Just like the extremist Jewish Zionists in Occupied Palestine who continue to steal land from the Palestinians, the extremist Muslim Fascists of Hezbollah are stealing land from Lebanese Christians in south Lebanon, with the specific objective of altering the demographics of the region. Lebanon’s Christians have seen their geographic presence across the country shrinking, ever since the 1975 war.
The Druze chased the Christians out of the Shouf district in the mid-1980s with wide-scale massacres and atrocities, and while today some have returned, the majority continue to fear future massacres and displacement and try to assert their ownership of the land without resettling for good. They show up intermittently at their villages and homes to tend to their orchards and publicly exercise their presence, but spend the least time possible there, returning to safer places within the Christian heartland.
The Shiite Muslims, led by the terror organization of Hezbollah which has effective control over the region south of the Litani river, have also embarked on a land-stealing program aimed specifically at various Christian regions of Lebanon.
In the highlands of the majority Christian Byblos District, there is a handful of Shiite villages (accounting for 19% of registered voters) like Bazioun, Afqa, Frat, Aalmat, Hjoula, Ras Osta, Lassa, and others. For the past two decades or so, with the Christians weakened by the 1975 war and Hezbollah’s strategic decision to mutate from a “militia” to a “political party” that now dominates all politics in the country, Hezbollah has encouraged its Shiites in the district to steal land from Christian owners, particularly lands owned by the Maronite Church or the various municipalities. In the case of the Byblos District, the process is simple: Shiite villagers approach the Church and ask permission to temporarily use plots for agriculture. Though reluctant, the Church grants permission with the objective of easing relations and avoiding tensions between the two communities. Yet, in the background is Hezbollah’s military sway over the entire country and the fear it strikes in anyone who opposes the group. For the past 40 years (Hezbollah was founded in 1981, soon after the Iranian Islamic revolution), acts of kidnappings, assassinations, hijackings, car bombings etc. have been carried out by Hezbollah against various targets. While initially aimed at all forms of western presence in Lebanon in the 1980s – peacekeepers, clergymen, university officials, journalists, diplomats, and others – Hezbollah turned against the Israeli occupation of the south during the 1990s. When Israel withdrew in 2000, followed by the popular uprising that evicted the Syrian occupation army in 2005, Hezbollah’s mutation into a political party did not alter its terrorist nature: It targeted several Lebanese politicians, journalists, and critics, including the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri who was blown to shreds in a car bomb in downtown Beirut.
After taking permission to exploit plots of land from the Church, Shiite villagers slowly turn their agricultural operations into permanent settlements. They start by building seasonal homes, which turn into permanent residences. Then a mosque is built and more people move in, creating a new status quo that the owner of the land, the Church in this case, would be hard pressed to contest. Occasional eruptions of tensions with neighboring Christian villagers are quickly pacified. But the harm is done. It will probably take a military force one day to dislodge the usurpers of the land.
In Beirut, the road leading to the airport was flanked by beautiful sandy dunes that were occasionally used by the Lebanese army for training purposes or as a staging area for driving schools and driving tests. During the 1960s and 1970s, massive migrations occurred from the villages to the city. The sandy dunes of Airport Road were slowly transformed into a maize of shantytowns, and when the Islamic Republic of Iran began funding Hezbollah in the early 1980s, the shantytowns became full-fledged residential suburbs with tall buildings, hospitals, and schools. Airport Road is used by Hezbollah these days to control who goes in and out of the country’s only airport.
In more recent months, the southern border Christian village of Rmeish was the scene of clashes last July between its Christian residents and Hezbollah members. The incident started when a Rmeish resident was chopping wood in the Qatmoun area on the outskirts of the village. Armed Hezbollah thugs opened fire and prevented him from continuing his work, arguing that he was clearing areas with the goal of “exposing a resistance [i.e., Hezbollah] post to Israeli surveillance”. A week ago, the residents of the village reported the rape and appropriation of their lands by Hezbollah operatives disguised as an eco-friendly organization with the name "Green without borders", an insult to all the other NGOs with the "without borders" tag, like reporters or doctors. The Iranian Muslim thugs bulldozed large plots of village-owned land, cleared wooded areas, and built installations using heavy machinery. The sad and revealing aspect of this is that all this activity was within sight of Lebanese army positions operating in an area subject to UN Security Council resolution 1701. Despite warnings and calls for help from the village municipal authorities, the Lebanese army and government did not take any action, underscoring the fact that the entire Lebanese government and its institutions, including the Lebanese Army, are cowered by Hezbollah and its weapons. Neither did Church authorities do anything to stop the land-grabbing operation, other than give vaguely phrased sermons.
Within this past week, another incident in the south saw Hezbollah members ambush and attack a peacekeeping UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) convoy, killing one Irish soldier, Private Sean Rooney, and injuring three others [See: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/12/unifil-is-to-blame-for-private-rooneys.html]. No one has yet been arrested, despite several ongoing investigations by the Lebanese government, by the UN, and by an Irish delegation. Like all the other terrorist attacks carried out by Hezbollah, no one is ever found guilty and Hezbollah’s criminal acts remain unpunished. Why? Because everyone is afraid of Hezbollah’s retaliation if confronted. Fear of Hezbollah is not as much because it might use its weapons against the Lebanese people and their institutions; the main fear, especially by the international community, is that Hezbollah might launch its missiles into Israel. The international community cares more about the safety of the radical Jewish terrorist racists of Israel (now crowned by Netanyahu's extreme right-wing government) than about the helpless innocent Christian people of Lebanon. The only conviction of Hezbollah members occurred about a year ago when the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) in the Hague found three men (who, in the perfidious opinion of the STL, happen “incidentally” to be Hezbollah members) guilty in absentia for the killing of Prime Minister Hariri in 2005. The cowardly nature of western institutions in the face of terrorism prevented the STL from directly holding Hezbollah itself responsible for the Hariri assassination. The three men of course are in hiding in Hezbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon and their arrest and extradition cannot be carried out by the fearful and colluding Lebanese authorities. Just like the Hezbollah killers of Private Sean Rooney who have gone hiding in the same lawless Hezbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon.
A few years ago, hypocrite British and European governments invented the scheme of separating Hezbollah into a political wing (i.e. respectable) and a military wing (i.e. terrorist) in order to be able to condemn Hezbollah’s military wing without upsetting the political wing, something they did with Hamas as well, again for fear of retaliatory assassinations and bombings. I wonder if, again, they'll blame the military wing, but not the political wing of Hezbollah, for Private Rooney's killing, hoping in a cowardly way to avoid retaliation.
The Christians of Lebanon are a very patient community. For decades, they have taken the blows against their security and liberty, but continue to demand justice by civilized means. The international community is again, like in the 1975 war, committing the crime of blaming the Christian victims out of fear of the Muslim criminals. Lebanese Christians who call for repatriating the 2 million Syrian Muslim refugees back to Syria are tagged as racists and islamophobes, when Lebanon's Christians have for the past century worked with their fellow Muslims to establish a fair system of division of power, which unfortunately the Muslims keep challenging every time Saudi Arabia or Iran prods them to do so. Unlike the Zionist thugs of Israel who invaded and conquered historic Palestine, exterminated the native Palestinians, herded what remains of them into refugee camps, and have condemned them to a life of absolute inhumanity, Lebanon's Christians tried from the start to find an accommodation with the Muslims. For some reason that only Freud can explain, the "Christian" west loves to blame other Christians around the world while crawling at the feet of their Muslim enemies. The Balkan War of the 1990s is an example, where not only did they blame Serbia for trying to maintain its territorial integrity, the West dismembered Serbia and created two new Muslim entities in the heart of Europe: Bosnia and Kosovo, something that will likely come back to haunt the West.
For the past 5 decades, Lebanon's Christians have been on the defensive. The Sunni Muslims first challenged the power-sharing formula of the Lebanese system in 1975. They won with the backing of Yasser Arafat's PLO and all the Arabs and the West, and reduced the Christians to a tolerated "Dhimmi" community. Now the Shiite Muslims, backed by Iran, are challenging whatever little power the Christians have left, in an effort to displace them and evict them by emigration and attrition, just like the Zionist Jews are doing in Palestine. But one day, when enough becomes enough, beware the retribution of the Christians of Lebanon. They've been in the country since the dawn of Christianity, having survived many a conqueror. There is a reason why they are the last "free" Christian community in the East.
To the West: Do not underestimate the wrath of Lebanon’s Christians when “enough becomes enough”, and do not accuse them of Islamophobia and racism like you did back in the 1970s because they tried to salvage their nation from the likes of Hafez Assad, Mouammar Kaddafi, and Yasser Arafat, despite your betrayal and your cowering to Arab oil and Zionist blackmail.
