Dinosaur Berri and America's Hatred of Lebanon's Christians

Nabih Berri has been Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament for 30 years. He is a Shiite Muslim, leader of the pro-Syrian Amal militia, and was first "elected" to the post in 1992 when the Syrian occupation forces of the dictator Bashar Assad had completed their takeover of Lebanon. 

Prior to the 1990s, Berri spent much of the 1980s massacring Palestinians (during the War of the Camps) in their refugee camps, attacking western forces and embassies in collusion with the other Shiite Muslim militia, the nascent pro-Iranian Hezbollah that was formed in the Bekaa Valley by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Berri also fought Hezbollah, in a fratricidal Shiite war over control of the Shiite Muslim herd. 

During his long tenure as Speaker, Berri flouted all the rules, made shady deals, acted on behalf of the Syrian dictatorship to repress any pro-democracy uprising in a Lebanon that had been vanquished by a collusion between the US and the West on one hand, and the autocratic repressive regimes of Syria and Saudi Arabia on the other hand. Under the impulse of the US whose sole concern is Israel's happiness, the international community agreed to place Lebanon under the Syrian Gulag with its assortment of human rights abuses, kidnappings and enforced disappearances, silencing of any opposition to the Syrian occupation, assassinations, and other forms of American-style hypocritical peacekeeping. Through the three decades as Speaker, Nabih Berri was the puppet of the Assad regime, serving as the Syrian coordinator with the Iranian theocracy and its local agent Hezbollah. 

The crushing and silencing by the US-Syria-Saudi alliance - sealed under the Taef Agreement signed in 1989 in the Saudi city of Taef - of the Christian community in Lebanon was a harbinger of what would be the worst twenty years for all the Christian communities of the Middle East. 

In Iraq, the Christians were displaced, massacred and evicted under the watchful eyes of the American occupation of the country.

In Syria, the civil war has all but eradicated the Christian community.

In Israel, the Christians of Palestine suffered the most from the Jewish occupation, particularly in Jerusalem where Christians are made to live in an open air concentration camp whose purpose is to slowly let the community die off: No passports, if you leave you can't go back, home demolitions, denial of building permits, cession of Palestinian homes to new Jewish colonists, etc. The last Israeli achievement was to kill the Palestinian Christian journalist Shireen Abu-Aqleh with a well-targeted Israeli sniper bullet to her head right between her helmet and her Press flack jacket.

In Egypt, the dictator Sissi is a friend of the US and Israel, so his persecution of Egypt's Coptic Christians is a no brainer. Killings, church destructions, harassment, forced conversions to Islam, murder of Muslim converts to Christianity, assassinations and imprisonment of journalists and civil society activists, etc. are a daily occurrence in Egypt.

There are no Christian communities to speak of in the US- and Israeli-friendly countries of the Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and others in the Gulf, so the relationship is smooth and unburdened by an annoying Christian community.

In the 19th century, the "Middle East problem" was the persecution by Arab and Turkish Ottoman Muslims of their Christian communities: Massacres and discrimination were rampant. Europe at the time intervened and secured some protections for the Christian communities. Nowadays, the "Middle East problem" has become the preservation of the ultra-religious Fascist artificial country of Israel, itself constructed over the corpses of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and millions of Palestinian refugees displaced both inside and outside Israel, to make way for European and American Jewish colonists who build their colonies over the ruins of nearly 600 Palestinian villages and cities. 

It seems that the United States has assumed the European guilt for the Holocaust and will acquiesce to any policy the pro-Israel lobbies impose on it. So it has decided to clear the Middle East of any native Christian presence, because it simplifies the otherwise difficult to comprehend complexities of the region: By eliminating the Christians - at least the traditional Catholic and Greek-Orthodox communities - the savant idiots of State Department can more easily intellectually fathom a simple Muslim-Jewish divide, without those bothersome Christians to muddy up the waters for them. Of course, the only Christians to thrive these days in the Middle East are the dumb American Southern Evangelical missionaries whose head is right up their Israeli bosses' caudal aperture. They are opening schools, converting thousands, and lobbying on behalf of all the atrocities Israel has been perpetrating.

What do the US Evangelical Missionaries want? They want the artificial and colonial enterprise called Israel, built over the cadavers of millions of Jews murdered by French, German, Italian and other European Fascists, and over the cadavers of millions of Palestinians, to succeed. Why do they want Israel to succeed? Because God says so in their trashy bible: Apparently, according to biblical garbage, in order for the Messiah Christ to return from his celestial vacation, he needs a Jewish Palestine, which is in the making in the form of the filth that is Israel. Once he is back, however, American evangelicals expect all Jews to convert to Christianity and accept Jesus as the Messiah. Those who don't accept Jesus will indeed be put to the sword. So the Israeli Jewish-Evangelical Christian love affair is predicated on a dangerous understanding for the Israelis.

I digressed from Nabih Berri, the pro-Syrian dinosaur who is about to be "elected" today for a seventh term as Speaker of the Lebanese parliament. His 30-year fornication with the Syrians and the Americans has given him sustainability, typical for traitors who work on the unprincipled fence of politics. We have not mentioned that his long tenure has allowed him to amass immense wealth, not from his salary as Speaker obviously, but from all the corruption and pilfering of public funds.

Congratulations, Mr. Berri. You have proven that bandits can become politicians, but while some bandits (like Robin Hood) steal from the rich to give to the poor, other bandits like you steal from the poor to enrich themselves. 

The America I've Seen

I've had enough of America, its brutality, its primitiveness, its hypocrisy and bigotry, its racism, its superficiality, its mercantilism, its ignorance, its biases, its arrogance, its insidious totalitarianism, and its subjugation to ultra-religious evangelist thinking and extremist right-wing friends (e.g. Zionists) around the world.

I've had it with the so-called liberals and socialists of New England, including former colleagues and friends, whose depth of thinking is the shallowest I've seen. I've met people in the area who think that the only suffering to have ever existed is Anne Frank's ordeal, and that is because Americans are brainwashed into thinking that only they, and perhaps those who hold them hostage, know suffering. You see, Americans are by and large self-centered, solipsistic, ignorant descendants of European peasantry and riff-raff. They see new immigrants coming in who, like their own grandparents, hail from poor working class people and peasants from the boonies of their country, and the "neo-natives" believe that all the people in those countries of origin are like the immigrants, destitute, ignorant, backward-thinking, conservative, and racist to boot. The abysmal American education doesn't teach them history and the universal human condition, and in every aspect of their lives, Americans cannot relate to people from other countries.

It is easy to fool ignorant people. Between Zionist propaganda, the US media and Hollywood, the American public is infantilized, treated like idiots who don't need to be educated or explained anything, and instead of lifting their audiences intellectually with worthy, truthful, factual information, they inject in their spongy brains all kinds of untruths, myths, lies and propaganda. They appeal to people's base feelings, rather than to their thinking minds. 80% of Americans believe in the literality of biblical accounts and other sordid religious texts.

The Uvelda, Texas, mass murderer has seen too many video games whose industry, just like the NRA, says that "people kill people; violent games and guns do not kill people." And stupid as they are, the Americans swallow this shit since it is argued as "constitutional rights". Just as they literally believe in the biblical accounts written some 3,000 years ago, Americans believe that their constitution, written 250 years ago by colonial pedophile slaveholders, promiscuous plantation owners, and greedy industrialists, is akin to "the word of God". Imagine the cesspool of ignorance that, even in 2020, makes half of the American people vote for a dangerous neanderthal mafioso moron named Donald Trump. 

The success of America and Americans was achieved over the backs of indigenous peoples and African slaves, in an open environment where there was no competition. That is why Americans are successful but dumb. They think they succeeded because of their smarts, when the fact is they succeeded because there was little opposition to their raping and pilfering of the country. In fact, Americans love Israelis because of their similar colonialist geneses. But Israelis faced a native Palestinian population that has been fighting them ever since they invaded Palestine. South Africans have succeeded in dislodging the dumb white colonials from power. Palestinians too will succeed in the near future. But America is only at the beginning of a tormented colonial journey that can only end in disaster: By 2050, the white colons will no longer be a majority. They will be the largest minority. And immigrants continue pouring in. Mostly from Latin America, and this proximity of the US to a vast reservoir of poor, disenfranchised, Spanish-speaking refugees will slow down, if not prevent, their integration.

I hope to be alive to watch it happen, unless Steven Spielberg makes another one of his stupid movies about it.

What Now for a Defeated Hezbollah?

What Now for a Defeated Hezbollah?

(Translated from Arabic - Hazem Sagghiyeh in “Ash Sharq Al-Awsat”)
May 18, 2022

Through the recent parliamentary elections, both the old Lebanon and the new Lebanon have closed in on Hezbollah and its allies, most notably those of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) of Michel Aoun and Gebran Bassil.

The old Lebanon, i.e. the Lebanon of the religious sects, could not bear any longer the duality of weapons between Hezbollah and the legitimate armed forces of the country. This old Lebanon has placed the Lebanese Forces Party on a parity with the Aounists of the FPM and at the helm of Christian representation in Parliament; it also has voted for some Sunni diehards despite Saad Hariri's withdrawal from the race, and has maintained Walid Jumblatt at the helm of the Druze community. This transformation in the landscape has deprived Hezbollah of most of its allies from outside the Shiite community, thus reducing the pro-Iranian militia to its own size, just as it deprived it of many of its appendages in other communities, including the local appendages of the Syrian dictatorship next door.

The new Lebanon, i.e. the younger generation of Civil Society that emerged from the October 17, 2019 revolution, is keen on fighting against the standard fare of Lebanese governance, namely looting and corruption. It has proclaimed in no uncertain terms its awareness of the link between the system and its military protectors. Accordingly, it has brought to Parliament, for the first time in Lebanon’s modern history, a respectable parliamentary bloc that may be able to develop new concepts and usher in heretofore unfamiliar mechanisms in the country's politics.

Those incoming young women and men were victims of Hezbollah’s repression when they challenged the looting and corruption regime in 2019, before they were targeted by Hezbollah’s media and spokespersons in a campaign of calumny, and accusations of treason and affiliation with the “embassies” (a euphemism for a purported role as agents of US and European “enemies” of Lebanon).

When measured against this rising generation of modern politicians who symbolize a new Lebanon, Hezbollah’s “Resistance” appears like a thing from an ugly and dull past, something really ancient, while also being the subject of a political embargo imposed by the old traditional establishment as well.

A striking similarity between Lebanon and Iraq cannot be ignored: The old Iraq, the Iraq of the religious sects and ethnic groups, is fighting Iranian influence through the Sunni and Kurdish blocs, while the new Iraq, the young Iraq, is fighting this influence and its proxies through a civil revolution launched three years ago by modernists and secular-minded progressives in the Shiite community itself.

But let us not be complacent in thinking that Hezbollah will “understand” the rejection by the new majority in Parliament of Hezbollah’s weapons and regime; let us not be naive in imagining that Hezbollah will comply with whatever decisions and resolutions the new Parliament will issue. Hezbollah's nature leads one to profoundly doubt that it will submit to the will of the people, expressed as it is by the election results.

It is true that Hezbollah's leadership, including its Secretary General and Deputy Secretary General, has more than once emphasized the importance of these elections and the need to abide by their results. Yet, one suspects that these assertions were mere placeholders to be used in case of Hezbollah’s victory in the elections. But in case of its defeat, which is what happened, there are opposite assertions ready to be used: those who won are, according to some other Hezbollah figures, conspirators backed by foreign embassies and non-governmental organizations and their deep pockets; they are “shields” protecting the eternal enemy Israel and seeking to normalize with it; they are fueling a civil war. Naturally, Hezbollah cannot hand the country over to these people.

It was constantly evident that Hezbollah tended to militarize political life in Lebanon, especially the elections. Standing against the practice and language of democracy, Hezbollah has mobilized a language of triumphalism and subjugation, of martyrs and martyrdom, not to forget the blind worship of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

More dangerous than all of that are the mobilization warnings embedded in Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches preceding the elections, particularly the insistence on exploring for oil along the southern Lebanese coast. According to Nasrallah, the Lebanese own a “treasure” they do not dare exploit out of fear of the Israelis and the Americans. But the “Resistance” is on standby, all ready and prepared to protect any courageous oil and gas exploration operation like this.

This narrative is amenable to be put militarily in practice at any moment with a populist message: Hezbollah is promising the Lebanese, who are reeling under poverty and misery, that this so-called “treasure” would fill their lives with prosperity and abundance.

It would not be surprising if Hezbollah were to resort to a military adventure of some sort, taking oil and gas exploration as a launching platform, to turn attention away from the election results, precisely as it did when it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and conjured up the July 2006 war to undermine the ascending sovereignist agenda spawned by the 2005 political assassinations.

Such a possibility could accompany the political, and perhaps security, tensions which may haunt the new parliament for the foreseeable future as it confronts its upcoming milestones: The election of a Speaker, the appointment of a Prime Minister, the formation of a new government, and finally the election of a new President. Tensions that will be exacerbated by a move on the part of Hezbollah's opponents, both old and new, to establish a front coalescing and coordinating their efforts.

Hence, it is not unlikely that Hezbollah will, once again, punish the Lebanese for what they have accomplished in the elections, supposedly to protect them or promote their welfare. We know from all the past experiences that the bank of Hezbollah's sublime objectives - that hide not-so-sublime activities - is no better than the banks that have confiscated the savings of the Lebanese people.

Hyprocite Europeans and their Dumb American Poodles

A female American citizen, a journalist no less, is killed by an Israeli Army sniper - who was able to aim the bullet at the journalist's face, right between her protective helmet and her press flack jacket - as she covered an impending assault by the Army on the refugee camp of Jenin in Israeli-occupied Palestine.

Joe Biden, whom I wholeheartedly respect and did vote for, fumbled when asked about Israel's responsibility in the murder of an American woman by Israeli forces. He couldn't get himself to condemn the killing, equating the Israeli butcher with his powerless Palestinian victim. Israel is an illegal occupier of Palestine, loaded with American-supplied overwhelming force, maltreating a largely hapless Palestinian population, forcing them to live like leper dogs under an Apartheid type of colonial-vintage European foreign occupation.

Everyone knows why. Everyone knows that Americans in general, and journalists and politicians in particular, live in fear of upsetting the Israelis. Everyone knows that any politician or journalist who dares to criticize Israel will be tagged an anti-semite, regardless of the merits of the criticism. A large segment of the American population, the 46% who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, is anti-semitic and racist, though again this anti-semitism and racism is repressed publicly, lest careers and reputations get ruined. By and large, Americans are brainwashed and tamed like zoo animals to display proper behavior and express the "correct" opinion in front of their media handlers.

Unlike Europeans (see below), the vast majority of Americans is largely a mass of dumb ignoramuses who have no idea what and where Israel is and what and where Palestine is. They themselves will admit their lack of knowledge of history and the rest of the world, living self-centered lives that are essentially fashioned by Hollywood, mind-numbing TV commercials, and a small cadre of media elites who, in their obedience to the official narrative, are themselves fearful of reprisals if they dare tell the truth. What truth? The truth about how Palestine has, for the past 100 years, been slowly eradicated and upon whose ashes and millions of dead and refugees the divinely-inspired Bronze Age fantasy of Israel has been created. The truth about how Israelis have adopted Nazi systems to control and eventually eradicate an entire population. Any idea that Israel is interested in some eventual Palestinian State is a fallacy. Colonial Israel is working on a slow-cooking genocide of the native Palestinian population with the sole objective of getting rid of this population on the long term. Home demolitions, deprivation of citizenship rights, assassinations, reprisals, denial of building permits, etc. (All documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others in their January 2022 report. See: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/01/israeli-apartheid-report-can-critic-of.html). I would not be surprised if one day Israel - should it maintain its current policies - evicts millions of Palestinians from the West Bank because current demographic trends favor the hostage Palestinian population and not the Israeli invaders who refer to this gathering threat as a "demographic time bomb".

The American female journalist who was killed is a Christian. So, justifications of Islamic terrorism do not hold. She was born in Jerusalem, a city that Israel's religious terrorists want to make the exclusive capital of Israel, which is a thorny reminder of the existence of a native Palestinian population that predates newly arriving European and American colonists who would rather exterminate it and get rid of it. She was covering the impending assault of a refugee camp of Jenin. Imagine, the Israeli soldiers were attacking the same refugees that they themselves evicted from their ancestral villages; a double whammy! Israel itself was built on the ruins of historic Palestine. Israeli soldiers who hail from colonies literally built on the ruins of ancient Palestinian villages whose inhabitants are today reduced to living in refugee camps. Israel made them refugees by stealing their land, and is now attacking them again in the camps in which they found refuge. Theirs is the "most ethical country on earth", say the Israelis in their own defense.

Too hard to comprehend? Too heart-wrenching to admit? Perhaps for the dumb Americans, but not for the hypocrite Europeans.

With Europeans, a similar automatic reflexive mechanism of self-censorship is by now wired into their brains, much more so than with Americans. At least Americans can pretend to have rescued the remaining victims of the Holocaust. But Europeans are guilty of the Holocaust. They are also guilty of gifting Palestine to the colonial enterprise that became Israel, and condoning the uprooting of millions of native Palestinians from their millennial villages and towns to make way for fresh-off-the-boat European refugees that Europe was getting rid of. The Europeans are the ones who murdered millions during world war II in concentration camps - not only the German Nazis as we're constantly told, but the French, the Spanish, the Italians and many others were accomplices of the Germans. In fact, these are the same Europeans who created empires in every far corner of the earth, stealing, killing, erasing, raping, and enslaving, with the justification of their white supremacy over the other "races". How did they get to the point where, today, they promote the racial superiority of their former Israeli victims over the newly discovered inferior Palestinian "race"? 

One answer, and only one answer: White Europeans (and their cultural poodles the ignorant dumb Americans) are stuck in a guilt-ridden mental state that makes them think that a victim cannot become a butcher. While constantly pounding into their captive audiences that molested children will become molesters themselves, they are terrified and are mentally castrated to admit to themselves what they know deep down: The victims of European hatred have become the Israeli butchers victimizing another population, the Palestinians. But since the Palestinians are an inferior race, it is tolerable that Israelis keep abusing, mistreating, killing and genociding them. Not only was it OK for the Israelis to eradicate 600 Palestinian "villages" from the map of historic Palestine and build upon the ruins their brand new "colonies", but it continues to be OK to erase any Palestinian identity marker from the land.

To add insult to injury, as the funeral procession of the American journalist made its way yesterday to her hometown of Jerusalem, Israeli police attacked the mourners and beat them just to snatch the Palestinian flags from their hands. Israelis are terrified of the Palestinian flag because it represents the authentic historic identity of the land that the colonialist Israelis wish to wipe out.

Until the white Europeans and their dumb American poodles overcome the guilt of having killed millions of Israelis some eight decades ago, they will not be able to be objective. In the meantime, and as the rage, exasperation, and hopelessness sink deeper and deeper into the Palestinian psyche, a new generation of Palestinians is waking up to a life of misery under one of the most brutal form of foreign occupations that any people have ever experienced, thanks to European hypocrites and their dumb Americans. 

Looking forward, what do you expect an enslaved people would do if they are denied their dignity, their nation, their land, their identity, and their historic rights? 

الانتخابات اللبنانية: أرموا القمامة السياسية في مزبلة التاريخ

يا أهل لبنان

أظهر لنا أخواننا وأخواتنا في المهجر حبهم للبنان البارحة (أو بالأحرى يوميّ الجمعة 6 والأحد 8 أيار الماضيين) بالإدلاء بأصواتهم في الانتخابات بنسبة معدلها 61 بالمئة عل صعيد العالم أجمعه. لا ننسى أيضاً أن المغتربين يبقون هذا الوطن على قيد الحياة من خلال إرسالهم الأموال منذ عقود إلينا لكي نعتاش، رغم اللصوص الذين حكموا هذا البلد منذ انتهاء الحرب اللبنانية-الفلسطينية في عام 1990

 لا أبالغ بالقول أن إتفاق الطائف - الذي من أجله استخدم اللبنانيون السُنّة السلاح الفلسطيني للاستيلاء على صلاحيات رئيس الجمهورية الماروني وإعطائها إلى رئيس الوزراء السنّي - كان المصيبة الأولى الكبرى في تاريخ لبنان المعاصر، وذلك لأن هذه الحرب كانت فرصة فريدة للانتهاء من الطائفية والإقطاعية والتزلّم والوراثية السياسية وكل رواسب الاحتلال العثماني. لكنكم أنتم أيها اللبنانيون عدتم وأوصلتم اللصوص وزعران الحرب والإقطاعيين وكل تلك الحثالة السياسية وأحكمتموها على رقابكم، علماً أن هؤلاء العكاريت لم يطبقوا من إتفاق الطائف إلا تلك المواد منه التي تصبّ في مصالحهم

ثم وفي عام 2005 وبعد جريمة قتل رفيق الحريري على يد حزب الله والنظام السوري، بدى لنا في الوهلة الأولى أنكم أفقتم من غيبوبتكم وكان أملنا الكبير أن ثورة الأرز سوف تكون فرصة ثانية لإحداث التغيير المرجو لخلاص لبنان ونقله من القرن التاسع عشر إلى القرن الواحد  والعشرين. لكنكم فشلتم مرة ثانية، ووضعتم اللصوص نفسهم الذين وقّعوا على اتفاق الطائف بسدة الحكم مرة جديدة. فازداد الخراب وأمعنت الحثالة السياسية مجدداً بسرقتكم وتهجيركم وتخريب البلد

أما اليوم، فاللبنانيون الشيعة يعاودون الكرة. أتى دورهم في الإمعان بهذا الوطن، كما فعل اللبنانوين السنّة في عقودٍ مضت. فتحت غطاء الـ"تحرير" وأكاذيب الحرمان والضغينة العائدة إلى القرن السابع، يحاول الشيعة الاستيلاء على الحكم. فها هم يضربون مكوّنات الدولة ويعتدون على أصدقاء لبنان ويقتلون من يخالفهم الرأي ويهددون يميناً وشمالاً بسلاحهم. ألم تفهم أيها اللبناني مما علّمك تاريخك الحديث أن الشيعة سوف يتحالفون من اللاجئين السوريين لمحاربة الدولة اللبنانية؟ كما فعل السنّة بتحالفهم مع اللاجئين الفلسطينيين لمحاربة الدولة اللبنانية عام 1975 تحت شعار العروبة ومحاربة الانعزاليين والصليبيين، أي المسيحيين؟ يشيطن حسن نصرالله اليوم المسيحيين بقوله أنهم حلفاء إسرائيل والصهوينية، وذلك تحضيراً للمعركة الآتية ولتخريب لبنان، ربما للمرة الأخيرة لأن هذه المعركة سوف ترى نهاية لبنان كما نعرفه    

أيها اللبنانيون، صدقتموهم عدة مرات. صدقتوا كل أكاذيبهم، من حروب التحرير الدونكيشوتية إلى شعارات العروبة العقيمة إلى قدرتهم على إدارة البلد بنحوٍ يرافق التقدم الضروري في القرن الحادي عشر. صدقتموهم وهم يسرقون أموالكم ويهجرون أولادكم ويمعنون بإفساد الإدارات العامة. فكنّا نحن المغتربون نعود من حين لآخر إلى البلد ونرى بأم أعيننا الأوضاع الرديئة، فنسألكم منتقدين: كيف تقبلون بالعيش بلا كرامة وبالبهدلة التامة في جميع نواحي الحياة اليومية من رشوة وطرقات مهترئة وكهرباء مقطوعة وماء جاف وأمن مرتهن واستنسابية في تطبيق القوانين، إلخ؟ فكنتم تجيبون: لبنان بخير الحمدلله، المشكلة أنكن أنتم المغتربون تطلبون الكثير من الدولة والحياة، ربما لأنكم تحت تأثير الحياة في دول راقية تحترم مواطنيها. فنسكت ولا نشمت ونعود إلى بلاد الغربة والحسرة في قلوبنا

هل ستصدقونهم اليوم؟ هل ستقترعون لهم يوم الأحد؟ هل ستتزلّمون لهم كقطعان الخراف الساذجة الذاهبة إلى المصلخ؟ أم تعلمّتم من دروس الماضي؟ إن العبء الكبير لهذه المعضلة يقع على عاتق الجيل الجديد. رغم جهله لويلات الحروب، لقد فطن هذه الجيل عبثية نظريات التحرير الخرائية التي لم تحرر لبنان إلا من أبنائه ومن ركبه لعصره، فأضحى بلداً من أواخر بلدان العالم، بلدٌ يُغتصب شعبه وتُغتصب بيئته وأحراجه وأنهره وبحره يومياً تحت أطنان القمامة والمبيدات الكيمائية الممنوعة عالمياً، بلدٌ لا يقدّم شيئاً للعالم لكي يشعر العالم بالحسرة عليه، بلدٌ جاهلٌ للعلم ومغمورٌ تحت ثقل الأديان والطوائف العقيمة الآتية إلينا من العصور الحجرية والبرونزية، بلدٌ يلجأ أبناؤه إلى القديسين والمعجزات والكهنة والأئمة والشيوخ والبطاركة والمطارنة وكل تلك الأصنام المنسوخة عن عبادات قديمة جداً ينحرها نور الحقيقة، ظنّاً منهم أن لا قيمة لهذه الحياة ولا مغزى من محاربة المتحكّمين بهم، حيث الاعتقاد أن الله وحده يسوّي مشاكل الدنيا والانحدار إلى مستوى من القدرية تجعله يستسلم للمصائب التي تعصف به. بينما الناس في البلدان المتحضرة يعرفون أن مصيرهم بأيديهم وحدهم وليس بأيدي الله، فيحاسبون وينتقدون ويثورون على حكّامهم

 خلاصكم بأيديكم. خلاصكم ليس بالمسجد أو الكنيسة، خلاصكم ليس بأيدي نبيه برّي وحسن نصرالله وسامي الجميّل وجنبلاط وجبران باسيل وميشال عون ومجد حرب ومعوّض والمرّ وجعجع و و و و و هم وأولادهم وأولاد أولادهم، لا مجال لتمسية كل المجانين والحربجيين واللصوص وقطاع الطرق وسفّاكي الدماء الذين يسيطرون عليكم

مرة واحدة في حياتكم حاولوا المستحيل، وإن لم ينجح فبإمكانكم العودة إلى حضن المجانين والحربجيين واللصوص وقطاع الطرق وسفّاكي الدماء الذين يسيطرون عليكم. حاولوا ولو مرة يوم الأحد القادم بالتصويت إلى أسماء جديدة وأوجه جديدة وممثلين لكم من الجيل الجديد، فربما ينتقل مصيركم من أيدي اللصوص إلى أصحابه، أنتم  

  

 

A Taste of Lebanese Parliamentary Elections

Lebanese Parliamentary Elections are scheduled to take place between May 8 and May 15, both in the country and across the five continents where the expatriate Diaspora has settled over nearly two centuries.

The country is divided vertically between:

1- The "Loyalists" - Lackeys of Syria, Iran and Russia, and currently the ruling coalition consisting of Nabih Berri's Amal Movement (pro-Syrian Shiite), Hassan Nasrallah's Hezbollah (pro-Iranian Shiite), and their Christian backers of the Free Patriotic Movement (Maronite Catholic) Michel Aoun and Gebran Bassil. Nabih Berri has been enthroned into the Speaker of Parliament chair for more than 30 years. Hassan Nasrallah leads the violent Hezbollah militia which draws all its weapons and money from the Islamic Theocracy in Iran, has established a mini-state separate from the legitimate State authorities, and has repeatedly plunged the country into wars and civil unrest whenever Tehran dictates it. Michel Aoun is the sitting president of the country who, at 87 years of age, is barely functional and is being manipulated by his puppeteer son-in-law Gebran Bassil into being a puppet for Hezbollah and the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad. This camp has other supporters from other insignificant parties affiliated for the most part with Syria, like the Marada Party of Sleiman Frangieh, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, or the Baathist Party.

2- The "Opposition" - In this camp are two groups of candidates:

- Older establishment parties and figures who are professional sectarian politicians by definition, and while they are as corrupt as the Loyalist camp, they oppose the latter for sectarian, regional, and historical reasons. Included here are the Sunni Muslims of the Future Movement (the Hariri clan) as well as other Sunnis in Beirut, Sidon and Tripoli; the Maronite Catholic and Orthodox Christians of the Lebanese Forces of Samir Geagea and the Kataeb of Sami Gemayel; the Druze of Kamal Jumblatt; and others. This cluster has refurbished its image a bit because much of it hasn't been in power in recent years, yet it is generally heir to the violent militias that waged the 1975-1990 domestic war, and is supported by the Americans and the Saudis. When that war was over, these people made peace with the pro-Syrian camp of Hezbollah and Amal, accepted the Taef Agreement, participated in governments and in the financial plunder of the country during the 1990s and 2000s, and it is only over the past few years that it became an "opposition"  and an outspoken critic of the Syrian-Iranian occupation of the country.

- A new crop of young(er) candidates born out of the October 17, 2019 revolution. Here, I'll say at the outset that I am voting for these people, regardless of their youth and inexperience: In Lebanon, political "experience" means the corruption know-how and the connections needed to pilfer the Treasury and run the country to the ground. So inexperience is welcome. On the surface, they are secular, educated, hailing from professional backgrounds, have great ideas, are motivated, know communications, have fought in the streets against repression from the ruling coalition, have become the most outspoken critics of the Syrian-Iranian occupation, and ground their opposition in arguments of economic and governance nature, rather than in sectarian and communal positions. These October 17 rebels have forced the traditional establishment to shift to a more serious opposition. The only problem with this segment of the opposition is that it never unified into one front, and it is waging this campaign as a multitude of small, non-coordinating, sometimes very local (instead of a nation-wide appeal) pools of candidates, which is why I am not listing them here. This newer grassroots opposition might steal a few seats in parliament, but had it been unified it might score a landslide victory. 

May 15 will reveal whether the Lebanese people have achieved the required level of political maturity to topple the old primitive ways of doing politics and bring reason and modernity to Lebanese politics. I call on the Lebanese voters to vote for any and all of these newer October-17 revolutionaries, in a Pascal's wager-like bet: Just try something new; it might be better than the same old rotten way.

Here is an example of one such new opposition. The "Sovereigntists of the Matn" electoral list includes a candidate for the Greek Catholic parliamentary seat for the North-Matn district. His name is Alfred Riachi, and these are excerpts of statements he made to the MTV television station (03-May-2022).

(translated from Arabic, as seen on: https://www.mtv.com.lb/Newsmtv-لبنان-وُلد-على-أسس-خاطئة-واتفاق-الطائف-لم- ل  

• Lebanon was established on erroneous foundations.

• The Taef Agreement doubled down on the problem and did not bring about a solution.

• I call for excluding Nabih Berri from Parliament on serious suspicions of corruption, and he should be investigated. What right does he have to break the law?

• Nabih Berri is the “murderer” of Tayyouneh.

• The concept of “Preemptive Resistance” is nonsense. Let them show evidence that the Shebaa Farms are Lebanese.

• Hezbollah is an Iranian militia and I call for carrying weapons to confront Hezbollah’s weapons.

• Either we all take up arms or we trust the institution of the Lebanese Army and let each party surrender its weapons to the Army.

• I call for dismantling the rotten corrupt system because we cannot continue this way.

• The centralized form of government is part of the problem, whereby a party or constituent community takes control of the country, which leads to the estrangement of the other constituents, and to wars and acts of violence.

Hezbollah-Israel Collusion: The Big Lie of the "Liberation" of South Lebanon

Perfidious Israel Gave South Lebanon to Hezbollah 

Contrary to Iranian and Syrian propaganda, Hezbollah did not liberate South Lebanon from the Israeli occupation in 2000. As it did in 1985 while evacuating the Shouf Mountains, Israel in 2000 betrayed its allies of the South Lebanon Army (SLA), withdrew without coordinating with them, and made a deal with Hezbollah behind the back of its allies. The deal consisted of the terror organization Hezbollah - not the legitimate Lebanese Army - protecting the Israeli border in exchange for Israel's withdrawal. All the bragging by Hezbollah about having "liberated" the south is one big lie that Lebanese imbeciles, mostly the Lebanese Shiite herd and the FPM fascists of Bassil and Aoun, have believed stock-and-barrel. Hezbollah and Israel - avowedly enemies - seemed to agree then, as they still do today, on keeping the Lebanese Army and State out of the southern border. The Lebanese government has been denied, with the "charitable" assistance of the US and the UN, any role in recovering sovereign territory lost since the 1969 Cairo Accord when the Arabs and then-US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger forced Lebanon to grant free movement and action to Yasser Arafat's thugs in the south of Lebanon along the border with Israel. The torment of the country has not ceased since.

In the piece below, Colonel Charbel Barakat, a former Lebanese Army officer who became a SLA leader, details the events behind the perfidious alliance between Israel and Hezbollah with the blessing of the US, and the resulting backstabbing of the Lebanese government. No one, especially the Christians of Lebanon, should trust the US: It has been undermining the stability of Lebanon ever since 1969 when Henry Kissinger thought he could give the Palestinian refugees a substitute homeland in Lebanon at the expense of the country's Christians, thus freeing the "conscience" of Israel of the guilt and of the burdensome Right of Return.

To read the original Arabic, please go to:

https://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/108382/باللغتين-العربية-والإنكليزية-دراسة-ت/

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Hezbollah and the Liberation of South Lebanon 

Colonel Charbel Barakat – April 30, 2022 

 

It has been 22 years since the withdrawal of Israel from the border region. Then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, a proponent of the view of leaving Lebanon and its problems in 1982, took the decision of a quick withdrawal. This idea was proposed at the time by senior Israeli officers to their command after the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) successfully fulfilled their mission in “Operation Peace in Galilee” in which they uprooted Yasser Arafat and his organization from Lebanon and sent them off first to Yemen, then to Tunisia. Since that time, General Barak has held on to his view of Israel withdrawing from what he called the “Lebanese swamp” and leaving Lebanon to flounder in its own problems. 

 

In 1999, Barak decided to run for the Knesset as a candidate of the Labor Party, which he headed, on the basis of a program that boiled down to withdrawing from Lebanon before June 2000, should he succeed in the elections. His victory in those elections triggered a countdown for the Israeli Army withdrawal, in a fulfillment of the promise made by now Prime Minister-elect Barak. Thus, an agreement was reached, with the blessing of the Americans, to ensure a smooth withdrawal of the IDF from Lebanon without major incidents. Meanwhile, the Syrian occupation army wanted the Israelis to remain in Lebanon in order to ward off any demands by the Lebanese for a similar Syrian army withdrawal, and so Damascus was maneuvering to convince everyone that Israel will not withdraw, and that Barak was merely sloganeering in an election campaign. 

 

In practice, the Israelis were seeking an agreement with the Iranians in which South Lebanon would be handed over to the pro-Iranian Hezbollah group on condition that the latter would control the border and interdict any military operations across that border. Several contacts and meetings were held through Swedish and German emissaries, a démarche that was amply covered by international news outlets, and Der Spiegel was not the only one to do so. The Americans, as far as is known, were aware of all the details of these negotiations, and of course the Syrians as well. Yet, the Lebanese government was not allowed to participate in any of these negotiations or to even express an opinion on what was going on, just as was the case when the “April Understanding” was reached in the aftermath of the 1996 “Operation Grapes of Wrath”, even though the matter concerned Lebanese territories and the fate of Lebanese citizens. As a result, the Lebanese State and its institutions, including the Army, were excluded from any effective participation in the matter, as if the operation was to be carried out in some remote place in the middle of nowhere. 

 

In the border zone, several intelligence operations were conducted with the objective of striking the infrastructure of the South Lebanon Army (SLA), in an attempt to present it as weak before Israeli and international public opinions. The movement led by Riyad Abdallah, an Amal Movement operative from Khiam village, might have taken the form of a coup, though it was not supported by SLA troops or the ordinary citizens of the border strip. This prompted the Israeli Director of the Lebanon Bureau, Uri Lubrani, and the Deputy Defense Minister, General Sneh, to pay a visit to Major General Lahad, and together contain this rebellion. At the same time, however, assassination attempts were initiated against security officials operating in the area, which climaxed in the killing of the Western District Commander, Colonel Akel Hashem, who also headed the Intelligence Service. The objective was to weaken the morale of the people of the area, and perhaps also to silence those who may disclose the names of people meeting with the Israelis. Some of the targeted individuals were slated to take up important posts in the armed organization at a later time. This was followed by an increased recruitment of informers working for Hezbollah and the Lebanese Army, some of whom had previously worked for the Israelis, in order to protect them and improve their image. The Lebanese Army at the time pretended to be blind to the unfolding events, ever since the Lebanese South was handed over to Hezbollah which would be the sole exclusive “Resistance”. 

 

The Lebanese citizens of the border strip and members of the SLA were aware of what was being prepared, and everyone knew of the Israeli government’s intention to withdraw. However, the discussions were about an agreement in which the United Nations forces would assume responsibility for security in the area, and SLA members would be incorporated into the Lebanese government troops who be entering the area under UN command. That agreement also stipulated the resolution of all pending issues, including a clean slate to erase the residues of the conflict between Hezbollah and the SLA and reconcile the Lebanese residents separated by the conflict, leading to stability under the umbrella of the UN and the Lebanese State. All of this was included in a memorandum drafted by representatives of the civilian committees of the border strip and submitted to the French and British ambassadors and to an attaché at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. The UN representative, Mr. Larsen, lacked even the courage to receive a copy of the memorandum when he visited the area, although a copy was delivered to the UN Command in Naqoura, while a second copy was directly forwarded to the relevant UN authorities in New York. 

 

But the Iranians were not interested in such a solution because it would deprive them of control on the ground and of their claims of victory. The Iranians pledged to the Israelis that not a single shot would be fired across the border if Hezbollah were to control security in the area. But if the Lebanese Army were to enter the area, followed by the Lebanese State’s official institutions, the Iranians would not bear any responsibility for transgressions that might ensue. The US ambassador to Lebanon, David Satterfield, agreed to the plan as it offered the fastest solution to reducing tensions and stop the attacks. 

 

As for the Lebanese side, the Taef Agreement had granted Syria complete control on the ground. President Assad had secured his grip on security in Lebanon, and therefore on the Lebanese government as well. He believed that keeping Hezbollah in south Lebanon served his interests, because Hezbollah was an integral part of his Iranian ally’s forces and gave Iran space to persevere despite its defeat in its war with Iraq. Iraq’s victory gave President Saddam Hussein a surplus of force that drove him to invade Kuwait and face an international coalition to liberate it, a coalition that included Syria. 

 

Details were being worked out on an agreement over border issues between Israel and Lebanon, using the officially recognized Lebanese and Israeli maps of the 1948 Truce Agreement to delineate the Blue Line under the auspices of the UN forces. The Lebanese State consented to the full implementation of UNSCR 425 as soon as Israel withdraws from Lebanese territory, on the basis of the Blue Line as the border between the two countries. 

 

In the Border Strip, Major General Lahad had instructed his staff that the agreement included ceasing hostilities, coordinating the entry of the UN forces following the Israeli withdrawal, oversight of heavy weapons, and the integration of SLA members wishing to continue to serve into State security institutions.  In exchange, Hezbollah was to surrender its weapons to the Lebanese government, as had previously happened with the other militias after the Taef Agreement. 

 

But the Iranian expansionist plan for the Middle East was still in its early phases, especially after the downsizing of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. As a result, these Iranian plans increasingly relied on creating local armed Shiite organizations that were brainwashed to blindly follow the directives of the Iranian theocracy and implement its expansionist projects. To appear as a victor that vanquished Israel was a very critical narrative in Iran’s future outlook for the region, something that Ehud Barak did not understand. He committed himself to a specific timetable for withdrawing from South Lebanon, which made him lose the prime ministership less than a year later and ushered Israel into many years of a cycle of violence inspired by the "success" of the radical "terrorist" movement in Lebanon, and sounded the death knell of all understandings to bring stability. 

 

Hence the Iranian attempts to score mediatic victories on the ground, with Hassan Nasrallah volunteering to issue brazen and depraved threats to enter into the bedrooms of the southern Lebanese residents and kill them in their sleep. Afterwards, no sooner had the Israelis withdrawn from the Bayyada site overlooking the sea that Hezbollah tried to seize the SLA position at Hamra Bridge, but it was ambushed by the SLA and lost more than 15 of its members whose bodies were left by the roadside near the Hamra crossing until the full Israeli withdrawal, not to mention the wounded, and despite the participation of the Lebanese Army artillery in the attack. Following that debacle, Hezbollah did not dare to use its own forces, and instead pushed waves of civilians into entering the area through the Shoumariyeh – Deir Seryan crossing point. 

 

Meanwhile, the Israelis had convinced Major General Lahad to visit his family in France before the scheduled withdrawal, so that he could be present and supervise the implementation of the agreed-upon provisions pertaining to the SLA on his return. But Ehud Barak, seemingly fearing an unraveling of the agreement with the Iranians, took the decision to withdraw precipitously one month before schedule, in the absence of the SLA Commander, and without a clear plan or instructions for the rank and file. The people of the southern border strip were left confounded, with no orders to fight or coordinate the withdrawal. In the absence of the Israelis and General Lahad, it appeared certain that there was an agreement to hand over the area to Hezbollah. Having no interest in fighting the Lebanese State or the UN, some of them preferred to enter Israel to avoid a gratuitous bloodshed, now that the Israeli “ally” had left and the Lebanese government and/or the UN forces were not allowed to negotiate with the Israelis. There seemed to be a will to transform the war in the south into a war between the Lebanese owners of the land on one hand, and the Iranian Hezbollah on the other, under the watch of the Lebanese government and the UN. The people of the south could not comprehend these events, for they had defended their homes and coordinated this defense with the Israelis, pending a return of the Lebanese government to assume its responsibilities. Their objective was to prevent a cross-border war and not engage in a war against their own people, even though their Lebanese opponents were under orders of a foreign country.   

 

The SLA was capable of resisting and controlling the area, and of compelling others to coordinate and negotiate with it over future arrangements. But the absence of General Lahad – some say he was sent away or excluded himself on purpose in order to implement the agreement signed in Sweden between the Iranians and the Israelis, which stipulated that Hezbollah will supplant the SLA in protecting the border and preventing any attacks across it – and Barak’s hurried withdrawal, with the blessing of Satterfield, had undermined any attempt at a successful normal process that would have rehabilitated the Truce Accords, the deployment of the Lebanese Army with the assistance of the SLA and the UN along the entire border, the surrender by Hezbollah of its weapons to the government, and the integration of willing Hezbollah and SLA fighters into the Lebanese Army.  

 

But the insistence on such a hasty withdrawal will remain a shameful scar on Barak’s character and career inside Israel. Many believe that his political leadership had betrayed the people of the border strip and walked away from the sacrifices made for the sake of peace across the border. As a result, the treasonous Israeli withdrawal was the principal driver for all subsequent terrorist attacks inside Israel, which were directly encouraged by the apparent victory of Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.  

 

Today, 22 years after the Israeli withdrawal, we can understand that Barak’s haste in making the decision, his disrespect and lack of protection of his southern ally, and the elimination of the SLA’s role as an element of balance in the Lebanese equation, constituted a grave “misstep” that contributed greatly to boost Hezbollah and assist the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in presenting themselves as victorious. It also led to the 2006 War that cost both Lebanon and Israel much pain. Thus, and even if it sowed the seeds for dismantling the Lebanese State (Israel’s enemies actually say that dismantling the Lebanese entity was one of Israel’s undeclared goals), the withdrawal lessened Israel's halo while leading without war to undermining the organized armies of neighboring Arab countries that have no peace treaty with Israel. Indeed, it favored the ongoing rapprochement between Israel and the Gulf Arabs who fear Iranian domination, and whose mixed sectarian demographics were exploited by the Iranians to sow terror in their prosperous societies and jeopardize their stability as a prelude to controlling their resources and capabilities, using organizations like Hezbollah to carry out their dirty deeds. 

 

As for the internal Lebanese situation, the Syrian occupation had tamed the forces opposed to it after the defeat of General Aoun and the entry of the Syrians into the Defense Ministry and the Presidential Palace in Baabda. The Syrian regime had imposed the Taef Agreement that legitimized its occupation of the entire country, followed by the defeat of the Lebanese Forces, their dissolution and the imprisonment of their leader Samir Geagea, the takeover of the Kataeb Party and the exclusion of President Gemayel from the political scene, the killing of Danny Chamoun and his family in a murder operation reminiscent of the assassination of Tony Frangiyeh and his family, leaving Syria's fingerprints over all of this, even in the assassination of Prime Minister Rachid Karameh. The Syrians now controlled the “pacified” country, with their tight grip on both its political and economic life. 

 

Everyone was led to concede that Hezbollah, backed by Syria and its Iranian ally, had "liberated" the Lebanese south and saved Lebanon from the Israeli “enemy”. None of the active political actors at the time realized that inflating the role of Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will eventually turn against Lebanon and prevent it from recovering its sovereignty, and will wipe out the hopes of the Lebanese for an end to wars and for a closure of the open wound in the South that had brought much destruction to them and their children. 

 

Everyone applauded the withdrawal of the Israelis from all Lebanese territory, but no one inquired about those brave SLA soldiers who had protected the South with their bodies and prevented the establishment of Israeli colonies in it, as had happened in the Golan, the Sinai, the West Bank and Gaza. It was them who protected people’s rights and properties, as well as the diversity of their communities, and even their political affiliations. The Druze citizen of Hasbaya, even as a member of the Socialist Party, was proud of his friendship with the Head of the Civilian Administration and may have had a child of his serving as a soldier or officer in the SLA. Similarly, the Shiite citizen who was affiliated with the Amal Movement, the Sunni Bedouin in the West or hailing from the Arqoub region, were also proud of their good relations with the SLA and even with the Israeli officers. The Christians were no different, they who defended the region since the occupation by the Palestinian Fatah and others, and who later prevented the Jezzine residents from being forcibly evicted and displaced like the fate suffered by the people of East Sidon and the Iqleem. They improved relations with the Mount-Lebanon Druze, allowing movement between Hasbaya and the Shouf, Bint Jbayl and Tibneen, Marjeyoun and Nabatiyeh. They had linked their region by sea with East Beirut before it fell to the Syrians, cooperating with the Lebanese Forces militia in its defense. However, after the fall of East Beirut to the Syrians as a result of the fratricidal war between its leaders, one of whom was exiled and the other jailed, all hope for salvation had evaporated, and there was no reason to connect with a Lebanon under the Syrian yoke. When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided to withdraw unilaterally, there was no one in Lebanon who cared for the citizens of the South who had kept the Lebanese flag flying high until the Israeli withdrawal, only to be replaced by the Iranian flag and the yellow flag that have nothing to do with Lebanon and are rather symbols of Iran’s domination over Lebanon. 

 

These days, we hear some politicians proclaiming their conviction that Hezbollah had liberated the South, while they're fully aware that Hezbollah did nothing but prevent the withdrawal of Israel for 15 years in order to complete its takeover of the Shiite community and isolate it into backwardness and the fear of cooperating with others. It then proceeded to complete its effective takeover of the country with its Syrian and Iranian masters’ help, and transform it into a failed state whose population can be easily forced into migration, as it did in Syria; it impoverished the country and destroyed the State institutions, beginning with the electricity sector; it forbade its followers from paying their bills to the ministries since 1982, and has filled the country's administrations with its own men who do not even go to work; it tainted the value of the country's universities, its banks whose trust and confidence it undermined, and even its social and medical security network and other institutions that managed people’s lives and contributed to the advancement of the country. They then attacked all the friends of the country and sowed division and conflict with them, they empowered the corrupt, the drug smugglers, and the theft gangs to erode all that the State’s infrastructure and projects, thus shattering the hopes of the Lebanese people of keeping up with the world. 

 

Those politicians who say that Hezbollah liberated the south from the Israelis are fooling either the Lebanese or themselves, in order to adapt and be part of this new system of subordination to the Persian theocracy that can only drag the country into backwardness, oppression, and isolation. By instilling fear between the various constituents of the nation, it makes them cease cooperating with each other, which puts Hezbollah as the arbiter of potential conflicts. These same politicians will marvel after the elections that they imposed a “defense strategy” in which Hezbollah, rather that dissolving itself and surrendering its weapons to the government, will control the Lebanese Army and the legitimate security forces. Lebanon will suffer the same fate as Iraq which is controlled by the Popular Mobilization Movement (Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi) and is preventing the rise of the Iraqi State. 

 

This domination by Hezbollah was made possible by the Israeli handover of the Lebanese South to it, which allowed the Iranian proxy to enter the political arena by means of the quadripartite alliance and later by its invention of the nonsensical “Blocking Third”.  The latter gimmick was used ad libitum to undermine the government until the pro-Iranian militia was able to impose a new electoral law by which it managed to take control of Parliament and subdue all three top offices in the land. Here is Hezbollah today having decided to run for parliamentary elections expected to increase the number of MPs under Hezbollah’s control to over 70, a number that Qassem Sulaymani, the assassinated Iranian leader of Al-Quds Force, bragged about reaching the previous time. 

 

Was it in Ehud Barak’s design to crush the surrounding Arab countries, including Lebanon, by means of Hezbollah's weapons and hostile ideology, under the control of the descendants of Qurush and Khosrow Anushirvan? Or is it pragmatism used by military people who cannot see beyond the immediate operation assigned to them in their mission, even if this were at the cost of other losses whose legacies could be much graver.  

 

The project of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards entails the destruction of all that surrounds it in order to build its new empire governed by the Jurisprudent Ruler. Iran has so far destroyed Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, after failing to destroy Bahrain. It is directly attacking Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and prodding Palestinian extremism on a daily basis to undermine Israeli production centers with the objective of destroying them, as it did in Lebanon and elsewhere in the region. Will the Abraham Accords between Arabs and Israel prevent the metastasis of this cancer and put an end to it? Or will these accords be more successful than those accords stained with the blood of the southern Lebanese and the Israelis, and lead to a new era of peaceful relations between the two countries? Those relations were ended by the conduct of a “pragmatic” short-sighted Prime Minister General Barak, much as the conduct of an “indecisive” President Amin Gemayel who obliterated all hope in the aftermath of Israel’s entry into Lebanon in 1982 that put an end to the legend of Arafat and his organization and to all of Syria’s military capabilities in Lebanon.

 

In conclusion, and 22 years after the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon, we ask: Isn’t it time to remove the “liberator” label off Hezbollah and show its true nature as the “occupier” on behalf of its Iranian masters? Or is hatred still controlling the Lebanese to the point where they've become blind to the hurtful truth and no longer know where their interests lie?

 

Translated from Arabic by Joseph Hitti.