities under the aegis of Athens and Rome. When Christianity was born under the Roman Empire, the Lebanese entity transitioned from a Phoenician-Roman province into a Roman-Christian entity. This transitional phase during which Lebanon changed from a purely Phoenician to a Greco-Roman and then to a Christian identity is best exemplified by the Roman city of Baalbek-Heliopolis in which all writings are in three scripts: Aramaic, Greek and Latin.
Roman Lebanon can still be seen everywhere in the country, including Baalbek and other places, but foremost of which is downtown Beirut where the Roman remains of the city now stand buried under the Christian Cathedral of St. George and, right next to it, the monstrous Mosque that the merchant Rafik Hariri built in the mid-1990s as if to deliberately dwarf the Cathedral, humiliate the Christians of Lebanon, and assert a preeminent Muslim identity to Beirut.
The point of this commentary is to raise what I consider a central question regarding the national identity of the Lebanese: The two Lebanons that co-exist today are based on religious identity. A Lebanese national identity does not really exist, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or living an illusion. We must confront ourselves before we can confront the world. This unresolved national identity remains the Achilles heel of the state of Lebanon and is the most fundamental parameter that is preventing the state from becoming a nation.
In the course of the change from a Roman to a Christian entity, the province of Mount Lebanon followed the trend unleashed around the Mediterranean by the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD. Monks and proselytizers in Lebanon and in Syria (St. Maroun), in Armenia (St. Vartan), in Ireland (St. Patrick), and others developed their own local followings that evolved into local religious denominations or churches. Oftentimes, this new religious identity dominated but did not eradicate the pre-existing national identity. Armenians are in their vast majority Christians, but they remained Armenians and the two identities, the religious and the national worked well together. Armenians have a country called Armenia, a separate language, and are Christians. Similarly, the Irish did not lose their Irish-Celtic identity upon becoming Christians: Today, the Irish are proud of their pre-Christian Celtic heritage, they speak both Gaelic AND English, and are staunch Christians (Catholic for the most part, though some were later converted to Protestantism by the English occupation).
Yet, something happened in Lebanon - and it is hard for me to decipher the exact moment or the factors driving this evolution - that made the Lebanese shed their Phoenician identity upon becoming Christians during the 5th century AD. Was it the Romans whose imposition of Christianity was so oppressive that the Lebanese were forced to abandon their Phoenician heritage, instead of blending it with their new Christian identity? Or did this phenomenon really happen later when the Arab-Muslim occupation took place in the 8th century and beyond? I believe that both these factors played a role, but most importantly, in my opinion, it was the fault of the Maronite Church (which came to dominate the Christian identity of the Lebanese) for leading the Lebanese into abandoning their Phoenician national identity, instead of a smooth and harmonious convergent evolution between a Phoenician national identity and a Christian religious identity.
The reason is that Lebanon is in the East, more so than Armenia, and much more so obviously than Ireland. In the East - as one can see with the history of the Jewish people and the Arab-Muslims today, religious identity trumps national identity. One is Jewish before anything else, and one is Muslim before anything else. For the Lebanese, and the Maronite Church in particular, it was essential to destroy the Phoenician identity and replace it with the Christian identity. The arrival of the Arab-Muslims exacerbated this proclivity to denounce nationalism to the advantage of religious identity, and somewhere by the 7th-8th century, the Phoenician identity, which had survived intact under the Romans, disappeared, and the Lebanese became Christians and lost all the attributes of a national Phoenician identity. I will agree with those who argue that this phenomenon was slower than I am proposing, lasting well into the 16th and 17th centuries, but the fact is that the Maronite Church, to this date, will reject taking second seat to a Phoenician-Lebanese identity.
The matter of the language, for instance, is the best exemplar of that evolution. Even as our national language - Aramaic (today surviving under the name of Syriac) - continues to be used in cryptic liturgies in the churches, it is a language that is not taught in the schools and is basically a dying language in the last throes of its demise, just as Latin died at some point in European history. The Maronite Church does not teach the national language, as for instance the Irish Church encourages the teaching of Gaelic as a national language. When Vatican II "liberated" the churches from the Latin dogma, the Maronite Church began using Arabic instead of Aramaic-Syriac in its liturgy. This was either a deliberate action aimed at cavorting to the Arabs and Muslims, or it was a deliberate action to prevent a national identity from re-asserting itself over a religious one, or it may also have been an ignorant move on the part of a Church that no longer knows what it is doing, worried only to preserve the power it holds over its even more ignorant flock. Vatican II occurred at the height of the resurgence of Phoenician patriotism, beginning after World War I and competing with other national identities (Arabs, Turks, National-Syrian, etc.), and exemplified by such poets and intellectuals as Charles Corm, Charles Malik, Saiid Akl and others...
While my proposal is not an academic one, based on elemental research, it is a thesis that needs to be pursued in order to understand the central question of why can't the Lebanese develop a national identity that is separate from, and not subservient to, the multiple religious identities that have prevented the rise of a strong nation-state called Lebanon. We remain mired in our pathetic religious fights for a seat in parliament or a portfolio in a cabinet, while the country is drifting and retrogressing into a dysfunctional failed state, without any cohesive bond.
I ask:
- Why can the Egyptians be proud of their Pharaonic past without seeing in it a conflict with the Muslim and Coptic identity of today?
- Why can the Israelis build a functional nation-state in which modern agnostics, fundamentalist Jews, and Palestinian Arabs operate under an Israeli national identity?
- Why can the Irish be staunch nationalists, devout Christians, speak and write English better than the English themselves, and yet teach and speak their national Gaelic language and still practice their Druidic national rituals without being accused of being traitors?
- Why can't the Lebanese embrace their glorious Phoenician past, revive their Aramaic-Syriac language as a national spoken language (like the Iraqi Chaldeans do who still speak today their national Chaldean language alongside Arabic), and develop a sense of nationalism that is unique to them (and not live the fallacy of a so-called "Arab world" whose only common attribute is a dead language called Arabic that no one speaks natively but which is artificially maintained alive by force of religious Islamic oppression)?
The Maronite Church stands accused of having killed Lebanese nationalism / Phoenician / Aramaic / identity for two reasons: 1) to cavort to the Arabs and the Muslims, and play the good Dhimmi Christian community; and 2) to prevent a national Phoenician identity from diminishing the religious Christian identity which the Church uses to maintain its hold on power.
We, the Lebanese, don't know who we are today. Our definition of ourselves as Christian Lebanese or Druze Lebanese or Muslim Lebanese is a virus that is preventing the country from evolving into a functional nation-state. We need identity attributes that bind us all together, not separate us with savage pogroms and massacres every one or two generations.
Hanibaal
Prior to the Greek-Roman Empire, Phoenician Lebanon was an assortment of powerful city-states (Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, Tripoli, etc.) whose unity and disunity ebbed and flowed according to the occupying power of the moment. Under the Greeks (Alexander the Great circa 330 BC), then the Romans (circa 64 BC), the cities maintained their separate local identities under the aegis of Athens and Rome. When Christianity was born under the Roman Empire, the Lebanese entity transitioned from a Phoenician-Roman province into a Roman-Christian entity. This transitional phase during which Lebanon changed from a purely Phoenician to a Greco-Roman and then to a Christian identity is best exemplified by the Roman city of Baalbek-Heliopolis in which all writings are in three scripts: Aramaic, Greek and Latin.
Roman Lebanon can still be seen everywhere in the country, including Baalbek and other places, but foremost of which is downtown Beirut where the Roman remains of the city now stand buried under the Christian Cathedral of St. George and, right next to it, the monstrous Mosque that the merchant Rafik Hariri built in the mid-1990s as if to deliberately dwarf the Cathedral, humiliate the Christians of Lebanon, and assert a preeminent Muslim identity to Beirut.
The point of this commentary is to raise what I consider a central question regarding the national identity of the Lebanese: The two Lebanons that co-exist today are based on religious identity. A Lebanese national identity does not really exist, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or living an illusion. We must confront ourselves before we can confront the world. This unresolved national identity remains the Achilles heel of the state of Lebanon and is the most fundamental parameter that is preventing the state from becoming a nation.
In the course of the change from a Roman to a Christian entity, the province of Mount Lebanon followed the trend unleashed around the Mediterranean by the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD. Monks and proselytizers in Lebanon and in Syria (St. Maroun), in Armenia (St. Vartan), in Ireland (St. Patrick), and others developed their own local followings that evolved into local religious denominations or churches. Oftentimes, this new religious identity dominated but did not eradicate the pre-existing national identity. Armenians are in their vast majority Christians, but they remained Armenians and the two identities, the religious and the national worked well together. Armenians have a country called Armenia, a separate language, and are Christians. Similarly, the Irish did not lose their Irish-Celtic identity upon becoming Christians: Today, the Irish are proud of their pre-Christian Celtic heritage, they speak both Gaelic AND English, and are staunch Christians (Catholic for the most part, though some were later converted to Protestantism by the English occupation).
Yet, something happened in Lebanon - and it is hard for me to decipher the exact moment or the factors driving this evolution - that made the Lebanese shed their Phoenician identity upon becoming Christians during the 5th century AD. Was it the Romans whose imposition of Christianity was so oppressive that the Lebanese were forced to abandon their Phoenician heritage, instead of blending it with their new Christian identity? Or did this phenomenon really happen later when the Arab-Muslim occupation took place in the 8th century and beyond? I believe that both these factors played a role, but most importantly, in my opinion, it was the fault of the Maronite Church (which came to dominate the Christian identity of the Lebanese) for leading the Lebanese into abandoning their Phoenician national identity, instead of a smooth and harmonious convergent evolution between a Phoenician national identity and a Christian religious identity.
The reason is that Lebanon is in the East, more so than Armenia, and much more so obviously than Ireland. In the East - as one can see with the history of the Jewish people and the Arab-Muslims today, religious identity trumps national identity. One is Jewish before anything else, and one is Muslim before anything else. For the Lebanese, and the Maronite Church in particular, it was essential to destroy the Phoenician identity and replace it with the Christian identity. The arrival of the Arab-Muslims exacerbated this proclivity to denounce nationalism to the advantage of religious identity, and somewhere by the 7th-8th century, the Phoenician identity, which had survived intact under the Romans, disappeared, and the Lebanese became Christians and lost all the attributes of a national Phoenician identity. I will agree with those who argue that this phenomenon was slower than I am proposing, lasting well into the 16th and 17th centuries, but the fact is that the Maronite Church, to this date, will reject taking second seat to a Phoenician-Lebanese identity.
The matter of the language, for instance, is the best exemplar of that evolution. Even as our national language - Aramaic (today surviving under the name of Syriac) - continues to be used in cryptic liturgies in the churches, it is a language that is not taught in the schools and is basically a dying language in the last throes of its demise, just as Latin died at some point in European history. The Maronite Church does not teach the national language, as for instance the Irish Church encourages the teaching of Gaelic as a national language. When Vatican II "liberated" the churches from the Latin dogma, the Maronite Church began using Arabic instead of Aramaic-Syriac in its liturgy. This was either a deliberate action aimed at cavorting to the Arabs and Muslims, or it was a deliberate action to prevent a national identity from re-asserting itself over a religious one, or it may also have been an ignorant move on the part of a Church that no longer knows what it is doing, worried only to preserve the power it holds over its even more ignorant flock. Vatican II occurred at the height of the resurgence of Phoenician patriotism, beginning after World War I and competing with other national identities (Arabs, Turks, National-Syrian, etc.), and exemplified by such poets and intellectuals as Charles Corm, Charles Malik, Saiid Akl and others...
While my proposal is not an academic one, based on elemental research, it is a thesis that needs to be pursued in order to understand the central question of why can't the Lebanese develop a national identity that is separate from, and not subservient to, the multiple religious identities that have prevented the rise of a strong nation-state called Lebanon. We remain mired in our pathetic religious fights for a seat in parliament or a portfolio in a cabinet, while the country is drifting and retrogressing into a dysfunctional failed state, without any cohesive bond.
I ask:
- Why can the Egyptians be proud of their Pharaonic past without seeing in it a conflict with the Muslim and Coptic identity of today?
- Why can the Israelis build a functional nation-state in which modern agnostics, fundamentalist Jews, and Palestinian Arabs operate under an Israeli national identity?
- Why can the Irish be staunch nationalists, devout Christians, speak and write English better than the English themselves, and yet teach and speak their national Gaelic language and still practice their Druidic national rituals without being accused of being traitors?
- Why can't the Lebanese embrace their glorious Phoenician past, revive their Aramaic-Syriac language as a national spoken language (like the Iraqi Chaldeans do who still speak today their national Chaldean language alongside Arabic), and develop a sense of nationalism that is unique to them (and not live the fallacy of a so-called "Arab world" whose only common attribute is a dead language called Arabic that no one speaks natively but which is artificially maintained alive by force of religious Islamic oppression)?
The Maronite Church stands accused of having killed Lebanese nationalism / Phoenician / Aramaic / identity for two reasons: 1) to cavort to the Arabs and the Muslims, and play the good Dhimmi Christian community; and 2) to prevent a national Phoenician identity from diminishing the religious Christian identity which the Church uses to maintain its hold on power.
We, the Lebanese, don't know who we are today. Our definition of ourselves as Christian Lebanese or Druze Lebanese or Muslim Lebanese is a virus that is preventing the country from evolving into a functional nation-state. We need identity attributes that bind us all together, not separate us with savage pogroms and massacres every one or two generations.
Hanibaal
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
What the Egyptian People Know
As a Lebanese, I bow to the Egyptian people because, among all Arabs, they are the only ones to have finally gotten what democracy is about, what it takes to dismantle centuries of backwardness, and most of all, they really know what they want of a new life.
Not only is Morsi a legitimately elected President, but he was elected on the heels of a bloody revolution that toppled a dictator like so many others in the Arab world. Yet, the Egyptian people's reaction to his usurping power, like any dictator would do, was to go back to the street. Not to let him get away and turn the clock back. Not compromise on those principles they viscerally understand. The Egyptian people are by far superior or ahead of us Lebanese sheep led to the slaughter every generation or so, trampled like corpses by our elected and unelected "leaders". Leaders we elect as if we were brainwashed prisoners. Religious neanderthals who dictate our daily lives and to whom we defer, as if we were the half-human, half-animal creatures sewn together by Dr. Moreau, and they were Dr. moreau himself.
We the Lebanese are like injured animals, like trapped animals. We live in our corners, subdued, content with processing our metabolic functions but without having any human aspiration beyond our basic needs of water, food, electricity.... that the "leaders" dole out to us in installments. Once in a while, when the torture becomes unbearable and when we have flashbacks to the days, long time ago, when we knew freedom, then and only then we erupt in violent outbreaks to try to bite the hands that feed us. But then, quickly, we are taken back to our conditions of prisoners, of a people brutalized by decades of atrocities by the same leaders who were warlords and criminals back then and are now MPs and Ministers and Speakers and Presidents. We cower back to our corners and resume our lives of an indentured enslaved people of serfs.
We have elections. That is the only semblance of democracy that we have. But, we don't know how to use it to good purpose. We re-elect the very same monsters that rule over the lives because we are tribal, we are sectarian, we are deeply primitive without even knowing it.
The Egyptian people are much much much more free and aware of their present and their future than we are. Perhaps living under the Mubarak dictatorship was not as brutalizing as living 40 years of Syrian, Israeli, Saudi, Iranian, Palestinian, and yes, Lebanese militias and terror organizations waging wars against us, on our own streets, in our homes, killing our children and dispersing the undead among them to the far corners of the earth. Perhaps the Egyptians have never endured what we have endured. But they know much better than us what it takes to reclaim the true freedom, the true dignity of what it is to be a human being before being anything else, before being Lebanese, before being Muslim, Christian or some other fucking religion. They know and we don't. They see and we are blind. They are already free, and we are still trapped in our cages.
When will we ever learn?
Hanibaal
Not only is Morsi a legitimately elected President, but he was elected on the heels of a bloody revolution that toppled a dictator like so many others in the Arab world. Yet, the Egyptian people's reaction to his usurping power, like any dictator would do, was to go back to the street. Not to let him get away and turn the clock back. Not compromise on those principles they viscerally understand. The Egyptian people are by far superior or ahead of us Lebanese sheep led to the slaughter every generation or so, trampled like corpses by our elected and unelected "leaders". Leaders we elect as if we were brainwashed prisoners. Religious neanderthals who dictate our daily lives and to whom we defer, as if we were the half-human, half-animal creatures sewn together by Dr. Moreau, and they were Dr. moreau himself.
We the Lebanese are like injured animals, like trapped animals. We live in our corners, subdued, content with processing our metabolic functions but without having any human aspiration beyond our basic needs of water, food, electricity.... that the "leaders" dole out to us in installments. Once in a while, when the torture becomes unbearable and when we have flashbacks to the days, long time ago, when we knew freedom, then and only then we erupt in violent outbreaks to try to bite the hands that feed us. But then, quickly, we are taken back to our conditions of prisoners, of a people brutalized by decades of atrocities by the same leaders who were warlords and criminals back then and are now MPs and Ministers and Speakers and Presidents. We cower back to our corners and resume our lives of an indentured enslaved people of serfs.
We have elections. That is the only semblance of democracy that we have. But, we don't know how to use it to good purpose. We re-elect the very same monsters that rule over the lives because we are tribal, we are sectarian, we are deeply primitive without even knowing it.
The Egyptian people are much much much more free and aware of their present and their future than we are. Perhaps living under the Mubarak dictatorship was not as brutalizing as living 40 years of Syrian, Israeli, Saudi, Iranian, Palestinian, and yes, Lebanese militias and terror organizations waging wars against us, on our own streets, in our homes, killing our children and dispersing the undead among them to the far corners of the earth. Perhaps the Egyptians have never endured what we have endured. But they know much better than us what it takes to reclaim the true freedom, the true dignity of what it is to be a human being before being anything else, before being Lebanese, before being Muslim, Christian or some other fucking religion. They know and we don't. They see and we are blind. They are already free, and we are still trapped in our cages.
When will we ever learn?
Hanibaal
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Time To Re-Arm in Lebanon
Everybody knows that in Lebanon every sect is armed or is re-arming. Ever since the Sunni-led governments of Rafik Hariri allowed Hezbollah to retain its weapons after Taef in 1989 under the charade of "resistance", the imbalance of power in Lebanon has been unsettling to say the least.
At the time, around the 1990s, Syria controlled Lebanon with its military and intelligence occupation, and allowing Heabollah to retain its weapons and run around free to "resist" as it pleased was one way for the Syrians to keep the Lebanese on a short leash.
Now that the Syrians have gone, the "resistance" charade has been uncovered for what it is - namely an Iranian occupation instead of a Syrian one - the time has come for the Lebanese to come clean on one fact: No one has completely disarmed. Not the Palestinians. Not the Sunnis. Not the Christians. And definitely not the Shiites. But of all these groups, only the Christians have kept their word and not used their weapons on the streets. Every protest or demonstration or street clashes or attempt at a power grab or challenges to the central authority was conducted by armed Muslims, including family gangs and smugglers, but never by Christians whose protests never include the use of weapons.
As events in the region are moving toward an escalation, it is time to stop the hypocrisy. The Christian militias should declare their level of arming and come out publicly stating that they too want to "resist" and defend their sect. Instead of playing poodles to the Sunnis (Geagea and Gemayel) and the Shiites (Aoun), the Christians should open training camps, recruit, and arm themselves because the 12th hour is fast appraoching. Cornered by a weakened Iran and Syrian regimes, Hezbollah is likely to engage in suicidal and openly confrontational politics that include military operations against other sects and groups in the country. For example, the current flare-up in Gaza is very likely to draw Hezbollah's 40,000 missiles pointed at Israel from South Lebanon, or even Syria's Assad. Both these parties have seen their base and ideological premises eroded by the Syrian revolution and a weakened Iran, and are therefore likely to see the current situation as a life-saving opportunity from which to regain the upper hand on the claim of fighting the "enemy".
But within Lebanon, nothing less than justice and fairness should drive the process of public re-arming by all groups. If the Islamic fundamentalists of the Sunni camp, the Alawites of Tripoli, the Shiites of Hezbollah and Amal, the pro-Syrian Palestinian terrorists, and every other garbage group or terrorist organization that the weak Lebanese government continues to allow to operate on its soil, if all these people can arm and engage in military confrontations that threaten stability and the progress of Lebanese society toward a modern State (rather than the decrepit sectarian division of power that has paralyzed the country for 4 decades), then the Christians have an equal right to do the same, and they might as well re-arm and be public about it.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the Christian militias (and their own resistance against Syrians, Palestinians, Islamic fundamentalists etc) were blamed for everything that happened in the country. Every son of a bitch in Europe, the United States and other jackass Westerners pitied the "poor" Palestinian refugees of Yaser Arafat who were burning Lebanon to the ground, or pitied the "Dispossessed" Shiites assholes of Hassan Nasrallah because they bore the brunt of Israeli retailations against the PLO in the south, or found reasonable the Syrian pretext of wanting to protect its flank by invading and occupying Lebanon, .... Now, 40 years later, the Shiites have dispossessed everyone else, have seized power in Lebanon and run the country as an Iranian province. The Palestinians remain armed and shelter more radicalized Al-Qaeda inspired Sunni fundamentalist terror organizations. The Sunnis have the ultimate political power in their holding the Premiership but have been weak and cowardly by not divorcing themselves from the Arab nationalist platform that has devastated Lebanon. But the Chrisitians have played by the rules since 1990, acting exclusively through the political process and not by military means, which has caused them to be sidelined and become irrelevant, at the risk of disappearing not only from the political map but also from the demographic map as thousands of young Christians continue to emigrate in a country that no longer tolerates them.
What did the Christians get in return of their playing by the rules? Assassinations of their political leadership; terrorist bombings such as the latest one in the heart of Christian East Beirut; loss of political power because it is not backed up by military power. Enough is enough. If the Muslims of Lebanon are not going to move away from terror, military solutions, and reliance on outside actors, and engage in a civilized political process, then the Christians will have to, sooner rather than later, return to the military logic of defending themselves and protect one of the last Christian strongholds still standing in the Middle East, with Syria and Iraq having lost most of their Christian population to killlings and emigration. Lebanon stands to be the next country to be fully de-Christianized if currents events maintain their momentum. Time for the Christians to re-arm and not be ashamed of it.
Hanibaal
At the time, around the 1990s, Syria controlled Lebanon with its military and intelligence occupation, and allowing Heabollah to retain its weapons and run around free to "resist" as it pleased was one way for the Syrians to keep the Lebanese on a short leash.
Now that the Syrians have gone, the "resistance" charade has been uncovered for what it is - namely an Iranian occupation instead of a Syrian one - the time has come for the Lebanese to come clean on one fact: No one has completely disarmed. Not the Palestinians. Not the Sunnis. Not the Christians. And definitely not the Shiites. But of all these groups, only the Christians have kept their word and not used their weapons on the streets. Every protest or demonstration or street clashes or attempt at a power grab or challenges to the central authority was conducted by armed Muslims, including family gangs and smugglers, but never by Christians whose protests never include the use of weapons.
As events in the region are moving toward an escalation, it is time to stop the hypocrisy. The Christian militias should declare their level of arming and come out publicly stating that they too want to "resist" and defend their sect. Instead of playing poodles to the Sunnis (Geagea and Gemayel) and the Shiites (Aoun), the Christians should open training camps, recruit, and arm themselves because the 12th hour is fast appraoching. Cornered by a weakened Iran and Syrian regimes, Hezbollah is likely to engage in suicidal and openly confrontational politics that include military operations against other sects and groups in the country. For example, the current flare-up in Gaza is very likely to draw Hezbollah's 40,000 missiles pointed at Israel from South Lebanon, or even Syria's Assad. Both these parties have seen their base and ideological premises eroded by the Syrian revolution and a weakened Iran, and are therefore likely to see the current situation as a life-saving opportunity from which to regain the upper hand on the claim of fighting the "enemy".
But within Lebanon, nothing less than justice and fairness should drive the process of public re-arming by all groups. If the Islamic fundamentalists of the Sunni camp, the Alawites of Tripoli, the Shiites of Hezbollah and Amal, the pro-Syrian Palestinian terrorists, and every other garbage group or terrorist organization that the weak Lebanese government continues to allow to operate on its soil, if all these people can arm and engage in military confrontations that threaten stability and the progress of Lebanese society toward a modern State (rather than the decrepit sectarian division of power that has paralyzed the country for 4 decades), then the Christians have an equal right to do the same, and they might as well re-arm and be public about it.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the Christian militias (and their own resistance against Syrians, Palestinians, Islamic fundamentalists etc) were blamed for everything that happened in the country. Every son of a bitch in Europe, the United States and other jackass Westerners pitied the "poor" Palestinian refugees of Yaser Arafat who were burning Lebanon to the ground, or pitied the "Dispossessed" Shiites assholes of Hassan Nasrallah because they bore the brunt of Israeli retailations against the PLO in the south, or found reasonable the Syrian pretext of wanting to protect its flank by invading and occupying Lebanon, .... Now, 40 years later, the Shiites have dispossessed everyone else, have seized power in Lebanon and run the country as an Iranian province. The Palestinians remain armed and shelter more radicalized Al-Qaeda inspired Sunni fundamentalist terror organizations. The Sunnis have the ultimate political power in their holding the Premiership but have been weak and cowardly by not divorcing themselves from the Arab nationalist platform that has devastated Lebanon. But the Chrisitians have played by the rules since 1990, acting exclusively through the political process and not by military means, which has caused them to be sidelined and become irrelevant, at the risk of disappearing not only from the political map but also from the demographic map as thousands of young Christians continue to emigrate in a country that no longer tolerates them.
What did the Christians get in return of their playing by the rules? Assassinations of their political leadership; terrorist bombings such as the latest one in the heart of Christian East Beirut; loss of political power because it is not backed up by military power. Enough is enough. If the Muslims of Lebanon are not going to move away from terror, military solutions, and reliance on outside actors, and engage in a civilized political process, then the Christians will have to, sooner rather than later, return to the military logic of defending themselves and protect one of the last Christian strongholds still standing in the Middle East, with Syria and Iraq having lost most of their Christian population to killlings and emigration. Lebanon stands to be the next country to be fully de-Christianized if currents events maintain their momentum. Time for the Christians to re-arm and not be ashamed of it.
Hanibaal
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Liberal Lebanon? Liberal Israel?
Politics often steals language and makes it subservient to its purposes.
For example, Israel claims to be a "Liberal" country and a democracy, when its very existence is premised on biblical crap from the stone age of humanity, whereby God promised the land to His Chosen People and guided Joshua into massacring the Canaanites and taking their land, then 2,500 years later, for the modern Jewish people to "return" and slaughter and disperse the Palestinians and take their land. Despite 50 years of Israel flaunting every international law in the books, and despite the Europeans, Americans, and other poodles of Israel, expressing their "regrets" that Israel continues to build illegal settlements - including a rift between the Obama Administration and Benjamin Netanyahu 2 years ago because Netantahy chose the day that Obama was visiting the region to announce the building of 3,000 Jewish settlements in the heart of Arab East jerusalem and in the West Bank.....Nothing serious was ever done to make the Israelis from blatantly stealing Palestinian land and essentially causing an irreversible judaization of the country. This, the claim of Israel being an island of liberalism and democracy in the Middle East is a sham, a fake, a charade... because it is 1) based on a self-declared religious notion from 3,000 years ago, and 2) it continues to be used to disaffect an entire people from its rights to its land and eventually to building a Palestinian State that Israel itself says it wants the Palestinians to have.
Lebanon is another example of a self-proclaimed "liberal" country and a so-called "democracy". The fact is, though, that the very foundation of the Lebanese State is premised on an exclusive club of 18 different religious cults who massacre one another every 30-40 years, then pretend to be tolerant and civilized in between. The appearance of liberalism and democracy in Lebanon is in reality not the result of a proactive deliberate will by an elightened Lebanese population that believes in the principles of liberalism and democracy. The Lebanese are a very backward, religious people who, among other attributes, treat their women like cattle - just like the other Arabs and Muslims. A Lebanese woman who marries a foreigner cannot give the Lebanese nationality to her children, whereas a Lebanese man who marries a foreign woman can. In Islamic law, as it is applied exclusively to the Muslim communities in Lebanon, women get half the inheritance their male siblings get, supposedly because the woman will one day "belong" to another man, and so she does not need an equal share of the inheritance that a man gets. In the Christian communities, the Lebanese have been producing saints by the dozens such that the Vatican has aked them to slow down a bit (religiosity is a sign of primtive backwardness everywhere). Christians and Muslims alike import maids by the hundreds of thousands from poor countries and treat them like animals.... There is no real fundamental difference between the Christians and the Muslims in Lebanon. During the ongoing Lebanese War (1973 to the present) Christians have allied themsleves with Israel and Syria, Sunnis has allied themselves with PLO PAlestinians, Saudi Arabi, Kuwait and Syria, and Shiites have allied themselves with Iran and Syria.... all of this to beat up, fight, massacre, and compete for power with the other religious communities.
Given this portrait of Lebanon, the reality is that Lebanon's appearance of liberalism and democracy is only because it is forced on the country by virtue of its diversity. The Lebanese are not liberal and have no idea what democracy is. They just cannot do otherwise. Each community has to "tolerate" the others because it cannot defeat and subjugate them. Lebanon's democracy is a sham because no voter can vote for whoever he or she wants: We are forced from birth to death to belong to a religious community that defines our primal identity before our national identity, and when elections time come (which is the only real attribute mascarding itself as democratic practice) we are forced to vote for a Christian or a Druze or a Sunni or a Shiite... and not based on merit or open-mindedness. If any of the competing 18 religious sects that the Constitution recognizes can impose its will on the others, it will do it just like Israel or Saudi Arabia and impose one religion or one ethnic group on everyone else. Give Hezbollah the weapons and the know-how that Israelis have, and they will turn Lebanon into a Shiite theocracy that will de-Christianize and de-Sunnify Lebanon, steal the other communities lands, force them into emigration (which is sort of happening as we speak, since Hezbollah has been buying lands in the Christian heartland and trying to link the seacoast north of Beirut to their enclaves in the eastern Bekaa Valley and the Hermel ). Hezbollah would expand the few Shiite villages in the Christian heartland with Shiite settlers and just like Israel does with Jewish settlers, using the demographic population bomb to one day claim the land as theirs.
Israel is a democracy - my ass! It is a Jewish theocracy.
Lebanon is a democracy - my ass! It is confederation of 18 theocracies that massacre one another every couple of generations, then pretend to be advanced, liberal and civilized in between. Bullshit. خرى is Lebanon, just like ISrael and all other Middle Eastern countries based on religion and backward customs.
Hanibaal
For example, Israel claims to be a "Liberal" country and a democracy, when its very existence is premised on biblical crap from the stone age of humanity, whereby God promised the land to His Chosen People and guided Joshua into massacring the Canaanites and taking their land, then 2,500 years later, for the modern Jewish people to "return" and slaughter and disperse the Palestinians and take their land. Despite 50 years of Israel flaunting every international law in the books, and despite the Europeans, Americans, and other poodles of Israel, expressing their "regrets" that Israel continues to build illegal settlements - including a rift between the Obama Administration and Benjamin Netanyahu 2 years ago because Netantahy chose the day that Obama was visiting the region to announce the building of 3,000 Jewish settlements in the heart of Arab East jerusalem and in the West Bank.....Nothing serious was ever done to make the Israelis from blatantly stealing Palestinian land and essentially causing an irreversible judaization of the country. This, the claim of Israel being an island of liberalism and democracy in the Middle East is a sham, a fake, a charade... because it is 1) based on a self-declared religious notion from 3,000 years ago, and 2) it continues to be used to disaffect an entire people from its rights to its land and eventually to building a Palestinian State that Israel itself says it wants the Palestinians to have.
Lebanon is another example of a self-proclaimed "liberal" country and a so-called "democracy". The fact is, though, that the very foundation of the Lebanese State is premised on an exclusive club of 18 different religious cults who massacre one another every 30-40 years, then pretend to be tolerant and civilized in between. The appearance of liberalism and democracy in Lebanon is in reality not the result of a proactive deliberate will by an elightened Lebanese population that believes in the principles of liberalism and democracy. The Lebanese are a very backward, religious people who, among other attributes, treat their women like cattle - just like the other Arabs and Muslims. A Lebanese woman who marries a foreigner cannot give the Lebanese nationality to her children, whereas a Lebanese man who marries a foreign woman can. In Islamic law, as it is applied exclusively to the Muslim communities in Lebanon, women get half the inheritance their male siblings get, supposedly because the woman will one day "belong" to another man, and so she does not need an equal share of the inheritance that a man gets. In the Christian communities, the Lebanese have been producing saints by the dozens such that the Vatican has aked them to slow down a bit (religiosity is a sign of primtive backwardness everywhere). Christians and Muslims alike import maids by the hundreds of thousands from poor countries and treat them like animals.... There is no real fundamental difference between the Christians and the Muslims in Lebanon. During the ongoing Lebanese War (1973 to the present) Christians have allied themsleves with Israel and Syria, Sunnis has allied themselves with PLO PAlestinians, Saudi Arabi, Kuwait and Syria, and Shiites have allied themselves with Iran and Syria.... all of this to beat up, fight, massacre, and compete for power with the other religious communities.
Given this portrait of Lebanon, the reality is that Lebanon's appearance of liberalism and democracy is only because it is forced on the country by virtue of its diversity. The Lebanese are not liberal and have no idea what democracy is. They just cannot do otherwise. Each community has to "tolerate" the others because it cannot defeat and subjugate them. Lebanon's democracy is a sham because no voter can vote for whoever he or she wants: We are forced from birth to death to belong to a religious community that defines our primal identity before our national identity, and when elections time come (which is the only real attribute mascarding itself as democratic practice) we are forced to vote for a Christian or a Druze or a Sunni or a Shiite... and not based on merit or open-mindedness. If any of the competing 18 religious sects that the Constitution recognizes can impose its will on the others, it will do it just like Israel or Saudi Arabia and impose one religion or one ethnic group on everyone else. Give Hezbollah the weapons and the know-how that Israelis have, and they will turn Lebanon into a Shiite theocracy that will de-Christianize and de-Sunnify Lebanon, steal the other communities lands, force them into emigration (which is sort of happening as we speak, since Hezbollah has been buying lands in the Christian heartland and trying to link the seacoast north of Beirut to their enclaves in the eastern Bekaa Valley and the Hermel ). Hezbollah would expand the few Shiite villages in the Christian heartland with Shiite settlers and just like Israel does with Jewish settlers, using the demographic population bomb to one day claim the land as theirs.
Israel is a democracy - my ass! It is a Jewish theocracy.
Lebanon is a democracy - my ass! It is confederation of 18 theocracies that massacre one another every couple of generations, then pretend to be advanced, liberal and civilized in between. Bullshit. خرى is Lebanon, just like ISrael and all other Middle Eastern countries based on religion and backward customs.
Hanibaal
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Say, You Want a Revolution?
The parliamentary elections are coming up in Lebanon, but, if history is any guide, the Lebanese are not politically mature enough to use this only tool they have to improve their lives.
Instead, the Lebanese - like a herd of sheep, like the "mountons de Panurge" - will follow the same leaders that have brought them nothing but wars, death, poverty, massacres, and corruption, and vote for the SAME people, the SAME families, the SAME sectarian criminals...
Where the Lebanese fail is in their lack of understanding of what elections are about (and that is why I do not agree that Lebanon is a real democracy). In a real democracy, the function of elections is precisely to HOLD ACCOUNTABLE the representatives (نواب) they elected at the previous elections. In other words, the voters a few months before elections should be asking themselves: Did Amin Gemayel or Walid Jumblatt or Nabih Berri or Rafik Hariri or Michel Aoun or their children and sons-in-law and cousins and wives, or anyone from in the political farms of Lebanon who runs in elections... Did these people do what they are supposed to do, or what they promised to do, during the previous four year?
Did they bring round the clock electricity?
Did they stop the corruption?
Did they protect me from war, destruction, anarchy?
Did they clean my streets and fix my roads?
Did they bring the highest telephone rates in the world down?
Did they work to bring reliable Internet to the country?
Did they protect the environment from pollution, from abusive and corrupt developers who steal public land to build their resorts and deny me access to my beaches, my mountains, and everything I love about Lebanon?
Etc....
While the answers to all these questions are undeniably NO, the strange thing is that the Lebanese people will not hold the politicians and representatives they elected 4 years ago accountable for having failed to deliver on all those issues. The fact is that not only did these politicians fail at improving things, they also made them worse. Security has declined in four years. Emigration of young people has increased. Life has gotten more expensive in Lebanon. Foreign countries' inteference and destabilization have increased, etc.
The Lebanese are so thick-headed that they know NOW that electing those SAME people, SAME families, SAME sectarian criminals back to power will NOT change anything to their miserable lives. You may wonder why are the Lebanese people so masochistic. The simple answer is that, like sheep herded into a hostile and scary environment such as the one that has existed in lebanon for 40 years, they no longer vote with their heads. FEAR is what drives stressed people. SECTARIAN FEAR.
For example, take a Christian mountain brute from the Metn or Keserwan. He or she looks at the candidates running in their district. One one side they see a couple of young newcomers, educated, apolitical, technocrats trying to break through, and on the other side they see the traditional feudal (Gemayel, Aoun, Murr, etc.), sectarian boss whose family has been running their lives for centuries. As a mountain brute, the Christian peasant - while educated at the best religious schools - is still a brute who, to make things worse, has been brainwashed by the feudal lord and ther religious establishment (Batraks, Mutrans, etc...) into thinking that only the Gemayels or the Aouns or the Murrs will save him from the next massacre by the Muslim brutes of the "other" Lebanon, namely the Hariris or the Jumblatts or the Berris, etc.
Instead of asking the ACCOUNTABILITY questions above, the mountain brutes of Lebanon lack the know-how and the imagination to break from the past, to break from the cycle, and to tell themselves, "let me try these new, young, smart, not corrupt candidates; I haven't gotten much from Gemayel or Aoun other than 40 years of massacres, gridlock, instability, corruption, war, etc."
It is a sad state of affairs. The only hope is for young people to break this cycle, to vote for their own generation, people from their own ranks, and not the sons and daughters of the political farms. Punish your leaders who have failed you time and time again. Punish Jumblatt because he is a criminal snake who changes his position every time the wind blows. Punish gemayel because he never had the courage to do anything bold, other than follow Hariri like a poodle. Punish Geagea because this war criminal has caused so much devastation to our lives and still pretends to want us to lead to better days. Punish Aoun because this other war criminal (General, my ass) has also changed his position and after ruining our lives, causing the death of thousands, and running away like a coward, he is now the top Syrian poodle in the country and the best lapdog that Hassan NAsarallah has. Punish all of them by NOT voting for them. By discarding them to the trashbin where they belong.
Vote for new blood. Vote for young smart technocrats whose last names are not Aoun, Hariri, Jumblatt, Gemayel, Salam, Berri, Frangiyeh, etc..... Vote for smart people with new ideas, with modern ideas, even if they are unknown, even if they are not from "big" families.... These new young smart people are just like you: They earned their living, they did not inherit it from their fathers. Prove to the world that you are smart voters and not some barbaric tribal idiots who vote like serfs from the Middle Ages. Prove what you always brag about to your friends around the world: that Lebanon is a real democracy, and not a theocracy disguised as a democracy. Prove to the world that Lebanon is indeed a decent country, and not a backward third-world cesspool of religious barbarity like Afghanistan, like Syria, like Somalia and all the other dysfunctional failed states.
Because no matter how much we brag about being modern and advanced, every time the electric power goes down, and you have to switch to the local generator, you are a third world country. Every time the Batrak or the Mufti or the Sayyid or the Sheikh... goes public to tell us what is right and what is wrong, we are a third world religious theocracy. Every time a bomb goes off, tearing your children and friends into pieces, you are a failed insecure country. Every time some President or some Speaker or some Prime Minister makes a statement that they have instructed the security services and the army to ensure the protection of people, you know they are lying, and you know that there will be another bomb, there will be another rocket or drone by Hassan Nasrallah over Israel inviting it to devastate your lives, there will be another statement by Michel Aoun that Bashar Assad is his hero. And every time the Minsiter of Tourism invites foreigners come and spend their pathetic dollars in Lebanon, you and I know that we are inviting them to take great risks just so that we prove that we remain a beggar country, begging the world for help because we cannot run our lives.
VOTE FOR A REVOLUTION. VOTE FOR AN UPRISING. VOTE FOR A BETTER LIFE.
Hanibaal
Instead, the Lebanese - like a herd of sheep, like the "mountons de Panurge" - will follow the same leaders that have brought them nothing but wars, death, poverty, massacres, and corruption, and vote for the SAME people, the SAME families, the SAME sectarian criminals...
Where the Lebanese fail is in their lack of understanding of what elections are about (and that is why I do not agree that Lebanon is a real democracy). In a real democracy, the function of elections is precisely to HOLD ACCOUNTABLE the representatives (نواب) they elected at the previous elections. In other words, the voters a few months before elections should be asking themselves: Did Amin Gemayel or Walid Jumblatt or Nabih Berri or Rafik Hariri or Michel Aoun or their children and sons-in-law and cousins and wives, or anyone from in the political farms of Lebanon who runs in elections... Did these people do what they are supposed to do, or what they promised to do, during the previous four year?
Did they bring round the clock electricity?
Did they stop the corruption?
Did they protect me from war, destruction, anarchy?
Did they clean my streets and fix my roads?
Did they bring the highest telephone rates in the world down?
Did they work to bring reliable Internet to the country?
Did they protect the environment from pollution, from abusive and corrupt developers who steal public land to build their resorts and deny me access to my beaches, my mountains, and everything I love about Lebanon?
Etc....
While the answers to all these questions are undeniably NO, the strange thing is that the Lebanese people will not hold the politicians and representatives they elected 4 years ago accountable for having failed to deliver on all those issues. The fact is that not only did these politicians fail at improving things, they also made them worse. Security has declined in four years. Emigration of young people has increased. Life has gotten more expensive in Lebanon. Foreign countries' inteference and destabilization have increased, etc.
The Lebanese are so thick-headed that they know NOW that electing those SAME people, SAME families, SAME sectarian criminals back to power will NOT change anything to their miserable lives. You may wonder why are the Lebanese people so masochistic. The simple answer is that, like sheep herded into a hostile and scary environment such as the one that has existed in lebanon for 40 years, they no longer vote with their heads. FEAR is what drives stressed people. SECTARIAN FEAR.
For example, take a Christian mountain brute from the Metn or Keserwan. He or she looks at the candidates running in their district. One one side they see a couple of young newcomers, educated, apolitical, technocrats trying to break through, and on the other side they see the traditional feudal (Gemayel, Aoun, Murr, etc.), sectarian boss whose family has been running their lives for centuries. As a mountain brute, the Christian peasant - while educated at the best religious schools - is still a brute who, to make things worse, has been brainwashed by the feudal lord and ther religious establishment (Batraks, Mutrans, etc...) into thinking that only the Gemayels or the Aouns or the Murrs will save him from the next massacre by the Muslim brutes of the "other" Lebanon, namely the Hariris or the Jumblatts or the Berris, etc.
Instead of asking the ACCOUNTABILITY questions above, the mountain brutes of Lebanon lack the know-how and the imagination to break from the past, to break from the cycle, and to tell themselves, "let me try these new, young, smart, not corrupt candidates; I haven't gotten much from Gemayel or Aoun other than 40 years of massacres, gridlock, instability, corruption, war, etc."
It is a sad state of affairs. The only hope is for young people to break this cycle, to vote for their own generation, people from their own ranks, and not the sons and daughters of the political farms. Punish your leaders who have failed you time and time again. Punish Jumblatt because he is a criminal snake who changes his position every time the wind blows. Punish gemayel because he never had the courage to do anything bold, other than follow Hariri like a poodle. Punish Geagea because this war criminal has caused so much devastation to our lives and still pretends to want us to lead to better days. Punish Aoun because this other war criminal (General, my ass) has also changed his position and after ruining our lives, causing the death of thousands, and running away like a coward, he is now the top Syrian poodle in the country and the best lapdog that Hassan NAsarallah has. Punish all of them by NOT voting for them. By discarding them to the trashbin where they belong.
Vote for new blood. Vote for young smart technocrats whose last names are not Aoun, Hariri, Jumblatt, Gemayel, Salam, Berri, Frangiyeh, etc..... Vote for smart people with new ideas, with modern ideas, even if they are unknown, even if they are not from "big" families.... These new young smart people are just like you: They earned their living, they did not inherit it from their fathers. Prove to the world that you are smart voters and not some barbaric tribal idiots who vote like serfs from the Middle Ages. Prove what you always brag about to your friends around the world: that Lebanon is a real democracy, and not a theocracy disguised as a democracy. Prove to the world that Lebanon is indeed a decent country, and not a backward third-world cesspool of religious barbarity like Afghanistan, like Syria, like Somalia and all the other dysfunctional failed states.
Because no matter how much we brag about being modern and advanced, every time the electric power goes down, and you have to switch to the local generator, you are a third world country. Every time the Batrak or the Mufti or the Sayyid or the Sheikh... goes public to tell us what is right and what is wrong, we are a third world religious theocracy. Every time a bomb goes off, tearing your children and friends into pieces, you are a failed insecure country. Every time some President or some Speaker or some Prime Minister makes a statement that they have instructed the security services and the army to ensure the protection of people, you know they are lying, and you know that there will be another bomb, there will be another rocket or drone by Hassan Nasrallah over Israel inviting it to devastate your lives, there will be another statement by Michel Aoun that Bashar Assad is his hero. And every time the Minsiter of Tourism invites foreigners come and spend their pathetic dollars in Lebanon, you and I know that we are inviting them to take great risks just so that we prove that we remain a beggar country, begging the world for help because we cannot run our lives.
VOTE FOR A REVOLUTION. VOTE FOR AN UPRISING. VOTE FOR A BETTER LIFE.
Hanibaal
Monday, October 15, 2012
Must Read on NOW LEBANON: We are a silly country
http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=445635
I would go much further. "Silly" is too nice. I'd say we are a "Horrible" country, because not only do we not learn from our history and past, but we brag about how great we are because long long time ago, the Phoenicians our ancestors made some significant contributions to our world. We are worse than the Arabs and Muslims who live in a cesspool of human rights conditions, but brag about the glories of the Arab-Muslim Empire some 13 centuries ago.
But WHAT ARE WE, the Lebanese, CONTRIBUTING TODAY TO OUR FELLOW HUMANS?
Nothing but "saints" every year (religion is the answer for primitive people), discrimination, racism, sexism, mecantilism, consumerism, superficiality and shallowness... and once every other generation, mass genocide andmurder, religious pogroms and massacres.....
We use what the rest of the world makes, but we make nothing ourselves.
We benefit from the discoveries of people all around the globe, but we make none ourselves.
We treat foreign workers and women like cattle and indentured slaves, yet we pretend to be sophisticated and advanced.
We take all that is filthy from other societies, but we take none of the good things that others can teach us.
REead the NOW Lebanon piece. It is a masterpiece.
Hanibaal
I would go much further. "Silly" is too nice. I'd say we are a "Horrible" country, because not only do we not learn from our history and past, but we brag about how great we are because long long time ago, the Phoenicians our ancestors made some significant contributions to our world. We are worse than the Arabs and Muslims who live in a cesspool of human rights conditions, but brag about the glories of the Arab-Muslim Empire some 13 centuries ago.
But WHAT ARE WE, the Lebanese, CONTRIBUTING TODAY TO OUR FELLOW HUMANS?
Nothing but "saints" every year (religion is the answer for primitive people), discrimination, racism, sexism, mecantilism, consumerism, superficiality and shallowness... and once every other generation, mass genocide andmurder, religious pogroms and massacres.....
We use what the rest of the world makes, but we make nothing ourselves.
We benefit from the discoveries of people all around the globe, but we make none ourselves.
We treat foreign workers and women like cattle and indentured slaves, yet we pretend to be sophisticated and advanced.
We take all that is filthy from other societies, but we take none of the good things that others can teach us.
REead the NOW Lebanon piece. It is a masterpiece.
Hanibaal
Telecommunications Corruption in Lebanon
The Lebanese government - or more accurately Ogero, the Hariri monopoly over telephone communications in Lebanon, which has kept rates in lebanon at one of the highest around the world to keep draining the Lebanese people and their connection to the outside world - has recently decided to ban the use of Internet devices to make phone calls in and out of Lebanon.
These devices (MAgicJack, etc.) allow you to make such calls at very very low rates. Because devices like this have eaten up into the market share of Ogero and the Lebanese corrupt establishment, which have made fortunes by imposing astronomical rates on the telecommunications of the Lebanese people, the Hariri empire and its political cronies have now blocked the use of these devices.
This is at a time when the Lebanese government and the political establishment is, unlike any other country, again denying the Lebanese expatriate community their right to vote at their consulates and embassies. The expatriates, called IGHTIRAAB or INTISHAAR, i.e. the Diaspora, number several million people living across all the continents who fled the war, the corruption, the filth, and the garbage of Lebanon.
With this blocking of an easy and cheap way of communicating with their families, the Lebanese political establishment and its business cronies have effectively blocked communications between Lebanon and the expatriates. On the other hand, you hear politicians and commentators in Beirut discussing ways of improving the links between Lebanon the homeland and the Ightiraab. The simple answer to this conflict is the following:
The Lebanese business and political establishment wants the expatriates to keep pumping money into the system, so that they - the businessmen and the politicians - pilfer it into their own pockets. If you are a businessman expatriate living, say, in Bueons Aires, and you want to start a business between Argentina and Lebanon, you will be faced with a mountain of bureaucracy destined only to pilfer money out of you at every step of the process: Bribes here, bakhshih there, payback here and so on and so forth. You would have to be out of your mind to even try.
Add to this the fact the Lebanese embassies and consulates abroad are all microcosms of the flith one finds in the Lebanese corrupt bureaucracy in the homeland: Try obtaining a passport or a visa or ttry shipping your belongings to Lebanon because you dream of returning one day... and you will be faced with incompetence, corruption, and outright criminal activity. It costs $300 to get a Lebanese passport for 3 years, in contrast to a US passport that costs $75 for 10 years. That definitely helps the Lebanese expatriates remain "in touch" with the homeland. Try shipping your home belongings to Lebanon: You will find that every box, every car, every piece of furniture that you sent has been opened, stolen, broken, parts removed.... etc...
Recently, president Suleiman visited Latin America to encourage Lebanese expatriates to remain in touch with the homeland and to stimulate economic exchanges. What an idiot this president is to think that he and his cohort of politicians can convince the Ightiraab to create economic links with Lebanon under the conditions of decay and corruption that they will face.
Right now, expatriates send money to their families by the billions of dollars every year for the simple reason that the Lebanese corrupt system has impoverished the Lebanese people to the point that there is no middle class left. In Lebanon, you are either very poor, or you are very rich. Most people have become poor after 40 years of war and under the business-killing corruption and the absence of the rule of law. People send money to help their families, but unfortunately this is money that ends up in the pockets of the Lebanese Mafia because the Lebanese have to buy water (no running water), pay two electric bills (one to the government that gives them only 8 hours of power a day, and another bill to the local crony who runs a generator to provide you with the remaining 16 hours of power a day), pay to have their garbage collected, pay bribes to get a phone line installed, etc.... There is no functional system in Lebanon - Lebanon is an utetrly dysfunctional country, which is why people create their own local governance, from electric generators all the way to militias to protect themselves.
So, this recent blocking of Internet phone calling devices is the latest in a long list of ways by which the Lebanese corrupt system fights its own people by forcing them to pay high rates to Ogero, the telephone monopoly owned by Saad Hariri and his empire, instead of helping them cut costs and save money and communicate better with their relatives around the world.
I can only conclude in Lebanese: كس إختو هالبلد شو مؤيّر.
Hanibaal
These devices (MAgicJack, etc.) allow you to make such calls at very very low rates. Because devices like this have eaten up into the market share of Ogero and the Lebanese corrupt establishment, which have made fortunes by imposing astronomical rates on the telecommunications of the Lebanese people, the Hariri empire and its political cronies have now blocked the use of these devices.
This is at a time when the Lebanese government and the political establishment is, unlike any other country, again denying the Lebanese expatriate community their right to vote at their consulates and embassies. The expatriates, called IGHTIRAAB or INTISHAAR, i.e. the Diaspora, number several million people living across all the continents who fled the war, the corruption, the filth, and the garbage of Lebanon.
With this blocking of an easy and cheap way of communicating with their families, the Lebanese political establishment and its business cronies have effectively blocked communications between Lebanon and the expatriates. On the other hand, you hear politicians and commentators in Beirut discussing ways of improving the links between Lebanon the homeland and the Ightiraab. The simple answer to this conflict is the following:
The Lebanese business and political establishment wants the expatriates to keep pumping money into the system, so that they - the businessmen and the politicians - pilfer it into their own pockets. If you are a businessman expatriate living, say, in Bueons Aires, and you want to start a business between Argentina and Lebanon, you will be faced with a mountain of bureaucracy destined only to pilfer money out of you at every step of the process: Bribes here, bakhshih there, payback here and so on and so forth. You would have to be out of your mind to even try.
Add to this the fact the Lebanese embassies and consulates abroad are all microcosms of the flith one finds in the Lebanese corrupt bureaucracy in the homeland: Try obtaining a passport or a visa or ttry shipping your belongings to Lebanon because you dream of returning one day... and you will be faced with incompetence, corruption, and outright criminal activity. It costs $300 to get a Lebanese passport for 3 years, in contrast to a US passport that costs $75 for 10 years. That definitely helps the Lebanese expatriates remain "in touch" with the homeland. Try shipping your home belongings to Lebanon: You will find that every box, every car, every piece of furniture that you sent has been opened, stolen, broken, parts removed.... etc...
Recently, president Suleiman visited Latin America to encourage Lebanese expatriates to remain in touch with the homeland and to stimulate economic exchanges. What an idiot this president is to think that he and his cohort of politicians can convince the Ightiraab to create economic links with Lebanon under the conditions of decay and corruption that they will face.
Right now, expatriates send money to their families by the billions of dollars every year for the simple reason that the Lebanese corrupt system has impoverished the Lebanese people to the point that there is no middle class left. In Lebanon, you are either very poor, or you are very rich. Most people have become poor after 40 years of war and under the business-killing corruption and the absence of the rule of law. People send money to help their families, but unfortunately this is money that ends up in the pockets of the Lebanese Mafia because the Lebanese have to buy water (no running water), pay two electric bills (one to the government that gives them only 8 hours of power a day, and another bill to the local crony who runs a generator to provide you with the remaining 16 hours of power a day), pay to have their garbage collected, pay bribes to get a phone line installed, etc.... There is no functional system in Lebanon - Lebanon is an utetrly dysfunctional country, which is why people create their own local governance, from electric generators all the way to militias to protect themselves.
So, this recent blocking of Internet phone calling devices is the latest in a long list of ways by which the Lebanese corrupt system fights its own people by forcing them to pay high rates to Ogero, the telephone monopoly owned by Saad Hariri and his empire, instead of helping them cut costs and save money and communicate better with their relatives around the world.
I can only conclude in Lebanese: كس إختو هالبلد شو مؤيّر.
Hanibaal
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)