From Syria with Love: The Children of Ghabey [Archives]

The piece below was written on April 10, 2005 as the barbarian Syrian army was being evicted from Lebanon after 30 years of occupation. Now (in 2023) that the Lebanese army is beginning to evict some of the 2 million so-called Syrian "refugees" (who, unlike real refugees, commute daily between their host country and the country they supposedly fled from, with loads of smuggled goods and their European-gifted US dollars to keep them from going to Europe), the criminals and thugs of both Bashar Assad and his enemies of the Free Syrian Army are spewing their Baathist venom on this Lebanon that will always reject their racist and Fascist Arab nationalism.

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From Syria with Love: The Children of Ghabey

Gone are the shabby checkpoints and the haggard Syrian soldiers manning them. Gone are the ‎green arches made from pine and palm trees downed to raise the portraits of the Assad ‎dynasty: from Hafez to Basel and Bashar. Gone are the statues of the dictators erected “in your ‎face” of the Lebanese people, for nowhere at their checkpoints or the office buildings they ‎confiscated or the dungeons they ran did Syria's men – over thirty years in their host country – ‎have the decency to raise a Lebanese flag next to the Syrian flag. What more did the Lebanese ‎people need to understand that Syria was in Lebanon not to liberate, protect or defend, but only ‎to subdue, erase, and eliminate by repression and oppression?‎

Gone are the drab green Soviet-vintage trucks. Gone are the civilian-dressed Mukhabaraat men ‎lounging at Beirut Airport and casually checking their registers for the names of the “wanted” ‎Lebanese who dared a homecoming. Gone are the cars with shaded windows, the vulgar and ‎sadistic killers, murderers, kidnappers, hoodlums, vengeful men who hated Lebanon and its ‎people to the bone. Gone are all these men who were trucked in from remote desert villages of ‎the Syrian interior, after being brainwashed to hate Lebanon as a renegade and decadent ‎province that needed to be “re-educated” into the fold of true Arabism. A strayed province of a ‎once glorious Arab Syria that, truth be told, never really existed except inside the ‎megalomaniacal minds of the Baathist criminals whose only source of pride in this world in ‎which they utterly failed is their delusional nostalgia for an antiquated fantasy. For the Syrian ‎reality remains a terribly miserable one, and the only escape from the Syrian Gulag is to feed off ‎the illusions of a past that has been mythicized and exaggerated in logarithmic proportion to the ‎misery of ‎‏20‏th century Syria. They are all finally going home to that land beyond the green ‎Lebanon mountain range and the barren hills of the Anti-Lebanon range where the Syrian desert ‎begins. ‎

To those of my generation, however, the departure of the Syrian men from Lebanon will never ‎erase the pain, the fear and the hurt of three decades. From the jewel of the Middle East, ‎resplendent in the glimmer of its joie-de-vivre by the Mediterranean, where East met West ‎around every street corner and in the myriad of cafes and restaurants, clubs and theaters, ‎beaches and mountain retreats, Lebanon was brought down like a calf to the slaughter by the ‎Arabs – every one of them, the Palestinians, the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, the Libyans and the ‎Egyptians, the Somalis and the Sudanese, and most of all the Syrians – because it stood as a ‎thorn in the side of the totalitarian drab of the Arab World. Lebanon violated every taboo and ‎every norm of that Arab World. It had Christians, Druze, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Armenians, ‎Shiites who intermarried and lived as equals side by side next to Sunnis. Worse yet, it had ‎Westerners living with all those people – not in walled compounds – but anywhere they wished. ‎It had church bells that tolled next to the Muezzin at the mosque. It had mini skirts in the ‎streets and bikinis on the beaches. It had Arak-drinking Zajal poets dueling with words on ‎television. It had a free press that poked fun at kings and queens, presidents, sultans, and Emirs ‎alike, often with the pens of the same Arab writers and intellectuals who had escaped from their ‎home countries to the refuge of Lebanon. ‎

This was too much decadence and diversity to handle for the pan-Arab Baathist nationalists who ‎preferred homogenized compliant societies to diverse and rebellious free people. Lebanon had ‎too many colors. It had Arab, French, American and Lebanese universities. It had a British High ‎School, an American International College, a secular Lyçée Français and a religious French Jesuit ‎school, and German, Italian and other schools, all coexisting next to a plethora of Lebanese ‎private religious and secular schools, as well as a full-fledged Lebanese public school system. It ‎had veiled women who watched streakers cross Hamra Street in the early ‎‏1970‏s. It had a red-light district where wealthy Arabs – from the kingdoms and emirates of the Gulf – mingled with ‎equally drunken sailors from around the world to defuse their repressed libidos. In the words of ‎a young Kuwaiti student I met once at Brown University, when Saddam occupied and was ‎brutalizing Kuwait, as I tried to compare his Kuwait under Saddam to my Lebanon under Hafez, ‎‎“We went to Lebanon to f--- your sisters and your mothers...You deserve to be occupied by ‎Syria, but we do not deserve to be occupied by Iraq”. Such was the gratitude of the Arabs for a ‎country they claimed as one of them, often against its own wishes, a country to which they ‎escaped from the boredom and repression of their own countries, and then only to turn around ‎and spit at it in hatred. ‎

And so, thirty years ago, as Lebanon was moving forward into the modern world by keeping its ‎doors open to the world, money, mercenaries, and weapons began flowing in from Egypt, Libya, ‎Syria and elsewhere in the Arab World. A rabid Arab media turned against small Lebanon ‎because it dared to say no to Arafat and his PLO. Never mind that the Palestinians had been ‎muzzled, massacred, and locked up in their camps in every other Arab country, and all the Arab ‎rulers wanted was to contain the Palestinians inside Lebanon for fear of a revolution at home. ‎And never mind that the Palestinian Cause was merely a commodity in the market of Arab ‎principles for the dictators to maintain their grip on power and their boots over their people. ‎

Maggie Abou-Jaoudeh's death in the Spring of ‎‏1976‏‎ epitomizes what the Arabs did to Lebanon. I ‎personally witnessed this one of many untold atrocities during the mis-named “civil” war between ‎the Syrian-Palestinian Arab cabal and the Lebanese people, when the war moved from the streets of Beirut ‎along the fortified PLO terror camps to the Mountain. Maggie was a ‎‏5‏‎-year-old with curly blond hair ‎who was killed by a single shell fired by the Syrian paramilitary Al-Saika organization from the ‎other side of the mountain facing Broumana on a glorious spring day of ‎‏1976‏‎. A single shell. Not ‎a volley. Not a battle. Not an artillery exchange. Just one mortar shell. There had been no ‎clashes for weeks, and spring on the hills was erasing the memory of the misery of that cold ‎winter we spent in Ghabey near Broumana as refugees from Beirut. It was not hot enough yet ‎for the cycads to begin their daytime rap on the trunks of the pine trees, but the air was light ‎and sweet. The war had followed us from Beirut, and the Battle of the Mountain was underway. ‎But we were enjoying a lull in the fighting. The children of Ghabey, a small village down the road ‎from Broumana going south towards Salima and Qornayel, were playing in the village square up ‎the hill from our house, and I could hear them from my room as I lay on my bed reading. My ‎mother was having coffee with Sayydeh, Maggie's mother, in the living room. The voices of the ‎children filled the village.‎

Then, there was a thud. One mortar thud in the distance. The echo quickly reverberated across ‎the valley beneath the Knaisseh peak, and I knew the mortar was launched from the other side, ‎as we had grown accustomed to instinctively listen and gauge the origin and direction of shells. ‎It took several seconds for the shell to fly overhead, with the nervous roar of its tail vrrrooming ‎over the house. And it took us a split second to realize that the shell was going to strike near us. ‎And then the blast. Fifty yards from the house, up the hill in the middle of the village square ‎where the children were playing. The children's voices went silent, like a school of sparrows on a ‎tree when their singing frenzy is disturbed. From the living room, Sayydeh's scream rose in a ‎fast crescendo, the primal scream of a mother's heart who knew her child had been ‎harmed...MAAAAGGGIIIEE.... and my hair stood on my neck before I could jump out of the bed. ‎We all ran up the hill. I ‎was one of the first people on the scene, as everyone was converging on the square. Maggie's sisters – Nana, Hamo, Zeezee – were there....The crater, and the little grey bodies melded into the ‎blackened rubble and pavement...the colors of their clothes muted...mixed into the monotone ‎shade of burned explosives and ravaged asphalt...motionless...just lying there...I don't recall ‎seeing the faces...just these still little bodies...like Guernica's children, and I recalled a Joan Baez song that ‎says, “and God filled their bullet holes with candy”... A single shell fired by the heroes of the ‎Arab Cause on the children of Ghabey on a spring afternoon...for no other reason but to kill the ‎children...for no other reason but to inflict deep pain...For the road to Palestine and the Golan ‎and all the lost Arab causes, as Syria still wants the world to believe even today, had to go ‎through every Lebanese village, all the way from Beit Mellat and al-Qaa in the north, through Damour and ‎on to the Shebaa Farms in the south, and over the dead bodies of Lebanon's children. The death ‎of Maggie and the children of Ghabey sums up the agony of Lebanon at the hands of the Muslim Arabs. ‎Wanton and barbaric, driven by hatred, jealousy and the frustration at their impotence against Jewish Israel. And so, ‎they chose Lebanon as the substitute enemy because on the scale of their racist view of the ‎world, Christian Lebanon ranks pretty high in the degree of its “otherness”. Lebanon was the proxy ‎‎“Crusader”, the isolationist, the Arab who does not want to be an Arab, the renegade, the whore ‎who went astray. ‎

What purpose, I ask today, as we near the thirtieth anniversary of the start of the Lebanese War ‎in April ‎‏13‏‎, ‎‏1975‏‎, has the Lebanese War served the Arabs and the Palestinian Cause? How can ‎anyone find a shred of credibility in Hezbollah's claims to resistance and liberation when that ‎organization's objective has been, and still is, to fight a war that the majority of the Palestinians ‎themselves abandoned more than ‎‏13‏‎ years ago in Oslo and Madrid? I say to Hezbollah, Palestine ‎belongs to the Palestinians, and the Lebanese should no longer die for Palestine. Like Jordan, ‎the Lebanese people have chosen a “Lebanon first” policy. The Lebanese of the South have been ‎led like sheep to the slaughter, first by the PLO between ‎‏1970‏‎ and ‎‏1982‏‎ and, after the PLO was ‎evicted from Lebanon in ‎‏1982‏‎, by Hezbollah which was created, armed, and financed by Syria and ‎Iran specifically to replace the PLO as the instrument of destabilization in the hands of the Assad ‎regime. Hezbollah has never served Lebanon. It has served Iran and Syria, and like these two ‎countries, Hezbollah has spilled Lebanese blood for the sake of other causes except the cause of ‎Lebanon. And to disguise its objectives, Hezbollah has assumed the cloak of a social welfare ‎organization after hijacking those functions from the Lebanese State to whom it continues to ‎deny access to the land of the Lebanese south. The Lebanese people have to wake up to the ‎truth and understand the Big Lie and the sham liberation ideology of Hezbollah that has been ‎shoved down their throats for close to two decades. Why, I ask Hezbollah, isn't there a Syrian ‎Hezbollah fighting the Israeli occupation – worse, the annexation – of the Syrian Golan Heights?‎

And now, as another April ‎‏13‏‎‏‎ comes to remind us of when, thirty years ago, that “uncivil ‎War” between the Lebanese and the Palestinians broke out, now that Lebanon is ending that era ‎of its history, I will never forget Maggie and the children of Ghabey, and will remind myself that ‎their death, in its inhumanity, was also the death of my country. If Lebanon is becoming alive ‎again, it is because all the children of Lebanon who were made to die for many years, like ‎Maggie and the children of Ghabey, have finally decided to come out and play on all the village ‎squares of Lebanon, including that big square in downtown Beirut. They no longer fear that their ‎voices will ever again be silenced by the shells of hatred or the drab totalitarian regimes of the ‎Arab World.‎

Hanibaal Atheos 

Bassil: Tactical or Strategic Repositioning?

Zebran Basij (a.k.a. Gebran Bassil) is slowly trying a comeback to the Maronite umbrella of the Lebanese Forces, his enemies for decades, now that his inter-sectarian love affair with his Shiite lover Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah has unraveled. Nasrallah recently fell in love with a certain feudal warlord from the northern highlands by the name of Sleiman Frangiyeh whom he wants in the presidential palace, thus forming a charming menage-a-trois with the butcher of Damascus, Bashar Assad. 

Basij recently declared, “we are driven by our ability to live in diversity and adjust to it. We hope to be able to blend a Lebanese system that is centralized in politics, defense, and monetary policies on one hand, and decentralized administratively and financially on the other hand. This is at the heart of Lebanese unity and has nothing to do with partition”. Yup, Zebran, is continuously trying to sit on the precarious fence between his treasonous alliance with Hezbollah and his fast slipping Christian base. "You're's so smart", they tell him. But not smarter than the Lebanese people who see in you all the symptoms of someone who was schooled in the methods of the Fascist Syrian Baath and the primitive Iranian Mullahs.

For a long time, Basij did not have any ideas or proposals for improving the decaying Lebanese system. He was obsessed with bringing his father-in-law Michel Aoun to the presidency, and the only way to do this was to make a Faustian deal with the domestic enemies of Lebanon, first among which is Iran's proxy Hezbollah. He accused the Lebanese Forces (LF) of fomenting partition because the LF party called for a change of the system to some form of federation, having come to terms with the fallacious and failed slogan of “shared-living” (between Christians and Muslims) that has been shoved down the throats of the Lebanese people for close to a century.

At a recent Iftar (Ramadan dinner, therefore before a Shiite Muslim audience) in Byblos, Basij said, “When we signed the memorandum of understanding [with Hezbollah], the defense strategy to protect and defend Lebanon was a pillar of the understanding, because we were convinced that the Army and the Resistance [codename for Hezbollah] had proven their ability at liberating Lebanon and protecting it.” Unfortunately, Basij and Aoun (a former Army Chief) kept repeating that the Lebanese Army was an incapable institution, as a way for to justify their enslavement to Hezbollah and its continued but unlawful existence.

May I remind Basij's followers, that the “liberation” of the south was a hoax deal between Iran (Hezbollah’s boss) and Israel, in which the Israelis withdrew without any warning and surrendered the south to Hezbollah without firing a single bullet. The agreement between Iran and Israel intentionally deprived the Lebanese State and Army from a unique opportunity to reclaim the State’s sovereignty over the south after its rape for decades by Yasser Arafat's PLO then by Iran's Hezbollah.

Basij went on to say, “…there are periods of our history that we should have learned from and should not repeat… We do not need anyone to use our land to send messages.... and we do not accept on our soil any other weapons than Lebanese weapons in Lebanese hands.” Fine, Basij is still fence-sitting and implying that Hezbollah’s weapons are Lebanese, when everyone knows that they belong to Iran and that Hezbollah is nothing but an arm of the Islamic Theocracy. But that is a slight improvement to his discourse because he now includes the Army. How patriotic!

Basij further made comments indicating his gradual and ever so Jesuitic shift away from Hezbollah’s lap and into the traditional Christian Lebanese posture held by the LF. “Having proven our capability [at defending ourselves thanks to Hezbollah], why do we accept that non-Lebanese rockets be fired from our soil, and why return to days past and long buried, from which we should have learned.” Problem with fence-sitters like Basij is they talk from both sides of their mouths, they say the thing and its opposite at the same time.

Basij was alluding to the Palestinian Hamas rockets fired last week onto Israel on behalf of Hezbollah (which gets to claim deniability) pretending to ignore that Hamas could not have come out of the Palestinian refugee camps some distance away from the border with Israel, and could not have traveled with dozens of rockets across Hezbollah-held territory, with some Lebanese Army presence and lots of United Nations peacekeeping patrols, without the assistance and acquiescence of Hezbollah. Particularly that the rockets were fired at the same exact moment that Nasrallah was meeting in Beirut with visiting Ismail Haniyeh, Palestinian leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Basij, like all his filthy ilk in Lebanese politics, thinks he is talking to dumbass Lebanese people. He, of course, can say everything and nothing to his own idiotic followers of his Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) party who, in the typical Lebanese client-boss relationship, will believe whatever garbage he feeds them. But the vast majority of the Lebanese people know he is lying, he is tergiversating, he is wavering, he doesn’t know what he wants, and he wants the cake and eat it too. He realizes that his bet on Hezbollah has met a gigantic failure of basic political acumen and vision, and worse, that it was an act of treason against the foundations of a normal sovereign nation and of his own Christian community.

After licking Nasrallah’s flip-flops for decades as the savior of Lebanon, speaking ill of the national army, and now that Hezbollah has dumped him like a piece of used toilet paper, he wants us to believe that his parting of ways with the Iranian traitors is an act of patriotism? Doesn’t he assume any responsibility for the past 18 years, the degradation of the national institutions, the collapse of the economy, etc. all because of Hezbollah’s parasitic empire of corruption, drug dealing, smuggling, assassinations of political figures, journalists and economists, all of which have sapped every bit of normal governance in the country?

Meanwhile, there is information of secret meetings between the LF and the FPM to coordinate on the stalemated presidential elections dossier. The LF is still denying the accuracy of this information, perhaps to force Basij to make more concessions before the LF “takes him back”. MP Fadi Karam of the LF insists that Basij is still attached to a future strategic understanding and relationship with Hezbollah, and is only maneuvering right now to try and ensure the failure of Basij's nemesis and Hezbollah’s presidential candidate, Sleiman Frangiyeh. Karam further says that the LF is strategically in a completely different place, which is to reject any compromise with Hezbollah as long as the latter persists in weakening the Lebanese State and holding the Lebanese people hostage [to Iran and Syria’s ambitions in the region]… "Our program consists in saving Lebanon from Hezbollah’s grip, while Basij’s program is still to maintain Lebanon in the Iranian axis."

In other words, the LF believes that Basij is only maneuvering to destroy any chances for Sleiman Frangiyeh, but has not fundamentally changed. He is using his rapprochement with the LF posture as a tactical pressure on Hezbollah. But I believe that Basij has taken stock of his monumental failure – as last May’s elections showed – and he is genuinely trying to move back to Michel Aoun’s original pre-2006 platform that he himself corrupted. But he thinks he is undertaking this move so slowly and stealthily, for two reasons: He thinks that the Christians of Lebanon will not notice his metamorphosis and will still trust him, and he is afraid of Hezbollah which is known to assassinate former allies whom it believes have betrayed it. Simultaneously dumb and coward!

Monopoly of Victimhood: What Exactly is Anti-Semitism?

The Semites are a group of peoples and nations scattered around the Near and Middle East. According to the fictional garbage of the bible, the Semites descend from one of Noah's sons, Shem. Today, Semites include residents of the Arabian Peninsula who speak Arabic, Amharas and other East African countries, speakers of Syriac in today's Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, in addition to the ancient Phoenicians, Hebrews, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Babylonians who spoke varieties of Semitic languages such as Aramaic. I am no expert, but do your own research to find out more about the Semites and Semitic languages.

The point of this piece is that an estimated half a billion people on earth today are considered Semites who speak any of a number of Semitic languages, of which only 6 million (i.e. 0.000001%) speak Hebrew. Yet, Anti-semitism is generally understood to be a strictly anti-Jewish animus. How can that be? 

One can imagine several answers:

1. As a result of the confusing stories about who is really responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, Anti-semites blame Jews for the killing of Jesus. Pontius Pilate, the governor of the Roman province of Palaestina at the time, apparently did not find Jesus guilty of any crime, washed his hands of the affair and handed Jesus to the Jewish leaders to decide. In turn, the latter handed the decision to their own people who voted by acclaim to liberate the criminal Barabbas and crucify Jesus. According to this version of events then, the Jews themselves essentially decided to kill Jesus, blaming him not for declaring himself a prophet or the son of God, but because he declared himself King of the Jews. The inscription on top of the cross, INRI, is in Latin, not in Aramaic or Greek - hence it was effectively an execution carried out by the Romans - "INRI" being an abbreviation of Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum, or Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. Regardless of whether or not this whole story is a fallacy made up by those who wrote the Gospels, the killing of Jesus was more of a political decision than a religious one. Still, the Romans did not shed any tears and were happy to get rid of Jesus because he posed a threat to their military occupation and stability in Palestine, but the Jewish leadership also did not want a competitor. In the end it was the Romans who implemented a Jewish decision by crucifying Jesus on behalf of the Jews. That is, both were equally responsible for killing Jesus.

2. European Jews had lived in small numbers in Europe for centuries, but during the 18th century,  Eastern Europeans (Russia, Belarus, Moldova, Poland, etc.) - which is where most invading Israeli colons come from today - converted en masse to Judaism. Within a century, some time during the 19th century, with the Elightenment and the Industrial Revolution, followed by the rise of nationalisms, Jews began moving out of their ghettos and into the worlds of academia, commerce, banking, and other professional circles. Fanatic Protestants and Catholics saw a threat to their monopolies and began persecuting and discriminating against their Jewish partners and colleagues who invented the term Anti-semitism to describe this hatred they suffered from at the hands of these barbarian Christian Europeans. This all culminated with the pogroms, the two world wars, the Holocaust, and the monumental crime of the creation of Israel over the ashes of historic Palestine and the near annihilation of the native indigenous Palestinian people.

Consequently, the majority of adherents to the Jewish religion today are not Semites. They are Eastern Europeans (blond, red-haired, blue-eyed..., i.e. not at all the prototype of the dark-haired, brown-eyed people of the Near East, East Africa and the Arab world) who wear strange Russian hats and long furry coats that are needed in the sub-freezing temperatures of the Eastern European and Russian plains, but are otherwise unknown in the Near East. Hence, most Israelis who claim the land of Palestine as their own, because supposedly God gave it to them some 4,000 years ago according to biblical garbage, are not genetic or cultural descendants of the Hebrews. In addition, there are black African Jews, Indian Jews, North African Jews, Chinese Jews, European Jews, etc. all with very different genetic and cultural legacies and traditions, which further indicates that Judaism is just a religion, it is neither a culture nor does it represent a scientifically classifiable ethnic group. In other words, there is no such thing as a Jewish "people", and more to the point, there cannot be a scientific or legal claim of ownership by all the holders of the Jewish faith around the world to the land of Palestine. 

The creation of the State of Israel cannot therefore be justified in any way, except on the sole criterion of a colonial European project established at the Congress of Basel in 1897 to emulate the brutal colonial project of Belgian King Leopold II who made Congo his own personal colony, or the German colonization of Namibia, or any of the other long-standing European (French, English, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish...) colonies around the world that brought immense wealth to the old continent by plundering the resources of the colonized countries. European Jews, as a result, saw in colonialism an opportunity to create their own colony somewhere around the globe, more as a source of wealth than to escape anti-Jewish hatred. Like their other fellow Europeans, they couldn't care less for the welfare of the native indigenous "sub-human savages" they were colonizing and whose countries they were raping for captitalist greed. In fact, the Jewish conferees at the Congress of Basel were secular, atheists, and socialists who ultimately founded the infamous Kibbutzim after erasing some 600 Palestinian ancestral villages. The impulse was not religious. It was social and economic, a sort of 19th century Jewish "me-too" capitalism that wanted its own colony. Indeed, Argentina and Uganda - not Palestine - were the first targets for establishing a Jewish homeland. It was later with the collusion of the racist supremacist British monsters who obtained a League of Nations mandate over Palestine, that the convergence of British interests and Jewish colonialism focused on Palestine, belatedly adding the bullshit argument of the "return" to the Holy Land to butress the colonial claim with a religious one.

Therefore, as they were the direct victims of European hatred and pogroms, and being ignorant (or arrogant) of the existence of other Semites, European Jews convinced themselves and others of being the only Semites around. By coining the term "Anti-semitism", they naively or deliberately hijacked the term to present themselves as the victims of Christian European racists, when in fact, a better term would have been "Anti-Jewishism" or "Anti-Judaism". By equating a narrow Anti-Judaism with a sweeping Anti-Semitism, they monopolized what is not entirely theirs.

Buried and suffocating under a constant flood of propaganda, no one today thinks of Arabs, Africans, and others when one hears the word "Anti-semitism". The definition of the term has become restricted to hatred of Jews, when Anti-Semitism should either be broadened to comprise hatred of all Semites, like Arabs, some Africans and other Semitic peoples, or it should be abandoned and more appropriate terms like "Anti-Jewishism" "or "anti-Judaism" be used instead. The term "Anti-semitism" can no longer be used exclusively to describe the horrible treatment that Jews suffered at the hands of Christian Europeans.

Alternatively, more specific terms should be coined. For example, "Islamophobia" refers to hatred of Muslims, regardless of their national identity. But such terms as "Anti-Arabism" could be used to describe hatred of Arabs, regardless of their religion, for example. 

I am a Semite and I am neither Muslim nor Christian. Religion is not part of my identity. I was raised in another of those backward monotheistic religions, which I have discarded from my life. Yet, I experienced racism in Europe and America. So technically, I cannot be a victim of Anti-Semitism because I am not a Jew, nor can I be a victim of "Islamophobia" because I am not a Muslim. Yet, I went through terrible experiences because ignorant dumb Western racists make suppositions as to my background.  I should either be able to use the term "Anti-semitism" to describe my experiences (though Jews might not accept me into their prestigious and exclusive Victim Club), or linguists should establish a lexicon of specific terms to be used to describe discriminatory attitudes against every single human group. Anti-Turkism, Anti-Kazakstanism, Anti-Chinesism, Anti-Africanism, etc.  

Finally, and according to a broadened and fairer definition of Anti-Semitism, Israeli Jews - who, again, are NOT genetic Semites - are themselves Anti-Semitic because of the hatred and barbarity they inflict daily on genuine Semites, namely the Palestinians. In fact, today's Palestinians are the direct descendants of the ancient Jews who, following the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD by the Romans, having stayed in Palestine (no evidence of a massive Jewish flight from Palestine has ever been discovered by Israeli scientists), became Roman Christians (Byzantine empire) for about two centuries (mid-400s to mid-600s), then became Muslims with the Arab-Muslim conquest in the 7th century. Racism is so stupid. It is always wrong when examined under a scientific lens. 

For more see: [https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-genetics-of-racism.html]

German Neo-Nazis March for Peace!

[https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-updates-easter-rallies-in-germany-call-for-peace/a-65262524]

They apparently no longer want wars, because their Nazi history is so stressful to their sensitive minds.

They march all across Germany calling on their country to stop sending weapons to Ukraine, and by extension allow the megalomaniacal Russian dictator Putin to succeed. 

These German neo-Nazi pacifists are the children and grandchildren of those Germans who willy-nilly became Nazis and didn't mind what Hitler was doing. Just as they don't seem to mind what Putin is doing.

Under the guise of pacifism, they allow dictators to slowly engulf Europe in another war.

That is what their grandparents did in the 1930s, and this is exactly what they themselves are doing today. In fact, it wasn't only Germans who followed Hitler: The English, the Americans, the French, and many others worked for "peace" with Hitler's Germany even as the latter was taking the Sudeten from Czechoslovakia, annexing Austria and threatening more land grabs. That is exactly the path Putin has embraked on. If he succeeds in Ukraine, then the Poles and the Germans better prepare for war. Is this what these hypocritical peacenik Germans want?

To not want war to the point of allowing brutal megalomaniacs to dominate is both stupid and criminal. You see, Germans are a very difficult people with complex neuropathological problems. They have an innate proclivity for guilt. They feel guilty just for being alive. They invented Protestantism which made them directly personally responsible (without church intercession) to God. That is not an easy burden. Muslims too have this direct relationship with God, and you can see the results. To compensate, people like that jump to extremes: harsh discispline, stubbornness, obsession with order, recalcitrance to change, radicalism, mental stiffness, no sense of humor, condescension to others, lack of compassion, etc. which are all tenets of both the Nazi and the Islamist ideologies.

By passively submitting to Hitler a century ago, their grandparents sent millions to their death and pushed a few million others into the British-American colony in my part of the world, the apartheid state of Israel which uprooted, displaced, and ethnically-cleansed the indigenous native Palestinian people out of their ancestral lands and into refugee camps, with all the disastrous consequences this have had on the world. Where do you think the majority of Israelis came from? Who do you think the majority of Israelis is today? Former Germans, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarussians, Moldavians, etc. who were reared under the Nazis and Fascists: they just happen to be Jewish. They all have German last names, with blond hair and blue eyes, and have nothing to do with the Near East. Their behavior is a copy-paste of the Nazis' behavior. Just as the Boers - a hodge-podge of Dutch, French and English extermist Protestant settlers - who had nothing to do in Africa except build a hateful, racist apartheid white supremacist colony called South Africa. Israelis are to the Near East what White South Africans are to Africa.

By pretending to be pacifists, these neo-Nazi Germans are essentially giving Putin a free hand in Ukraine, to be followed - as history showed us - by further heartache and torment across Europe.

Enough western hypocrisy. All the ills of our current world are the legacy of European colonialism: subjecting other peoples to slavery, terror and occupying their lands, greedy capitalism, pilfering their natural resources, disrupting their environmentally-balanced lifestyles with fake modernity.... and they still have the gall to pretend to be peace-loving democrats who love nature. Just look at these privileged Westerners, these "lovers of nature" with all their plastic gear with which they climb mountains, dive in oceans, walk through forests, drive their SUVs into the heart of the most distant places on earth.... all of it because they want to "protect" nature. Protect it to death, that is.

By the way, Deutsche Welle (whose article is in the link above) is a prototype of that bigoted German Christian cabal, a den of residual Nazism that is intrinsic to the German mind: Not long ago, Deutsche Welle sacked all its Palestinian and Arab reporters because they reported on the barbaric atrocities that the German Nazi grandchild called Israel is causing to the Palestinian people. Just as their predecessors sacked all their Jewish employees back under the Nazi regime.

Remember what I say: Germany will one day become the biggest threat to Europen stability again. Nazism is still alive and kicking deep in the German mind, and can at any time wreck all that was built after World War II. The pseudo-pacifist Germans marching to stop aiding Ukraine are not marching for peace, they are marching in support of the Russian dictator Putin, just as their grandparents and parents marched for Hitler. Chassez la nature, elle revient au galop.

How Israel Fights "terrorist" Palestinians

One picture for a thousand words: How Israel fights "terrorist" Palestinians. By dragging and manhandling an older Palestinian woman, an "agitator" according to Israel's Crime Minister Netanyahu. 

Notice all the materiel that Israeli soldiers carry to repress stone throwers. Jewish Fascism at its best. 

Remember the images that Israel's apologists continuously bombard us with, to drain every bit of sympathy we might have for other suffering people on this earth, and keep it concentrated on the ultimate exclusivity of victimhood, the Jewish Holocaust: Spiffy, well-dressed, aryan-looking, blond-haired, heavily armed German soldiers manhandling destitute raggedy Jewish civilians?  

 

The Uselessness of UNIFIL in South Lebanon

Since its inception in 1978, UNIFIL has cost the United Nations billions of dollars. Result: Zero. Nothing. For 45 years, nothing has changed in the configuration of south Lebanon. But hundreds of UNIFIL soldiers have been killed, sometimes in the crossfire, sometimes by attacks from within Lebanon by Palestinian and Hezbollah militants. The latest was the shooting by Hezbollah operatives on a UNIFIL convoy last December 2022, killing Private Sean Rooney of the Irish contingent.

The pattern of hostilities itself has not changed since the late 1960s: Someone (out of the Lebanese government's sovereign control of its territory) fires a useless rocket or shell on Israel's northern settlements - initially Palestinian militants, then Hezbollah militants - and Israel retaliates. Over the decades, the retaliations ranged from minor shelling of uninhabited areas (like yesterday) to targeted attacks against Palestinian refugee camps, to major destruction of entire villages in the south or to large sections of Beirut itself.

Thus, one can reasonably conclude that the presence of UNIFIL has never prevented any war or cross border attacks. In fact, by freezing the unlawful presence of non-state actors like the PLO or the PFLP or Hezbollah or Hamas into so-called ceasefire agreements or "rules of engagement" understandings, UNIFIL has granted legitimacy to outlaw and terrorist organizations. The UN's job is not simply to prevent escalations (which it never did anyway); the UN should prioritize the return of sovereignty for the country or government in question. And that has never been UNIFIL's priority. In the case of Lebanon, UN resolutions should first and foremost stipulate the requirement for a return of Lebanese state sovereignty AND include a mandatory military mechanism to enforce such a provision. To date, the Lebanese Army has never been allowed, since the late 1960s, to be the SOLE custodian of the Lebanese south, and every UN resolution called for a return of sovereignty but without any enforcement mechanism. As if the Security Council NEVER wanted Lebanon to recover its full sovereignty over the south.

Despite grandiose but humble declarations and statements, UNIFIL doesn't really control the territory it was mandated to control, hence anyone can get in their pickup truck and fire a few rockets across the border. According to UNSCR 1701, the area south of the Litani river was supposed to be free of militias and militant organizations. That has never been implemented. Why? Because 1701 did not include an enforcement mechanism, such that UNIFIL forces have no way to prevent violations of 1701. Hezbollah, Hamas, PFLP and others run freely across the south, shooting rockets on Israel and giving the latter every pretext to retaliate.

The 1989 US-Saudi sponsored Taef agreement denied the Lebanese army full and exclusive control of the south, thus indirectly giving Hezbollah (backed by the Syrian occupation) free rein in its unlawful activities in the south, under the pretext of "resistance". But the Lebanese army was granted control over access and traffic in and out of the Palestinian refugee camps. Today, there are Lebanese army checkpoints at the entry of every Palestinian refugee camp. So how can Hamas, normally present inside the camps, exit the camps with dozens of rockets mounted on vehicles, and head to the Israeli-Lebanese border without anyone (Lebanese army, UNIFIL, Hezbollah) noticing?

Incidentally, the Gaza Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, was visiting Beirut - supposedly on a private visit - the day the rockets were fired on Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah are both under Iran's control, and Hezbollah brags about coordinating the "resistance" with Hamas. So how can pundits say that Hezbollah has nothing to do with the firing of rockets on Israel? It is more than likely that the firing of rockets yesterday by Hamas operatives from Lebanese soil was coordinated with Hezbollah which controls the entire area from which the rockets were fired. 

Finally, assuming Hezbollah had nothing to do with the incidents, isn't Hezbollah's eternal "resistance" posture supposed to defend Lebanon against Israeli aggression? Where was the resistance to Israel's retaliation yesterday?

Why is it that the Lebanese government no longer has sovereignty over its south? How can the multitude of United Nations Security Council resolutions issued over more than the past 50 years not include an enforcement mechanism for a return of Lebanese sovereignty over the south?

Israel-Hezbollah Collusion to Exit their Respective Crises

This was the pattern from the 1970s: When Israel's government got in trouble domestically, it would fire up the Lebanese border. When Syria's government or its terrorist proxies got in trouble, they'd shoot a few rockets on Israel. Whether these escapist movements stopped short of a major war or escalated into a war is not the point. The point is to distract their captive people from the troubles the governments were facing, to rally their ultra-nationalist and ultra-religious followers, and thus relieve themselves of the pressures they're facing.

Hezbollah continues to this day with this approach. Every year, "someone" fires a rocket from South Lebanon onto Israel's northern colonies. We never find out who that "someone" is, but Hezbollah's lackeys claim it must be a "rogue" Palestinian who acted without seeking permission from Hezbollah or the Lebanese government. A reminder that Hezbollah controls Lebanon south of the Litani river in collusion with an inept, incompetent UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) whose sitting duck soldiers' job is to count the rockets and who have no authority whatsoever to prevent these actions. Obviously the only missing actor in the area is the Lebanese army whose minimal and even more useless presence is a decoy to satisfy the idiots at the UN. This circus has been going on since 1978, and it did not prevent any wars (e.g. 1982) or cross-border attacks (e.g. 1996 and 2006).

Hezbollah has lost its majority in last May's elections in Lebanon, and has been unable to impose its own candidate to the presidency of the country. It is facing unprecedented attacks on the domestic front from the majority of the Lebanese who are sick and tired of making Lebanon the only Arab country "liberating" Palestine. For 5 decades, this has been the fate of Lebanon: To be the village idiot of an Arab world that has essentially given up on liberating Palestine and has in fact made peace with Israel. The collapse of Lebanon is largely attributed to Hezbollah's domination and to its engaging in all manner of corruption and unlawful activities to finance itself. How can Hezbollah, whose last act of "liberation" from the Lebanese south goes back to 2006, rehabilitate itself in the eyes of a despondent and angry Lebanese population? By resurrecting its "resistance" posture. But it is too corwardly to do so in a frontal manner, because that would bring its existence into serious question. So it hides behind "rogue" Palestinian refugees to shoot a few rockets on Israel and try to herd the Lebanese population behind it, like it used to do. But the Lebanese people have long understood the game Hezbollah plays.

That does not mean that Hezbollah (and Syria and Iran behind it) is the sole culprit. The Israelis do it too. Extremist Jewish terrorist Netanyahu is in a dire situation. He is facing criminal charges and is trying to subvert the independence of the judiciary in order to save his hide. He is facing months-long demonstrations, and has caved in to the pressure by postponing acting on the law he has drafted to kill the independence of the judiciary. What else can he do to distract his foreign colonists and settlers? He has increased his terrorist policies against the indigenous native Palestinians, and only yesterday his forces have stormed into the Al-Aqsa mosque, killing and maiming Muslim worshippers on the tenuous motive that there were "agitators" inside the mosque. How rich!

And now, Hezbollah's Palestinian-camouflaged rockets against the Israeli north is giving Netanyahu a break. He can now claim to defend the country against the terrorists of Hezbollah, and by raising the antes, he hopes to distract his colonist settler people away from his crimes and his subversion of the judiciary. His government, the most radical right-wing Jewish terrorist settler government in the history of Israel - which was founded by secular atheist socialist European Jews - aims in fact to annex the West Bank and Gaza, and be done once and for all with an independent Palestine.

In other words, terrorist Hezbollah is now giving terrorist Israel a pretext to make a final land grab in Palestine, from the river to the sea, in exchange for rehabilitating its "resistance" lies in the eyes of the Lebanese population. By hoping to fire up the Lebanese-Israeli border, Hezbollah is trying to escape a harsh final judgment on its career as a fake "resistance" movement.

That has been the modus operandi in Lebanon for the past five decades, involving a variety of actors - Palestinians, Syrians, Iranians, Israelis, Americans, French, Saudi, Egyptian, etc. They all had a role to play in the never-ending torment of this tiny country.

Poles Turn Right: Back to Stupid with King Jesus [2016 Archives]:

[Posted in 2016]

The Polish people have long been suspected of stupidity. We all have heard Polish jokes in the US and Europe. Regressive right-winging is fashionable again - you know, the degenerate British numskulls and their Brexit, the backwoods Neanderthals of the American South and Midwest and their election of Donald Dumb, and many others... in a global domino effect taking the planet back to early 19th century.

And the Polish people are, of course, in the vanguard of idiocy. What have they done now? Well, they have done what the primitive Hebrews of Bronze Age Palestine refrained from doing: They have declared one Jesus Christ - an obscure Jewish rabbi from said Bronze Age Palestine who mounted a failed rebellion against the Roman occupation - THE KING OF POLAND. You got it. Catholic Poland now has a Jewish Palestinian king from the Bronze Age. Too bad Jesus wasn't mummified like Egyptian pharaohs.


Mind you that the Vatican was opposed to the idea. It wasn't the senile Bishops' idea to begin with, so they wouldn't have it. But says "father" Paul McDonald in his Rorate Caeli BlogSpot: "This was done in the official presence of the President of Poland, Andrzej Duda. Many pilgrims were present in Poland for this event. The act will be repeated in all the Polish cathedrals and parishes. This took place yesterday, Saturday, at the Church of Divine Mercy in Krakow."

And "father" McDonald (no relation to the infamous Canadian child molester priest whose blog would more aptly be entitled "Rorate Braccis" [drop your pantaloons]) continues in his nonsensical theological garbage: "The providential and proximate origin of the act is to be found in revelations received, or said to be received, by the Servant of God Rosalia Zelkova. The Lord -- she said -- demanded that He be enthroned as King by the Polish Nation as such, and not just in the hearts of the Poles, in a particular manner, and this would have saved Poland in the war that was coming." Sounds almost Socratic in its logic.

And to buttress this solid argument with even more obtuse trash, McDonald expounds: "But the social kingship of our Divine Lord is absolutely founded in necessary and dogmatic truths about Christ. It is not merely an element of private revelation. St. Gregory the Great said that they were heretics who denied that Christ is the King of and over everything." Case closed. McDo nailed it. Excluding the Christians, about 7 billion people on earth are heretics and won't be able to take a SpaceX ship to paradise!

Not one history book from the contemporaries of the said renegade rabbi Jesus mentions him. There are serious doubts as to whether he actually existed. His fame was built up out of nothing by some of his followers who were kicked out of Palestine by the Romans when the latter destroyed the temple in 70 AD. Soon he was made to be the son of God, then he was made to have been born out of a virgin who was impregnated by God without breaking her hymen - the angel Gabriel apparently stealthily "beamed" the sublime sperm across her hymen, and she didn't even feel anything. She had to be told later that she was knocked up - and mystery of mysteries, she remained a virgin even after giving birth to the rebellious baby in a stable with donkeys around. Then he was made to have risen from the dead and ascended to the Big Zombie in the sky. The stories told by his "disciples" a century after the death of the rabbi became fertile ground for exaggerations and mystification, so much so that the credulous wife of a Roman Emperor facing extinction at the hands of the northern barbarians (the Polish people's ancestors, to be exact) became a secret follower of the Jesus movement and convinced her husband to dump Jupiter for Yahweh, Juno for Mary, and Apollo for Jesus and embrace the new religion. Roman practices did not change much with the switch and adoption of Jesus as the new hero: They still built statues to worship, lit candles, intoned hymns, sacrificed slaves, ate flesh and drank blood (figuratively, but still), enslaved other peoples.... all the way to about the 19th century, with genocides and inquisitions in between, when reason, humanism, and secularism opened the eyes of a few enlightened humans who liberated us from the barbarity of Christianity, and for that matter that of Judaism and Islam as well.

In any case, the regression of the Polish people back to the Bronze Age is astounding. "King Jesus", as far as I can tell, cannot form a government or enact budgets etc. to manage the country. All he can do is "miracles" - rare events, often intended as brief suspensions of natural physical laws, and of reason of course - Obviously, none of Jesus's disciples and the thousands of other super-human Christian heroes known as saints was ever able to regrow a severed limb, for example. That would actually be enough to convince me into returning to the faith. Unfortunately, all Catholic miracles are cryptic, invisible, sudden and unproven claims of healing that only an idiot with half a brain can believe. No saint has ever resurrected a dead person, for example. Why? After all, Jesus is claimed to have done it with Lazarus and himself. So if a saint or an apparition of Mary can heal cancer or quadriplegia, why can't they bring back the dead? Or grow a severed limb?

I used to like the Polish people - not for having given us a Pope by the name of John-Paul II - but for having stood up to dictatorships and for always being victims of oppressive Russians and Germans. I admit, I used to like the Polish people also because of an impenetrable (meant only metaphorically, of course, because ...well, not here, and not now) Polish woman I met long ago by the pseudonym of Lidia who, in between fantastic voyages to the twilight zone, said she proofread scripts for Roman Polanski. I didn't believe her. Now, I don't know anymore. I think Polish people, like all stupid people, almost always deserve their predicaments. The Lebanese people are one outstanding example.

So, after congratulating Aoun in Lebanon, Trump in the US, and soon Marine LePen in France, let me extend my heartfelt congratulations to the right-wing extremist, anti-refugee, isolationist, white supremacist Palestinian Jewish King Jesus of Poland who once uttered the incongruous and idiotic advice that we must love our enemies and lend our hand to the needy. Yup, this divine command has never, and is not now, obeyed across the Christian world. To the contrary, massacres, wars, genocides, racism, hatred, etc. seem to be the hallmark of Christianity. 

But then again, with King Jesus on the throne in Poland, perhaps Latin might catch up again, and King Jesus might ban anyone who is not Catholic from illegally entering the Christian paradise orbiting above the clouds upon their death. After all, jackass King Donald Dumb, himself a descendant of euro-trash German-English peasants, wants to ban anyone who is not a white anglo-saxon protestant from entering the trigger-happy earthly paradise called the United Scams of America.

Hallelujah, brothers and comrades. Ad Majorem Dei Ignominiam.