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!
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