Syria is Lebanon's Enemy Number One

Here are some elements to consider in determining whether Syria is a "sister" country or Lebanon's Enemy number one:

- Since independence from the French Mandate in 1943 (Lebanon) and 1946 (Syria), Syria's successive governments (established by one coup d'etat after another between 1946 and 1970, then under the Assad regime from 1970 to date), have refused to recognize Lebanon as an independent nation. Just as Russia views Ukraine as a renegade province of its empire, or just as Saddam Hussein considered Kuwait a renegade province artificially created by British colonialism, Damascus sees Lebanon as a Syrian territory that was separated from the fantasy of Greater Syria by the French, when in fact Lebanon had freed itself of the Ottoman occupation in as early as 1840-1860 under the internationally sanctioned Règlement Organique. Between 1943 and 2005 (62 years), Syria constantly refused to exchange ambassadors with Beirut, but it was finally forced to do so after its assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and the end of its occupation in 2005 when its troops were evicted by an angry Lebanese population.  

- Syria refuses to this day to delineate the border between the two countries, leaving it as a porous passage for weapons and terrorists, and over the past decade for the smuggling of Lebanese government-subsidized goods (i.e. cheap) into Syria where they are re-sold for higher profits, including flour, gasoline, medicines and the like, while the Lebanese people suffer from the scarcity of these commodities. This disastrous smuggling enterprise is carried out by Syrian pseudo-refugees who move freely across the border, with the support of the Hezbollah militia which also generates profits to fund its illegal activities. Between the 1940s and 1960s, Lebanese leaders used to fear a Syrian invasion and repeatedly called for deploying UN forces along the Syrian-Lebanese border, while the Lebanese-Israeli border was quiet and governed by the 1949 Truce.

- Syria has supported various terrorist groups operating in Lebanon, all of which were created by Syrian Intelligence (Mukhabarat) for the specific purpose of undermining Lebanon. Other than the Fascist SSNP (Syrian Social Nationalist Party) which staged a failed coup d'etat in 1961 against the government of President Fouad Chehab, groups like the Yarmouk Brigades, the Palestine Liberation Army, the Saika, the Aasifa, the Youth of Ali (فتيان علي), the Oppressed of the Earth, and many many others were all creations of the Baathist regime whose job was to stir violence and undermine the stability of Lebanon. They fomented troubles under the guise of Arabism, Islamic fundamentalism, sectarianism, and other ideologies. A Lebanese Baath Party - a direct emanation of the Syrian Baath Party - fielded candidates in Lebanese elections under the Syrian occupation until this latest May 2022 election when the Baath and the SSNP were crushed by a Lebanese electorate and lost all their seats in Parliament to the benefit of a new generation of reformer MPs. 

- The Syrian regime would send these groups inside Lebanon across a porous border whenever it wished to pressure Lebanon. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, these groups would stage attacks against Lebanese police in various parts of the country, and against defenseless Christian villages near the Syrian border, thus stoking sectarian violence and tensions. The villages of Al-Qaa, Beit Mellat, and others (see also: https://www.annahar.com/arabic/article/570540-خمس-قرى-لبنانية-لا-يعرفها-أهلها-القصة-عمرها-59-سنة). In more recent years (2015), an example of the Syrian terror theater consisted of the Assad regime and its ally Hezbollah dispatching a contingent of 20 or so Daesh (ISIS) terrorists to stage a fake attack along the Syrian-Lebanese border on the peaks of the Eastern Lebanon mountain range. The "battle", as it were, between those fake Daesh and the so-called "protector" of Lebanon, the Iranian-Syrian bastard militia Hezbollah, was intended to scare the Lebanese and "prove" to them that Hezbollah and Syria were protecting Lebanon, especially its Christians. In that staged battle, which occurred in an area controlled by Syria's proxy Hezbollah, which raises the question of how could such a group of terrorists manage to reach the border without the assistance of Hezbollah and Syria, a confrontation with the Lebanese Army left many soldiers kidnapped, held in caves, then killed. Then, the heroic Hezbollah (but not the Lebanese Army) "rushed in" to defeat the Daesh numskulls, put them in air-conditioned buses and send them off to... where else? Syria of course. After this masquerade, Hezbollah then, and only then, allowed the Lebanese army to come in and clean up, in a humiliating moment for a sovereign country like Lebanon under the presidency of Michel Aoun.

- Leading up to the 1975 Syrian war against Lebanon, Hafez Assad, the butcher father of current baby butcher Bachar, took over power in Damascus in a coup d'etat in 1970. From that point forward, Lebanon was to become Syria's voodoo doll: blockades, border closings, interdiction of trade between Beirut Harbor and the Arab hinterland, incursions, invasions, massacres, occupation, and attempted coup d'etats.

- Assassinations of Lebanese leaders of all religious denominations. Any Lebanese or foreign politician, journalist, or religious figure who dared challenge Syria's brutal meddling in Lebanese affairs was assassinated. French ambassador Louis Delamare (1976), US ambassador Francis Meloy (1976), the journalist of Al-Hawadess Magazine, Salim Lawzi (1981), whose body was found in a ditch with his right hand melted in acid, Lebanon's Sunni Mufti Hassan Khaled (1989), President-elect Bashir Gemayel (1982), and many others during the years of the 1975-1990 Syrian war against Lebanon when Syrian troops still pretended to be an "Arab Dissuasion Force", then with Lebanon under a formal and direct Syrian occupation (1990 - 2005), then again after its troops withdrew from Lebanon (2005-to the present): Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, for whose assassination in 2005 two Hezbollah terrorists were found guilty in recent months by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon at the Hague, Samir Kassir, George Hawi, Gebran Tueni, Walid Eido, Pierre Gemayel, Francois Hajj, Wissam Eid and others, and more recently Loqman Slim in 2021 etc...

See an exhaustive list in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attacks_in_Lebanon; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_Lebanese_politicians

- After the PLO was evicted from Lebanon by the Israeli invasion of 1982, Syria and with it the new Islamic Republic of Iran (established in 1979) needed another decoy "resistance" to maintain the pretext for harassing Israel from Lebanon. Hezbollah was thus born and immediately engaged in a bloodbath of bombings and assassinations: The US embassy twice, the French embassy, the peacekeeping US Marines (with barracks at Beirut airport) and French Paratroopers (at Drakkar Compound) in simultaneous truck-bomb attacks in October 1983, the hijacking of TWA flight 847 in 1985, the kidnapping of university educators, clergymen, journalists who were chained in dingy basements throughout the 1980s and released one by one every time the West made a concession to Syria. The climax concession came when the US of George Bush Senior, needing Syria in the anti-Saddam coalition, essentially gave Lebanon to Syria which proceeded to bomb (in an unprecedented blind eye by Israeli air force) the presidential palace in Baabda and take full control of the entire country. Between 1990 and 2005, Syria directed all political life in Lebanon, installing puppet presidents, appointing prime ministers, extending the mandates and terms of otherwise defunct parliaments, not to mention the enforced disappearances of tens of thousands of Lebanese citizens, of whom 17,000 have been documented to remain in Syria's notorious prisons where torture is routine. Lebanese inmates would have their names changed, so when relatives inquire about them their incarceration would be denied.

- Syria today wants the 1.5 million Syrian refugees (over a 4 million Lebanese population) it evicted from Syria to stay in Lebanon and change the demographics of the country to its advantage. The vast majority of these refugees are supporters of the Syrian regime while pretending to flee from it. When elections are held in Syria, these refugees vote for Assad, march in the streets of Lebanon voicing their support for Assad, while claiming to be afraid of returning to Syria. Meanwhile, the hypocritical West and its NGOs give $100 a month to every Syrian refugee in Lebanon, which is more than what the average Lebanese makes these days, instead of encouraging the refugees to return to Syria. The NGOs can still pay the refugees $100 a month INSIDE SYRIA. The danger here is that, just as the Palestinian refugees came in 1948 and founded the PLO in 1965 and waged war on Lebanon, the Syrian refugees, now in their eleventh year in Lebanon, will one day wage a war on their host country, which is what the Assad regime wants. It tried and failed with the Palestinians, and now it will try with its own Syrian refugee population.

- One wonders if the West and its NGOs do in fact want to destroy the country of Lebanon, make it a substitute homeland for Palestinians and Syrians, and indirectly help Israel resolve its problem with the Palestinian refugees by eliminating the Right of Return. If the Palestinians and Syrians end up settling permanently in Lebanon, the country will implode because its status as a haven for minorities in this tormented Near East would come to an an end. The vast majority of refugees (Palestinian and Syrians) are Sunni Muslims, and if they permanently settle in Lebanon, this country will become another Sunni Arab country. Lebanon's Christians are the last enclave of free Christians in this Middle East, and is apparently a thorn in the minds of Western liberals whose bleeding hearts always favor their enemies, not their friends. Minorities are a bothersome factor for the simpleton minds of western liberals who cannot compute the complexities of the region. They prefer to reduce the complexity by eliminating all these other "lesser" variables, and so Lebanon must be eliminated. What an easier Middle East it would be if the West had only to deal with Sunni Arab Muslims and Jewish Israelis (as the current love affair between Israel and the Sunni Gulf shows). The West fought against Serbia's Christians to create two new Muslim sovereign nations in the heart of Europe (Bosnia and Kosovo); is it is too much to ask the West to protect the Christian minorities in the Middle East? When Lebanese Christians raise the problem of refugees overwhelming the delicate demographic balance of the country, they are attacked as racists, while the Israeli friends of the West and their NGOs, who have been slowly genociding and ethnically cleansing the native Palestinian population for 70 years, are patted on the back. There are no Christians left in Iraq and Syria, Palestinian Christians are under siege in Israel, and the Lebanese Christians are on their way to disappearing thanks to Western hypocrisy and cruelty. The West no longer needs the Christians of the Near East; it has Jewish Israel.

- The Shebaa Farms charade: The Shebaa Farms (a bald 38-square mile hilltop abutting the Golan Heights at the tri-border junction between Lebanon, Syria and Israel) is Lebanese territory assigned to Lebanon at the border demarcation in the late 1930s. As Riad Solh, the independence Prime Minister of Lebanon, tells us in his memoirs, the harassing Syrians invaded the Shebaa Farms in 1956, killed two Lebanese gendarmes, and seized the small territory. Lebanon, overwhelmed by a host of issues with the Syrian troublemakers, never filed a complaint with the UN about the seizure. Thus, during the 1967 and 1973 Syrian-Israeli wars, the Shebaa Farms were taken by Israel as part of the larger seizure of the Golan Heights. Since Israel technically took the Shebaa Farms from Syria, it can only legally return them to Syria. The only way for Lebanon to reclaim the Shebaa Farms as Lebanese is for Syria to first officially cede back the Shebaa Farms to Lebanon by submitting documents to the UN and officially relinquishing any sovereignty over the territory. Naturally, as part of its "always say no" rejectionist policies, Syria refuses to concede Shebaa back to Lebanon, thus giving Hezbollah the pretext that Israel "still" occupies Lebanese territory, which Hezbollah uses to claim it is resisting the Israeli occupation. Back when he was anti-Hezbollah during his Syrian-imposed exile of 15 years, the now traitor president of Lebanon, Michel Aoun, himself designated the Shebaa Farms as a LIE manufactured by Syria's Assad and the Iranian Ayatollahs to perpetuate the justification for the existence of Hezbollah as a "resistance" militia. Aoun has since made a 180 degree turnabout in exchange for becoming President. He not only is a supporter of Hezbollah, but he has become a Syrian-Iranian puppet President of Lebanon thanks to his erstwhile enemies. Finally, the US has recently recognized Israel's sovereignty over the Golan, and by extension over the Shebaa Farms as well, By not protesting this move, the Syrian regime and its Lebanese puppet government of Aoun have shafted Lebanon by by gifting the territory to Israel.

- Syria is more of an enemy of Lebanon than any other country can be. Counting the 50-year long intervention of the Baathist regime, including a 30-year direct and brutal military occupation (1975-2005), and counting the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese dead, maimed, and kidnapped by enforced disappearance who remain to this day in Syria's notorious jails, any harm done by the repeated Israeli invasions and occupations pales in comparison with Syria's horror balance sheet vis-à-vis Lebanon. 

- The Lebanese Christians must learn their lessons if they are to survive, namely that bravado and macho politics do not work with the West. The Christians have to first win the media war rather than the military war they already lost during the 1975-1990 war. Their losses over the past half a century are mainly due to two facts: 1- The West doesn't care for yet another (other than the Jewish) minority in need of protection, and 2- Lebanon's Christians remain abysmally conservative, ultra-religious, and Fascist to some degree, something a liberal West doesn't countenance. Lebanon's Christians must cease to appeal to the West as a religious minority in need of protection - perhaps change their name - and must instead turn politically to the left and adopt liberal platforms like the environment, social liberalism, women's rights, scientific literacy, and so on. Instead, Lebanon's Christians continue to wallow in antiquated religious beliefs from the Bronze Age. For example, the Maronite Church, just as the Muslim authorities, reject in toto the scientific basis of evolution; they both reject instituting a civil status charter outside the purview of the religious authorities (e.g. they reject civil marriages). Granted that Lebanon's Christians carry a heritage of religious affinities with Europe, but now that Europe has by and large abandoned religion as an identity maker, Lebanon's Christians must evolve and become a secular-minded community. The Israeli Left is an example: Jewish they are by history, but religious they no longer are, and they get much sympathy from the West. 

- Instead of erecting yet another statue of their numerous saints, Lebanon's Christians must erect laboratories and research institutes, they must protect their environment decimated by garbage, chemicals, and pesticides, they must believe their scientists rather than their very popular fortune tellers and religious charlatans. They must protect their forests, rivers and seacoast. They must adopt renewable green energy instead of importing and driving huge gas guzzling SUVs. Lebanese expats are successful in many of these emerging fields in their host countries, but never in Lebanon. Lebanon's religious establishments oppose government-mediated services (schools, hospitals, nursing care institutions, etc.) because if the State were to actually serve the Lebanese people, the religious authorities would lose money and their sway over a credulous population. In fact, the State spends more money on so-called religious charter schools (i.e. gives money to private schools) instead of upgrading the degraded and destitute public education. Lebanon's Christians must not wait for their country's incompetent and corrupt governments; they must implement de facto decentralization by adopting their own programs and policies aimed not only at making fucking money off tourists, but also to bring Lebanon up to par with advanced countries and elevate Lebanon's goodwill and reputation among the international community. Lebanon produces the largest number of Catholic saints per capita than any other country on earth. Two new candidates for sainthood were beatified two weeks ago by the Vatican. This will NOT help the economy, create jobs, fight poverty, clean the environment, and develop new technologies. It will be yet another occasion to erect more plaster statues across a landscape already littered with shrines, statues, churches, all basking in a sea of garbage, plastic bags and bottles, industrial waste dumped every which way on mountainsides, and all of which end up in valleys, rivers, and the Mediterranean ... No one seems to notice the sharp indirect correlation between being a self-declared highly religious community on one hand, and the abysmal state of affairs on the other. The Lebanese excel at looking cool but are very weak on substance. Intellectually they are lazy about details, do not do due diligence and lack humility before proclaiming their superiority, are scientifically and technologically illiterate, and do not read much. Every Lebanese is a general, rarely a soldier. Compounding this aspect is the megalomania they exhibit which rests upon a 3,000-year old Phoenician past they poorly understand and which they have failed to document to the world. All they know to do is sit in cafés, smoke water pipes, brag about their past, and claim that they love life while bathing in garbage. But loving life requires hard work to make/build your own life, not simply import it from the west. The Lebanese are fundamentally ashamed of who they are. Have you ever seen a Lebanese wearing the country's traditional clothing? Every self-respecting country will display their traditional costumes around their head of state, but not Lebanon. Take for example the Greek traditional Cretan Evzonas costume or the Scottish Kilt. They are worn by official guards in front of major government buildings. But the Lebanese are ashamed of wearing the Sherwal and the Lebbede or Tarboush, and an army guard wearing a vulgar military uniform walks the goose step all day long at the gate of the presidential palace. When Lebanese Army troops march in parades, they are made to jump like apes (supposedly in a sign of strength and readiness) instead of simply walking with pride, sobriety and discipline like parading armies do in the civilized world. Take a tour of Lebanon's villages, and you'll see garbage everywhere, illegal quarries that have disfigured the mountain sides, random chaotic constructions of ugly buildings and factories (with all the ensuing pollution and destruction) in the middle of forests and fields. Chaotic driving. Chaotic parking. Chaotic construction without respect for preserving the old and the environment. Lebanon is Chaos itself. And the Lebanese wonder they get no sympathy when they beg for the world's attention and help. Go figure.