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