Pro-Hezbollah Christian MP Alain Aoun Loves Sitting on the Fence

Hezbollah ally, pro-Syrian, pro-Iranian MP Alain Aoun is a fence-sitter par excellence. He is Michel Aoun's nephew, and together with Michel Aoun's son-in-law Zebran Basij, they form the political family farm's nepotistic nucleus. He is afraid of naming a candidate to the presidency and is waiting for Hassan Nasrallah to tell him what to do. Problem is that Nasrallah seems to have made his bet on the Syrian dictator's favorite candidate, Sleiman Frangiyeh, discarding Basij in the trashbin and with him their infamous Memorandum of Understanding.

Hezbollah wants the presidential election stalemate over soon, hopefully before the Iranian regime falls apart, and has no time for Basij who is traveling the world capitals begging for forgiveness and for the lifting of sanctions imposed on him. Basij knows that unless he severs his satanic ties with Hezbollah he has no chance of ever becoming president. That is how a deal with the devil comes around demanding your soul in exchange for the fake eternal life he gave you.

Alain Aoun's problem is that he is the weak element in the inner Aoun family sanctum. He obviously is afraid of saying no to an over-achieving, abrasive and domineering Basij, but deep down he himself wouldn't probably mind becoming president. We all know how these things work inside politically-inbred families. Still, and until Hezbollah tells them what to do, they have no favorite candidate and will continue dropping blank votes and blocking the quorum for a second round of voting. That Memorandum of Understanding between the FPM and Hezbollah is full of misunderstandings, and like the Taef Agreement, was never really intended to be implemented. It merely gave Hezbollah a Christian fig leaf of pseudo-respectability, while propelling by the force of Hezbollah's weapons Michel Aoun to the presidency where, over 6 long and abominable years, Aoun botched everything and never achieved anything except oversee the collapse of the country and its institutions. 

Now a chasm has formed within the Syrian-loving ménage à trois (Hassan Nasrallah, Zebran Basij, Sleiman Frangiyeh): Hassan and Basij got married in February 2006, but now the turbaned-bearded Casanova is in love with pretty boy Sleiman "Sam" Frangiyeh, and Zebran is losing his mind over this betrayal. He wants to change his name back to Bassil, after Hassan lovingly nicknamed him Basij during a make-out session in honor of the brutal thugs of the Iranian paramilitary militia established in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Here are excerpts from Alain Aoun's interview with "Free Lebanon" in which he explains, like the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping would,  that democratic competition is bad for the country. Alain wants a "consensus" president whose farce of an election is pre-cooked in a backroom deal, then revealed to the Lebanese people, just as the Chinese Communist Party selects its country's president. Alain Aoun does not want a real election because there is a chance his horse might lose. So he wants the new Lebanese president to be "chosen" the way his heroes in dictatorships and autocratic regimes (China, Iran, Syria, etc.) choose their leaders: The big boys sit down for a soiree with cigars and drinks, and barter favors and money until they find a suitable political eunuch slave whom they install and begin tormenting for the next 6 years. They are terrified at any candidate with political testosterone.

Alain says:

Our choice is we do not want to vote as a mere formality, but rather we want to prepare for the vote with the other blocs. We have a right to use blank votes, but not to block the quorum at the sessions [to elect a president].

In an interview with “Free Lebanon”, MP Alain Aoun, Michel Aoun’s nephew and a prime example of the Aoun dynastic nepotism, said, “it doesn’t appear that there is a candidate who has a serious chance at getting elected, and even the candidacy of Michel Mouawwad is treading water”.

“We are not insisting on Zebran Basij or anyone else. We want to develop the possibility of a consensus candidate without entering into a bazaar of names, and whether this candidate is from our bloc or from somewhere else, we will support him”.

Aoun criticized the opposition for fielding Mouawwad as a candidate in order to withdraw his candidacy later, like it was done with Line 29 [in the maritime border delineation with Israel]. He pointed to the fact that “no one has announced Basij’s candidacy to the presidency”, adding, “He has the right to present himself, and at the present time the conditions are not favorable to his candidacy. These conditions could change, but for now the political circumstances are bad”.

Aoun claimed that “the [Change and Reform] Bloc is open to an agreement over names”, rejecting the equivalence between candidates who are open to options and those who have no options”.

Aoun said that “we cannot go on ad eternum with a vacuum in the presidency [a vacuum he himself is creating by refusing to vote for a candidate]. The problem today is political. The vacuum cannot last, and we won’t be part of it”, clarifying that his beloved uncle Michel Aoun “waged a partnership battle to correct the way in which the Christians are dealt with in the political system as a whole while today there is a Christian representation balance. If the two Christian blocs can agree and embrace one candidate, no one can beat that candidate”.

On the question of Hezbollah’s weapons, the Jesuitic French-educated Alain Aoun said, “We need to complete the discussion on this matter and remove it from the lines of division across the country. We disagreed with the various forces on many political issues. We must seek understandings to produce a president, and we are looking to communicate with everyone and reconcile with everyone because we need to open new channels in order to deal with them”.

Each party has the right to obtain guarantees from its candidate. As the Free Patriotic Movement [Tayyar], we want a president with whom everyone feels at ease and who reaches a realistic and responsible understanding with Hezbollah over its weapons”. Aoun was adamant that “the Tayyar has not named a candidate to the presidency, and it may be that Ziyad Baroud is one of the options over which the bloc could agree if the circumstances are made favorable.”

Aoun concluded that “domestically Hezbollah is a representative and a partner in the country; it is part of an axis in which it is difficult to separate the various arenas from one another.”

Why Lebanon Cannot Elect a President

Update (November 17): For the 6th time in a row, the coward FPM slaves of Hezbollah were so afraid of the turbaned, bearded Captagon Chief that they once again dropped blank votes at this 6th session to elect a president. They insist on violating the constitution by walking out of session just before the mandatory second round, thus breaking the fallacious 2/3d quorum imposed by their ally, Speaker Nabih Berri, and following him and his Syrian and Iranian sponsors like pathetic dogs. They claim to want to protect Christian rights, while elevating Shiite Muslim abuses of the country to new heights.

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At the fifth session today (November 10) of the Lebanese parliament, no president was elected. This is likely to go on for several weeks and months as has become the practice in Lebanese politics. Here's why:

- The opposition parties (Lebanese Forces, Kataeb, and others) have named a candidate since the first session, Michel Mouawad. They have voted for him at every one of the previous presidential election sessions. Between sessions, they try to convince independents and others to join them and vote for Mouawad.

For background, Michel Mouawad's father, René Mouawad was assassinated in November 1989, 18 days into his presidential term, probably by Syrian Intelligence, like all other political assassinations in Lebanon. Anyone in Lebanon who doesn't submit to the diktat of Damascus becomes a pending target. The 1988-1990 time frame was one of battles between those who wanted to rid Lebanon of the Syrian occupation and those who submitted to, and collaborated with, the Syrian occupier. In the end, the Syrians won and their occupation persisted until 2005. So candidate Michel Mouawad is considered "anti-Syrian", which explains why the pro-Syrian loyalist camp is against him and is doing everything it can to scuttle his election, as is described below.

- The loyalists (Hezbollah, Aoun & Bassil's FPM....) drop a blank vote in the ballot box every time. They have no candidate because they know they'll lose if they field a candidate. They keep calling for "dialogue" and for a "consensus" president. For the past 30+ years, no dialogue has ever yielded any result since Lebanon's establishment politicians began holding dialogues as a way to go around constitutional provisions. And for the past 30+ years, every "consensus" president elected has been a failure.

Here are the many ways that the dinosaur Speaker of Parliament, Nabih Berri, who is in the loyalist camp, violates the constitution at every one of these sessions:  

Per the constitution, 

1) Once the current presidential term ends, Parliament becomes a de facto electoral body (and is prohibited from serving as a legislative body) that should remain in permanent session until it elects a new president; and 

2) When the session to elect a president is convened, and assuming a quorum, a first round of voting takes place. If a candidate gets 2/3d of the vote, he becomes president and the election is over. If no candidate gets 2/3d of the vote in the first round, a second round (and more rounds, if necessary) is immediately and automatically held in which whoever gets 51% becomes president.

This is not happening as we speak. What is happening is that Berri calls for a session of Parliament to elect a president. In the past 5 sessions so far, a quorum is achieved, a first round is held, opposition candidate Mouawad gets anywhere from 40 to 50 votes (out of total of 128 MPs), which is not the 2/3d required in that first round. Hezbollah and Bassil-Aoun's loyalist camp votes with blank or frivolous votes. But here, instead of the Speaker immediately holding a second round for a 51% majority ballot, he instructs his allies (Hezbollah and Aoun-Bassil) to walk out of the session, killing the quorum and with it the second round of voting. The Speaker then adjourns the session and calls for another session to be held a week later. And so it goes, week after week, another one of these months or years on end during which Lebanon remains without a president or without a government. THIS IS WHY LEBANON IS A FAILED STATE. Unlike normal democracies, Lebanese democracy is one in which the players of both camps do not play the game; instead, they argue over the rules and tamper with them. Instead of discussing the substance of the problems facing the country, the politicians spend their time arguing over the rules they themselves established and swore to upheld.

By "consensus" president, the loyalists mean someone who is no one, someone who usually may be an otherwise professionally qualified individual but who is politically weak, without political or popular backing, someone they can manipulate and impose conditions on. The loyalists do not want an independent president who is likely to confront them and confront Syria's continued grip over the country. 

The whole "consensus" paradigm of the Lebanese political class - broadly referred to as "consensual democracy" - is a charade of democracy. Simply put, people vote for their representatives from all camps, including most prominently the loyalist and opposition camps. But then, instead of whoever wins forms a government, and whoever loses becomes the opposition, the loyalists and opposition politicians sit down and form a government together. Such governments never work. They are not to be confused with what genuine democracies know as "coalition governments"; Lebanese consensual governments are not coalition governments formed over a compromise over policies, they are an aberration. If one camp makes a proposition, the other camp blocks it, and so no decisions are made at the level of the government. ANOTHER REASON WHY LEBANON IS A FAILED STATE.

Furthermore, and regardless of whether the Lebanese constitution as enacted in the Taef Agreement of 1989 allows it, the norm has been set to allow a member of parliament to be a government minister AT THE SAME TIME, which is a ridiculous and common practice in Lebanese politics. So imagine the conflicts of interests inside such a political system: Both opposition and loyalists sit in the same government, which means that the opposition is not really an opposition anymore; AND those MPs who become ministers in the government are supposed to hold themselves accountable for their own failures. This is how the Lebanese political establishment operates, and this why Lebanon is a failed state, rife with corruption and abuse of power.

Back in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, Lebanon was a normal country with clearly defined prerogatives and responsibilities between the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judiciary, AND these responsibilities were actually enforced under the law, such that decisions could be made quickly and executed. That was before the Taef Agreement. When the Muslims of the country won the 1975-1990 War with the backing of the Americans, the Europeans, the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Libyans, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis and every other f----- Arab, European, and Asian mercenary and terrorist they could find, the Taef Agreement was signed as a new constitution in 1989. In this new constitution, the head of the Executive - the Christian President - was castrated, became a figurehead, and his responsibilities distributed to the Muslim Prime Minister and the Muslim Speaker. As a result, the country became governed by a three-headed monster with conflicting and overlapping authorities such that no decisions could be made. Each of the three "presidents" created his own domain, his own mini-state rife with corruption, clientelism, cronyism and nepotism. For instance, there are numerous "security forces" bodies in Lebanon, each belonging to each of the three "presidents": Internal Security, General Security, State Security. After 30+ years of Syrian occupation, Lebanon's Muslims essentially cloned the Syrian Baathist model of governance. And to add insult to injury, the new Muslim rulers exercised - Islam oblige - a specific practice in which they surrender to God's will every decision they are incapable of assuming themselves - Inshallah (God willing) is a phrase you hear all the time from the mouths of Muslim MPs and Ministers. It's all in God's hands anyway, so why bother trying to improve people's lives? This is why personal and collective responsibility is more lacking among Lebanon's Muslim communities than in its Christian communities.

Religions as Political Cultures

There is no hiding the fact that the United States is on a campaign to convert Latin America away from Catholicism to Evangelical Protestantism in what may be called "Religious Colonialism", as opposed to military or economic colonialism. It is already established, for example, that Brazil has now, or will soon, become a Protestant majority country that is losing its Catholic character. This trend can be witnessed all across Latin America and Africa, and to a lesser extent in Europe and Asia.

The repercussions of such a shift are enormous. For example, if the Latin American migrants to the US have been converted prior to their arrival, then they'll swell the ranks of the extremist Evangelical Protestants once they enter the country. This will also mitigate the fear that WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) have of losing their own demographic dominance, as it is projected that by 2050 they will no longer be the majority but merely the largest minority group.

In Brazil, a sizable voting block behind Fascist extremist Jair Bolsonaro was the Evangelicals, as we saw them on television raising hands to the sky and swiveling their hips in their way of "worshiping", and denouncing the moderate Lula Da Silva as the "devil". In the US, the bulk of southern Evangelicals stands behind Donald Trump's populist platform. He tells them that he is going to restore America's "glory", a word he borrows from the Evangelical dictionary. He, in fact, moved his embassy to Jerusalem and recognized the city as Israel's capital in line with the Evangelicals' aspiration to see the Hebrew State welcome the return of Christ and bring about Armageddon, at which time, unfortunately for the radical extremist Jewish Israelis who are allied with them, the Evangelicals' current love for Jews would come to an end if the latter do not 'finally' admit Christ as the Messiah.

These days politics has become enmeshed with religion. As the liberal political order that developed after World War II is eroding around the world, people resort to religion and religious conservatism to find a sense of certainty. It is the history of humanity: Religion is a universal implement of all human cultures, and "culture" in its broadest meaning is itself an escapist but futile way to assuage our disgruntlement in the face of our mortality. Our brain needs answers to all it sees in its environment, and the most profound angry question humans have always pondered is the one directed at our mortality. Our brain doesn't understand why we must die, so it invents fantasy stories to alleviate this anger, and these stories are what we call "religion" and by extension "culture". When science provides the facts for a reasonable answer, humans abandon the magical explanations of religion. In the Middle Ages, people attributed the Plague to God's dissatisfaction with human conduct. Today, we no longer attribute epidemics to God's wrath; we know it is the bacterium Yersinia pestis causing the plague or the SARS-CoV-2 virus for the Covid pandemic.

That is why Pharaohs erected their entire civilization around the notion of continuing life in the afterlife. The only function of mummification and pyramid building was to ensure the immortality of the concerned. Christianity offers "eternal life" and "resurrection", and Islam promises paradise and postmortem life, in exchange for faith. Humans cannot fathom why they have to die. Of all other living beings on earth, we live beyond our biological means. Sex is no longer strictly for reproduction (as it is in biological terms), it is now a cultural phenomenon: the search for pleasure. When an animal is irremediably sick, we "put it down humanely", but we deny an irremediably sick human the same "humane" treatment because we can't accept that a human dies. Religion makes us sacred beings, when the reality is that we are no more sacred than any other animal or plant. We are born by biology, and even though we reject our death, we always end up dying because our biology fails, even when the drive to death is cultural or religious. A soldier who dies in the battlefield was motivated by his love of country (cultural), but he dies only because his body fails from an injury (biological). In sum, "human culture" is a pile of horse manure and magical illusions destined to blind us to our mortality. Everyone wants to be remembered long after they're dead: Mad generals, artists, kings and queens "by the grace of God"; we all try to leave behind us something to be remembered by. The reality is that some day on this earth there will be another dominant species that wouldn't even know that the human species once existed. Our destiny is oblivion. Life has no purpose. Better accept it, live with it and enjoy it while it lasts. It brings a sense of liberation and weightlessness. 

In the Christian religion, the Catholic Church always lags behind scientific developments: It first rejects them, then slowly comes around to accepting them. Is the Earth at the center of the world (geocentrism) and is it flat? The Church killed people for believing otherwise. Is evolution by natural selection the mechanism by which humans came to be? It took the Catholic Church 100 years to state in its typical convoluted language that "evolution by natural selection is not incompatible with the teachings of the Church". 

The Evangelical Protestants, who ought to be more liberal than the Catholics since they originated in a more rational view of the Christian religion with the reform of the 1500s, have become the most backwardly conservative. They endorse autocratic dictators and have allied themselves with the most fanatic groups of the apartheid state of Israel. They are constantly debating matters that really belong in the domain of the fantastic, not unlike the recent generation of Hollywood movies with superheroes and science fiction, all based on the garbage fiction of the bible: End of times, Armageddon, the Apocalypse, Antichrist, etc. Every decade or so, a southern US preacher declares that God has whispered in his ear a specific date for the end of the world, but then nothing of the sort happens.

Looking at the trajectory that religion has taken from the earliest human civilizations to our time, there clearly is a vector of a numerical reduction in the numbers of gods. It begins in earlier cultures with thousands of gods everywhere (rocks, soil, plants, stars, etc.), a number which then shrunk to a few hundreds of gods during the Bronze Age and the Greco-Roman period, to one god in monotheistic Egypt and Hebrew Palestine... and I let you project where it is going nowadays. But as struggling religions fight this trend, they go through upheavals, dissent, and lots of ups and downs, and extreme reactionary postures. The most caricatural manifestation of such a convulsion is the Southern Evangelicals of the Southern United States in the area known as the "Bible Belt".

To help you understand (if at all possible) the rubbish with which religious conservatives are trying to buck the trend of advancing reason, science and technology, here are some Christian theological terms and their definitions which I received by e-mail from a linguistic source (whose name I cannot recall).

eschatology [ĕs'kə-tŏl'ə-jē] 1844, from Gk. eskhatos "last, furthest, remote." - As a theological term it means the study of "last things," i.e. death, judgment, heaven, and hell.

parousia [pär'ū-sē'ə, pə-rū'zē-ə] -A Greek term that means "arrival" or "coming." It is usually used to mean the Second Coming of Christ.

Millennium [mə-lĕn'ē-əm] from L. mille "thousand" + annus "year," hence a period of 1,000 years. - In Christian theology it denotes a period of 1,000 years during which Christ rules on Earth, a golden age, a time of universal peace.

Amillennialism - The "a" is a negative. This is the teaching that there is no literal 1,000 year reign of Christ as referenced in Revelation 20. Instead, it teaches that we are in the Millennium now. At the end of this millennium Christ will return. The final judgment will take place and the heavens and the earth will then be destroyed and remade.

Antichrist - a figure who opposes God. The word is used to describe a spirit of rebellion against God. Taken literally it refers to a specific future person who actively opposes Christ. He is able to perform miracles. Some believe he will be an incarnation of Satan. Christ will defeat him in a final battle.

Armageddon [är'mə-gĕd'n] - the battle in which Christ destroys Satan, hence any complete disaster resulting in the end of the world.

Tribulation - a seven-year interval when a world religious-political leader called the Antichrist takes power.

Rapture - from Medieval Latin raptura, "seizure, rape, kidnapping" from Latin raptus "a carrying off." An eschatological event in which "true Christians" are caught up in the air to meet the returning Christ.

NOTE: There is disagreement as to whether the "Rapture" will take place before, after, or during the "Tribulation."

Historical Premillennialism - a belief held by a large percentage of Christians during the first three centuries of Christianity. It is the belief that the Antichrist appears on earth and sets off the seven-year Tribulation. At the end of the seven years Christ comes, the saved are "raptured," and his Church rules the Earth for a Millennium. During this thousand years of peace the faithful live in Jerusalem, occupying spiritual bodies. After this period, all people are judged. The faithful will spend eternity on a new earth, not in heaven.

NOTE: After Christianity became the official religion of Rome in the fourth century CE, this belief was declared a heresy and suppressed. The belief reappeared in the 19th century and, with several variations, has again become widespread.

Post-millennialism [pōst'mə-lĕn'ē-ə-lĭz'əm] - the belief that Jesus established the Kingdom of God in the first century and that we are already in the Millennium (not an exact 1,000 years, but "a very long time"). The Second Coming will occur after (post) this current Millennium.

Pre-millennialism [prē'mĭ-lĕn'ē-ə-lĭz'əm] (1844) - the belief that the Millennium lies in the future. Christ will come, bind Satan and his helpers, and rule over a peaceful earth for 1,000 years. At the end of that time Christ will release Satan and his angels who will raise an army which Jesus will destroy in the Battle of Armageddon. The Last Judgment will occur and a new heaven and new earth created.

 

Kataeb in 1975 ... Tayyar in 2022

Lebanon's Christians are facing their most existential threat since 1920. They survived the 1975 war but were defeated. Why? Because they behaved like the very same barbarian enemies they were facing and presented themselves by their actions to the international decision-makers as a bunch of nagging barbarians. What will they do if the present challenges develop into another war? Will they behave as a civilized people and thus gain the sympathy of the world - just as the Ukrainians are doing these days? Or will they again lose the war primarily because they lost it in the media?

When the Lebanese War of 1975 erupted on April 13, 1975, I was one block away from the intersection in Ayn Remmaneh where Kataeb Party leader Pierre Gemayel was targeted for assassination as he participated in the opening celebration of a church. Four people were killed, including Gemayel's bodyguard, but Gemayel himself was not hurt. Later that morning, in the heated atmosphere caused by the assassination attempt, the young men of the area, mostly Kataeb Party members, were on high alert when a bus carrying Palestinian fighters perched on the bus roof with their Kalashnikovs pointing in every direction, decided to go through Ayn Remmaneh as they commuted between the Sabra-Shatila fortified camps to the west and the fortified camps of Jisr El-Pacha and Tal-Zaatar in the east. Either they were unaware of the morning's event, or they deliberately crossed through, no one knows. But as they went by an intersection three blocks west of the church where the earlier assassination attempt took place, they fell to the fire of the neighborhood's Kataeb members and somewhere between 22 and 28 Palestinian militants were killed.

For the previous several years prior to that April 13, we had grown accustomed to seeing Palestinian fighters brazenly driving around with their guns, setting up checkpoints, arresting and kidnapping people including members of the Lebanese police and army, holding them hostages, etc. But it was rare for the Palestinians to actually enter residential areas they knew were potentially hostile to them, as they typically drove along major roads and highways that went around such residential areas.

Who knows why on that fateful Sunday the Palestinians decided to go through the very same area of Ayn Remmaneh where the earlier shooting targeting Pierre Gemayel occurred. They usually went around the area, taking the Damascus Road to Hazmiyeh or the Chiyah-Galerie Semaan road then the Camille Chamoun Boulevard. 

With the war slowly ratcheting up in what were known then as "rounds", each round of fighting (1-2 weeks) separated from the next round by a lull of a few weeks, until September 1975 when the old souks (markets) of Beirut and its downtown were ravaged by a fire caused by the fighting. 

The object of this post is not to recount the history of the Lebanese War of 1975. But this was the context in which the immediate trigger of the war took place. Of course, tensions were building up since 1967 as a result of several incidents and events in Lebanon and the region. There was the 1968 attack by Israeli jets in Beirut Airport in which 13 airliners of the national Middle East Airlines carrier were destroyed on the tarmac in reprisals for an attack on an Israeli Airliner two days earlier by a Lebanon-based Palestinian militant organization. There was the 1970 migration of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters from Amman to Beirut after King Hussein massacred his own Palestinians in September of that year. There was the 1972 assassination of Palestinian leader Ghassan Kanafani by a car bomb in Beirut, in reprisals for the Ben Gurion Airport massacre by the Japanese Read Army organization earlier in May of that year. There was the May 1973 assassination by Israeli commandos of three Palestinian leaders in Beirut, Kamal Adwan, Kamal Nasser, and Abu-Yousef Al-Najjar. Then the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war in which Israel further defeated the Syrians and the Egyptians. Lebanon stayed out of that war.

This tit-for-tat had nothing to do with Lebanon per se. Lebanon at the time was a thriving prosperous cosmopolitan place. It just happened to host the Palestinian refugees and their militant organizations, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also migrated to Beirut. But as expected, it wouldn't be long before the Lebanese themselves got involved in spite of themselves. The Ayn Remmaneh incident above was the climax of several incidents between the Lebanese Armed Forces, Security Forces, and ordinary Lebanese citizens on one hand, and the armed Palestinians on the other. Obviously the Palestinians were very nervous, suspecting anyone and everyone to be an infiltrated Israeli agent. I recall one incident where the Palestinians had set up a checkpoint at night near the Shatila camp. A newly married Lebanese couple were returning from a night out on the Raouche seafront, did not see the checkpoint and drove through it, prompting the Palestinians to shoot them dead.

The Lebanese State was completely overwhelmed by this build-up of tensions, and as it tried to respond diplomatically (the 1969 Cairo Accord, the 1973 Melkart Accord) and militarily (I personally witnessed from the town of Hadath the Lebanese Air Force jets bombing the Sabra-Shatila camps in 1973), the Sunni Muslims saw in this an opportunity to score points by undermining their fellow Christian Lebanese. Boycotts of the government by the Sunnis, demonstrations against the Lebanese Army, forcibly removing the teaching of the "Civic Education" subject matter from high school programs (thus undermining the awareness by young Lebanese of their country's constitution and laws), backing the Palestinians against the Lebanese State, etc. 

As the State became paralyzed and unable to restore order and clamp down on the Palestinians like King Hussein of Jordan successfully did (because Jordanians and Palestinians are both Sunni Muslims, the divide had no sectarian dimensions), the Lebanese population, in particular the Christians, slowly began to fill the void left by a handicapped State. The Kataeb Party of the Gemayel family became the leading opponent of Palestinian activities that were jeopardizing the stability and future of the country. 

Following the Ayn Remmaneh incidents of April 13, 1975 and as the war became part of people's daily lives, the Kataeb were joined by several other parties and groups with their own militias. The Christian leadership formed the joint Lebanese Front, while the Sunnis grouped around them the Druze, the Shiites, and the Palestinians into the National Movement.

For us, ordinary non-partisan Lebanese, and notwithstanding the fact that the Kataeb were facing off forces we clearly perceived as hostile to us, we gradually saw a deterioration in the Kataeb's conduct of the war. From defenders of the Lebanese cause and of Christian areas, the Kataeb became murderers, rapists, thieves, and gangsters. Neighborhoods were dominated by small groups who went about terrorizing their own people with extortion, hashish dealing, robbing abandoned properties, seizing businesses, etc. all under the justification of defending their people. We were their people, but they were robbing us, terrorizing us, etc. I recall the summer of 1978 which we spent under the constant shelling of the Syrian occupation army. Every morning, there was a lull in the shelling and people came out of their basement shelters to go find bread, check on their properties etc. My father and I would walk out  to the abandoned outskirts of our neighborhood in an area under construction and slated to become a highway. There, we'd see the burned out bodies of people killed the night before. We'd later learn that these were people who were stopped at checkpoints, or suspected of communicating with, or spying for, the other side. Most often, these were lies and pretexts to cover up for other crimes, like robbing, raping, etc. I remember the calcined body of a woman with a huge cross shoved into her abdominal area. Our own apartment, which was on the front line and which we had abandoned in 1975, was broken into and robbed. The Kataeb took everything, and those items of furniture they could not carry, they smashed. One time, I went in to inspect the apartment looking for salvageable memorabilia, and saw a Kataeb fighter cutting glass panels with a diamond knife. Down the street from the school where I had finished my high school years, there was a grocery store where we purchased sandwiches and drinks and which was owned by a certain George. I later learned from George's wife in the 1990s, after I had left the country and was back for a visit, that the Kataeb thugs of the area had shot George dead point blank because he refused to pay them protection money. 

This type of behavior made the Kataeb very unpopular among the Christians. Other groups were no less criminal in their behavior, with the exception of the Guardians of the Cedars militia who were known for their decency and integrity. But they were a minority. Later all these groups were forcibly united into one militia known as the Lebanese Forces by one Bashir Gemayel. 

The Kataeb were essentially an ultra-nationalist Fascist party. They were founded in the 1930s by Pierre Gemayel who adulated Mussolini and the other European Fascist movements and cloned Italian Fascism into his own Kataeb party. The word Kataeb is Arabic for Phalanges, like the militias of Francisco Franco, the Fascist dictator of Spain. The avowed enemy of the Kataeb was the SSNP - The Syrian Socialist National Party - which advocated unifying many countries of the Near East into a Greater Syria, just like Hitler wanted to unify all German-speaking populations into his Third Reich. The SSNP was a clone of Hitler's Nazi Party (For astonishing details of this political cloning, see https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/06/dying-nazis-of-near-east.html ). 

Today, the Kataeb remains the same party owned and run by the Gemayel family. Who knows how the Kataeb will behave in case of a repeat of the 1975 war. But there are two new players on the stage that are likely to face the dilemma of how to conduct a war without the past criminality and brutality of the Kataeb in the coming years: The Lebanese Forces (LF) which were born out of the coerced unification of the Christian militias by Bashir Gemayel circa 1981 and which were initially dominated by the Kataeb until they emerged as a separate force around 1985; and the Tayyar party (or Free Patriotic Movement, FPM) of Gebran Bassil and Michel Aoun. While the LF have so far shown no propensity for violence, the thugs of the Tayyar are already demonstrating their skills. They attacked a funeral procession in Sin-El-Fil last week because it simply passed by their headquarters with the flag of a rival party draping the coffin. Last night on the MTV television station during a political conversation show, the so-called "Old Guard" militia of Gebran Bassil's Tayyar, dressed like Hezbollah's Black Shirts and armed to the hilt, and with premeditated planning, broke into the television station and assaulted people in the live audience. Perhaps inspired by the Iranian theocracy's virulence and violence, Bassil should change his last name to Basij, the name of the Iranian paramilitary organization operating under the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

The Tayyar is today what the Kataeb was in the 1970s: An up-and-coming Fascist Party that cannot tolerate difference. Michel Aoun is out of office, and with the attrition of all the decent elements from the Tayyar, the bottom of the barrel is what constitutes Zebran Basij's following right now. Just like Pierre Gemayel who founded the Kataeb with good intentions, yet his political heirs turned the party into the scum that was on display during the 1975 war, Michel Aoun founded the Tayyar with good intentions and ideas. But Aoun's political heir, Zebran Basij has now decided to transform the Tayyar into a Fascist militia. Maronites NEVER learn from their own history.

What if Netanyahu....?

What if right-wing extremist Benyamin Netanyahu walks out of the Maritime Border Agreement between Israel and Lebanon? In his campaign, he has already indicated he's ready to do so, citing his opposition to the Oslo Agreement with the PLO as a precedent. 

With a coalition government between Netanyahu's Likud and the radical Jewish supremacist groups, Jewish Power bloc, Shas and United Torah Judaism, the stakes could not be higher on many domestic issues (mainly the future of the Palestinians under occupation), as well as regional issues (Iran's nuclear program). These ultra-religious right-wingers do in fact call for the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of all Palestinians from their ancestral lands and the annexation of all Palestinian territories, which even "moderate" left-wing Israelis conveniently forget when reminded that the entire construct of Israel was the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of millions of Palestinians from their lands in the 1930s-1940s.  No one in the West, especially the former European Nazis in France, Germany, Italy etc. dares criticize such mass-murderous criminal Israeli plans: The Europeans are crushed into submission by their guilt over the Holocaust and by the constant blackmailing by Zionists of labeling them anti-semites if they merely give friendly advice, let alone criticize Israel. There is no deeper fear and cowering by Europeans than in the face of the accusation of anti-semitism.

Netanyahu adores Donald Trump whom he finds to be the perfect dumb American president to be manipulated into moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel's annexation of the Golan, supporting expansion of Jewish terrorist settlements in Palestine, etc. Meanwhile, next week's midterm elections in the US could deliver a Republican majority in the Congress, which would weaken Joe Biden's presidency. The equilibrium in US-Israel relations that was restored to some normality by the eviction of Trump from the White House could swing back in favor of radical right-wing policies.

During his campaign, Netanyahu has denounced Yair Lapid's signing of the maritime border agreement with Lebanon. But will he go so far as to withdraw from it, and risk rising tensions and war with Hezbollah? (see: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/10/maritime-border-agreement-with-israel.html)

Certainly, the Iranian regime behind Hezbollah has been weakened by the ongoing popular uprising against it, and if the trend continues, it might embolden an extremist radical right-wing Israeli government to take risks such as withdrawing from the Lebanon-Israel maritime agreement and waging war with Hezbollah, and perhaps even striking Iran's nuclear facilities. The negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program have all but stalled, and a deal to resurrect the JCPOA is going nowhere. 

During campaigns, candidates tend to raise their rhetoric beyond what they realistically can deliver. So if Netanyahu inches a bit closer to the center on some issues when in power, such as maintaining Israel's adherence to the maritime agreement which is a source of revenue for the country, he might have to deliver to his Jewish terrorist coalition partners on other issues, such as expanding Jewish settlements and further terrorizing the Palestinian population. The gas-thirsty Europeans will naturally turn a blind eye to such crimes against humanity as long as gas is flowing from Israel to Europe.

Therefore, on the whole all indicators point to stability on the Lebanese-Israeli front, even with a right wing extremist Netanyahu government. The only wild card in the equation is the future of the Iranian regime. If cornered by its own people, by the international sanctions, and by a threat to its nuclear facilities, the regime of the Mullahs might lash out against Saudi oil facilities (as it did a few years ago, without any reaction from Donald Trump's administration) or against Israel's gas platforms near the Lebanese border through its Hezbollah proxy. Indeed, such a threat to teetering international oil and gas supplies is probably Iran's master card short of a nuclear bomb.