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 tows 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 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:
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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. 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-
"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, and by terror and repression 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 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 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 idiot son Bashar who remain 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, be "English" and part of some "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 maid of Bashar to lie by saying that Mr. Hitti wants Lebanese education to be solely in French, when he was arguing that the Syrian primitive 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 University (French Catholic), Arab University (Egyptian 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 maid to the Damascus butcher Bashar Assad.
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