Kamal begot Walid, and Walid begot Taymour

If the title sounds biblical, it is because the facts are of biblical vintage. 

In Lebanon, as elsewhere in the archaic Middle East, leadership has nothing to do with merit and has everything to do with genes. The genetic transmission of political power is alive and well today as it was in the Bronze Age and the Middle Ages. Leaders always make sure to have male progeny, and invariably have only one or two at most, because their families are otherwise "modern" (i.e. beget few children) in contrast to their own prolific herd of mountain peasants. After all, those lords have amassed monumental fortunes from decades of corruption and pilfering of the country's public finances.

When the leader (in Lebanese jargon, he is the "zaiim" or boss, just like in the Italian Mafia) dies, often by assassination, the tribe or the religious sect immediately pledges allegiance to his son. Here I describe one, though not an exclusive, example of Lebanese genetic transmission of political power: The Jumblatt family, perched high in a medieval castle in the village of Moukhtara in the Shouf Mountains southeast of Beirut, was granted the title of "Bek" by the Ottoman occupiers with whom they collaborated. Though hailing of authentic feudal vintage, the Jumblatts claim to be Progressives and Socialists, leading a so-called Progressive Socialist Party composed exclusively of members of their own Druze sect. I often wonder how is it possible that all the Socialists in Lebanon are members of one religion (in this case, the Druze), and vice versa, how is it possible that all the Druze in Lebanon are Socialists when their community operates by rules from the Stone Age? Where would a Christian or Sunni Muslim or Shiite Muslim with progressive socialist ideas go to find a political home? Also, stupid European Socialists have romantic notions about the feudalism-socialism fusion, and have a love affair with the salon bourgeois-Socialist Jumblatts, whom they invite to every one of their conferences. They apparently see no contradiction between the Jumblatts' tribal feudal religious makeup, and their claims to socialism and progressive politics, not to mention their barbaric genocide of the Christians of the Lebanese Shouf District during the 1980s.  

Between 1968 and 1976, Kamal Jumblatt had done everything the Syrian regime wanted him to do: Undermine the Lebanese State by allying his tribal Druze hordes with the Palestinian terror groups of Yasser Arafat and assorted communists and radical left-wing groups, and leading a savage war against the Lebanese Christians. By 1977, with the war in full swing, the Syrians had no more use for Jumblatt, and just as they always do with former agents (like they did with countless others and were to do with Rafik Hariri in 2005), Syrian Intelligence planted a roadside bomb that killed Kamal Jumblatt. Then the Syrians proceeded to invade Lebanon with their own army.

Kamal had, thank God, begotten an only son Walid who, unlike the herd of mountain Druze peasants who mounted donkeys and wore bouffant pantaloons, rode a motorcycle and wore jeans, went to elitist AUB (American University of Beirut) - he was most likely admitted there by Wasta (political influence over AUB administrators) despite awful grades and only on account of his family's political clout - and led a life of a playboy who gave no indication of wanting a career in politics. In fact Playboy magazine published an interview with Walid in the mid-1980s (see: https://en.calameo.com/read/0000038542ff9fadb0f33) in which he gave cool smart-ass answers (see an excerpt below) to the reporter's questions, just as he continues to tweet cool smart-ass commentaries today in his waning years, camouflaging his feudal backwardness under a shallow pseudo-intellectual veneer. When his father Kamal was killed by the Syrians, Walid was immediately enthroned (in the local vernacular, he was "pledged allegiance to" or مبايعة) as chief of the Druze tribe and of the Socialist Progressive Party by the herd. No questions asked about merit or ambition. No competing candidates. He had no choice. And even though the Syrians killed his father, he spent much of his political career kissing the Syrians' behind until the Americans, who had colluded with the Assad regime in the destruction of Lebanon, changed their minds. The Arab nationalist and Socialist Jumblatt switched camps, jumped off the Syrian ship to climb on the American ship, and throughout the 2000s and 2010s Walid played the on-off pro-Syrian-anti-Syrian switcheroo game depending on which way the wind blew, yet the Syrians never assassinated him because, after spewing venom against Assad for some time, he'd go to Damascus and literally beg the Syrian tyrant for forgiveness. Principle to Walid Jumblatt is like dirty underwear: He changes it every day.

Walid Jumblatt nevertheless proved his own barbaric prowess in continuing in his father's footsteps and prosecuting the next 13 years (1977-1990) during which he slaughtered the Christians of the Shouf, destroyed their villages, stole their properties, ransacked their churches, desecrated their cemeteries, then was granted enormous sums of money after the war to supposedly entice those Christians to return to their villages and rebuild. This the Christians never did, as they never trusted the Druze since the massacres of the 1840s, 1860s, 1920s, and 1980s. The Christians have yet to return for good to their homes and villages. There is a Lebanese saying that goes like this, "Eat at the Druze's home, but sleep only at the Christian's" (كول عند الدرزي بس ما تنام إلا عند المسيحي), indicative of how the Christians feel about trusting the perfidious Druze. We now learn, by Walid Jumblatt's own admission (https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/01/06/the-other-ugly-face-of-lebanon/), that at the onset of the October 17, 2019 revolution he managed to whisk some 500 million dollars out of the country, just in time before the US dollar became rare and the Lebanese Lira collapsed. What a charming Socialist.

Now Walid too, thank God, had begotten an only son, Taymour, a name inspired from the infamous bloody conqueror Tamerlane (in Arabic Timourlank تيمورلنك). See how cultured and cool Walid is? Still a young fellow who may have said one day that he wasn't interested in carrying the mantle of a tribal feudal sectarian leader, Taymour was shoved head-first by the tribe into that very position he apparently dislikes, well before his father Walid even dies to be reincarnated into another life form (according to Druze beliefs). Taymour too was of course "admitted" to a corrupt American University of Beirut eager to maintain good relations with the equally corrupt and nepotistic political establishment, and like his father, he couldn't refuse the feudal lord mantle. That is why the Jumblatts rarely smile. They always bear that disgusted gaze of resignation on their faces. The herd demands the same genes at the helm, and so Taymour was forcibly pledged allegiance to, and has been shadowing his father like a sacrificial lamb to political meetings in which he rarely says anything, appearing to be learning the ropes on the job. And in effect, Taymour was made a candidate to Parliament, and was "elected" by the Druze herd in this so-called Lebanese democracy as a patrician MP representing the plebeian Druze peasants of the Shouf Mountains. 

As mentioned earlier, this pattern of primitive politics is not unique to the Jumblatts or the Druze. Among the self-anointed "more advanced" Christians, you have the Gemayel tribe, the Frangiyeh tribe, the Chamoun tribe, and the latest addition the nouveau-riche arriviste Aoun tribe, and others where sons, nephews, brothers, uncles all inherit the political staff in proportion to the fraction of the original founder's genome they carry. Sunni Muslims too: Karame, Hariri, Salam, etc. Not quite to their credit, Lebanon's Shiites have opted out of the genetic conference (they once had illustrious tribal names like Assa'd, Husseini, Hamade, Osseiran etc.), and have joined an even more primitive conference, a religious one, after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Shiites now transfer power laterally from turbaned bearded clergyman to turbaned bearded clergyman.

It is worth noting that the Druze community, whose territory straddles the tri-border region between Lebanon, Israel and Syria, is itself like a collective chameleon (the herd factor), donning the political colors of the substrate on which they tread: They are fake Socialists in Lebanon, fake Zionists in Israel, and fake Baathists in Syria. Perhaps they take on these fake identities in order to survive, but it ain't decent. Again, the charming perfidy in bouffant pantaloons. And so it is no wonder that the Druze and the Jumblatts have no principles whatsoever in politics, only primitive survivalism.

Unfortunately for pro-Syrian, anti-Western, Christian Lebanese President Michel Aoun, he begot only three daughters. How sad for the macho patriarchal numskull. Since women in tribal societies are deemed inferior beings to their male siblings, Aoun's daughters (whose flagrantly French names Claudine, Chantal and Mireille do not jibe with the family's pro-Iranian, anti-Western politics) had to make do with a less satisfactory son-in-law, Gebran Bassil (whom I cajole as Zebran Basij), whose adherence to family tribalism rests entirely upon his continued consummation of marital obligations. 

In the parliamentary elections of May 2022, there were hopes that the October 2019 revolution and the economic collapse have awakened some Lebanese to the putrid state of their tribal social-political structures, and spawned genuinely progressive movements and groups. Unfortunately, those groups never managed to convince the electorate in a significant way and coalesce into a unified weighty political force that can effect change. Up to 12 MPS (of a total of 128) were elected from supposedly "reformist" ranks. Not enough to muster sufficient power.

For similar ideas on political and sectarian feudalism in Lebanon, see "https://newsroomnomad.com/2017/03/20/circle-life-lebanon-feudal-rule/" 

Excerpt from Walid Jumblatt's 1984 interview with Playboy in which he gave "smart-ass" answers about American women:

Ukraine and Lebanon: The Curse of Geography and History

Translated from Arabic (https://www.asasmedia.com/news/391781)

Ukraine today hearkens back to Lebanon of recent years. We watch the invasion of its cities and streets, and we remember the battles of Achrafieh and Zahle, and the conquering vanguards of the Syrian Army and the Deterrence Forces which were under Hafez Assad’s sole command.

In many of his past utterances, Vladimir Putin has elaborated at length about his theory that Ukraine, with its plains and geography, its society and its origins, was no more than a Russian invention that was gifted by his ancestors to those orphans who survived on crumbs doled out to them by the Soviet Union as gifts and gratuities. He now finds it unbearable that this bastard country and its people would rise up and seize their independence, sovereignty, and free decision-making, after decades of a complete Russian hegemony over aspect of their lives.

In a recent meeting with Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin deliberately seated his French counterpart at a provocative distance from himself that may have required his guest to yell or use a megaphone to get his points across, an image that distilled two fundamentally different views of the growing crisis. A crisis that starts with a personality of a petulant man with a countenance of extreme superiority that trickled down to his profile and behavior, and which doesn’t seem to end with an entitlement mindset underlying his policies of systematically subjecting neighboring countries to be part and parcel of Greater Russia. Which means that no one, not anyone, has the right to sit at a table of discussion or dialogue. Should anyone try to engage Putin in discussion or dialogue, he’d have to sit at the same table that Emmanuel Macron was made to sit, a table that by its shocking dimensions appeared to have one end in Moscow and another in Paris.

Feu Hafez Assad of Syria was made of the same cloth. As the dictator of Syria, he repeatedly refused to visit Lebanon and meet his Lebanese counterpart at the Presidential Palace in Baabda. Instead, he summoned the Lebanese presidents to come to Damascus, often in an expedited manner, as if they were governors under his command of a small Syrian province among its sister provinces in the Damascus governorate. He ceaselessly repeated that Lebanon was a mistake of history and geography, that it was and will always be a small piece in the Greater Syria mosaic, not deserving of embassies or consulates or diplomatic exchanges. Rather, Lebanon was worthy of lower-level hybrid boards and councils, of vassal personalities, and of a military and security regime no less oppressive than the worst political and military hegemonies and occupations the world has known. When, 50 years after their respective independence from mandatory France, Syria was forced by the international community to exchange diplomatic missions with Lebanon, the matter seemed more like a folkloric aspect of their bilateral relations.

Assad’s Putin

In his last conversation with Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri complained that Syria’s custody over Lebanon was beginning to choke off Lebanon. But Syria did not want an ally, or a friend, or a peer in Lebanon; it wanted subjects to its dominion, dependent vassals to its ambitions, and mere tools in its orbit that acted according to Assad’s interests. All of this was accomplished under the cover of undisputed deceitful slogans, and when the pathways diverged, the Syrian regime found no alternative but to kill and eliminate.

The Assad regime did it with Kamal Jumblatt who sought to become a peer, refusing to cower in Hafez Assad’s big prison. Then it did it with Mufti Hassan Khaled, Presidents Bashir Gemayel and René Mouawad, all the way to Rafik Hariri. Some of these people were in fact political opponents of each other, sharing only their common aspiration to a sovereign and independent Lebanon.

Putin is pretexting a presumed Ukrainian role in targeting Russia to justify his invasion of Ukraine. This is exactly what Hafez Assad did vis-à-vis Lebanon, both before and after The National Movement [an amalgam of Muslim and Palestinian groups affiliated with Syria], before and after the Lebanese Front [an amalgam of Lebanese groups opposed to Syria], before and after the Palestinian Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat. The Syrian tyrant did not need justifications to invade and subdue Lebanon. He used every actor and every action to expand his intervention and his hegemony, as in the rumor that the selectmen of the town of Zahle called on him to invade the town, a call to which he could not but expediently respond, given his magnanimity, chivalry, and neighborliness!

Lebanon is not Ukraine

In 2005, in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah repeated his famous phrase, “Lebanon is not Ukraine”. We could not understand at the time the monumental similarity between two countries whose geographies made them lie inside the mouth of a bear or that of a lion [Assad in Arabic means lion]. We could not foresee that they’d be paying the ultimate price, not for any ostentatious hostility on their part, but simply for their natural right to freedom, liberation, and self-determination regardless of the whims of their Big Brother next door whom they knew only as a murderous hegemonic mad killer who did not desist from liquidating people, shelling cities, razing villages to the ground, whenever he so desired.

Ukraine today is like Lebanon of the recent past. We watch the invasion of its cities and streets, and we remember the battles of Achrafieh and Zahle, and the conquering vanguards of the Syrian Army and the Deterrence Forces which were under Hafez Assad’s sole command. We do not know Ukraine, nor do we know its people; we do not share borders, nor do we have a special relation or interests with it. But we do stand by them and feel sympathy for them, because we share with them the double curse of geography and history, for we know Russia and we know Putin, and we know from experience that Putin’s fabric is one that can only offer death, blood, and destruction to the world.

Now is not the time for nostalgia. The entire world is facing a difficult test and choices no less complicated, difficult, and sensitive. But the impact of allowing the fall of Ukraine is nothing less than igniting a Third World War.

The Scourge of Monotheism in the 21st Century

 These are the people who represent monotheistic religions in 2022:

Apparently, they get along sometimes.... But they wage wars and kill one another because of their God-mandated Bronze Age ideas.

Some of them have dropped the beards, the robes and the strange hats, and donned ties and suits, but their ideas are still those of the Bronze Age. Pastor Robert Jeffress, who is a Southern Baptist evangelical pastor and Donald Trump's spiritual adviser, says that Muslims, Mormons, Jews and members of non-Evangelical faiths are going to hell.

The Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Yitzhak Yosef, has numerous times referred to Black Africans (including those among them who are of the Jewish faith) as monkeys and called them by the derogatory term "kushi". He says he is quoting from the Talmud. (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrWLEjPLqVg). Here is what he looks like:

For its part, the Catholic Church has declared yoga a form of "Devil worship", though it often wavers and retracts statements made by some of its priests. Yet, child rape by priests has been tolerated and covered up for decades, if not outright forgiven, because the devil apparently is not involved; it's just that Catholic priests have loose pants.

The scourge of the monotheistic religions continues to haunt humanity, thousands of years after they were invented by smelly bearded old men within 500 miles of each other in the deserts of Arabia. They each took turns claiming to have the answer and the "true" religion: Hebrews claim that God has chosen them as his preferred people, split oceans for them, and ordered them TWICE to genocide the original inhabitants of Palestine (Joshua in biblical times, then Theodore Herzl in the 19th-20th centuries); Christians claim that a Jewish rabbi named Yesou' (name distorted by dumb pagan westerners as Jesus) who rebelled against the Roman occupation of Bronze Age Palestine, is actually the son of God who was born of a virgin and rose from the dead; Muslims claim that theirs is the final religion that God has chosen to reveal to their prophet Muhammad who flew to Heaven on a winged horse from Jerusalem, and whom Islam has decided is the final and last prophet ever, and anyone who rejects this proposition is worthy of nothing short of death.

Since I was brainwashed from birth into the Christian bullshit, there is a particular story in the Christian Gospels that was the straw that broke the camel's back: We are told in Mark and Matthew's gospels that the Jewish rabbi Yesou' called my ancestors of the Lebanese cities of Sidon and Tyre (referred to as Syro-Phoenicians or Greek-Canaanites) to be mere "dogs" to their "masters" the Israelites. The story (Mark 7:24-30, and Matthew 15:21-24) says that a Phoenician woman approached Yesou'-Jesus as he was visiting Sidon and Tyre and asked him to cast away demons from her daughter, to which he reacted angrily and asked his bodyguards-disciples to send her off and leave him alone, which is not a nice thing to do when you're a celebrity pretending to be the son of God. But she persisted, so he told her, "It is not right to take the children's [the Israelites] bread and cast it to the dogs [the Lebanese]", adding, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Apparently, Yesou'-Jesus was a Jewish supremacist racist who excluded all non-Jewish humans (99.99% of humanity) from his so-called mission of saving them from a sin his own father, the supreme alpha male zombie in the heavens, inflicted on them at birth without their knowledge or approval. Should he choose to return to Earth, as his followers claim he will, he might as well join the extremist right-wing Israeli government of Neftali Bennet and shoot - in his renowned sacred rage - at the Palestinians praying at the Al-Aqsa mosque. When will the lethal brainwashing of newborns into religious hatred of other humans stop?

What Hezbollah and the Americans want in Lebanon

The following are excerpts from a speech delivered yesterday by Hashem Safieddine that reveal Hezbollah’s thinking about Lebanon. I have always believed that Hezbollah would never relinquish its weapons and its will to dominate Lebanon, unlike others who naively believed that it will give up its "resistance" once Israel withdrew from the south in 2000. They were wrong, for Hezbollah invented new pretexts to retain its weapons. 

At its founding, Hezbollah clearly stated that it wanted to transform Lebanon into a new Iranian-style theocracy (ولاية الفقيه or The Rule of the Religious), and despite its talk about the plurality and diversity of Lebanese society with which it implies that won't control a multi-diverse Lebanon, we should remember that Iran is also a very diverse and multicultural country, yet is dominated by the fundamentalist Shiite bosses of Hezbollah. 

Unfortunately, I happen to also believe that the West, led by the Americans, has allowed Lebanon to fester for decades as a cesspool of violence dominated by America's enemies like Syria's Assad and Iran's Hezbollah, when the US had ample opportunities to prevent the decline and fall of a country that was once a major ally of the US in the region. One wonders why, and whether there is a priority in deliberately keeping Lebanon as an unstable crucible of containable violence where Syria, Israel and others can wage their wars without spilling too much over into their neighbors. One wonders why the Americans, who have defeated and/or helped topple many Arab dictators, have done everything they could to maintain the inimical, terrorist-supporting, human rights-violator Assad regime in power since 1969.  When Israel strikes Syria these days, or when Israel annexes the Syrian Golan Heights, the Syrians never react and somehow have the luxury to ignore these blatant attacks against their sovereignty. In contrast, Syria's allies like Hezbollah have been causing mayhem, war and instability (including the murder of hundreds of Americans) in Lebanon for decades if one Israeli jet flies overhead in the skies of Lebanon. 

 Here are a few salient points of the Hezbollah's mullah's speech:

- The Americans will learn soon enough …. that Hezbollah will take certain undefined actions to implement Hezbollah’s design for a new Lebanon.

- Hezbollah wants to “Sweep” the Americans and their cronies out of Lebanon. (Implying: Hezbollah will do what it did in the 1980s when it resorted to extreme violence to dislodge Ronald Reagan’s Marines and every other Westerner from Lebanon)

- Hezbollah will build a new Lebanon upon new “priorities” that will erase the past 70-80 years of Lebanon’s history. (Implying: the 1943 National Pact and Lebanese constitution will no longer be the basis for Lebanon’s current formula of governance).

- Only the “Resistance” will be the absolute master of the new Lebanon. (i.e. just as the Khomeini revolution of 1979 did with the Iranian nation).

Below are the excerpts from Safieddine’s speech:

Hashem Safieddine: We need to choose self-reliance to build our nation, and then “sweep up” the Americans and their cronies from Lebanon

Sunday, 20-February-2022

The head of Hezbollah’s Executive Council, Hashem Safieddine, said during a meeting of educational institutions in southern Lebanon, “All the Lebanese should know, and all the Americans should know, and they will find out soon enough, that if these pressures persist and if this meanness and hatred to the Lebanese continue in their livelihood and their money, we won’t have but one option, namely to rely on ourselves and to build our country as nations and countries should be built. We have the brains, capabilities and capacities that enable us, God willing, with all the sincere and honorable people, to rebuild a new, strong, resilient, resistant, fortified and independent Lebanon that can preserve its maritime and terrestrial sovereignty, its oil and its maritime resources, and its present and future for generations to come.”

Safieddine further said that “If the American wants to put us under maximum pressure, I think we should move to the maximum option of relying on ourselves to build our nation, then we shall sweep up the Americans and their cronies in Lebanon … From these pressures, we shall perform the miracle of building the new Lebanon on new priorities, and on a genuine and inclusive culture for all religions, denominations and regions detached from the bosses, the authoritarians and the feudal lords who have dominated the country over more than seventy or eighty years up to this day.”

Safieddine concluded, “We have the Cause of the Resistance, the vertebral column of all this strength and power without which there is no way of building neither a new Lebanon nor an economy,” adding “Whosever is preventing the Lebanese from building a real economy is the United States of America that does not want a solution in Lebanon in order to secure political gains that serve Israel.”

Inevitable Hezbollah & Lebanese Army Confrontation

The leader of the Iranian militia in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, has launched his first verbal attack against the Lebanese Army. In the past, Nasrallah was careful to include the Army in his mediatic triad of the "People-Resistance-Army", as a way to shelter his terrorist group behind a facade of legitimacy.

After having operated outside of State institutions for close to 20 years (1980-2000), Hezbollah faced an existential threat with the withdrawal of Israel from south Lebanon, since its "Resistance" was no longer needed, particularly since its existence was already a violation of the 1989 Taef Agreement that stipulated the dismantling of all militias. As a result, Hezbollah had to realign its strategy by entering the fray of Lebanese domestic politics. While maintaining its military capabilities, Hezbollah became also a political party, fielding candidates in elections and entering into alliances with other political parties. However, it never abandoned its essential nature as a terrorist militia serving Lebanon's archenemies Syria and Iran. 

As it waged its new political battles, Hezbollah nonetheless waged a wave of political assassinations against those it perceived as a threat to its existence as a military terrorist organization: It assassinated the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and another dozen political figures, journalists and opponents. In July 2006, it initiated a destructive war with Israel with a cross-border kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. In May 2008, when its own communications and espionage network came under attack by the Lebanese government, Hezbollah dispatched its thugs into the streets of Beirut and parts of the Shouf mountains south of Beirut. 

Politically, Hezbollah coined the triad mantra of the "People-Resistance-Army" which it imposed across government institutions and the media. By instilling fear throughout the social-political order of Lebanon, the mantra did survive to the present time. No one was willing, except in timid ways, to challenge this imposition by an foreign-funded terrorist militia on the entire country.

Until the fall of 2019, when a younger generation of Lebanese, fed up with the lies of the pro-Syrian, pro-Hezbollah camp and its domination, took to the streets primarily to protest the cover that Hezbollah and its allies provided a corrupt political establishment that was bilking the country of every penny and running the country down to the abyss it finds itself today.

It took some time for people to realize the nexus between allowing a freewheeling terrorist militia to operate outside of State institutions (with smuggling drugs, weapons and operatives to fund itself) on one hand, and the widespread rampant corruption that was sapping every corner of the Lebanese public administration on the other. It was fine to ignore Hezbollah when it was focused on fighting the Israeli occupation in the south, but as Hezbollah progressively turned inwards and became a tool with which to repress free expression, assassinate opponents, pilfer the treasury and threaten the very livelihoods of ordinary people, the anger led to an explosion in the streets of Beirut and across the country. 

In the 30 years since the end of the 1975-1990 war, life did not improve in Lebanon. Basic infrastructure (electricity and water) deteriorated, communications (Internet and phone services) became mediocre and expensive, standards of living declined, and the remittances from the Lebanese diaspora (which have historically kept Lebanon alive) were gradually eaten up by bribery and corruption in every aspect of life. I count myself among those whose "returned" from overseas in recent years, only to experience repeated humiliations and extortion for every transaction with public and private transaction (moving, clearing belongings at the harbor, registering civil status documents, etc.)

As a result of the revolution of October 17, 2019, and the more recent explosion of Beirut Harbor in August 2020 (attributed to the stocking by Hezbollah of thousands of tons of explosive ammonium nitrate which it uses to manufacture bombs), the "People-Resistance-Army" mantra is finally coming apart.

As I alluded to in an earlier post (https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2021/11/useless-dangerous-lebanese-army.html), the perception was growing among the Lebanese people that the Lebanese Army had become subservient to the diktat of Hezbollah. Yet, in recent weeks, Hezbollah's leader has begun expressing his frustration at feeling the noose tightening around his neck and his organization, particularly when he knows that the only force that could stand against his militia (barring any foreign intervention) is the Lebanese Army. 

Only yesterday, Nasrallah declared that US Army generals live and work in the Lebanese Ministry of Defense in Yarzeh, basically labeling the Lebanese military headquarters a den of American spies intent on hurting and ultimately eliminating his group. He also attacked in similar terms the US embassy in Awkar, northeast of Beirut, and US ambassador Dorothee Shea as directing operations in the Lebanese Army. I would like to remind readers that in the 1980s, Hezbollah bombed the US and French embassies twice, the US Marines and French paratrooper compounds (1983) in which 243 US servicemen and 58 French paratroopers were killed, kidnapped dozens of western journalists, clergymen, and academics chaining them for years, then handing them to the Syrian dictator Assad to trade them for political concessions from the West. The list is too long to enumerate all of Hezbollah's exploits over the decades, but the point is made.

For decades, a duplicitous American policy in Lebanon has been to strengthen the Lebanese Army just enough to stand up to, but never defeat, groups like Hezbollah. Apparently, the Americans, just like the Syrians and the Israelis, and behind them the Saudis and others, prefer Lebanon to remain a boxing ring in which these players can engage in matches once every few years, but without ever declaring a winner, least of all the legitimate State of Lebanon and its Army. Lebanon was, for example, never allowed to own fighter jets, or warships, or offensive weapons of any kind. The argument, according to the Americans, is that should the Lebanese State fall to Hezbollah, those weapons would then be turned against US interests and allies. Self-fulfilling prophecies indicating that successive US Administrations do not believe the Lebanese Armed Forces are capable enough to be trusted with weapons that could in fact restore the dominance of the State over groups like Hezbollah. A circular argument that never reaches a conclusion. 

Thus, without real support and arming, the Lebanese Army can only scare Hezbollah but not defeat it, which means that the so-called friends of Lebanon, who claim to want to take Lebanon out from under the Syrian-Iranian umbrella, wish for Lebanon to engage in a renewed civil war, a war of attrition that never concludes, that drags on and on, allowing among other nefarious consequences Palestinian and Syrian refugees to settle permanently in the country and transform it irreversibly into a Muslim-dominated country that would, in a twisted mindset, make peace with Israel, the only thing that the US really cares about in the Middle East.  

It's been decades since the mid-1960s when Lebanon began its descent. Not to repeat the clichés, but Lebanon thrived between the 1940s and the 1960s because it was the Western allies' best friend. Why has the West abandoned Lebanon? I leave the answer to the reader while recalling that the Middle East problem in the 19th century and for the first decades of the 20th century was centered on the Christians of Lebanon. Nowadays, another minority, certainly more reliable and advanced than Lebanon's Christians, has taken root south of the Lebanese border, and so the Middle East question in Western eyes is no longer that of the Christians of Lebanon.

Will there be a confrontation between Hezbollah and the Lebanese Army? Most likely. Who will win in that confrontation? Most likely Hezbollah, barring a massive foreign intervention. I say to my fellow Lebanese: Brace yourselves for another 15 years of torment. You have been primed by the 1975-1990 episode, and now you're inured to such disagreeable ways of living your lives, while the desperate ones among you emigrate to never return.

Totalitarian American Zionism...No end in Sight

Read the below article about an American Jewish teacher who criticized Israel on her blog and was fired by the school where she taught.

Hummmm... Is there such a thing as an anti-Semitic Jew?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/jewish-teacher-criticized-israel-she-140631501.html 

Just like the fundamentalist Muslims of Daesh and Al-Qaeda; just like the fundamentalist Evangelists of the American south; just like the fundamentalist Jewish Zionists: You have no right to deviate from the rigid archaic dogmas these ultra-religious dinosaurs dredge up from the Bronze Age and impose on their own members. If you do, you're cast out, you're reviled as a traitor....

As a Lebanese who hates everything the radical fundamentalist Muslims continue to do to Lebanon, I cannot but regret how otherwise tolerant Lebanese Christians are reacting by turning into a fundamentalist Christian Daesh. 

The response to rising monotheistic fundamentalism should be a reinforcement of all the values that have accrued since the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, a re-dedication to the value of the individual freedoms of conscience and speech, a re-assertion of the principles of inclusiveness against those of exclusiveness. The moment you create an association of human beings around a divinely-inspired notion of "chosenness" or superiority of one's identity over that of other human beings - which is what nationalism and religion are - you are excluding, you are erecting barriers, you are classifying human beings into "us against them", and we all know where this leads.

It is unthinkable how, in our day and age, the scourge of monotheism continues to destroy, separate, and instill hate among people. 

Tantura: Israel's Independence as a Monumental War Crime

Read this story, then multiply its event by several thousand fold across the former territory of historic Palestine and you get the idea behind the creation of the State of Israel, as told from the horse's mouth.
________________________________________________________
Owen Gleiberman
As reported in Yahoo News - Tuesday February 1, 2022

If you asked a random group of Israelis and a random group of Palestinians to describe the events that surrounded the founding of Israel in 1948 (chief among them the War of Independence, which lasted close to a year), you’d probably come about as close as you could get to a world political "Rashomon" [The film by Akira Kurosawa]. The Israelis would likely tell the story of their nation’s founding as a heroic saga of Zionist destiny cloaked in historical justice. The Palestinians would likely tell the story of how they lost their nation, and would evoke that loss with the phrase they have always used to describe it: The Nakba (“The Catastrophe”). Hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed by the Israelis in 1948, and at least 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. To this day, however, to utter the words “The Nakba” is a taboo in Israeli society. Alon Schwarz’s documentary "Tantura" explores just why that is. And it does so by digging into what has been, in Israel (and, for the most part, in the mainstream American media), forbidden territory. The film includes graphic testimony, and it comes from the most authoritative sources possible: those who fought in the war and lived it — the Palestinians, but also the Israeli soldiers themselves. The film’s central figure is a man named Teddy Katz, who is now in his late 70s and has suffered several strokes, but is still a spry interrogator of history. In the late ’90s, when he was doing graduate work in the Middle Eastern Studies department at the University of Haifa, he put together a thesis about what had gone on, just weeks after the proclamation of Israeli statehood by David Ben-Gurion on May 14, 1948, in Tantura, a Palestinian fishing village built around two small bays on the Mediterranean coast. Katz interviewed witnesses, half of them Palestinians and half of them Jews who were members of the Alexandroni Brigade, recording their words on 135 hours of cassette tapes, which we hear throughout the documentary. What he uncovered, without much prodding, was the chronicle of a massacre.

The battle for Tantura was brief; we’re told that only 10 people died in it. “Tantura” is concerned almost entirely with what happened after the battle, once the villagers had surrendered. It’s about the fate of civilians and the soldiers who were taken prisoner. And what we hear — almost entirely from veteran Israeli soldiers — is horrific. There are stories of people being lined up and shot. There are stories of rape. There are stories of people being killed with flamethrowers. There are stories of robbery and looting. There’s a story about a man in a pith helmet who comes up and shoots a bunch of civilians in the head. And there are stories of bodies dumped into a mass grave. In Tantura, which is now an idyllic spot that looks like a vacation getaway in Greece, that grave has been paved over by a parking lot.

What we hear in “Tantura,” on the tapes and from some of the soldiers interviewed today, is not a description of the agonies of battle. What we hear is a description of war crimes and ethnic cleansing. It’s estimated that 270 to 280 people died during the Tantura massacre. To give that figure some perspective, the number of Vietnamese civilians who were killed in the My Lai massacre is said to be 350 to 500. “Tantura” is a record of atrocity and tragedy.

But that, in an odd way, is not even the thrust of the documentary. When Katz first turned in his thesis, it received approval at the university, and not that much was made of it. But when a journalist from the daily newspaper Ma’ariv got wind of Katz’s findings and published them, the story blew up. The Israeli Defense Forces denied there was any reality to the thesis, and the Israeli soldiers — the very ones who had given their testimony to Katz — recanted what they said and sued Katz for libel. The whole Israeli system turned against him. He was not even allowed to play his tapes in court.

Schwarz goes back and interviews many of the men on the tapes, all now in their 90s. “There were many Arab casualties, and they were scattered, like garbage,” says one witness. “It’s forbidden to tell,” says another with an awkward smile. What Schwarz gets is a range of views (some confession, some denial, some balancing of the books). Yet much of the story can be read on the soldiers’ faces. My read is that most of them are too sincere, in their old age, to lie well.

“Tantura” is about how the knowledge of Israel’s conduct during the war was suppressed, denied, and covered up in Israel by a counter-mythology. In the documentary, the historian Adam Raz describes how “the DNA of the Zionist story” is that the Israelis were the most moral army on earth. Ilan Pappe, professor emeritus of Haifa University, says, “I think the self-image of Israel as a moral society is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. We are the ‘Chosen People.’ This is part of the Israeli self-identification. And I think it’s very hard for Israelis to admit that they commit war crimes. Because basically, the project of Zionism has a problem…You cannot create a safe haven by creating a catastrophe for other people.”

In other words, the profound accusation made in “Tantura” — that Israel committed war crimes in 1948 and covered it all up — isn’t merely a matter of calling out Israel for moral hypocrisy. It’s a case of the chickens coming home to roost. It’s about how the repressed reality of Israel’s founding is a key aspect of what has driven the Arab-Israeli crisis for seven decades. Of course, observers from all over the world might say: So what else is new? If you’ve read your Noam Chomsky, none of this comes as news. Yet the extent to which the reality has been covered up in Israel, and to a large degree in the United States, remains daunting.

“Tantura” also documents the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homelands in 1948, and how that was accomplished with the aid of the global news media. The Palestinians were torn from their houses and villages and sent packing, but Schwarz documents how the Israelis brought in camera crews from all over the world, including one from MGM, to stage a fake-news version of what was happening, making it look relatively benign. “Tantura” gives a black eye to David Ben-Gurion by recording how, in the 1950s, he commissioned studies and demanded that they illustrate the thesis that the Arabs had left of their own accord.

Given how much criticism Israel has received in recent years for the ruthlessness of its settlements program, and for a system that no less judicious and sympathetic a statesman than Jimmy Carter described, in 2007, as apartheid, a documentary that records the buried sins of Israel’s military past may seem to have only a distant relevance. Yet as “Tantura” makes clear, these lies are ghosts that have kept coming back to haunt Israel. That’s the very reason the lies persist: because the Israelis know that their occupation of a “moral high ground” is based on elevating those lies into myth. “Tantura” is far from the last word on the subject. It’s more like a salvo blast that, for Israel, raises the stakes of truth.