Another April 13 is coming up, the date in 1975 when the Lebanese Christians took up arms against the Syrians and the Palestinians in an attempt to prevent that Lebanon becomes a substitute Palestine.
It is important to state at the outset that the label "Christian" is more a political identifier than a religious one in Lebanon. To be a Christian Lebanese does not mean that one is an ultra-religious fundamentalist. Most Christians in Lebanon are not practicing Christians, they are secularists and liberal-minded, even though the Church and religious institutions still hold sway. Lebanon's Christian community is in a conflicting transition between their attachment to an archaic religious conservatism, and their aspiration to be a secular liberal community calling for the separation between state and religion. But the Muslim community, like any Muslim community on the planet, is incapable at this stage of its evolution to let go of Islam as its primary identity definer. There is no Muslim state on earth that has separated state from religion; Turkiye tried it with Ataturk in the 1920s, but it has regressed back to an Islamist country under Erdogan. Muslims see themselves first as Muslims, then as nationals of their country. In a manner of comparison, Lebanon's Christians are the cognates of Israel's secular Jews, while the Muslims are by and large the equivalent of Israel's Orthodox Jewish community.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), founded by Yasser Arafat in 1965, began a campaign of destabilization and war against the Lebanese State. Unable to do anything worthwhile for Palestine, the Palestinian “Revolution” turned against its host country, Lebanon. Backed by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Libya among other Sunni Arab countries, Arafat challenged the very existence of the Lebanese state by ignoring the Lebanese authorities, his PLO acting as a sovereign government within the Lebanese state. Lebanon's Muslims, as expected, preferred to side with their Muslim Palestinian co-religionists than with their compatriot Christian Lebanese. In fact, the Muslims were to use the Palestinians as their militia against the state and the Christian militias.
Arafat would welcome and bid farewell to foreign dignitaries at Beirut Airport without notifying or involving the Lebanese government. Shootings and killings of Lebanese citizens at nighttime checkpoints on suspicions of being Israeli agents, kidnappings of Lebanese soldiers and security forces, massacres in remote Christian villages, etc. All these activities were funded and armed by Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and Libya with the support of the Stalinist Assad regime in Damascus which had created entire Palestinian contingents within the Syrian army, like the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), the Yarmouk Brigades, the Saika, the Assifa and others. The regime would dispatch these terrorists into Lebanon to carry out their attacks and operations against Lebanese targets, claiming deniability for itself by saying these were rogue Palestinian groups. Lebanon slowly began to simmer and boil. Today, the Iran-backed Hezbollah is doing exactly what the PLO did in the 1970s.
After the 1973 defeat of the Arabs by Israel in the October war, the US Administration of Richard Nixon, at the behest of its State Department Secretary, the war criminal Henry Kissinger, concocted a deal with the Assad regime in 1974 in which the US would ignore, indeed encourage, the Assad regime’s undermining of Lebanon in exchange for not challenging the Israeli occupation (and annexation) of the Golan Heights. Meanwhile, all these Syrian Baath Party-affiliated terrorist groups were “liberating” Palestine from south Lebanon: This consisted in lobbing low-quality shells aimlessly into Israel, shells that often landed inside Lebanon itself, thus giving the barbaric Israelis the pretext to bomb entire Lebanese villages along the border. Thousands of mostly Shiites from the south migrated to Beirut where they squatted on public and private lands along the Beirut Airport highway, now known as Hezbollah’s southern suburb, the Dahiyeh.
The Palestinian-Syrian-Israeli war against Lebanon thus began in earnest in 1975. As the years and the violence progressed, the Lebanese discovered that the Americans and their European poodles in fact backed all of these violators of Lebanon’s sovereignty, either directly or indirectly. As would become gradually clear, the Kissinger-Assad deal was also backed by Israel since its objective was to dismantle Lebanon’s multi-sectarian model that stood in sharp contrast to the barbarian Jewish-only model Israel was pursuing in Palestine. What added to the attractiveness of the deal for Israel was that by eliminating Lebanon as we knew it – liberal, open, prosperous, tolerant – a victory by Arafat and his Lebanese Druse and Sunni Muslim traitors could turn the country into a substitute homeland for the Palestinians. A permanent settlement in Lebanon of those Palestinian refugees who were ethnically cleansed by Israel would void the refugees’ Right of Return to Palestine that is guaranteed by international law and several UNSC resolutions. Everyone saw a win in whatever disastrous outcome would befall Lebanon.
Lebanon being a small and weak country, its custodian politicians relied on international law to try and salvage their country from the hands of all these foreign protagonists fighting on its soil. Alas, they found only deaf ears in Washington DC and Paris whose interests were in contradiction with their stated western values of freedom, sovereignty, democracy and such: Arab oil and Zionist interests came first. Whenever the Lebanese devised a plan to recover the attributes of a sovereign nation, the US and Europe would collude with the oil-rich Arabs and the rabid Zionists to maintain Lebanon as the only war front with Israel. Every presidential election that threatened to bring an independence-minded candidate to power was opposed by the Western-Israeli-Arab cabal. With no oil and no financial charms, Lebanon was like an old prostitute whose time had come to retire. Lebanon was a cheap and insignificant price to pay to placate all these other players and thus stabilize the entire region. For example, Syria and Israel had drawn each other red lines inside Lebanon which they dutifully respected for several decades. Syria could not fly its air force in Lebanese airspace and Israel would not attack Syrian army positions inside Lebanon. They also agreed not to fight each other along their own shared border on the Golan. Both occupiers of Lebanese territory (90% to Syria and 10% to Israel) concentrated on beating up on their respective targets inside the country: Israel freely targeted Palestinian positions and refugee camps and pro-Palestinian Shiite villages in the south, while Syria freely bombed the Christian districts of Lebanon’s cities and regions.
Fast forward to 2024. The situation in Lebanon is an exact clone of the situation in 1974, except for a change in one of the players. The PLO is gone, but has been replaced by Hezbollah. Otherwise, everything remains the same.
Syria’s Assad regime continues to wreak havoc in the country: crime, smuggling, lawless border, etc. with the difference that it has replaced its 40,000-strong army of occupation by 2.5 million illegal migrants that Assad supposedly drove out of Syria during his savage war against his own people since 2011. The so-called “Syrian refugees” are not refugees: They freely move across the border without any fear from Assad’s soldiers; they smuggle Lebanese subsidized goods into Syria where they sell them at higher prices; they smuggle weapons and mercenaries that arrive from Iran to Hezbollah inside Lebanon; they assassinate or kidnap dozens of opponents to the Syrian regime, including presidents, journalists, academicians, clergymen and others, not to mention the 17,000 Lebanese citizens seized in Lebanon and transferred to Syrian jails and whose whereabouts are unknown; Syria refuses to submit documentation to the UN asserting Lebanese sovereignty over territory occupied by Israel along the border, which gives Israel the justification for maintain its occupation of these disputed tiny slices of territory. This list is by no means exhaustive.
Earlier this week, Syrian operatives kidnapped and killed a Lebanese cadre of one of the Christian parties. Pascal Sleiman is the coordinator in the city of Byblos (25 miles north of Beirut) of the Lebanese Forces Party. The kidnapping took place in the Christian heartland district of Byblos, but his body was found inside Syria. This assassination may be seen as a way for Iran to retaliate against the bombing of its Damascus embassy. For several decades, Lebanon's Christians, being the "other" non-Muslim minority in the Near East, have always been the voodoo doll with which impotent, coward and treacherous Arabs would get back at Israel. Now thanks to decades of Western and Arab treachery, this state of affairs continues. Lebanon's Christians have always been accused of being neo-Crusaders, isolationists, self-hating Arabs, and more to the point, pro-Israeli, which they are not. Lebanon's Christians have no particular sympathy for either Arab Muslim or Jewish Israeli extremists, and generally see both sides as ultra-religious warmongerers.
At this time, the Lebanese state has no president, and only an illegitimate and impotent caretaker government that fears everyone and tries to please everyone, beginning with Syria’s criminal regime. So, it came up with a story to explain the murder of Mr. Sleiman: The Syrian kidnappers wanted to steal the victim’s car, but they killed him inadvertently. They left his car in Lebanon (the car they were supposedly stealing) and smuggled his body to Syria where they thought the Lebanese could not find it. In other words, the caretaker government of one of the most corrupt Sunni politicians, Mr. Najib Mikati, is a powerless scarecrow that covers up for the Assad regime for fear of assassination, and is trying to defuse the growing tensions between Lebanon’s Christian population and the Hezbollah-Syrian migrant alliance by turning a political assassination into a vulgar car hijacking that went awry.
Now Syrian crimes inside Lebanon do not target only Christians. Many anti-Syria, anti-Hezbollah dissidents have been assassinated. One notorious assassination was that of Lokman Slim who was a rare Shiite Muslim who openly criticized Hezbollah and its Syrian regime backer. In 2021, he was found dead in a car with multiple bullet wounds. But in Lebanon, the sectarian lines are very tenacious. Even though most Lebanese are sick and tired of Iran and Syria’s brutality in Lebanon, only the Christians, and lately a few Sunnis but virtually no Shiites, dare vocally challenge Hezbollah’s hijacking and Iran’s occupation-by-proxy. This was the case back in the 1970s, when only the Christians stood up against Arafat and his hordes while many of the Muslims and Druse joined the Palestinians in their fight against the state. The army was paralyzed and indeed broke apart along sectarian lines. This left the Christians no option but to defend themselves: they formed militias and fought the Palestinian-Muslim-Druse-Syrian alliance.
At this time, the situation is eerily reminiscent of the conditions preceding the 1975 explosion. The mangled and dysfunctional Lebanese state has an army that is supposedly supplied by the US, albeit with second-hand useless equipment, to serve as a glorified police force and not a real army. The hypocrites in America claim that if the US were to supply the Lebanese Armed Forces with useful weaponry, the latter could fall into the hands of Hezbollah and be used against the sacred cow south of the border, the Jewish colony in Palestine. Since the Syrian civil war of 2011, Lebanon has been living on a knife’s edge, what with the ensuing street protests in 2019 that were repressed, the pandemic, and the collapse of the economy due to Lebanon’s insolvency in paying off its debt. The Lebanese state has genuinely ceased to exist in any substantive manner: Official administrations are closed most of the time, banks have ceased to function like banks and have been reduced to foreign currency exchange outlets, schools are opened on and off, businesses have been devastated, emigration has skyrocketed. Even Syrian migrants are trying to flee their host country to better pastures by crossing the Mediterranean to the European country of Cyprus.
Meanwhile, the Iranian Hezbollah outfit has linked its warfare with Israel in south Lebanon to the outcome in the Gaza onslaught, and that warfare has gradually escalated across both sides of the border: Israel bombs targets everywhere in Lebanon (not only along the border) while Hezbollah is caught between a rock and a hard place: If it doesn’t fight Israel it will look like a sissy “resistance” and would lose the coerced legitimacy it has imposed by force, but if it does fight Israel it risks the usually disproportionate Israeli response which could turn Beirut into another Gaza. So, its masters in Tehran are terrified as Israel has ramped up its attacks against Iranian targets like the embassy in Damascus, and it is reduced to ghost fighting Israel with the tip of its fingers, not exceeding the limits of engagement agreed to by both sides and, contrary to its high-testosterone testicular integrity, it and Iran refuse to be dragged into a full-scale war whose outcome could lead to Hezbollah's ultimate downfall. Israel too fears Hezbollah’s hypothetical deployment of hundreds of thousands of precise missiles buried in tunnels and underground caves and the brush along the border.
The Christians of Lebanon had established Lebanon as we know it as early as the 1840s. They are the primary custodians of the country, but they are not innocent of the crime of weakening the central state. Right now, they claim day in and day out that they want the protection of the state and will not resort to their own self-defense, but given the deep ailments of Lebanon's "consensual democracy", the sectarian political system, and the gangrenous collusion between politicians and their respective religious establishments, the state is very weak. It cannot protect anyone, let alone the Christian minority. So the Christians always end up abandoning the state when the latter is unable to protect anyone against the chronic encroachments by Syria, Iran and Israel who see Lebanon only as a battlefield where they settle scores.
Only a strong state with functioning institutions can protect their existence as the last free Christian community in the entire East. We are at the point in the past couple of decades where Lebanon’s Christians are on the verge of an explosion of anger: They were patient between 1965 and 1975 with the PLO, Syria and Israel, but then exploded and waged a 15 year-long war through 1990 when they were partially defeated but managed to remain alive and relevant. Today, they are facing a similar situation. They have been patient since the mid-2000s, have watched in horror the dismantling of the state institutions, and can no longer ignore the direct threat to their existence posed by a million Palestinian refugees and 2.5 million Syrian refugees on top of a native population of 4 million. What country could bear such an asymmetry where half the population is made of foreign, mostly illegal, refugees?
In 1975, the Lebanese Christians were accused of being self-hating Arabs, isolationists, modern-day crusaders, Zionist agents, etc… But their numbers, roughly 1.5 million, cannot pose a threat to any of the vulgar hyper-hyper-militarized Syrian and Israeli regimes around them. Yet, they armed and defended themselves in the absence of a Lebanese Army. Today, the Lebanese Army looks nice on TV, but it is as feeble and brittle as it was in 1975. It cannot fight Hezbollah any more than it can fight 2.5 million Syrian criminal refugees or control the country’s borders against Syrian and Israeli incursions and attacks. And, it will break apart the moment Hezbollah’s silverback leader orders the Shiite contingents of the army to leave their posts and join Hezbollah.
What should the Lebanese Christians do to ward off any risk of their disappearance? In Iraq and Syria, the ancient Christian communities have all but disappeared. So is the case in Israel. In Egypt the Coptic Christian community has been cowered into a Dhimmi (“tolerated”) minority without any rights, and the burning of its churches and persecutions are a daily occurrence. Only in Lebanon can the Christians still claim to have their freedom and a say in their government. But for how long?
This is a message to the West: The Christians have not laid a hand on a Syrian refugee so far. They are unarmed. They keep demanding the rule of law and to be protected by the state. But Syrian migrants have settled everywhere in Lebanon, including in the Christian heartland. That has given Assad's criminal Syrian gangs the illusion that they can plunder, rape, kill and steal at will. Not two weeks ago, a Syrian gang infiltrated a Christian Lebanese household with a female pretending to be a housekeeper. She proceeded with the help of her male gang members to assassinate the older couple and steal their belongings. This is but one example of what the Syrian illegals are doing in Lebanon.
The patience of the Lebanese has run out, and the West is not helping. It attacks the Lebanese as “racists” because they ask for help managing the overwhelming illegal migrant/refugee population. At the same time, those same westerners are themselves the racists who are turning away migrants: Europe along the Mediterranean coast, and the US along its borders with Latin America.
The video below shows one of the first vigilante actions taken by local residents of the Armenian suburb of Bourj-Hammoud in Beirut who are suffocating under Syrian crime. It is a telltale of things to come. The Lebanese Christians will not stay idle forever and they are beginning to manage their own security given the impotence of the security forces which are in collusion with Hezbollah.
Is this what the West and the international community want? A war between the Lebanese and the Iranian- Syrian terror tandem?
[The video is not loading properly. Here is a transcript of what a man on a motorcycle is shouting through a loudspeaker: ... [unintelligible] all commercial businesses on Friday. We are warning you, so do not later say you were not warned. To all the Syrians in Bourj Hammoud, vacate all commercial businesses and houses in Bourj Hammoud. You have been warned. ]
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