How Iran Rules Lebanon

At the Beirut Book Exposition over the weekend, the Hezbollah stand featured Iranian books and publications, and displayed a giant poster of Qassem Sulaymani, the Iranian Quds Corps Chief assassinated in Baghdad by a US drone attack.

Not far from the Hezbollah-Iranian stand, a choir was signing to entertain the visitors. When the choir began singing “Beirut, Lady of the World” by a famous Lebanese female singer, a group of men approached the singers and rudely cut their singing off. As other visitors approached to see what was going on, the electric power feeding the choir was cut off.

Yesterday, Monday March 7, as the exposition resumed, a young activist by the name of Shafiq Bader, who apparently was dismayed at what happened to the choir the previous day, approached the Iranian stand and began chanting, “Free free Beirut, out out Iran.” Out of nowhere, thugs affiliated with Hezbollah attacked him and began beating him violently on the head, on the back and the chest. The thugs yelled back, “there is no Beirut, there is only Tehran. There is no Lebanon, only Iran” within eyesight and earshot of the Lebanese Security Forces who have become either agents or puppets of Hezbollah. In effect, the activist Bader was arrested and interrogated while his attackers went about their business.

This is but a sample of the big chasm inside Lebanon between those who believe in Lebanon as their final identity, and those who are only Lebanese in name but with an Iranian identity. Hezbollah and the Lebanese Shiites in general indeed have no consideration for Lebanon as their ultimate identity, but are rather Iranians disguised as Lebanese. Just like the Lebanese Sunni Muslims who, since independence in 1921 and through the 1970s and 1980s, deemed Lebanon a part of the wider Muslim Umma or even Greater Syria, and whose identity was Arab, not Lebanese.

Some say that the Sunnis have learned their lessons and have become Lebanese patriots at heart, but I have my doubts. The Sunnis may be posturing as Lebanese patriots simply because they are threatened by the Shiites, and so have made an (temporary?) alliance with the Christians who have no other identity than that of Lebanon. Lebanon’s Christians, like all Christians around the world, have managed to keep their religious and national identities separate, unlike the Muslims who see themselves as Muslims first or the Jews who see themselves first as Jews.

There are many lessons to be learned from this incident. Just as they have done for the past half a century, the Lebanese never confront a problem upfront. They avoid, make detours, temper, and hope the for the best when everything around them is falling apart, such that problems accumulate, persist, fester, and then explode in an orgy of violence. Lebanon faced this problem back in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of the Palestinian liberation movements, the sequels of which have yet to fade. And now, Hezbollah has been wreaking havoc in the Lebanese body politic since the 1980s, and no amount of compromises, deals and temporary band-aids has yielded any result. Because Lebanon is gradually being crushed under the Iranian occupation, the Lebanese population, the Christians in particular, will at some point explode, arm themselves and begin a new civil war to rid themselves of the Iranian occupation.

The West chided and criticized the Christians in the 1970s and 1980s as fanatic right-wingers because they opposed Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian takeover of their country, while Israel was genociding the Palestinians and getting patted on the back by the Europeans and the Americans.

What will the West do this time around? The Lebanese government and institutions are cowering in the face of Hezbollah. The government of traitor Michel Aoun and his army will not confront Hezbollah, arguing that they don't want to start a civil war. Will the West demonize the Christian population at some point for arming itself and trying to lift the Iranian yoke from Lebanon? Will it still call them fanatic right-wingers? I think not. Why? Because the West has had its share of violence inflicted on it by militant Islam, be it Sunni or Shiite. This time around, perhaps, the West has learned its lessons.