Saniora: Lebanon to Reactivate 1949 Armistice Agreement with Israel

Finally, Prime Minister Saniora of Lebanon is no longer an idiot and is beginning to make some sense.

By expressing Lebanon's desire to revive the 1949 Armistice Agreement with Israel, Saniora is taking the first step to normalizing relations with Israel - like Egypt and Jordan have done - and shielding Lebanon against the mud of the Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. By doing so, he is pulling the rug from under Hezbollah's argument that it is a resistance movement, since by re-establishing Lebanon's relations with Israel within a legally-recognized and internationally-sanctioned framework, all pretexts of "occupation" and "resistance" are removed. If Lebanon's Muslims had accepted to take that step back in May 1983 when Lebanon and Israel were on the verge of signing an agreement based on the 1949 Armistice Agreement, Lebanon would not have gone through 25 more years of bloodshed and Syrian occupation, and Hezbollah would not be the threat it poses today.

Similarly, by demanding that Lebanon's relations with the Baathist enemy entity in Syria be normalized - demarcation of borders, clearing the Shebaa Farms lie once and for all, establishing diplomatic relations - Saniora is also rejecting the lies he himself and his late boss Rafik Hariri used to believe in (though dicks like Robert Fisk still do): Unity of path and destiny between Lebanon and Syria, one people in two states, Lebanon as a part of Syria, etc. This goes a long way towards affirming Lebanon's existence as as a sovereign nation, independent from any other pan-Arab, pan-Syrian, or pan-Islamic construct, and is a slap in the face of top Baathist criminal pimp Bashar Assad and Syrian whore-in-chief Buthaina Shaaban who run Syria and who are among the "network of criminals" identified by UN investigator Daniel Bellemare just yesterday. Finally, Saniora has decided to play it straight and stop sitting on the fence between a defunct and obsolete Arabism on one hand, and a clear Lebanese nationalism independent of any other attribute. If Lebanon's Muslims had stood by their own State and institutions in 1975, instead of siding with Yasser Arafat's PLO against their own country and their fellow Lebanese Christians, Lebanon would have been spared all the agony of the past 30 years.

In an address to Arab heads of state which was broadcast live on the eve of the Arab Summit currently convened in the Syrian capital of Damascus, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saniora made the following points:

"Lebanon boycotted the Damascus summit only because it rejects to be represented by any person other than the elected president and in protest against Syria's policies and practices regarding Lebanon," he said.

Saniora also called for releasing Lebanese detainees held in Syrian jails, the demarcation of Lebanese-Syrian borders and normalizing relations between the two states, a reference to demands for setting up diplomatic ties between Damascus and Beirut.

On relations between Syria and Lebanon, Saniora highlighted the fact that "a new chapter of relations with Syria should be based on mutual respect and relations should be between two governments so that neither the Lebanese nor the Syrians should have relations with political factions or military groups operating in the other state."

He pointed out the importance of border demarcation with Syria. He labeled this issue as "normal and necessary" and called for dealing with "demarcation in the Shebaa Farms sector as a top priority".

"Lebanon wants to reactivate the 1949 armistice agreement with Israel" Saniora confirmed. The Lebanese premier also raised in his address the issue of pro-Syrian armed Palestinian factions in refugee camps and bases and called on Damascus to cooperate to remove them.

Hanibaal

UN investigator: Criminals, not nuns, killed Hariri

Even though the whole world suspected a gang of "Sacred-Heart nuns" (led by the infamous duo Sister Marie-Ange and Sister Marie-Archange) behind the Hariri assassination, the UN investigators have actually uncovered the real assassins: In an earth-shattering finding, the investigator into the Hariri assassination has just revealed that a "criminal network" was behind the killing. No one would have anticipated that "criminals" would commit a "crime", but they have, thanks to the finding by UN investigator Daniel Bellemare.

This discovery has radically changed the way I think about nuns and criminals. From now on, I will not rush to judgment. I have learned to expect the unexpected.

Hanibaal

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UN Panel Blames 'Criminal Network' For Hariri Murder - AFP

UNITED NATIONS (AFP)--A "criminal network" of individuals acted in concert to carry out the 2005 murder of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri, a report by the new head of a U.N. enquiry panel confirmed Friday, but didn't name any suspects.

The panel headed by Canadian former prosecutor Daniel Bellemare said in the 10th report on the case that it could now confirm that "on the basis of available evidence...a network of individuals acted in concert to carry out the assassination."

It added that this "criminal network" or parts of it were also linked to other attacks against anti-Syrian Lebanese figures carried out between October 2004 and December 2005.

  (END) Dow Jones Newswires
 03-28-081152ET
 Copyright (c) 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

“Anti-Syrian” Siniora and the Upcoming Arab Cesspool in Damascus

"Anti-Syrian" prime minister of Lebanon Siniora is still unsure if he will take a dip in the cesspool (also known as a "summit") of the Arab League in a couple of days in Damascus. Behind him stand all the other neo-sovereignty, independence-chic, freedom-to-go mastodonts of the March 14 that make up the majority and the entirety of the Lebanese government.

You see, His Nibs Siniora, and all these oh-so-pro-democracy, so-pro-US, so-anti-Syrian buffs are torn behind their tribal feelings of brotherhood towards Lebanon’s Arab sister countries, including Syria, and their equally despicable regimes, monarchs, dictators and gifts-from-God illuminati who run the Arab masses on one hand, and their newly and belatedly discovered love for the virtues of Lebanon’s freedom, independence, and sovereignty on the other hand, which, truth be told, germinated out of the dung Syria made them pile up on the Lebanese people during 20 years of collaboration with the Assad regime and its valiant "Arab" army of occupation.

So, Siniora is still wondering, as we speak, whether to go meet his asinine Arab brothers in Damascus and save the face of this major Arab cesspool League, and thus risk his life or the lives of others in his entourage, or stay home and betray his primal Arab brotherliness. In the three years since its humiliating withdrawal from Lebanon, the Syrian regime - out of spite and revenge, but also to scuttle the International Tribunal slated to try the regime itself for the assassination of Grand Arab Cesspool Master Rafik Hariri - has killed up to about 20 (no one knows the real number anymore) of Siniora's own allies and fellow politicians in the March 14 dung heap.

Arabs like Siniora abide by the irrational primal instinct of primitive people to stand by one’s brother even if he is murdering you. Kinship altruism taken to an extreme. Genes in the Arab world are by far the top criterion by which people are judged. Not any other rational, independent, objective criterion. You could be a cruel despot like Saddam Hussein who wantonly killed 500,000 of his own people, and your Arab brothers will still prefer you to an American invasion that prompted the killing of 100,000 Iraqis by other Arabs masquerading as renegades, insurgents, terrorists and such of Al-Qaeda, former Baathists and the Shiite militias.

Same thing with Saad Hariri, Walid Jumblatt, Amine Gemayel or Bashar Assad. They can be the last idiots on earth, but because their chromosomes share half of their fathers', they are automatically enthroned in positions of power to replace their fathers. You see, backward peoples don’t believe in nurture. It’s all about genes, especially the male ones.

Same thing with Siniora. The Syrians are, to date, his worse – and very real – enemies: They have killed 20 of his fellow supporter politicians. They hold hundreds, if not thousands, of Lebanese prisoners, less for political reasons and more for the vulgar Syrian practice of blackmailing the prisoners’ families out of bribe money. They terrorized Lebanon for 30 years and still occupy large chunks of Lebanese territory along the Syrian border. They refuse to officially cede back sovereignty of the Shebaa Farms to Lebanon, thus bringing an end to the torment of this small country. They continue to smuggle weapons and terrorists across the border. Yet, Siniora is still having moral doubts about whether to go to Damascus, a Cornelian problem between love (to his Syrian Arab brothers) and duty (to his country).

Mind you, he is quick to denounce Israel – the theoretical Zionist enemy who is not an Arab brother – when it flies jets over Lebanon hunting for Siniora's own sworn enemies, the Hezbollah bomber-hijacker-suicide killers, or when it bombs nuclear/chemical weapons targets in Syria. He makes grand declarations that he – the prime minister of Lebanon – will be the last one to negotiate peace with Israel, after all the Arabs do. Mind you too, however, that the Arab brothers he so yearns to see in Damascus have, for the most part, made peace with Israel one way or another: Syria has adhered religiously to a ceasefire on the Golan since 1974, never allowing anyone to fire a bullet across the ceasefire line; Egypt and Jordan have full-fledged peace treaties with Israel and embassies in Tel-Aviv; the hypocrites of the Emirates, Tunisia, Morocco and other Arab countries bark loudly against Israel but open Israeli trade offices and hold cultural, commercial and scientific relations with Israel.

Prime Minister Siniora – like Prime Turban Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah – is an unflinching enemy of Israel. Together, they will burn Lebanon to the ground to "score" any quixotic victory against Israel. For 30 years, they kept – and are willing to keep for the foreseeable future – Lebanon and its people hostage to a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. They insist that Lebanon will never know peace as long as Israel is not destroyed and eliminated. Note that the Americans too insist that Lebanon never know peace, but for a different set of reasons: An eternally burning Lebanon is a prime candidate for the displacement of the Christian population by massacres and emigration (which has already happened), for the permanent settlement of the half million Sunni Palestinian refugees currently living “temporarily” in camps in the country (which is happening as we speak), and to relieve Israel from the “Right of Return” imperative which stands in the way of a final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians (which is the ultimate goal of the United States).

I wonder why turncoat George Bush does not urge Siniora – the head of the "pro-Western" Lebanese government – to negotiate with Israel and settle the Shebaa Farms issue peacefully, thus short-circuiting Hezbollah's claims to resistance and Syria's holding Lebanon hostage to a resolution on the Golan. This would be a quicker and no more painful a solution to Lebanon’s eternal crisis. Shouldn't there be a convergence between American interests and Lebanese interests, beyond a defeat of Hezbollah? If there is, then what are those common interests, once Hezbollah is dismantled and eradicated? Are they to genuinely pacify Lebanon and allow the country to evolve its democracy beyond the pestilence of Islamo-Arab brands of democracies? Are they to finally shield Lebanon from the stench of the Islamic-Jewish conflict in Palestine-Israel? Are they to allow the Lebanese people to clean their house from the shackles of antiquated religious and feudal governance by supporting authentic democracy advocates, reformists, human rights activists and other agencies of real change? Or are they to allow the criminals and the corrupt of the ruling establishment - the March 14 mastodonts - to reassert their hold on the country, after they contributed to its demise? In sum, does America really want to let Lebanon become a normal country again? Or is America's plan to keep Lebanon in the crucible until it becomes the permanent dump for all the trash of the Arab-Israeli conflict? Will Lebanon finally foot the bill of the Kissinger Plan, namely to become the sacrificial lamb over whose cadaver the Israeli-Arab conflict will one day be resolved for good?

Why is the US not pushing Siniora to negotiate a final settlement between Lebanon and Israel, and thus extricate Lebanon from the Arab-Israeli conflict? Instead, it lets Siniora bash Israel every which way he goes and whenever he opens his mouth.

Shouldn’t the US be arming the Lebanese army so that one day it can defeat Hezbollah and assert the State’s authority over every inch of Lebanese soil? It isn’t. It lets Hezbollah continue to arm itself, smuggling and installing longer and longer range missiles 20 miles from the Israeli border, while begging Syria for a more positive role (even after 30 years of colluding with the Syrian regime led US policy nowhere). What is so different about Lebanon that it has to be treated like the whore of the neighborhood and the village idiot? The only answer to these questions that have haunted the Lebanese people for close to 40 years is that the US indeed plans to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Arab-Israeli conflict over the remains of Lebanon.

Hanibaal

Love mail from a Canadian friend Eehab Taliani (The Italian) - a Hariri supporter

From:	"Eehab Taliani" info@taliani.ca
Subject:	Your Article About ...
Date:	Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:34:42 -05

Only fuckers like you will be licking any ones boots in Lebanon soon. One day more mosques will be built on top of your beloved synagogues and churches... not beside them... the Hariri family is too nice to your community. Go fuck yourself and take your hatred with you to hell - you jealous and immature bastard. Your glory days are over... just like your "phonecian" ancestors - you will become nothing but a memory or should I say...a myth.

Your article only shows how desperate you fuckers are to hanging on to anything in Lebanon that was not rightfully yours in the first place. God bless the Europeans and Americans for opening their countries to fuckers like you .... we will remain in Lebanon when all you fuckers leave and buy out everything so that you don't even have a pot to piss in.

Now go write an article about that you self-centered mother-fucker!

Eehab Taliani
Real Estate Agent
Edmonton Canada

Hezbollah & Israel: To Avenge or not to Avenge?

The countdown is racing to that moment this weekend when Hezbollah will "retaliate" for Imad Mughniyah's assassination in downtown Damascus las February. It is expected that the Israeli-Jewish targets will be outside of Israel proper, for the simple reason that Hassan Nasrallah was very explicit in his barks following Mughniyah's killing: Since Israel is now playing outside of the "recognized field of confrontation" (i.e. south Lebanon) by attacking in Damascus, then Hezbollah will avenge that action "at the time and place it chooses".

Questions abound:
1- If the attack is outside Israel, should Israel retaliate against Lebanese targets? Will Israel's retaliation again be out of proportion to the triggering event?
2- Is anyone doing anything to try and stop the next round of devastation to be inflicted on the Lebanese people? Or is Prime Idiot Siniora more worried about attending the Arab summit in Damascus itself where he is slated to meet with the figures of the same regime that has been assassinating his peers in the Lebanese loyalist camp?
3- Will the Lebanese people finally move against Nasrallah's madness and discourse of violence to put an end to the ruin visited upon their country by 15+ years of PLO mayhem (1967-1982), followed by 26 years of Hezbollah mayhem (1982-2008) in the Lebanese south?
4- Is General Aoun trying to discreetly advise Nasrallah not to carry out retaliatory actions, simply because Lebanon cannot endure another round of Israeli counter-retaliations? Or is Aoun's FPM supporting the "Resistance" to engage the country in another round of violence (consistent with FPM official statements and the Memorandum of Understanding between Hezbollah and the FPM?)
5- How is the Lebanese government of Prime Idiot Siniora preparing the country for a likely Israeli retaliation? Shelters, food, transportation, medical preparedness, etc... Or are the Lebanese again plunging headfirst into the abyss, only to scream bloody murder later on against Israel's "unprovoked" retaliation?
6- What is the UNIFIL doing in that regard? Is it preparing the South against a massive (and haphazard) campaign of rocket attacks by Hezbollah operatives against Israel? What will UNIFIL do if its soldiers intercept Hezbollah activity? Will there be a war between UNIFIL and Hezbollah?
7- Will this be the final showdown in which the US, the West, the March 14 Cedars Revolution Lebanese cretins, the UN and Israel will seek - and this time succeed - to annihilate or defeat Hezbollah enough to get to a solution?

Hariri's Solidere Demolishes Beirut's Last Jewish Buildings

The last witnesses to Beirut's architectural heritage and to the once-thriving Lebanese Jewish community in Wadi Abu-Jmil fall to the bulldozers of Saad Hariri's Solidere.

Here is Saad Hariri, the much flaunted US ally in the Lebanese corrupt political and financial establishment, laying his hands on the last architectural gems of pre-war Beirut. Not to preserve them, turn them into a Museum, and definitely not to return them to their rightful owners. But to demolish them and turn them into yet another disgusting skyscraper in which to house more corrupt businesses beholden to the Hariri empire and its company Solidere.

What happened the other day is but one of the last examples of how the late Rafik Hariri - the "great martyr" of the March 14 Cedars Revolution, better known as the former pro-Syrian collaborator prime minister of Lebanon who licked the Syrian regime's occupier boots as long as they let him seize all of downtown Beirut (in exchange for massive bribes and kickbacks) and turn it into his own Solidere company, without any consideration for Beirut's ancient Roman and Phoenician pasts, building a huge mosque right next to St. George's Maronite cathedral just for spite - like his Palestinian Sunni brethren did in Bethlehem with the Church of the Nativity.

Except now, it's his son, the half-Saudi, half-Lebanese hybrid Saad, who inherited this empire that was pilfered from every ordinary owner of real estate in downtown Beirut. And in one of the most egregious crimes against Beirut's historic legacy, Saad Hariri just tore down the last three standing Jewish buildings in Beirut's old Wadi Abu-Jmil district, gems of Beirut's 19th century architecture.

As architect Amine-Jules Iskandar describes the scene in a letter he sent to the Lebanese French-language daily L'Orient Le Jour, those three buildings were "classified" (i.e. protected as historic landmarks) and are now no more than a pile of debris.

To add insult to injury, it appears that Saad's father, "martyr" Rafik Hariri waited for all the media to rush to Cana the day after the massacre in April 1996, to launch Solidere's bulldozers into Wadi Abu-Jmil to demolish a dozen or so "protected" buildings. Samir Kassir, the other "martyr" journalist, could only at the time deplore the loss of those magnificent witnesses of Beirut's architectural heritage upon his return from Cana. Three buildings had survived because they abutted the ancient synagogue of Beirut.

Today Saad Hariri is doing it again, in the tradition of his "great" father. While the country is in a deep economic and political crisis, and people are worried more than ever about their future, Saad Hariri felt he could complete his father's "achievement" stealthily while no one was watching. Solidere's bulldozers came the other day and discreetly tore down the last three buildings. Today, there is a sign in the area forbidding anyone to get near the site with a camera.

In architect Iskandar's own words: "We are witnessing impotently the disappearance of our architectural, cultural and identity heritage. These buildings represented the last vestiges of an era that was the golden age of the Beirut Jewish community."

In contrast, the legacy of Rafik Hariri, and his son, Saad Hariri, will be to have altered Beirut's history in the cheapest, sleaziest, in-your-face, uncultured mercantilism so typical of the Hariri family's Arab Mediterranean background, doubled by an equally tacky, oil-slick, fascist and fundamentalist Sunni Islam of Saudi vintage.

Robert "Dick" Fisk: Always Smelly but never so Slick

In his March 15, 2008, opinion "Silenced by the Men in White Socks", Rober Fisk of the Independent proves himself, yet again, to be the true dick that he always was.

First, somehow in his "deep thoughts" about the Middle East, which he has intellectually plundered over the years with the Orientalist inanities of the bored English countryside "gentleman" (bad teeth, stinking bad breath, and all) that he is, he has noticed that "all the men of the Arab Mukhabaraat - Intelligence - Services wear white socks". What relevance does this have to do with human rights in Syria is beyond comprehension, unless perhaps Dick Fisk wishes to add a smudge of nostalgic Orientalist poetry to his perpetually boring blatherings about the Middle East, which, after decades of his own intellectual Onanist machinations, have yet to climax into anything worth remembering him for.


Second, this English dick of a British journalist has spent a lifetime shoving his nose into other peoples' asses that he can no longer smell his own filth. In a not so subtle attack on France's legacy in the Lebanon-Syria area - still to drill the standard canard about how artificial Lebanon is as a country and how much victimized was "Syria" by the French- this English dick states that:

"First came the one-armed General Henri Gouraud, who tore Lebanon off from Syria in 1920 and gave it to the pro-French Christians. Then Paris handed the Syrian coastal city of Alexandretta to the Turks in 1939 – sending survivors of the 1915 Armenian genocide into exile for a second time – in the hope that Turkey would join the Allies against Hitler. (The Turks obliged – in 1945!) Then in the Six Day War, Syria lost the Golan Heights – subsequently annexed by Israel. Far from being expansionist, Syria seems to get robbed of land every two decades."

Why, I ask, is Dick Fisk avoiding the stench coming from south of the Lebanese border? Perhaps out of shame for the atrocious and utterly hypocritical role played by his beloved Albion in the creation of the State of Israel, the partition of Palestine, the displacement of the Palestinian people, the dismantling of historic Palestine by the the British Mandate, the creation of the equally artificial Jordan, Israel and Iraq, the deprivation by the British Empire of the Kurdish people of a righteous place among the nations, in the hope of stuffing the British treasury with European Jewish funds, and building railroads through Turkey to the oil fields in the Gulf, maintaining British control over these oil fields and the route to India (not to mention the partition of India and the creation of the failure called Pakistan today, etc. All of this, in fact, much more recently than France's withdrawal from the region, since Kuwait and a bunch of the decadent and equally smelly pro-English Sunni Arab emirates south of the Peninsula were still British Protectorates well into the 1960s.

Third, you can hear Dick Fisk's own yelps as he pleads with his Syrian victims of French colonialism to stop abusing and arresting human rights activists - "Why – oh why – must this be so? Why did the Syrian secret police have to arrest....", as if these arrests were merely superfluous mistakes over an otherwise clean record, But Dick Fisk's yelps reveal that by doing so the Syrians have shattered all the lies on which Dick Fisk has rested his entire career. These arrests, it seems, inflict greater harm on Dick Fisk himself, in a psychotic version of the Stockholm Syndrome of which he suffers, than they cause their real victims, because they shatter the "nice" image of the Syrian regime which he spent his life painting, while bashing the many many victims of that regime. Listen to his yelps addressed to the Syrian regime:

"Instead, we've gone back to the midnight knock and the clanging of the cell door. Why – oh why – must this be so? Why did the Syrian secret police have to arrest Dr Ahmed Thoma, Dr Yasser el-Aiti, Jabr al-Shufi, Fayez Sara, Ali al-Abdulla and Rashed Sattouf in December, only days after they – along with 163 other brave Syrians – had attended a meeting of the Damascus Declaration for Democratic Change? The delegates had elected Dr Fida al-Hurani head of their organisation. She, too, was arrested, and her husband, Dr Gazi Alayan, a Palestinian who had lived in Syria for 18 years, deported to Jordan."

Yalla, we say in Lebanese, what's another British or English dick going to do more than his own "empire" did for centuries? They'll always come and go, though never as persistently as this genuinely phallic dick called Rober Fisk, and yet he, unlike all of them, has yet to "finish" and go home.

Hanibaal

Lebanon Braces Itself: Hassan's Revenge is Coming

Hassan Nasrallah has made his threats to avenge the Lebanese Hezbollah terrorist Imad Mughniyah's assassination in Damascus last February 12. Rumors in the superstitious Middle East are rampant that Hassan will execute his threats on the 40-day anniversary (March 23) of Mughniyah's death (the 40 days of mourning are a tradition for both Muslims and Christians in Lebanon the region, at which time there is a second round of condolences and religious ceremonies, and probably another one of Nasrallah's vitriolic speeches). Israel has mobilized its forces along the Lebanese borders and is counter-threatening that it will wage a war against Lebanon if the Shiite group launched a retaliatory attack to avenge the killing of Imad Mughniyah.

Interestingly, Mughniyah's widow, who is an Iranian national, has accused the Syrian authorities of helping Israel in assassinating her husband. There are reports that Syria's allies Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah have growing suspicions that certain elements of the Syrian regime might have been involved in Mughniyah's death.

Interestingly, if these reports are correct, then we should be on the verge of a split between Syria and Hezbollah, which would weaken the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah axis on the Lebanese arena. Alternatively, there may be internal dissensions within the Syrian regime, which would translate into a purge in Syria - pushing that country to either fall into the American camp or reaffirm its rejectionist position in the Iranian camp. Either scenario is compatible with the American policy towards Syria, which is to let the Baathist regime in Damascus implode internally, which would deal a death blow to the rejectionist camp, since it would be a decisive severance of the trans-Syrian umbilical cord between Tehran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

What is certain, however, is that the coming confrontation will, ONCE AGAIN, take place on Lebanese soil, costing Lebanese lives and further undermining the long term survival of this small and tormented country. Lebanon has indeed become the village idiot whom everyone beats up when the bullies (US, Iran, Syria, Israel) don't want to beat on each other, or the doormat where everyone in the neighborhood come to wipe the shit off their shoes. This is possible because of the prostitutes who call themselves "politicians" in Lebanon and all the bastard Lebanese who worship them. From Aoun to Geagea, from Gemayel to Jumblatt, and from Nasrallah to Hariri, and all the herds of cretins in Lebanon and abroad who follow them.

The crisis in Lebanon today can never happen anywhere else. Much worse opponents than the Lebanese parties have in other instances find a way out - either by stepping down, or by fighting to death, or by coming together and agreeing in some way. Only in Lebanon can a stalemate become the modus operandi because the Lebanese prostitute politicians actually benefit from a crisis that drags on. Most of Lebanon's big business is owned by the prostitutes: airlines, gasoline, the media, the electric generators (since electricity is still rationed after 18 years since the end of the war), the cell phones (the highest rates in the world are in Lebanon) etc. So the prostitutes don't suffer. They make more money at times like these. Meanwhile, the Lebanese people are starving, they are emigrating, and they are coming to the conclusion that Lebanon is a fucking failed state not even worth that crappy piece of real estate it sits on. What is the point, the Lebanese are asking themselves, of claiming the nationality of a country that can't govern itself, where ordinary people have no voice, where the rulers are prostitutes to outside powers, where people's religion is more important than their own human dignity and livelihood, and where the best thing they can do is sit around waiting for the next bomb.

And now, the Lebanese sit around, knowing what the next round will be: Some trigger - a bomb, a rocket, a Katyusha, a kidnapping, which Hezbollah will claim as its act of revenge.... which in turn will give Israel the justification to retaliate...and everyone's gonads will inflate in inverse proportion to their moral dwarfism and political ineptitude. Thousands of lives will be eliminated, and of course the infrastructure which everyone will deplore. Everyone at the UN will become agitated and deliver yet another resolution which no one will abide by.

The Lebanese are bracing themselves for the next round. They should, instead, converge on their prostitute politicians' houses, pitchforks and all, and hang them by their gonads (Hassan should be hanged by his beard because he has no gonads) until they make a deal and stop using Lebanon as a brothel for their high-paying sponsors from Iran, the US, Israel and Syria, not to mention the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and the Europeans...

Hanibaal

The Bush Administration: Back to Old Tricks

After September 11, 2001, we heard President Bush and his thinkers make a major reassessment of how the US conducts its foreign policy: We heard it said many times that the US will no longer seek stability by colluding with dictators and criminal governments at the expense of the true aspirations of the peoples of the Middle East and the world at large. We were promised that from that day forward only the long term interests of the peoples of the region - democracy, freedom, justice, free determination, and the pursuit of happiness - will guide US policy, and not short-term interests associated with supporting defective leaderships that are often imposed on people by force or by antiquated traditions.

Fast forward to March 2008, and witness Samir Geagea one the most criminal warlords of the Lebanese War who leads the Lebanese Forces - now a party, but between 1975 and 1990 one of the most murderous militias whose political program is to eradicate the Lebanese State institutions and replace them by a Christian-based government under the leadership of the Maronite Patriarch. In other words, a Christian counterpart to what Hezbollah stands for today on the Muslim side of the equation.

Witness this assassin of thousands of innocent Lebanese of all denominations, including his own Maronite community, be welcomed to the White House by Steven Hadley and John Hanna. Witness the Bush administration licking the boot of this murderous gangster only to promote him as the "Christian" leader of the Hariri-Siniora-Jumblatt Sunni-Druze Mafia that calls itself "The March 14 Cedars Revolution". Witness the Bush administration call Geagea a "major" figure in the March 14 coalition, since back when the US was sponsoring the Syrian occupation of Lebanon throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and Syria was a friend of the US and a "factor of stability" in Lebanon (which then became an occupying force after 2003), Geagea's militiamen stood side-by-side with the Syrian soldiers, shelled the Christian sectors of Lebanon, and helped the Syrian occupation impose a 2-year long siege of the Christian sector to force the Christians to kneel and sign the infamous Taif Agreement that took power from the Christian President and gave it to the Sunni Prime Minister.

Witness the Bush administration give an official welcome to a murderous warlord who, notwithstanding his opposition to Hezbollah and to their fanatic Islamic platform, wants to impose a similarly fanatic and racist Christian platform of government for at least the Lebanese Christians, if not the entire country. This is the man whose Lebanese Forces militia's logo is a cross looking like a knife, with which they slaughtered untold numbers of Lebanese during those years when they controlled the streets and back alleys of the country. I was there during those years and I experienced first hand how they robbed people's houses (ours included: they were protecting us from the PLO and the Muslims), stopped cars and killed people on the basis of their religion, how every morning after the nighttime battles we walked to the abandoned lots behind our neighborhood to find the semi-burned carcasses of women with huge crosses shoved into their vaginas and men with their hands tied behind their backs killed by a bullet in the head and a burned cross on their chests. These are the Lebanese Forces who in the mid-1980s, after having lost Beirut, penetrated into the mountains south of Beirut (the Shouf, the Sidon District, etc.) and provoked every Druze and every Shiite that had so far had nothing to do with the war, triggering a massive backlash of ethnic cleansing by Walid Jumblatt's militias (today an ally of Geagea) that emptied the southern half of Lebanon of its Christians - except for the pockets along the Israeli border that stayed until the Israeli occupation ended in 2000.

This is but a sample of the activities and achievements of the Lebanese Forces, those saviors and defenders of the Christian Lebanese. Taken altogether, their management of the Lebanese crisis from its outset, whether one looks at it from a local, regional or international angle, has been a total failure, for the Christians have lost the war thanks to Geagea. And now, having earned the hatred of his own people, the Christian Lebanese, Geagea is trying to hang on to power by clinging to the coattails of Hariri and the Bush administration.

One cannot fathom how the Bush administration justifies to itself even talking to Samir Geagea when it should detain him and try him for crimes against humanity and war crimes. The Bush administration is making a huge mistake - like the mistakes it made for 60 years cavorting to criminals and dictators who mistreated their own people - by giving credibility to this criminal assassin. Once again, the Christian people of Lebanon is being betrayed by a short-sighted US foreign policy which hopes to defeat Hezbollah and Iran by cozying up to feudal warlords and criminal warlords.

Our hopes have been shattered. The lessons of September 11, 2001 have indeed not been learned. It has been said that the Americans don't have a sense of history. Samir Geagea in the White House in 2008 is the evidence that another huge mistake is being made by the Bush administration in the Middle East.

(Below is the newspiece about Geagea at the White House)

Hanibaal

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Geagea gets pledge of support from officials in Washington
Lf leader discusses Syria, hizbullah with rice, hadley

Daily Star staff
Wednesday, March 12, 2008

BEIRUT: Lebanese Forces (LF) boss Samir Geagea, who left for the United States on Saturday, met on Tuesday with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as part of a tour of America.

US National Security Advisor Steven Hadley has told the LF chief that America was strongly committed to helping the Lebanese build an independent state, the An-Nahar daily quoted a White House source as saying on Tuesday.

"The US is still strongly committed to help the Lebanese people fulfill their dream of building a free, independent and prosperous state," Hadley told Geagea in Washington on Monday, according to the source.

The source said the talks touched on ways to help the Lebanese government achieve such goals and US worries of "continuous efforts" by Syria and Hizbullah to "undermine" Premier Fouad Siniora's Cabinet.

The same source also told An-Nahar's correspondent in Washington that the Hadley-Geagea meeting "reflects our appraisal of him as a major March 14 movement leader."

The LF said in a statement Tuesday that Geagea held talks at the White House with Hadley, Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs John Hannah and Chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia Gary Ackerman.

It said Geagea and his accompanying delegation discussed among other issues the US government's support for the Siniora government, including military and economic aid.

A source close to the LF said that Geagea discussed with the US officials the issues of the occupied Shebaa Farms area and Lebanese prisoners held in Israeli and Syrian jails.

The source said talks also focused on the status of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the need for an official US stance on the issue.

The delegation rejected the naturalization of Palestinians in Lebanon, the source added.

Meanwhile, LF lawmaker Antoine Zahra ruled out the possibility of electing a president on March 25.

"March 14 forces are still holding to Army commander General Michel Suleiman as a consensus president, irrespective of the date of the Arab Summit," the MP told the Saudi daily Okaz on Tuesday.

Zahra said it is becoming more evident every day that Syria, Iran and their Lebanese allies insist on blocking the presidential elections by attempting to impose their conditions and turn Lebanon into an open ground for regional and international confrontations.

Zahra said March 14 was considering what to do in the event that consensus over the presidential election is not reached.

"Our choice cannot be other than the primary choice, which is the Lebanese state and its institutions. As for the means to build this state and run it, the March 14 Forces will declare any decision we make at the appropriate time," Zahra added.

The March 14 pro-government coalition held a conference at the Bristol Hotel Monday to announce the agenda of its inaugural general assembly, which will be held Friday at the Beirut International Exhibition and Leisure center.

The "Spring of 2008" assembly will see the declaration of a general political platform for the parliamentary bloc. - The Daily Star

The Hariri Legacy - The Man Behind the Lies

Read the following appraisal of the Hariri Legacy, then read at the end of this piece another posting on this blog back in January - "Hariri: The Man Behind the Lies" - at:

http://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2008/01/hariri-real-man-behind-lies.html

The Hariri Legacy
March 07, 2008
Mideast Monitor

Although Western journalism has long had a spotty track record in Lebanon, no subject has been more misrepresented than the legacy of the late Prime Minister (1992-1998 and 2000-2004) Rafiq Hariri. Many elements of the myth are true, of course. He was a man of humble origins who struck it rich and lavished money on charitable causes for two decades before becoming prime minister. A great many Lebanese - including some of his fiercest political opponents - genuinely liked him as a person and grieved when he was brutally assassinated in February 2005. Nevertheless, the reality was "more complicated than the fairy tale," as Anna Ciezadlo aptly observed, and "not as easy to report." [1]

During the 1990-2005 Syrian occupation of Lebanon, mainstream American and European media regurgitated a quasi-fictitious narrative of Lebanon's postwar economic and political revival marketed by Hariri. They showed little interest in the darker sides of Beirut's glittering reconstruction, such as steadily widening income inequalities, rampant corruption, and the devastating impact of unregulated Syrian labor exports (which benefited Hariri and other Lebanese construction tycoons) on the poor. The steady erosion of civil liberties during Hariri's first tenure (a necessary adjunct of his economic policies) was largely downplayed.

Sugar coated press coverage was driven less by inscrutable complexities of the subject matter or conscious intent to distort facts than by a profound reluctance to acknowledge problems that have no easy solution and heartfelt support for a political establishment that many Westerners saw as the only viable bulwark against extremism and internal disintegration. While Western media coverage of Hariri during his lifetime was slanted mostly by omission, it veered toward blatant misrepresentation after his February 2005 assassination and the subsequent withdrawal of Syrian forces. As the March 14 coalition, headed by the Hariri family and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, narrowly won a parliamentary majority and assumed the reins of power, an even more grandiose Hariri myth was born and reproduced verbatim in the Western media.

Hariri, who never once publicly criticized the Syrian occupation, was recast by The New York Times as a towering nationalist "known as a fierce opponent of Syrian domination."[2] Variations of this claim have been ubiquitous in Western media reports on Lebanon. The Los Angeles Times and the BBC prefer the phrase "vocal opponent,"[3] while Agence France Presse is partial to "outspoken opponent."[4]

While Hariri is known to have secretly encouraged outside pressure on Syrian leader Bashar Assad not to extend the presidential term of Emile Lahoud (his political archrival) in 2004, his aim was simply to win a greater share of the spoils within Syria's orbit. Even after the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1559 calling for an unconditional Syrian withdrawal and began deliberating over how to implement it, the prime minister spent weeks trying to convince Assad to grant him a two-thirds veto-proof cabinet majority before eventually resigning. Being killed by the Syrians (presumably) does not retroactively make Hariri a "fierce opponent" of Syrian domination, even if his death inspired many others to demand an end to the occupation.

Other aspects of the late Hariri's legacy are routinely misrepresented in the Western media. Hariri did not, as The New York Times reported, "broker an end to the civil war in 1991."[5] He played a role in persuading (and, it is widely rumored, bribing) parliamentary deputies to sign the 1989 Taif Accord, but the terms of this accord were handed down by the Saudis, with non-negotiable clauses legitimating the Syrian military presence. In any case, the agreement did not bring an end to the war (none of the combatants were even present at the negotiations) - it brought a beginning to internationally sanctioned Syrian hegemony in Lebanon.

The Economist recently reported that "a lack of foreign aid and high reconstruction costs" after the war account for Lebanon's crushing debt burden today.[6] In fact, Lebanon was one of the world's largest per capita recipients of foreign aid during the occupation. The problem was that billions of dollars in bilateral and multilateral grants and soft loans were grossly misspent. A 2001 UN-commissioned assessment report on corruption in Lebanon estimated that the country had been losing $1.5 billion in graft annually (almost 10% of its GDP).[7] This was why Lebanon was saddled with "high reconstruction costs" and why it now has a massive debt burden.

Whether Hariri "drove the country forward often by sheer force of his personality," as The New York Times recently reported,[8] is perhaps debatable (since the Syrians were appointing Lebanese prime ministers, the alternatives could have been worse). However, modest economic growth at the expense of generating one of the largest per capita foreign debts of any country in the world doesn't normally win plaudits from Western journalists. These results might well have been the best possible in a country under Syrian occupation, but if so that only highlights that the occupation might well have collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions had Hariri and his Saudi financial backers not stepped in.

The rehabilitation of Hariri's legacy has greatly benefited his political heirs and allies in the March 14 coalition (where is name is invoked more often than American Republican politicians talk of Ronald Reagan) have inherited much of the media's fawning coverage. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, a close associate of Hariri who ran the finance ministry of occupied Lebanon longer than all others combined, was described by The Financial Times as "a career banker accidentally thrust . . . into the top job" after Hariri's assassination.[9] In fact, this government stalwart was chosen after careful deliberations within the Hariri family and the March 14 coalition.

The Western media's misrepresentations and glorification of Hariri's legacy constitute one of the most startling anachronisms in journalism today. Elsewhere in the Middle East (and the world), Western journalists intensively scrutinize governments, empowering their disaffected constituents and enhancing the international community's understanding of impediments to democratic change. Lebanon remains very much an exception.

Notes

[1] Anna Ciezadlo, "Sect Symbols," The Nation, 5 March 2007.
[2] "U.N. Delivers Plan for Court In Hariri Case To Lebanon," The New York Times, 11 November 2006.
[3] "U.N. Raises Pressure on Syria Over Killing; The Security Council tells Damascus to fully assist in Hariri inquiry or face consequences," The Los Angeles Times, 1 November 2005. UN team investigates Beirut blast, BBC, 24 February 2005.
[4] "Hariri assassination probe underway: Annan," Agence France Presse, 16 June 2005.
[5] "A Father's Shadow Clouds His Son's Rise in Lebanon," The New York Times, 3 October 2007.
[6] "Debt and destruction; Lebanon's economy," The Economist, 2 September 2006.
[7] The report was conducted by Information International, and commissioned by the United Nations Center for International Crime Prevention. "Lebanon loses 1.5 billion dollars annually to corruption: UN," Agence France Presse, 23 January 2001; The Daily Star (Beirut), 27 January 2001.
[8] "A Father's Shadow Clouds His Son's Rise in Lebanon," The New York Times, 3 October 2007.
[9] "Ceasefire leaves tensions between Beirut and Hizbollah simmering," The Financial Times, 9 November 2006.

George W. Bush & Lebanese War Criminal Samir Geagea: The Bush Legacy in Lebanon

President Bush is again betraying the principles upon he based his presidency, indeed his entire legacy. He is welcoming the Lebanese war criminal Samir Geagea whose Lebanese Forces militia spent most of the 1970s and 1980s killing, massacring and kidnapping on the pretense of defending the Christians of Lebanon, yet demonstrating the most brutal of war crimes. The career of the Lebanese Forces militia culminated when, in a reversal so typical of all Lebanese warlords and politics, Geagea sided with the Syrian occupation army against his own government and his own Christian people, shelling Christian neighborhoods with a savagery he did not display even against his own enemies. In 1982, it was the Lebanese Forces militia which was behind the slaughter at the Sabra-Shatila Palestinian refugee camps.

For his collusion with the Syrian occupation, which completed the takeover of what was the last bastion of freedom in Lebanon in October 1990 thanks to Geagea’s help and support, the Syrians shoved him in 1994 in an underground dungeon for 11 years, under a death sentence that was later commuted to a life sentence. Geagea was pardoned in a special bill passed by the Lebanese parliament on July 18, 2005. That "special pardon" included Geagea and a score of Al Qaeda-inspired extremists who were captured after conducting terrorist attacks against the Lebanese army and civilians in 2000-2001.

For mysterious reasons, the US Administration is set for an official meeting in March with Samir Geagea who is widely recognized for planning, ordering and committing war crimes that left permanent scars on the minds and bodies of thousands of Lebanese citizens. His bloody history against the people and the national army of Lebanon has shaped Lebanon’s modern history, leaving behind thousands of widows, orphans, handicapped and displaced people, as well as destroyed public and private property. If for any reason Samir Geagea should be in the United States, it should be to stand trial for his war crimes against the families and friends of many Lebanese-Americans who either lived or witnessed the Lebanese war. Geagea is believed to have been directly involved in:

1. The assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister, Mr. Rachid Karami.

2. The assassination of Christian leader Dany Chamoun with his wife and two young children (ages 5 and 7)

3. The assassination attempt against Deputy Prime Minister/Minister of the Interior Michel Murr.

A leader of an insignificant political party, Geagea holds no public official or representative status. This criminal holds no official title or position in the Lebanese government that warrants that he be received by the Bush Administration or the Republican Party. Geagea allied himself and his militia with the Syrian occupation in 1988 and 1989, and committed massacres against both Christian and Druze villages in the Shouf mountains south of Beirut.

To grant a US entry visa to a convicted war criminal such as Samir Geagea is not only against US law but is also an unacceptable immoral act and an insult to the American people and to the values inherent in the American Constitution. Criminals such as Geagea should not set foot on the soil of the United States, not to mention that of the White House or the Capitol Building.

It is a sad statement on the Bush presidency that, after leading the charge for democratization and emancipation of peoples and countries suffering from brutal regimes, it has now allied itself with criminals and corrupt regimes like the Siniora Government of Lebanon, of which war criminals like Samir Geagea and Walid Jumblatt are ardent supporters. The Bush administration likes them because, after 25 years of working for the Syrian occupation, they now say they are anti-Syrian: Screw the Lebanese people and their genuine aspirations for honest government and decent leaders! Screw the real reformers and democracy activists! Screw the human rights defenders! George W. Bush is a friend of Lebanese war criminals, warlords, militia leaders, corrupt traditionalists and old-boy feudal style politicians.

President Bush: So much for your “We will no longer seek stability at the expense of democracy and liberty”, because this is exactly what your administration is doing right now in Lebanon.

Hanibaal

Gaza, Israel and Hassan Nasrallah

The Lebanese in their vast majority don't give a damn about what Israelis and Palestinians do to each other. For one, they both have done great harm to a once peaceful and glorious and tolerant Lebanon. From Yasser Arafat to Ariel Sharon and all the Arab-Israeli wars in between, including the Syrian cowards who live in peace with Israel on the Golan since 1974, they can all go to hell: women, children, men, donkeys, presidents, prime ministers, Hamas radicals, moderate Fatah, right-wing likudniks or left-wing Labor maniacs.... Two, we just have nothing to tell the Palestinians and the Israelis other than to take their fanaticisms and their anachronistic beliefs in what God or some other deity may have promised one or the other of them, and shove all of them - Torah, Bible, Gospel and Koran included - as far away from Lebanon as they can (which unfortunately is not far enough, but the idea is still sound). Just take their armies, militias, resistance fighters, suicide bombers, spies, and other criminal and murderous military personnel of all kinds, their tanks, Qassam rockets and their jet fighters, their refugees and their settlers, Jews, Moslems and Christians alike, and leave Lebanon alone.

Hassan Nasrallah, though, unlike this majority of Lebanese, wants to liberate Jerusalem from the Jews on behalf of the Moslem Palestinians. He's an altruist, this Hassan. He obeys God. God told him that he must kill every citizen of Israel (and naturally every Lebanese and Palestinian along the way) in order to fulfill God's grand plan. Somehow God never told him of His great munificence, forgiveness, and all the Islamic rabble about Rahmah and Ghufran and compassion, etc. Somehow, the only message Hassan hears from God is the same message that Hamas crazies and Jewish settler idiots believe in: Kill the others and take their land. These people still believe promises God made thousands of years ago, when Homo sapiens barely walked out of the trees and into the Savannah, walked upright, and started using his brain and his hands. They still cling to beliefs inherited from the time of the Neanderthals and Cro-magnon men.

My ancestors the Phoenicians may have sacrificed virgins to Eshmun, Melkart, Baal, Adonis and Ishtar, but we never received divine promises to go take other people's wives and children as slaves, or take other people's lands. And even if we did back then, we no longer believe crappy religious texts written by smelly old men who slept with their own children and their maids.

I digress. Back to Hassan: He wants to liberate Palestine, but only from the Lebanese south, hiding in rat holes like the coward that he is, coming out of the rat hole long enough to fire a rocket on innocent civilians, haphazardly and randomly, then retreating back and inviting retaliation on equally innocent Lebanese civilians who have nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. Or, like he did in the 1980s, kidnapping innocent Westerners, torturing them and and holding them for years chained to the wall, or kidnapping a plane full of innocent travelers, or bombing 241 American and 58 French troops in their sleep while stationed in Beirut to protect other Arabs...That is what is called heroism by some Lebanese and all the other Arab cowards who otherwise live peacefully and in prosperity, some with full peace treaties and embassies exchanged with Israel, and others occasionally hurling an insult at the "Zionist entity", but never wasting any treasure or blood on the "Arab cause".

But somehow, Hassan Nasrallah, the altruistic coward, is dumb enough to allow the Arabs, including his patrons the Syrians and Iranians, to get away with that. They are building their countries (albeit while depriving their own people of their freedoms), but he is dumb enough to destroy his own country (Lebanon) over the corpses of his own people (us) in order to save another people (Palestinians) from the insults of yet another people (Israelis). Hassan is willing to put his own Shiite community in Lebanon and the Lebanese at large in 40 years of mayhem and destruction, just because he loves the Palestinians more than the Palestinians themselves.

There is much feeding frenzy in Beirut these days over the USS Cole looming across the horizon in the Mediterranean off the Lebanese coast. Another bloody chapter is about to be written. I have seen this happen over 50 years in Lebanon, and I keep asking myself: is this final chapter of the Holocaust of Lebanon? I wish it were. I wish for any war that will bring an end to this travesty of human history that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and all the harm it has inflicted on my country.

Hanibaal.