Student Critics of Apartheid Israel? or Campus Antisemites?

In an opinion posted September 23, 2023, on CNN entitled “When will colleges stand up to campus antisemites?”, Jonathan Greenblatt, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), claims that Jewish students on US college campuses are facing a rise in antisemitism. Mr. Greenblatt says that as a parent he worries about sending his own children to college.

Yet, again and again, Zionists like Mr. Greenblatt hope to continue injecting a false narrative in the national discourse by deliberately degrading legitimate opposition and criticism of the state of Israel's dehumanization policies vis-a-vis the Palestinian people down to baseless antisemitic attacks on Jewish people.

He says, "The threat of antisemitism has been growing across American society, and colleges are not immune. But while antisemitism nationally has diverse causes, often including ties to White supremacy, campuses more frequently witness boycotts and demonization of Israel that lead to attacking or ostracizing Jewish students because of their own perceived or actual support for Israel".

In substance, therefore, Mr. Greenblatt is suggesting that American students stop criticizing Israel for its apartheid repressive regime against the native Palestinian people in the Near East, in order to protect Jewish students on US campuses against attacks and ostracization. This is akin to demanding that US citizens stop criticizing the repressive regimes of Islamic Iran or Saudi Arabia in order to fight Islamophobia here in the US. This is a standard Zionist modus operandi.

Mr. Greenblatt says that his American Zionist organization - ADL - tracked 665 “anti-Israel incidents” at US university campuses during one academic year (2022-2023), including the “vilification of Zionism”. He defines Zionism as the “belief that Jews have the right to self-governance in the historic land of Israel”, which is a belief based solely on Stone Age biblical trash fiction. In ancient Canaan-Palestine, Hebrews (not Jews) had two separate and enemy kingdoms (Judah and Israel) for some 300 years about 3,000 years ago. Before them the Canaanites - ancestors of the Palestinians - were massacred by the nomadic Hebrews on orders from frikin' Yahweh in the first ethnic cleansing campaign in recorded history, though no reasonable person should believe the fictional self-serving ramblings of the Old Testament-Torah. After the Hebrews, it was the successive turns of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Seljuks, Ottoman Turks, British crooks and finally colonial Zionist settlers to establish kingdoms and empires. Modern Jews are not the genetic descendants of Stone Age Hebrews. They are East Europeans and Russians who converted recently (a few centuries ago) to Judaism. Even if we grant that these non-native modern invaders of Palestine are cultural Jews, their claim to Palestine is so puny that any of these other civilizations that have ruled in historic Palestine can make at the very least an equal claim to Palestine. And even if one accepts that modern Jews have some claim to Palestine, it is disgusting to see that such a claim has become a license to kill, displace, terrorize, evict, and otherwise ethnically cleanse the land of its native indigenous population.

As he defends Zionism, Mr. Greenblatt speaks not as a Jew but as a European-American Zionist whose late 19th century colonial project began in 1897 to invade and conquer Palestine, massacre, displace and dispossess its indigenous Palestinian people of their millennial villages, towns and cities, and erect a brand new state over a land that last saw a Jewish person some 2,000 years ago. Not unlike all the other European colonial conquests in Asia, Africa, Middle East and Latin America that reached their climax in that same 19th century when each European state had its “empire”: Invade, conquer, massacre, displace, dispossess the natives and erect a brand new state ruled by the invaders, not by the indigenous owners of the land. With Zionism, European Jews embarked on a me-too mercantilist colonialist enterprise to build themselves an empire like their fellow French, Belgians, Dutch, Portuguese, Spaniards, British and other Europeans.

Is it “antisemitic” to analyze the creation of the state of Israel from the lens of a colonial enterprise like so many others that came out of the Europe of the 19th century? Is merely questioning in an academic setting the historicity of the creation of the state of Israel a crime? Is Israel infallible simply because, though born as a colonial enterprise, it came of age partly - not entirely - as a result of the Holocaust?

Just to be clear to my readers: There is a huge difference between antisemitism and criticism of Israel. Please read carefully and understand the distinction: 

“Antisemitism” is a longstanding hatred of Jews by Europeans based on abhorrent false claims of blood libel, rejection and killing of Christ, conspiracy theories of world control, financial greed and so on. But these are not the arguments that today's critics of Israel put forward;  

"Critics of Israel" make no such nonsensical claims; they simply argue that Israel is a documented practitioner of horrible policies against the colonized Palestinians that include walled separation, harassment, sieges, rampant discrimination, home demolition, dispossession, land theft, identity-denial… all with the openly stated objective by Israeli officials to one day annex the remaining Palestinian lands, declare Palestine dead, and deprive the 4 million Palestinians of their right to a state of their own on their own land. Israel is thus not only a colonialist settler enterprise; it adheres to an expansionist ideology for future land theft and ethnic cleansing. That is why in fact Israel does not have a constitution because writing one would force it to define its borders and legally prohibit it from stealing more land from the Palestinians and its neighbors.

Having not mentioned antisemitism early in his opinion, Mr. Greenblatt moves quickly to amalgamate criticism of Israel and vilification of Zionism with antisemitism, thus insidiously bridging the civilized pillars of freedom of opinion and defense of victimized people with the universally denounced and condemned belief in racist antisemitism. And this is where the crux of the matter is: Zionists continuously conflate a desire for debating the apartheid policies of the state of Israel with hatred of Jews. What does Mr. Greenblatt then call all those Israelis and Jews who condemn Israel for its policies? Is there such a thing as a Jewish antisemite?

According to Univstats, [ https://www.univstats.com ], there are 6,543 colleges and universities in the US. Therefore, the statistic of 665 “anti-Israel” incidents says that 10 out of each 100 colleges and universities have experienced some poorly defined “anti-Israel” incidents, which Mr. Greenblatt himself attributes largely to white supremacist actors, i.e. white anglo-saxon protestant racists who have sympathy neither for the Israelis nor for the Palestinians. Just read further below how a university conference on Palestinian literature is included in Mr. Greenblatt's list of "anti-Israel incidents".

Then the sneaking around the core argument begins with a pretentious waiver: “To be sure, criticism and debate over the policies of the State of Israel, just like criticism of the policies and actions of any country, is part of a healthy campus ecosystem. The First Amendment protects the right to boycott, as well as the right to engage in harsh and divisive rhetoric. Undoubtedly, one can criticize Israel’s leaders and actions without being antisemitic.” How civilized of Mr. Greenblatt! We ought to be grateful!

So I urge Mr. Greenblatt to put an end to the obfuscation and make two side-by-side lists: One list is for actions and arguments that critique Israel without being labeled antisemitic, and another list of actions and arguments that critique Israel and are antisemitic. Many around the world are utterly confused by the Zionist arguments – indeed confusion and obfuscation are probably the objective of Zionists since it allows them to say the same thing and its opposite at once - because it seems that any time someone criticizes Israel, they are immediately attacked as antisemitic by a wide range of Israeli apologists, from paid Zionist trolls on the web to senior officials in the Jewish government. A most recent and flagrant example was accusing the UN, Human Rights Watch and even the Israeli organization B’Tselem of being antisemitic for issuing their 2022 report calling Israel an apartheid state [See: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/01/israeli-apartheid-report-can-critic-of.html ]

Next, Mr. Greenblatt unleashes his dual nature venom. Believing that he has firmly equated antisemitism with Israelophobia, he states, “One of the worst examples of campus anti-Israel activity in recent memory is the Palestine Writes Literature Festival set to take place at the University of Pennsylvania this weekend”. Notice that he labels this activity as “anti-Israel”, not as “antisemitic”, thus contradicting his own supposed welcoming of healthy debate on the Israel-Palestine question.

He then goes through a long list of outrageous extremist statements and positions by anti-Zionists on US campuses, essentially parading a tiny minority of extremist white Christian American supremacists and suggesting that they somehow are representatives of the Palestinian movement for justice. This is the same Zionist propaganda that equated the legitimate Palestinian national movement with a minority of “communist terrorist subversives” during the 1960s and 1970s, then with a minority of “Islamic terrorists” in the 1980s and 1990s. Hiding under these fake arguments, Israel has continued to steal Palestinian land, dispossess the Palestinians, deny them an identity, demolish their homes, expel them to no return, uproot their millennial olive orchards, kill them with indiscriminate bombings and assassinations, dispossess them of property in Jerusalem to the benefit of foreign settlers, etc.

But now that it has ran out of scarecrow labels to attach to the Palestinian national movement, and that the label of antisemitism has worn out its utility, Zionists are promoting an alternative lie and new misleading terminology, namely that criticism of Israel is hatred of Israel or “Israelophobia”, a new term Zionists have coined to malign anyone who dares criticize Israel for its endless torment, racism and hatred toward Palestinians – let's call it, in a tit-for-tat, "Palestinophobia". Zionists hope to surf on this new one for the next two decades or so until they exterminate or expel all the Palestinians and achieve their pure Jewish supremacist colony they call Israel.

But the 2020s are no longer the 1950s and 1960s when Zionists could blatantly disinform and misinform a captive audience with their monopoly on information; the Zionist jig is up. People now can see for themselves through the Zionist lies couched in guilt-infliction on the European Holocaust criminals. Palestine is today everywhere and on everyone’s mind. Sympathy for Palestine is quickly overwhelming the 1950-vintage pity for Israel. The Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement worked very well with apartheid South Africa. Despite outrageous lies and disinformation, the BDS movement will eventually work well to rescue Palestine from the claws of European Jewish racism and religious extremism. Apartheid South Africa did not have an international Zionist movement to lie and misinform on its behalf, but it allied itself with Apartheid Israel and its dumb American sponsors which aided it with finance and weapons. Israel was the only country in the world to defend Apartheid South Africa's dehumanization of the native African population.

The Zionist Movement was founded like many other European corporations, like the British East India Company, the Dutch East India Company and others, whose task was to colonize, subdue and exploit colonies anywhere they could around the world. The Zionist Movement first targeted Uganda in Africa, but later changed its target to Palestine when the British crooks offered Palestine to the Zionists (Balfour letter) in exchange for financial loans to aid the British war effort. The Basel Conference in 1897, which laid the groundwork for the Zionist Colonial Corporation, was a follow-up to the Berlin Conference of 1884 which effectively divided Africa among European powers like Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Italy and Spain. Always "special ones", the non-state European Zionists wanted their share of the pie.

In the post Word War II period, colonialism effectively came to an end. Virtually all former colonies of Europe have gained their independence, which leaves Israel today as perhaps the only British, now American, colony to remain a barbaric foreign racist implant of repression and dehumanization of native indigenous people. To paraphrase Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian people are the only remaining colonized people on Earth who are asked to guarantee the security of their colonial occupier, while Israel is the only colonial occupying country that demands to be protected from its own colonized victims.

Regardless of how long it might take to bring justice to Palestine, injustice will never prevail. As long as this monumental injustice persists in Palestine, perpetrated by foreign invading settlers and targeting a native indigenous population, there will never be peace.

What is Palestinophobia?

"Hard as they try to deny a Palestinian identity, Zionists have a huge credibility problem"

In the West, thanks to Islamic terrorism and to Zionist propaganda, Arabs and Muslims are viewed as "bad" people. While Islamic terrorism by itself is sufficent to justify anti-Muslim stereotypes, Arabophobia (as opposed to Islamophobia) is all the exclusive doing of Zionist propaganda.

One of its insidious aspects is what Israelis and Zionists say about Palestinians. They never refer to them as Palestinians, but as Arabs. Of course, Palestinians are Arabs, but being Arab does not deny one's identity as a Tunisian, a Syrian, an Iraqi, etc. There are many different types of Arabs, just as there are many different types of Europeans. Not all Arabs speak Arabic. Not all Arabs are Muslims. When Israel was born out of the violent terrorist seizure of land and extermination of Palestinians, Zionists claimed, and continue to claim, that they were defending themselves against attacking "Arabs". That was true only insofar as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan declared war on the nascent Jewish country of Israel in 1947-1948. But long before that 1948 war, there had been a defensive war by the native indigenous Palestinians against the invading hordes of east european barbarians throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. That war was conducted by no one but the Palestinians against the invading Jewish colonialist settlers. No Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese or Jordanians were involved. That was not an "Arab" war against the illegal Jewish terrorist colonists. That was a Palestinian war. But the Zionists claim that their persecution of the native Palestinians is justified because the Arab countries attacked Israel as soon as it was formed. Yes, perhaps these Arab countries tried but failed to assist the Palestinians in 1947-1948, but these attacks cannot be used to deny the long-standing Palestinian resistance and delegitimize the decades-long fight of the Palestinians for their country and their identity.

Just as illegal migrants cross the US border every day in our time, back in the 1920s-1940s, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and other eastern europeans disguised as poor migrants illegally poured into Palestine. As barbarian illiterate peasants from the east european steppes, these illegal migrants could not tell a Palestinian from a Lebanese or a Jordanian or an Egyptian, all next door neighbors of Palestine. To these backward europeans, they were all Arabs. Just as numskull British colonial invaders would make no distinction between the various African countries and cultures and would refer to anyone on the continent as "African" or "negro", or for that matter how today's Muslim migrants into Europe do not see any difference between the English, the French or the Italians... to them they're all Europeans.

As the poorly equiped untrained Palestinians (just liberated from Turkish ottoman occupation) defended their land against the war-trained and British-backed illegal migrant Europeans, Zionists soon began to realize that the "Arabs" of Palestine are different from the "Arabs" of Egypt, Jordan, Syria or Lebanon. They each had its unique character, languages, dialects and traditions, just as Europeans differ from one another yet constitute a general ethnic group.

With Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria gaining their respective independences during the 1930s and 1940s from their French and British mandatory occupiers, the Zionists feared that conceding to a unique identity for the Palestinians would also lead to Palestinian independence and obstruct the Zionist goal of exterminating the Palestinians and stealing their land. Which is why, to this day, Zionists continously deny the existence of a Palestinian people, as stated by Golda Meir's famous "there is no such thing as a Palestinian people." Logically, Palestinian nationalism would not only undermine the foundational lies of the state of Israel, but it would be very dangerous to the expansion of the Zionist colony and to its Jewish "purity". As a result, and beginning in the mid-1960s when the Palestinians finally asserted their identity, after being mere nameless refugees, by organizing themselves in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other national groups, the Zionists deliberately began to never refer to the Palestinians as Palestinians, but only as Arabs, or Arab Israelis, or Arab refugees. 

Even today's Palestinian citizens of Israel (i.e. those who stayed and did not flee the exterminating Jewish terrorist rampages) are referred to as "Arab" Israeli, not as Palestinian Israeli:

• There are 1.9 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, or 21% of Israel’s population. At the time of the fabrication of the state of Israel, these 1948 Palestinians were separated from their fellow citizens of the West Bank (3 million-strong) and Gaza (1.8 million-strong). Together, the "resident" Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories total 6.7 million people. There are also millions of Palestinians who live in refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, in addition to the expat Palestinians living around the world.
  
• Most Palestinian citizens of Israel live in three areas: the Galilee in the north, the so-called “Little Triangle” in the center of the country, and the Negev/Naqab desert in the south.
• There are more than 60 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel.
• There are 60,000 to 70,000 homes (as of 2020) belonging to Palestinian citizens of Israel that are threatened with demolition by the government because they were built without official permits that Israel deliberately refuses to issue them. Why does Israel deny its own Palestinian citizens building permits? Is home construction or expansion a "terrorist" act? Of course not. But this is exactly the sort of criminal scheme that a colonial ethnic cleansing authority like Israel would engage in if its goal is to stunt the natural growth of the native Palestinian population. All actions by the oh-so-respectable Israeli government, hiding behind a colluding justice system that often invokes Ottoman era (i.e. before Israel was even fabricated) laws, aim at de-Palestinizing Palestine and thus, by default, make it more Jewish.  By denying the native Palestinians their natural growth as a community, Israel wants to suffocate them, force them to leave, and replace them with foreign settlers.
  

If you check any of the widely visited news and chat rooms, you will always have the same Zionist trolls injecting their lies and fake information into the conversation. Examples: 

- There is no Palestine. 

- Palestinians do not exist, they are Arabs. 

- As Arabs, they can go anywhere in the Arab world. They do not need Palestine.

- Arab countries are bad because they do not assimilate and integrate their "Arab" (understand Palestinian) refugees.

- If these Arab countries integrated their Arab (understand Palestinian) refugees, there will be no "Right of Return" for these refugees to go back to their native villages, towns and cities in historic Palestine. How convenient for the Zionists!

- These "Arabs" (understand Palestinians) are not native to Palestine. They are squatters from the surrounding Arab countries who came to Palestine AFTER the east european Jewish invaders conquered Palestine to create Israel.

- Palestine had no people. It was a land without people for a people without land.

The denial of the existence of a Palestinian people, and the denial of the existence of Palestine (even though that was the name of the country for millennia, including when it was ruled by Rome and when Jesus walked the earth in Jewish Palestine) has been the mantra propaganda of Zionism. It is part of the dehumanizing and identity-denial strategy that Israel has adopted for decades because it knows that Palestinian nationalism would be the death sentence for Israel. Hence, there are no Palestinians, there are only "Arabs", and these "Arabs" are all Muslim terrorists.

The reality is that there are no generic "Arabs" in Palestine; there are first Palestinians who happen to  secondarily be part of the wider ethnic Arab stock. The Palestinians' only connection with the other "Arabs" is that they speak a form of Arabic. Just as there are French people living in France who happen to secondarily be members of the wider European stock that includes other French-speaking countries like Belgium and Switzerland.. 

Finally, historically and anthropologically the Hebrews are really just another Arab tribe. According to Jewish biblical trash, Abraham came out of Ur, near Baghdad in Iraq, he fathered Ismail, the progenitor of the Arabs. He then abandoned that "Arab" Ismael and his mother in the desert and favored his "Jewish" brother Isaac, the progenitor of the Hebrews. Though this religious bullshit is completely made up by smelly old nomads as they wandered in the desert, science says that Arabs and Hebrews were once one and the same Semitic people who spoke the same proto-Semitic language. Just as the Germans, the Dutch, the Scandinavians etc. were once one people speaking proto-German who diverged into speaking slightly different but related languages, the proto-Semitic people later diverged into Arab and Hebrew tribes who spoke slightly different languages, Hebrew and Arabic, that remain today nearly identical languages. 

So for Zionists to keep trying to distinguish themselves from Palestinians stems first from their racism, but second from the fact that virtually ALL Jews of Ashkenazi or European stocks are NOT genetic descendants of the Hebrews. Rather, they are relatively recent European converts to Judaism (some time betwen the 11th and the 16th centuries). Their genetic traits are completely different and quite opposite to the generic Semitic stock from the Near East. With their Germanic names, their blond red hair, their blue and green eyes, their Russian-steppe anti-freeze furry hats and coats, they cannot possibly have any connection with the Near East. 

The only "true" Jewish descendants of the Hebrews are those Jews of Yemen, Saudi Arabia (before it became Muslim), and the East Coast of Africa (Ethiopia). These are the Arab Jews who migrated to Israel under pressure from the Jewish Agency and other Zionist agencies, and not because the Arab countries expelled them as Zionists claim. These people might be of genuine Hebraic stock, but they Jews never lived in Palestine. They come from the multitudes of Arab Jewish tribes that lived in and around the Arabian peninsula since time immemorial: Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, etc. For their part, North African Jews are essentially those Jews who were kicked out of France, Spain and Portugal along with the Moorish Muslims around 1492 by the Spanish Reconquista. Where did these Spanish Jews (Sepharads) come from in the first place? Not a mystery: They fought alongside their Arab brothers during the Muslim conquest of North Africa, Spain and southern France between the 7th and 8th century AD. That is why they coexisted peacefully during the Arab Muslim occupation of Spain, and were both evicted together by the Spaniards in 1492. 

Most Arabs of the Arabian peninsula around the 7th century were Jewish tribes, some of them having converted to Christianity when Rome adopted Christanity as its official religion around 400-500 AD; it is therefore absolutely possible that these same Arab-Jewish tribes later followed Mohammed's call, became Muslim and participated in the Islamic conquest. So when the Spaniards kicked them out of Spain, they did not distinguish between Muslim and Jew; to the Spaniards, they were both foreign Moorish-Arab invaders. Indeed, there were essentially no differences between Arab and Jewish tribes in Arabia, as they all practiced the same traditions and worshiped the same gods. It was only in time that Arab Jews gradually adopted a stricter monotheistic view than their other sister Arab tribes. Which explains why Islam in its genesis was a reaction against the perceived polytheism of Christianity that erupted into Arabia with the Byzantine Roman Empire. Traditions between modern Judaism and Islam are nearly identical. Islam may therefore be seen as a "reform" movement against the new Christian religion and a "return" to the strict roots of Jewish-Arab monotheism. [See: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2023/06/kinship-between-islam-and-judaism.html ]

In conclusion, hard as they try to deny a Palestinian identity, Zionists have a huge credibility problem. They themselves are not genetic descendants of the Hebrews. They are recent converts to Judaism and cannot have any claims to being "authentic" Jews nor any claims to Palestine, except on the basis of a dubious and tenuous religious connection through the fictional biblical garbage. If one makes an effort and grants, for the sake of argument, that biblical garbage is correct history, then the Zionists have to subsume themselves under the broader Arab Semitic identity of which they are merely a branch. Otherwise, by betting too much on being more "western" than Arabs and desperately attempting to distance themselves from Arabs, they undermine and continue to erode their claims to historic Palestine.

Palestinophobia has long being injected by Zionist propaganda into the mainstream. This strategy has generally worked through the 1960s when the Palestinians were still picking up the pieces of their identity and country after the Nakba of 1948, itself the culmination of 30+ years of Jewish European terrorism; they hadn't yet spoken up: To the world they were mere refugees that the Zionists deprived of not only their homes, lands and villages, but also of their identity as Palestinians. Since the 1960s, when Palestinians regrouped as a nation, their nationalism was first a secular revolutionary movement without a hint of religious fervor in it. Some of it later mutated into Islamic movements under the influence of a broader world-wide rising Islamic nationalism. But today, the bulk of Palestinian resistance is still a patriotic nationalism without any Arab or Islamic bent. Zionism has succeeded in stealing the land, but has failed at eradicating the Palestinian identity. Zionists have now embarked on a new strategy couched in a new code word, "Israelophobia", to serve as a new and improved Zionist scarecrow (since antisemitism has worn out its abuse) that is meant to scare you or anyone else who criticizes Apartheid Israel. Good luck with that.

Nag and Rape: Israelophilia for Dummies

A coalition of nagging Jewish groups has filed a lawsuit against the Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) in which it accuses the school board of being anti-Semitic. The 86-page long suit was filed by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. 

The suit claims that SAUSD has allowed its Ethnic Studies curriculum to say that Israel is a “settler colonialism” project, and to refer to Zionism as a "nationalist, colonial ideology" that calls for the expansion of the Jewish state in “historic Palestine by any means necessary.”

Again, the nagging Jewish groups equate Judaism as a religion with Israel as a political entity. Attacks on the Jewish religion with stereotypes and conspirationist theories may constitute anti-semitism, but criticism against the conduct of a state that, after its founding by violently ethnically cleansing the native indigenous Palestinian population, continues to occupy, discriminate and violently repress that same population's legitimate resistance to the foreign occupation, is not anti-semitic.

Yet, the nagging Jewish groups deliberatly confuse Judaism with Israelophilia. In other words, according to the naggers, no one can NEVER, under any circumstance, criticize the apartheid state of Israel lest they be accused of hating Jews, i.e. being anti-semitic. 

The nagging groups complain that SASUD did not ask their opinion in developing the curriculum. Should SASUD have asked the native Americans, the Mexicans, Latinos, Hispanics, African-Americans, the white anglo-saxon Europeans, the Indian immigrants from India, the Arab immigrants etc. about how they should be described in the curriculum? Imagine the chaos if the school board had to check with every one of these communities. But, as always, the nagging Jewish groups are the most "sensitive" ethnic group that make up the American population. Perhaps, it is because they have a "nagging wall" in occupied, mistreated, dehumanized Jerusalem.  

“Closed-door discussions prevented input from marginalized communities – in direct contrast to the goal of the ethnic studies program, which is to support marginalized communities”, said one of the representatives of the nagging groups who 

- 1) deliberately amalgamate Israelis (citizens of a political entity back in the Middle East) with Jews (religious community living in Santa Ana in California), and 

- 2) declare the Jewish community of Santa Ana a "marginalized" community. 

According to official statistics, the Jewish community of the United States is perhaps the most affluent, wealthy and dominating community, bar none. When did it become "marginalized" is anyone's guess. But again, the curriculum in question is not addressing the Jewish community in California or the US, but talks about the state of Israel which is NOT an American community unless one includes the barbarian Jewish Americans who go  settle Palestine and kill Palestinians and steal their land, and unless one accepts the fact that Israel controls America via its lobbies. What these fundamentalist American settlers of Palestine do there is the very definition of "settler colonialism". 

In other words, America = Israel, and Israel = America, and those idiot Arabs who accept American "mediation" between them and Israel are simply idiots. For example, Amos Hockstein, the "mediator" between Israel and Hezbollah on the issue of the maritime borders, is a dual Israeli-American citizen who served in the Israeli Army. He may have killed Hezbollah members during the endless clashes between the two sides; yet, Hezbollah negotiates with him. Either Hezbollah is stupid, or it is in cahoots with the Zionists whom they claim to be fighting. But when it comes to making money out of offshore oil platforms along the Lebanese-Israeli coast, bitter enemy Semites like Hezbollah and Israel have no problem making sweet deals. But killing innocent civilians because of religious trash is not a problem for these barbarian Jews and Muslims.

A spokesperson for the SASUD school board issued a statement stating that its goal is to provide “balanced, multiple perspectives” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The District itself has no political position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, just like the District would not take a political position on other global conflicts,” the statement read. “However, we do understand that members in our community, including our students and families, share strong opinions on issues such as these. We will always encourage open and respectful dialogue in our schools as part of our effort to provide a well-rounded education.”

MEANWHILE, 

Israel, whose citizens are the self-declared "most moral people in the world", the "chosen ones", the "righteous among nations" etc., has deceived its admirers when five of its citizens violently gang-raped a British teenager in Cyprus earlier this month. Of course, if the Israeli rapists end up in jail as they should, there will be gigantic campaigns claiming the Cypriot courts are anti-semitic and that these good decent Jewish young men should be immediately pardoned and released. Since God has chosen them, the Jewish people can by definition do no harm whatsoever. Even if they gang-raped the British teenager, it must have been in a moment of temporary weakness for which Yahweh will punish them and for which they promise to repent for the rest of their lives. 

Remember Jonathan Pollard, the Jewish American man who betrayed the US by selling its secrets to Israel and served 30 years in prison for it? He too was the subject of a nagging campaign by the same nagging groups calling for his release because as a Jewish American he is automatically a friend of Israel, to the point that there is no longer a difference between America and Israel. As an American "friend" of Israel, his selling of American secrets to Israel does not make him a traitor. Selling your mother's secrets to your bastard son is not "such a crime" after all. A Jewish traitor is always of a different class than your average traitor, according to the naggers, especially since he only betrayed his mother. No big deal, really. Incestuous betrayals are an altogether different class of treason. When released, Pollard was welcomed as a hero in the British-American colony that occupies Palestine, otherwise known as Israel.

In Cyprus, the 20-year-old British teenager tourist said she was raped by a group of five Israelis, aged between 19 and 20, after a pool party at a three-star hotel in Ayia Napa, a resort town known for its bars, clubs and beaches. The Israelis were arrested shortly after the gang rape on Sept 3 and were remanded in custody for eight days, a period which on Tuesday was extended for another six days.

‌The British teenager told Cypriot police that one of the five Israelis “forcibly” grabbed her and took her to his room as she was partying with friends around the pool of the Hotel Fedrania Gardens.  The man proceeded to rip off her bathing suit despite her protests, and was immediately joined in the hotel room by the other suspects, she said.

As one of the Israelis raped her, another one forced her to perform oral sex, according to her statement. She was then raped again by another of the Israelis, she said. ‌She fled to the bathroom and locked herself inside. Eventually she managed to escape, find her friends and report the alleged gang rape to hotel staff, who in turn called the police.

‌When officers arrived, they said they found the suspects using bed sheets to try to clean blood stains from the floor of the hotel room. ‌The British teenager was in a “bad psychological state” after the alleged attack. Two of the Israelis have admitted to having intercourse and oral sex with the woman, but insisted it was consensual. The other three said they had no sexual contact with the woman. They are expected to plead to charges including rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment and abduction. Police are carrying out forensic tests on bed sheets and clothing taken from the hotel room.

The grand question is: How could these Israelis, whose fake country could not have existed without the complicity of the British "Empire", do this abomination to a British woman? Just as American Jewish groups believe themselves better than the average American whose taxpayer money goes directly to artifically float the colony of Israel, it seems that Israelis believe themselves better than their own mother country, colonial Britain.

 

Bouthaina Shaaban, the Damascus Butcher's Jezebel

In May of 1991, the New York Times published an op-ed celebrating the return of peace to Lebanon [Keep the Peace in Lebanon, May 7, 1991] after the Syrian airforce in collusion with Israel and the United States violently dislodged the last free Lebanese government. Typical of a US press that toes the line of its government on matters of foreign policy, much like happens in totalitarian systems. When George W Bush invaded Iraq by lying to the world and his own people, not one in the maintream press dared oppose the nationalistic fervor of the dumb American public that is always exploited to marshal support for the war.

Recall that the Arab-ass-licking Republican administration of George H W Bush and James Baker the Turd had allied itself with the Damascus butcher Hafez Assad - who topped the US State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism - and Saudi Arabia against the Christians of Lebanon and proceeded to applaud the Syrian occupation of the country as a "factor of stability", referring to it as a mere "presence", not an occupation. It was only in 2003, after the September 11, 2001 attacks that Colin Powell used the term "occupation" when referring to Syria's brutal destruction of Lebanon and its institutions.

Recall also that this treacherous conduct by the republican administration followed the bombing of the US embassy and the US Marines Headquarters in Beirut in 1983, and the US and western hostage taking during the 1980s, to name only a few of Syria's terrorist-by-proxy exploits. Nowadays, some thirty-plus years later, Lebanon is on its deathbed because of that policy.

A certain Youssef Hitti sent a letter (text in italics below) to the editor of the NY Times in response to the op-ed. Here is its text:

------------------

A Syrian Dark Age

To the Editor:

As you point out (Editorial, May 7), the Lebanese have surrendered their weapons and disbanded their militias. But a lasting peace will be achieved only when Lebanese sovereignty is restored. Foreign intervention remains the firmest obstacle . Every time the Lebanese component of the crisis is resolved, Syria's and Israel's intransigence and interventions plunge the country into chaos. The Israelis will not withdraw from the south, arguing that pro-Syrian Palestinian and Shiite guerillas strive to attack northern Israel. The Syrians have broader goals in Lebanon, like Saddam Hussein's ambition over Kuwait, and entrench their hold.

So-called reforms are enacted [under pressure from the Syrian occupier] to re-arabicize Lebanon and force it to re-enter the brotherly world of Arab nationalism. In education, foreign language instruction is increasingly prohibited. History texts are rewritten to reflect the anti-Western ideology of the Syrian Baath Party. From the country with the highest literacy rate in the Arab world, Lebanon is receding into an educational dark age under the guise of "Arabization".

The Syrians occupy 90 percent of Lebanon, control the army and foreign policy, and soon will "appoint" a third of the new Lebanese parliament. What Saddam Hussein failed to achieve in Kuwait, Hafez al-Assad is securing in Lebanon, and the Bush administration continues to pat him on the back.

Youssef S. Hitti

May 14, 1991

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On June 18, 1991, a rebuttal to Hitti's letter appeared in the same newspaper signed by a certain Bouthaina Shaaban. Its text is reproduced below. Notice the absolute disconnect between the rebuttal and Hitti's letter, and the lies and fake facts with which the author peppers her own letter. I wonder if Bouthaina Shaaban (today's media adviser to the Junior Butcher of Damascus, Bashar Assad) needs permission from the Israelis to drive around Damascus, let alone go to the occupied-and-annexed Golan Heights, or permission from the Americans to set foot in the northeastern half of Syria, or permission from the Turks to go to northwestern Syria, or permission from ISIS to go to eastern Syria. It seems that her stinking Syria is nowadays limited to Damascus and to the butcher's home district in Lattakiyeh. Israel bombs the fake disintegrated "Arab" country of Syria almost every day; yet there are no Syrians fighting back just as there is no "Hezbollah" resistance against any of the above multiple occupations of the artificial state of  Syria. The only "resistance" that the vulgar regime of Assad and Shaaban seems capable of is to shell and barrel-bomb its own cities over the bodies of millions of its own citizens. What valiant proud Syrian Arabs they are.

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Lebanon Returns to Precolonial Heritage

To the Editor:

Youssef S. Hitti expresses concern about Lebanon's sovereignty, fearing that the teaching of Arabic in Lebanese schools and the dismantling of a confessional, colonial heritage will throw Lebanon into a "Syrian Dark Age" (Letter, May 30). As an Arab woman, I am dismayed to find an Arab man so contemptuous of his people's history, language and culture, and so proud of the imprints of a colonial past that almost drove the country to its demise. I fail to see how Mr. Hitti connects Arabization with "an educationa dark age". Does Arabic for him mean "dark" and French "white"?

Lebanon will continue to have the highest literacy rate in the Arab world with an important difference: Lebanese will learn Arabic, as well as French, in the schools. Instruction in foreign languages is not prohibited in Syria, so how could Syria act to prohibit it in Lebanon?

What Mr. Mr. Hitti means is that French will no longer be the only language taught at many schools in Lebanon. Is there anything more natural for an Arab country than to have its own language taught in schools? I fear that for Mr. Hitti one can only be educated if one has graduated from an école Française:

If Mr. Hitti is worried about occupation, he needn't worry about the Syrians. The real occupation is in southern Lebanon  where Mr. Hitti cannot go without special permission from the Israeli authorities. I can only feel relieved that not many Lebanese share his lack of pride in his history and culture. As an Arab woman I am delighted that Lebanon is back where it belongs: the heart of Arab writings, publication and culture.

Bouthaina Shaaban, Associate Professor, Department of Asian and African Languages and Literature, Duke University, Durham, N.C., June 2, 1991.

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My comments:

1-

Before a recent trip to China where the Chinese dictator laid out the red carpet for the Syrian butcher Bashar Assad, the "advisor" of the latter, the Baathist Bouthaina Shaaban, said the following in an interview with the Chinese state-run CGTN network:

"China wants to end poverty in its rural areas, and to help other countries reach economic growth. It wants to strike partnerships with other countries. The essential difference between China and the West is that the mentality of the Chinese leadership is a mentality of collaboration, a humane mentality, which sees all of humanity as brothers.

Conversely, the mentality of the West is one-sided and racist against all our nations. They do not see us as people who are their equal. Whenever they went to other countries, they did so in order to impose their hegemony and their model. Unfortunately, all the countries they entered ended up in ruin. They had been much better off before [the West] came."

Why, I ask, did Ms. Shaaban choose to work at a Western university, namely Duke University in the racist south (North Carolina) of the United States, rather than at a humane Chinese university?

She could have done her "research" for example in the Xinjiang autonomous region where her fellow Chinese colleagues would have instructed her about the humane treatment they reserve to the Muslim Uyghurs. Since she is Muslim, she would have been eligible to be interned in one of the hundreds of concentration camps and be indoctrinated into the greatness of the Chinese system. She would have been spared having to work with her racist colleagues at Duke University.  

2-

Syria is an artificial country cobbled together by the French mandate from disparate desert cities that have nothing in common: Turks, Assyrians, Kurds and Armenians in the north, Sunni nomadic Arabs in the east, hybridized Christian-Alawites in the west, some scattered Christians in the southwest, and Druze in the south. Yet, the nearly defunct Fascist Baath Party claims to have united, admittedly coercively, all these communities under the banner of Arab nationalism.

It appears that Bouthaina Shaaban's reply is an exercise of her imagination fertilized by decades of Baathist indoctrination and vitriolic ultra-nationalist anti-Western ideology. Her ignorance of the "Arabization" question in Lebanese education is evident in her literal interpretation of the term, in which she implies that Arabic is never taught in Lebanese schools. Let me educate her and dismantle for a change some of the miswirings of her desolate brain, she who seems to have learned nothing from her stay at Duke University in the very America she hates. "Arabization" is a slogan of Pan-Arab nationalists whose ultimate wish is to obliterate diversity in the Arab world, consistent with the Baath Party's Fascist coercive promotion of a single and monolithic Arab identity, just like Nazi Germany coercively promoted a German identity across Europe. Baathists like Shabaan persist in denying a distinct Lebanese identity based on the country's religious, ethnic and linguistic components. Baathists then contradict themselves by arguing for a Palestinian Arab identity separate and different enough from the Jordanian identity to warrant an independent Palestine. Their mindests, fossilized in the colonial victim syndrome, continue to blame the West for the ailments of their societies torn apart by the opposing tensions between their archaic structures and the modern world. Arabization is analogous to the Germanification of Europe or the Russification of the soviet republics.

Note that Shaaban is admitting that the Syrian occupation was actively involved in the "dismantling of a confessional, colonial heritage" which Arab Fascists attribute to Lebanon. Yet, as the maid of a 53-year-long inbred genetically-transferred dictatorship, Shaaban does not mind that Bashar Assad and his regime is the monopoly of the Alawite sect, one of these Arab tribal herds with their own special brand of religion. The Alawites used to be Byzantine Empire Christians who were forced to convert to Shiite Islam, resulting in an amorphous hybrid Christian-Muslim set of beliefs. That sect represents 10% of Syria's total population, yet by terror and repression it dominates the rest of the population, the vast majority of which is Sunni Muslim. Now that Assad has ethnically cleansed his own country by chasing the Sunnis into refugee camps in Turkiye, Lebanon, Jordan and all over Europe, his Alawite sect now has a far greater relative demographic advantage. So this idiot charlatan Sunni Muslim bitch Shaaban, who claims to want to dismantle the confessional system in Lebanon, should first stop serving as the official whore of the Alawite dictator of Syria and try to dismantle her own sectarian and vulgar system. 

When the Baath-doped Shaaban speaks of Lebanon's "colonial" past, she means the puny 20 years between the two world wars when France was the mandatory power (i.e. it was granted a mandate by the League of Nations, the forerunner of the UN. Lebanon and Syria were never French colonies as West and North Africa were) over both Lebanon and Syria. Those two decades between 1921 and 1943 pale in comparison with the 400 years of the backward and brutal Muslim Turkish Ottoman occupation that preceded it. Yet not one of the Arab nationalists like Shaaban ever complains about it because, despite being Turkish and not Arab and spoke Turkish not Arabic, it was Muslim. Muslims and Jews are alike in that religion overrides national identity. France on the other hand gave Lebanon and Syria institutions and constitutions which Lebanon has, despite constant Syrian obstruction and meddling, adhered to, while Syria embarked on annual coup d'etats between 1946 and 1970 when the butcher dictator Hafez Assad seized power, kept it until his death in 2000, and tribally handed it over to his imbecile son Bashar who remains the junior dictator butcher to this day. So much for the heralded secularism of Baathist Pan-Arab nationalists. 

Shaaban also sweeps under the rug the foundational Canaanite-Phoenician identity of Lebanon that lasted from way back in antiquity through 400 AD when the Phoenicians turned Christian Lebanese. The Phoenician homeland, with all its contributions to western civilization, was successively occupied by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantine Christians, Arab Muslims, Frankish Crusader Christians, Seljoukids Muslims of Turkestan, Egyptian Mameluk Muslims, Ottoman Turkish Muslims, French Christians, East European/American Jewish colonists (a.k.a. Israelis), and the last ones to be kicked out of Lebanon by a population hurling slingshots of pure Lebanese excrement at them, the Syrian Arab barbarians of Dr. Bouthaina. As one can see from Lebanon's long history, the "Arab" occupation interlude is only a speck in the geological time scale of the country's history. The Arabic language is the only criterion that might suggest an Arab identity to Lebanon, but are the Irish, Australians, Canadians, Americans, Jamaicans, all "Englishmen" and part of an "English World" under an "English" ethnic identity because they share common history, religion and language? Or would Austrians, Swiss, German, Dutch and others all be called Germans because they are all protestant Christians and speak a form of German? According to the Baathist ideology, and to a vast spectrum of incompetent western academics and politicians who are incapable of comprehending the complexities of the Near East, the "Arab World" is a simplifying construct in which a multitude of diverse linguistic, ethnic and religious groups are all lumped together as "Arabs" because their people were forced to speak some form of Arabic as a result of the Arab Muslim colonialist conquest and occupation beginning in the 7th century AD.

While Lebanese law protects the freedom of schools to teach in any language, schools must comply with official secondary school requirements (Baccalauréat) and teach Arabic as a language and use it as  a language of instruction. Hence, all schools - public and private - adopt a bilingual approach in which a multitude of subjects are taught in parallel in two languages, one of which is always Arabic: Arabic -French, Arabic-English, Arabic-Italian, Arabic-Armenian, etc. In general, math, science and foreign history, literature and social studies are taught in the foreign language, while the same subjects, except science, are taught in Arabic. So it is disingenious of the Sunni Muslim Baathist prostitute of Baby Butcher Bashar to lie by saying that Mr. Hitti wants Lebanese education to be solely in French, when he was arguing that the Syrian barbarian occupiers of his country wanted to impose Arabic as the sole language of instruction, as it is in backward Syria. I've met so many Syrian fugitives from the Assad regime who complained that Syria never taught them any foreign language sufficiently enough to allow them to integrate the workforce in their countries of exile. Instead, Syrian students are brainwashed by daily classes on National Socialism à la Baath flavor and the long vanished Arab glory of 900 AD, with copious injections of hatred toward every other culture and country.

It is worth reminding Jezebel Bouthaina Shaaban that if the Arabic language, which had languished in slumber for 600 years under Muslim Seljuks, Mameluks and Turks, came back to life, it is on account of those Christian Lebanese whose openness to the world made them vanguards and pioneers in the re-awakening and modernization of the Arabic language in the late 19th century: It was Khalil Gebran, Mikhail Naimeh, and Amin Rihani, the so-called Prophets of New York, who inaugurated the Nahda (renaissance) of the Arabic language; it was also Philip Hitti who introduced Arabic and Islam to the anglo-saxon world through his founding of the very first department of Near Eastern and Semitic Languages in American academia at Princeton University, of which Duke University where harlot Bouthaina deployed her veiled Baathist charms is a Johnny-come-late poor imitation. These are only a few of those Lebanese Christians who resurrected Arabic after it had died under Muslim rule. Indeed, it was Lebanese monks in their monasteries in Mount Lebanon who in the 17th century printed the first Bible and the first Quran in the entire Arab Muslim world. It is primarily on account of their exposure to both east and west that the Lebanese, to this day, continue to be at the forefront of change in the Arab world. Unfortunately, primitive Syria and its appendages like the Iranian terror organization of Hezbollah, that have dominated Lebanon for the past 3 decades, have taken Lebanon down a path of islamization and arabization that led to it becoming a cesspool of corruption, poverty, wars and mismanagement. 

Finally, unlike the monolith of backward education that Bashar Assad's maid Bouthaina Shaaban wants to impose on Arab youths under the pretext of Arab nationalism, Lebanon's young people have a choice between either a French-instruction or an English-instruction public or private school in their pre-university education, then shift to the other language for their university education, which allows them to work and easily assimilate in academia and professional environments in the West and in the Gulf region. If, in the obtuse regressive mind of Bouthaina Shaaban, such Lebanon-based foreign academic institutions like American University of Beirut (US Protestant), Saint Joseph's University (French Catholic), Arab University (Egyptian Sunni Muslim Arab), Lebanese-German University (German non-governmental), and many others are shameful relics of a colonial past rather than open cross-cultural bridges, wasn't it demeaning of this Baathist slut to have earned a living in American academia, perhaps because in her native Syrian Arab country she may not be allowed to speak, drive, or practice her profession, except of course that of a whore to the Damascus butcher Bashar Assad.

 

Religious Mafia Keeps Lebanon in Bronze Age

Lebanon is ruled by a religious Mafia that either is itself involved directly in politics or operates like a pupeteer handling subservient puppet politicians. If you watch the political process in the media, you will see more men in robes, beards and strange headgear than men or women in normal professional attire. The Shiite sect is run directly by mullahs, imams or other clergymen, with a handful of civilian hacks posturing as politicians (MPs, ministers, etc.). Other sects like the Sunni or the Maronite sect present themselves publicly with civilian ministers, party leaders or MPs, but when the system breaks down, as it is right now, patriarchs, muftis, bishops and other clergy take over and speak on behalf of their respective sects about political issues, essentially becoming themselves the political leaders.

This is the Mafia that divides the country into religious concentration camps in which the individual is trapped within his/her community and has no value or rights except to serve as a faceless member of a herd. While sects claim the freedom to worship without restrictions imposed by the other sects, individuals within each sect have no freedom. A Lebanese Christian who claims to be free means he is free to ring his church bell on sundays without the Muslims prohibiting him from doing so. I call this "communitarian freedom". But within the Christian community, there are no individual freedoms: A Maronite individual cannot openly challenge or criticize the Maronite Church. 

The Lebanese confessional or sectarian system of government, disguised under the fabricated filth of "consensual democracy", grants rights to religious sects, but not to individuals within those sects. All of Lebanon's current problems are due to disagreements between the sects, not between individual members of those sects. The fallacy of "consensual democracy" is exactly the problem facing the country today in the inability of Parliament to elect a president. In a serious democracy, all differences are solved by voting, either in a popular vote or a vote inside the assembly, and the winner moves forward to form a government or pass a law while the loser becomes the opposition that tries to improve its standing with a view at winning at the next vote or elections. In Lebanon, however, differences always end up in a stalemate. When faced with a vote or an election, the party that suspects it might lose does everything it can to block or obstruct the vote or the constitutional process under the pretense that it wants dialogue and consensus.

By dialogue and consensus, the parties, regardless of the wishes of their constitutents, meet in backrooms away from public scrutiny, make deals that often involve payments and bribes and other concessions, and reach an agreement over, for instance, appointing a president, thus bypassing the constitutional process. Since the last exercises of real democracy some time around the early 1970s (1970 for presidential elections and 1972 for legislative elections), all elections and votes have in fact been fake and for show, since they were always overridden by consensus, deals, impositions by occupying countries like Syria and Israel, and appointments to public office. In other words, "consensual democracy" has replaced the genuine democracy that Lebanon had practiced in the early decades of its existence. For the most part, genuine democracy was practiced when the Christians had a bigger say in government (1943-1976), while bullshit consensual democracy took hold when Muslims grabbed power thanks to Palestinian terrorism, the Syrian invasion-occupation, and the Taef Agreement - sponsored I should say by the self-declared beacon of democracy, the United States - that shifted power from the Christians to the Muslims. The US republican administrations (Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.) have not ceased since the early 1970s kissing the oily asses of the Arab dictatorships, sacrificing and backstabbing every other minority in the region (Kurds, Maronites, Copts, Yazidis, Armenians, etc.) in exchange for cheap Arab oil, while those same Arab dictatorships were dispatching terror groups to attack the West in the heart of its cities and capitals.

Why pretend to have a democracy? Why have elections and votes? Why even have a constitution and laws? Why not go back to a primitive form of government in which the religious bosses of the sects regularly meet and enact laws that suit their objectives without taking into account the people's wishes? This is how the Taliban mullahs rule in Afghanistan. This is how the ayatollahs rule in Iran. These are the forms of government in which the people are infantilized as ignorant of their interests, and only the religious dinosaur in power knows what is best because he, and only he the dinosaur, understands the will of God as stated in dubious parchemins and scrolls written some thousands of years ago during the Bronze-Iron Age by even older stinking dinosaurs.

In a country with a diverse population and a myriad of sects, the problem is compounded by the co-existence of multiple Mafia bosses. In Iran, there is one dinosaur boss, the ayatollah. In Afghanistan, the chief Mullah runs the show. In Lebanon, with its 18 religious denominations recognized by the constitution, the authoritative power of the religious boss is diluted and distributed across several bosses, which makes reaching a consensus even more difficult. It is easier when you have one dictator, but imagine if you have several competing dictators. That is why reform is impossible in Lebanon as it exists today.

When the bosses of the religious Mafia disagree amongst each other, they wage wars in which hundreds of thousands of people die. And they convince their people that their death (sacrifice, martyrdom, etc.) is part of asserting God's will. The status of victim is idealized to that of a martyr for the cause. The Christian Church created the myth of the "martyr" in its early days, making saints out of suicidal rebels. The Muslim world today does the same: every jackass who gets killed in a car accident or who blows himself to kill other people is a "martyr" on a express lane to heaven.

When the bosses agree, they act jointly to keep their respective herds in tow and the existing system in place. On questions of the civil status, religious laws and courts override civilian laws and courts. Inheritance, marriage, divorce, births and deaths... are all the purview of the religious authorities who engage in all manner of discrimination, abuse and corruption, especially against women. Lebanese women who marry foreign men cannot grant their children the Lebanese nationality. If a Lebanese woman dies without a direct male relative (brother, son, husband), it is virtually impossible to declare and register her death. I personally was unable to register my maternal aunt's death because she had no brothers, wasn't married (no husband) and had no children, let alone male ones. I, as her male next-of-kin could not officially declare her death, and we had to resort to "wasta" (personal connections and a courageous selectman willing to bend the law) to to obtain a death certificate.

Over the past few decades, people - overwhelmingly young people - have been demanding civilian laws for the personal status, as for example civilian marriage. Right now, Lebanese couples cannot marry before a judge; they have to be married by a priest, an imam, a sheikh, etc. The irony is that if a couple travels abroad and gets married in a civilian court, their marriage is accepted in Lebanon. Similarly for divorce: Some sects make it very difficult to obtain a divorce for the purpose of extorting money from the couple, but if the divorce is processed overseas it is accepted in Lebanon. Every time calls are made to adopt civilian laws for the personal status, the clergy of ALL the sects, Christians and Muslims alike, band together, and since they control the politicians, it is virtually impossible to change the law. The point is that the religious Mafia is alive and well: it controls people's lives and makes money out of marriage, divorce, birth, death and inheritance proceedings. Christian and Muslim authorities always come together to defend their money-making power-holding turf, always declaring that people's lives outside the religious lines are sinful to God. But when they disagree and fight, they push people to take up arms and commit massacres in the name of God. Everyone is convinced that God is on their side and they brandish Him like a scarecrow to order the herd back in line. Imagine what centuries of this abuse and brainwashing can do to people: They become like sheepish obedient slaves during the light of good days but can be turned into werewolves in the darkness of the bad nights. Christopher Hitchens once said, "Religion makes otherwise normal people do wicked and disgusting things".

When it comes to LGBT rights, the religious authorities have in recent months rallied together to stand up against an increasingly vocal LBGT community. Lebanon has always had a gay community that was generally accepted in public, but now the religious dinosaurs are competing with one another as to who can harass the gay community more. The mere display of a rainbow invites chastisement and harassment. Christian thugs, declaring themselves "Soldiers of God", and probably dispatched by the Maronite Church, recently descended on a street in the Christian neighborhood of Ashrafiyeh and harassed and beat up bar patrons because of suspicions that they were gay. The Shiite Muslim Hezbollah minister of culture - how can any sane person hand the culture ministry to a radical Muslim fundamentalist militia? - decided to ban the movie Barbie on the ground that it promotes gayness. He hasn't yet succeeded, but there is a threat against those theaters who show the movie and against people who go see it. 

The bigotry of the religious establishments is so blatant. On top of the Bkerke hill (some 10 miles north of Beirut) sits the Maronite Patriarch whose humble title is, "Patriarch of Antioch and the Entire East", even though his flock is about 1 million in Lebanon and a couple of millions overseas. Despite all the frowny disguisements of piety and deep faith, right under the windows of Bkerke and under the nose of a giant statue of Mary, is the Maameltayn red light district where prostitutes from around the world plough their trade near the city of Jounieh. Just google "Jounieh prostitutes" and read about how travel websites describe the area. Over the past several decades, child sex abuse by Catholic priests has been exposed all over the western world. It is no longer a secret that many homosexuals and pedophiles chose the religious "vocation" as a way to hide themselves and lead secret sex lives, including molesting and raping children. Not one country has been spared, except those opaque dictatorial backward countries that deny the existence of what they call the disease of homosexuality. Which means that child sex abuse by clergymen is a world-wide pandemic, and by applying simple statistics one can extrapolate the phenomenon, with a very high likelihood, to Maronite Catholic priests in Lebanon. Yet, only one case (Mansour Labaki) has ever been denounced for a long series of abuses between 1967 and 1997, and while the Maronite Church tried to sweep it under the rug, it was only in 2013 that the Vatican declared him guilty, but the Lebanese authorities refused to extradite him in 2017. He was tried and convicted in France in 2021, but never in Lebanon which refuses to extradite him.

[https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1280979/mansour-labaky-a-priest-faces-the-demons-of-the-past.html ]

https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/lebanon/2022/09/27/vatican-defrocks-lebanese-priest-convicted-in-france-of-sexually-assaulting-girls/].

Only God knows what else is beneath the tip of the iceberg. More than in any Mafia, the omerta is very powerful here in the Lebanese religious Mafias.

Finally, one question that has always haunted me: Why are there so many sects within one religious denomination? For example, within the Christian community in Lebanon, the Catholic faith is represented by the following different sects, each with its church, patriarch, institutions, courts, schools, etc.: Maronite Catholic, Latin/Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Chaldean Catholic, Assyrian Catholic, and Syriac Catholic. I am fine with diversity, but when diversity signifies division, suspicions, lack of solidarity, and allegiance to outside powers, it becomes a handicap.  Why so many catholic sects? If the Catholics can't agree on belonging to one church, why is there a Catholic church to begin with? Why doesn't the Pope order them to coalesce into one Catholic sect that is specific to Lebanon, let's name it "Lebanese Catholic". Once you are in Lebanon, you should no longer be Latin, Greek, Roman, Assyrian, Armenian, etc., dragging your ancient and primitive history into our time.

Same thing with the Orthodox Christians: Greek Orthodox, Assyrian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox... How about merging them all into a unified "Lebanese Orthodox" church?

Same thing on the Muslim side: Sunnis, Shiites, Ismailis, Alawites, Druze... Plus the Protestant and the Jewish sects which are recognized by the constitution, though their numbers are very small.

SSNP: Recalcitrant Trash

A message from Mr. Nadim Boustani, an attorney who was physically assaulted by Fascist terrorists of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) at the Justice Palace in Beirut because he had written an article dissecting the SSNP's troubled history. The original article in Arabic can be read on:
https://alkalimaonline.com/news.aspx?id=576937

Undeterred, Mr. Boustani re-posted his article, whose ENglish translation is presented below.

For more on the SSNP, see: [ https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/06/dying-nazis-of-near-east.html ]. The SSNP no longer has any members in the Lebanese parliament, having suffered a crushing defeat in last May's elections.

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In response to the physical attack against me today by the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) at the Justice Palace in Beirut, I re-post the article I had written as a critique of this Fascist party, out of my conviction that terrorism will not defeat freedom of opinion.

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The Syrian Social Nationalist Party – Trash that refuses to go into the trashbin of history

Antun Saadeh (whose real name is Antun Moujaess), the founder of the party, is an insane criminal maniac who believed himself to be a prophet. There are medical reports about his mental condition (Dr. Nassib Himam). Saadeh’s father, Dr. Khalil Saadeh, killed his mother, Nayfeh Khonayser, in Alexandria, and “leader” Antun carried this guilt complex all his life and constantly physically abused his father.

Referred to by his followers as “The Leader” (Az-Zaiim) [inspired by the Nazi "Führer"], Saadeh considered himself an equal to Abraham, Christ and Mohammed, whose mission was to complete their divinely-mandated message. This hallucination disorder made him say in a speech in Amyoun in 1937, “The world has known in this area religions that came down to earth from high above; but today it is witnessing a new religion rising from the earth and lifting souls in a red whirlwind [the logo of the SSNP] up to the heavens”. Saadeh failed to complete his university studies (he holds no university degree) and taught German [where his connection with Hitler lies] at the American University of Beirut. Most of his writings are copies, translations and plagiarized foreign texts, which he was careful to modify slightly by inserting his own notions, a process whose results were catastrophic from an academic perspective.

The ideology of the SSNP is racist and strange: It classifies humans into those with elongated skulls as intelligent races, and flat skulls which are features of lower races. Saadeh’s hallucinations made him believe that Cypriots and Kuwaitis and others belong to his “Syrian Nation” and are one and the same people. Saadeh invented a strange religion – Al-Madrahyah [loose translation: Spiritual Materialism] – whose rituals are practiced by party members. At funerals, they say, “Long Live the Nation, Eternal Life for Saadeh”. They hold laughable marriage ceremonies with warlike rituals. Saadeh claims that Syrians built the pyramids even though the Greeks gave this region the name “Syria” in 330 BC, which is 2,200 years after the pyramids were built. This name was meant as an administrative region for the Hellenic ruler and did not define a nation or a homogenous people.

To party members, ”Leader” Saadeh is infallible and no criticism of him is tolerated. His leadership is eternal, even after his death. Anyone who contradicts his ideas deserves death. The Party must accede to power by violent means. The poet Youssef El-Khal quotes Saadeh as having said, “everything I do is ideology, what I write and say is ideology, even buttoning my pants is ideology”.

The SSNP’s ideology is a plagiarized version of the European Fascist narratives, along with its slogans, whirlwind logo, and “Hail” salutes as set by Hitler and Mussolini. Even his “Greater Syria” and Syrian Nation hypotheses are stolen from the Jesuit priest Henri Lamens. Saadeh attempted two coup d’états in Lebanon in 1949 and 1962. The party was dissolved a second time by President Fouad Chehab who was a serious president who planned to build a state of laws and institutions. He was unforgiving to the SSNP.

The SSNP does not recognize Lebanon as a nation-state, even though it is only in Lebanon that it is tolerated, where its license is granted and from where its leaders hail. It took the Syrian Baath regime until 2005 to grant the SSNP its license as a political party in Syria, but that was at the cost of its total subservience to the Baath Party and its subsuming Syrian nationalism under Arab nationalism. What matters to the SSNP is that it gets a few crumbs of power from its masters the Baathists.

The SSNP carried out several massacres against civilians, most notably in Abdil-Akkar, Al-Qaa, Aintourah, Amyoun Road, Shekka, and Forzol. It is responsible for blowing up 57 booby-trapped car bombs in East Beirut out of a total of 72 between 1982 and 1991.

For most of its history, the SSNP was fractured into what amounted to tools for outsiders. There is the SSNP affiliated with the Palestinian Fatah organization, and the opposing SSNP with allegiance to Hafez Assad of Syria. Today, the SSNP is a subsidiary of Hezbollah whose reference is Islamic Iran, which is counter to the claims of the SSNP’s secular principles. Not to mention other current divisions whose orientations are all over the place.

The SSNP’s long-serving chief, Asaad Herdane, is accused of several assassination attempts. He was known as a womanizer who seduced women and tricked them into carrying out suicide operations on the ground that their blood gives life to the Syrian Nation. For instance, Sanaa Mheideli was dispatched to execute a suicide operation as a 16-year-old child. It is indeed the party of the rights of women and children!

The SSNP assassinated the Lebanese prime minister of independence, Riyadh Solh, and the promising Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel. The latter act was instigated by Jean Nader who was sleeping with the sister of the killer, Habib Chartouni. Treachery is indeed one of the defining characters of the SSNP. There is no heroism in its modus operandi; it is simply base to turn against those who were kind to you. Even Michel Aoun was not spared as the SSNP’s terrorists tried to assassinate him in Cyprus in 1988 (on the very territory of Greater Syria!).

The SSNP wasn’t even capable of embracing its own “hero” and party member Habib Chartouni, the assassin of Bashir Gemayel, officially declaring that Chartouni’s actions do not represent the party even as he is adulated by the party membership. Chartouni, for his part, is a fugitive from justice and denigrates his own party by saying it has become an instrument of power with an unprincipled leadership.

The party’s ideology is capricious and variable according to the leader’s state of drunkenness and the party’s blundering leadership. Sometimes the borders of Greater Syria stop at the Euphrates, other times they reach the Tigris. Sometimes it claims that the temple of Solomon is in a cave beneath the Dome of the Rock and that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is a historical forgery, and at other times it opposes the right of Jews to exist within the Syrian Nation. Then again, the party says it is part of freemasonry and promotes its beliefs through the Syrian Star celebration in Brazil, while at other times it considers freemasonry a Jewish tool that aims to destroy the Syrian Nation.

The SSNP is hostile to the Lebanese Kataeb Party which it brands as a Fascist reactionary party, yet it fought alongside it during the 1958 revolution against the Nasserite movement with funding from the CIA which was seeking to stop Soviet expansion. SSNP militiamen ran patrols to protect the US marines landing on the Lebanese beaches that year.

The SSNP was founded in part thanks to efforts by French intelligence services in 1932 to use it to rein in the Arab Nationalist ideology. But no sooner had the SSNP’s popular base expanded within three years of its founding, that it rebelled against the French. It then shifted camps again in the 1970s and joined the leftist axis, after it was a right-wing party. During Lebanon's war of 1975, it received weapons from the USSR and money from Qaddafi of Libya.

I have no idea why anyone still believe they must join this farcical and bloody party. I have no idea why it has not yet imploded to rid us of this parasitic cancer on our society. May we one day have a leader like Fouad Chehab to ban such a party whose existence is counter to the foundations of the state and the constitution, and counter to all ethical and humanistic values of the 21st century. Fascism was supposed to have died with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.