Where Was the World? Assad's Brutality: 35 years in Lebanon vs. 9 months in Syria.

Where was the world when the Assad Regime was genociding the Lebanese people during 35 years of occupation?

Where were the accusations against the Assad family of committing crimes against humanity when the same Syrian security and armed forces that are brutalizing the Syrian people today were brutalizing the Lebanese people from 1972 to the mid-2008?

Why were the Lebanese people put at the mercy of this criminal regime under the pretext of "peacekeeping" by an "Arab Deterrence Force"? And why was the Lebanese Resistance against the Syrian occupation and its proxy terror organizations (PLO, PFLP, and all the hoodlum Palestinians) deemed a "right-wing" conspiracy against the "poor Palestinian refugees"?

Why was the Damour massacre of January 1976 ignored by racist liberals like Robert Fisk and his ilk, while the Sabra-Shatila continues to this day to be a subject of much debate?

Why the double standards? Why is it that the destruction of Lebanon for more than 40 years at the hands of filthy Arabs (including today's "awakened" Gulf Arabs from Qatar, the Emirates and Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and all the neanderthals of pan-Arab nationalism) who colluded with Yasser Arafat and paid him and armed him to destroy Lebanon and bring it to its knees, is ignored and dusted under the rug?

Was it to secure Israel - who today is already mourning the impending fall of the brutal dictator in Damascus because he protected Israel's Golan annexation of his own Golan Heights - against the Right of Return by offering Lebanon as a substitute homeland for the Palestinians?

What conspiracy theory are we to believe as an explanation for the collusion of the international community at destroying the only decent country in the Middle East to the claws of Arab Nationalist Socialist dictators, Islamic theocracies, and the Jewish theocracy next door? The West and the international community at large knew what the Syrians and the Arabs and the Israelis were doing in Lebanon; yet they kept telling the Lebanese that all their occupiers and tormentors were "factors of stability".... until September 2011, when everyone woke up to the monster they had all created. It was only in March 2003 that then Secretary of State Colin Powell uttered the word "occupation" to describe what had heretofore been called a mere Syrian "presence"?

From 1972 onward, Syria committed massacre after massacre in remote Christian villages along its border with Lebanon. It fueled, financed and armed all the Palestinian factions into destabilizing Lebanon. It assassinated foreign and Lebanese dignitaries and diplomats, including Louis Delamare the French Ambassador, and Francis Meloy the US Ambassador. It bombed the Iraqi Embassy in Beirut in 1981 (because the Syrian Baath of the Assads did not like the Iraqi Baath of Saddam Hussein). Syria later bombed the US Embassy in Beirut TWICE, not once, and the French Embassy in 1983. It carried out the bombing of the US Marines compound and the French Paratroopers compound in 1983 as well, forces that had come to Beirut as peacekeepers to supervise the withdrawal of Yasser Arafat's PLO criminals. Syria was behind every kidnapping in Lebanon of the dozens of Western hostages throughout the 1980s, some of whom were murdered in captivity while others were later released in a trickle, appearing suddenly in Syria under portraits of the same Assad who ordered their kidnapping in the first place. Syria essentially evicted the West from Lebanon in order to secure its grip on its neighbor, ensure that the instability in it continued under the pretense of fighting Israel while along its own borders with Israel on the Golan Heights not one bullet was ever shot from 1974 to date.

Meanwhile, the lives of the Lebanese people were shattered. Not one Lebanese family did not see their house destroyed, their son killed or kidnapped to Syria to rot in Syria's notorious prisons, their village uprooted, their city bombed for months on end, their children emigrate, and the entire country becoming the longest held hostage country to a resolution of the otherwise insoluble Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even today, the Lebanese continue to live at the mercy of Syria's foremost ally in Lebanon, the terrorist organziation of Hezbollah which has hijacked the government and state institutions, and maintains Lebanon forcibly in a state of war, simply as a pressure card in the hands of Syria and Iran.

Whatever happens in Syria can never erase the harm and the hurt that the crime committed by the international community against the tiny defenseless country of Lebanon. In its heyday, Lebanon was the only island of tolerance and multiculturalism. Today it is a backwater cesspool of religious intolerance and a haven for terrorist organizations.

Had the world intervened to rescue Lebanon from the claws of the Assad regime in the 1970s, it could have averted the evolution of radicalism that ultimately led to September 11 and the worldwide terror we live in today. Had the world intervened forcefully in the 1970s and 1980s to prevent the takeover by Syria, Iran and Hezbollah of Lebanon, perhaps we would not be fearing Iran's development of nuclear weapons. Lest it be forgotten, the first suicide bombing ever that caused the most dead among Americans prior to September 2011 is the 1983 Beirut twin suicide bombings of the US Marines and French Paratroopers compounds. What did the French and US (Reagan) governments do? They fled like rabbits, hopping onto their ships and returning home with their tails between their legs. Who was behind their defeat? Syria.

It took the world 30 years to begin reacting to the horrendous record of the Syrian Regime in human rights and genocidal crimes in the region. Why? What is it about Syria that is so "strategic" for the West to have protected this monster for so long? After all, the Syrian army is more pathetic than Saddam Hussein's battle-tested army, and Syria no longer has the protection it once had of the Soviet Union. Yet, the criminal tyrant in Damascus continued to be received in Geneva every year by US presidents and state department secretaries, and his crimes against the Lebanese people continued to be ignored. Why?

The only explanation is unfortunately a conspiracy theory: The Syrian regime provided Israel with the stability it needed on the Golan, and it muzzled the Palestinians of Lebanon sufficiently, to allow Israel to continue swallowing up the West Bank and erode all the foundations of a future State of Palestine. Had Yasser Arafat succeeded in taking up the Lebanese government, he would have turned Lebanon into his Palestine, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would have ended.

With American idiots like Newt Gingrich subscribing to the fallacy of the Palestinians as an "invented" people, it would then have made sense for the world to accept Lebanon as a substitute Palestine. But, luckily, things did not work that way. Sooner or later, people act in their interest, no matter the cost. The Lebanese stood up to Arafat and Assad, and though losing all the battles, they have won the war of preserving Lebanon for the Lebanese, albeit at a horrendous price. And now, the Syrian people have stood up. I wish them luck for the next 30 years or so, because they are going to need it.

Hanibaal