Ralph Lee Abraham is a Louisiana republican. Mixing his Lebanese descent's ultra-religious conservatism with the backwardness of Louisiana's southern conservatism is not new to the Lebanese American community.
This imbecile who has served as Louisiana's Surgeon General has halted his state’s vaccine campaigns and delayed warning the public about a deadly whooping cough outbreak. Because he's an idiot doctor who doesn't believe in science (???), he has secretly been installed - without fanfare - as the second-highest official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Department of Health and Human Services did not even announce this appointment. Abraham shares with the voodoo shaman Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., skepticism on vaccines. "Doctor" Abraham has promoted discredited COVID-19 treatments including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, although rigorous clinical studies had demonstrated ivermectin’s ineffectiveness against COVID-19.
In September, the conservative Lebanese American moron told news oulets that the COVID vaccine is “dangerous” and does not recommend it to his own patients. At a state legislative meeting last September, he claimed: “I see, now, vaccine injury every day of my practice” from COVID vaccines, though he did not specify the nature of these injuries. The claim contradicts extensive research showing COVID vaccines significantly reduce hospitalizations and deaths.
Many of today's Lebanese immigrants to the US are some of the most stupid and short-sighted Americans. They bring with them from Lebanon their ultra-religious barbarism and their religious hatreds (Christians vs Muslims, and vice-versa), as well as intra-religious sectarianism (Latin Catholics vs Greek Catholics, Armenian Orthodox vs. Armenian Catholics, Greek Orthodox vs. Maronite Catholics, etc....).
Nowadays, there is a syndicate of Lebanese-American Christians who want to turn Lebanon into another Israel, a christian one. It is understandable that many Lebanese Christians feel that their century-old attempt at finding a modus vivendi with the Lebanese Muslims has proven disastrous, and their immediate impulse is to seek a separation from the Muslims and a return to the smaller semi-independent Mount-Lebanon entity that existed prior to World War I.
But this poses a big problem for them: If they do separate and retreat into their Mount-Lebanon enclave, they stand to lose many of the cities and regions that define their pre-Islamic ideology as descendants of the Phoenicians. That was, in fact, the ideological drive behind enlarging the smaller but independent (from Ottoman Turkey) Mount Lebanon "Mutassarifya" in 1920 to the Greater Lebanon republic we know of today. This enlargement brought the Phoenician cities of Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre, as well as the Akkar Plain (north), the Bekaa Valley (east) and the Jabal Amel (south), all of which heretofore were part of Syria, into Lebanon. But it also brought a reluctant and large Syrian Muslim population into the country.
Hard as the French mandatory power advised them against this enlargment, the Christians did not listen to their French protectors who warned them that such a move would reduce them to a minority. But the arrogance and hubris stood in the way, and the small overwhelmingly Christian Mount Lebanon became the half-Muslim, half-Christian Greater Lebanon that has proven ungovernable, mostly because the Muslims never really identified as Lebanese. In Greater Lebanon, the Muslims cannot seek the presidency, reserved for the Christians under the constitution; the Muslims have co-religious sponsors around in the region (Saudi Arabia as the babysitter for the Lebanese Sunnis, and Iran as the nanny of the Lebanese Shiites). For these previously Syrian Muslim communities, they integrated Lebanon coercively and have yet to see Lebanon as their primary criterion of national identity; religious and sectarian affiliations remain deep and current.
Backed by beacons of oppression and backwardness, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, Egypt, Libya and others, the Lebanese Sunnis waged a war against the Lebanese State and the Christians from the late 1960s through the early 2000s, using the Palestinian guerillas as their militias. The Sunnis won and took control of the Executive power, sidelining the Christian president into a castrated figurehead. In turn, and backed by the "enlightenment" of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Tehran, the Lebanese Shiites waged a similar war against the Lebanese State and the recently-annointed Sunni masters over the country between the early 1980s through the present time. The Christians are sick to their stomach for watching the Muslim destruction of the nice country they managed to build since the 1940s.
So, a separation from the Muslims is, in and by itself, not a bad idea. I am all for it, but it has to be a reasoned, negotiated type of evolution of the Lebanese political system. This could be done in stages, beginning with an enhanced decentralized management in which local governments acquire more of the decision-making, and gradually moving to a federation or confederation between various more or less homogenous regions and districts. Moreover, this modification of the system of governance should be the product of the Lebanese themselves, and not something that is imposed by the outside.
South Sudan is a negotiated Christian secession from Muslim-dominated Sudan. Pakistan is a negotiated Muslim secession from Hindu-dominated India. Both have more or less worked. But Kosovo is a non-negotiated Muslim secession from Christian Serbia imposed by the West and it has hardly worked. Israel is a non-negotiated Jewish (although non-native foreign colonial) secession from Muslim-dominated Palestine imposed by the West.
But what the dumb Lebanese-American "representatives" of Lebanon's Christians in the US want is what amounts to a catastrophe of demographics, an orgy of violence, in which they clone the Israeli macabre experience of separation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and land theft. And they expect the United States under Trump to deliver. Their "proposal" includes:
- Evicting (ethnic cleansing) the Shiite Muslims from the south of the country. In this project, they want/imagine the Shiites gone, just as Israel wants/imagines the Palestinians gone: Ethnic cleansing and land grab. In fact, they model their ethnic cleansing on the Israelis: Somehow drive the Shiites from the south and up to the Bekaa Valley where they might be forced to settle for good, just as the Zionists want to drive the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank into the Sinai and Jordan, respectively. This would premit the Christians to retain the Phoenician sities of Sidon and Tyre. There are a few ancestral Christian villages in the south whose existence precedes the islamization of the country in the 7th century, unlike the Zionist Jews who had no established presence (no towns, no villages,....) in Palestine for 2,000 years. Now they only have "settlements".
- Like the Zionists did by forcibly gathering every willing Jew they could find around the world into Palestine to artificially raise the proportion of Jews in the demography of the new country, the Lebanese-American savants want to uproot all the Christians of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and anywhere else in the Levant - and perhaps even the Egyptian Coptic Christians - from their pre-Islamic ancestral lands and move them to the Lebanese south to replace the Shiites. Thus millennia of Christian existence across the Levant would vanish to no return, and all the Levantine Christians would become concentrated in Lebanon (assuming they overcome their miserable divisions into a pleiotropy of Catholic vs. Orthodox ethnic and national sects).
- As for the Sunni Muslims of Lebanon, they can stay in their seacoast cities (Tripoli, Sidon, Tyre...) as long as they keep their mouths shut and don't complain as a minority in a Christian-dominated Lebanon. The current love fest between the Sunni Arabs, the Zionists and the Americans should provide some assurances to the Christians of Lebanon against potential Sunni barbarity, although such assurances would last as long as the love fest is ongoing. But history tells us that these love fests, based on oil and greddy capitalism, never last forever. Lebanon's Sunnis in such a future Christian Lebanon would be like the 1948 Palestinians who stayed in their lands after the creation of the artificial "State" of Israel. A 20% minority without much say in the governance, with a few decoy representatives in the Knesset with which the Zionists can claim to be "tolerant" and "democratic".
- Meanwhile, the national ethnic pockets that seem to be emerging in the region are used as a model. If the Alawites of the Syrian coast, the Kurds of the Syrian northeast, the Druze of the Syrian south, the Jews of Israel... are all non-Muslim or non-Arab enclaves that are either established or on on their way to some sort of separation from the rest of the Arabian peninsula, why can't a mostly Christian Lebanon also emerge?
Thus, in this scheme that is cloned on the Israeli model, the Lebanese Christians would rule the country again.
Where their decerebrated brains fail:
- Creating another "Israel" in the Levant is not an appealing proposition in general for the West. Unless one assumes a gigantic Crusade on the part of West to essentially de-Islamize the Levant, with troops on the ground and western settlements and the whole caboodle of colonialism and colonial rule, this is unacceptable for the west.
- The Lebanese Christian mindset is not like the Israeli Zionist mindset. The Lebanese Christians do not have the experience, the capabilities, the organization and the solidarity that made the Zionist Jews succeed in raping Palestine. Israel's success has much more to do with organization and manipulation of information than with military prowess. Without the American umbilical cord that feeds Israel with money, weapons, and propaganda, Israel would not survive.
- The Lebanese Christians and their moronic Lebanese-American advocates do not seem to have learned anything from their history with "Western help".
- They sought and obtained French protection for centuries, only to dastardly evict their own French protectors in 1943, when the French were on their knees during WWII. Not only did they engineer their own divorce from the West, but they did it to please the Muslims and the Arabs.
- They do not seem to have learned from Anglo-Saxon perfidy over the past two centuries. Not only do the protestant (and worse, Evangelical) Americans hate Catholics in general, they hate eastern Catholics even more. From American University of Beirut's origins in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College, a "religious" missionary institution that failed to convert those Arab Papists of Lebanon to protestantism, changing instead after WWI to its new and improved "educational" American University of Beirut (AUB) that still harbors bitter animus toward the Catholic Maronites. The custodians of AUB refused to associate their university with Lebanon's name after its independence because they never did recognize Lebanon as a legitimate nation, hence American University 'of Beirut', and not 'of Lebanon'. All of which driven by England's rivalry with France. Since Lebanon's Christians were Catholic France's favorites, the protestant Anglo-Saxons (English then American) did their best to undermine the Lebanese Christians by fomenting Muslim and Druze strife and uprisings against the Maronite Catholics ever since the mid 1800s.
- In more recent history, the descent of a briefly (1940s-1960s) glorious and prosperous Christian-led Lebanon into hell began in 1974. More precisely, the creation of Jewish Israel pushed Christian Lebanon into the background. The "Question d'Orient" of the 19th century concerned the Christian minority of Lebanon and the need to protect it from Muslim (Turkish then Arab) intolerance. Nowadays, the "Question d'Orient" concerns the protection of the Jewish minority in Palestine. In the mid sixties, the Palestinians began asserting their identity as a nation, and not as a herd of refugees expelled by Jewish and Zionist violence in Palestine. Lebanon welcomed hundreds of thousands of these refugees. With violence erupting between the Palestinians and the Israelis, the Christian Lebanese and their decent Lebanon ended up paying the price of that conflict. In 1974, Henry Kissinger sealed an agreement with Assad of Syria (soon to be placed on Kissinger's own State Dept's list of State Sponsors of Terrorism) in which Syria would relinquish its Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in exchange for being granted dominion over Lebanon. All Arab countries backed that arrangement because it contained the revolutionary Palestinians inside Lebanon. The "Civil War" broke out in 1975 between the Palestinians and the Lebanese Christians who saw Yasser Arafat and his PLO as an existential threat. The Syrians invaded and occupied the country to "manage" the conflict such that no one wins. Since the Palestinians are majority Sunnis, the Lebanese Sunnis coalesced with the Palestinians against the Christians and the State.
- Throughout the period from the late 1960s to some time in 2004, the Americans consistently sided with the Palestinians, the Lebanese Sunnis and the Syrian occupation against the Lebanese State and the Christians. In 1982, at the height of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the republican president Ronald Reagan sent the Marines to Beirut not to assist the Lebanese state, but to protect Arafat and his Palestinian guerillas as they evacuated Beirut. To replace the Palestinians, Khomeini's Iran stepped in, gave birth to Hezbollah in 1981 which proceeded to bomb the US Marines headquarters near Beirut Airport in the first ever terrorist truck-bombing attack. What did Reagan do? He packed his remaining Marines and fled the scene, abandoning Lebanon and its Christians to Syria and Iran. Why would he do that? He didn't want to upset the oil-drenched Arabs, primarily Saudi Arabia which wanted the Lebanese Sunnis in power in Lebanon to the detriment of the Christians.
- Again in 1988, the Americans chose to appease the Arabs and Syrian at the expense of the Christians. Republican George H W Bush and James Baker the Turd threatened the Christians with Syrian "chaos" if they do not vote for the Syrian-appointed puppet candidate for the presidential elections. The Christians rejected the said candidate and Syria unleashed a three-year long barrage of violence on the Christian enclave, killing thousands of civilians. It all climaxed in October 1990 when Bush recruited Assad's Syria into the anti-Saddam Hussein coalition and the prince was, again, Lebanon and its Christians. Lebanon was forced to sign the Saudi-American dictated Taef Agreement that pushed the Christians aside and elevated the Sunni Muslims to power.
And now, the Lebanese Christians and their American Lebanese moron representatives in the US still trust the republican administrations because they think, against reason, that the US will help them because they are Christians. The Americans, Trump in the lead, do not give a shit about Lebanon's Christians. Arab oil, billion-dollar deals in the Gulf.... those are the priorities for the US. Lebanese Americans are so naive to assume that the "new Middle East" of Trump and Netanyahu will somehow ensure not only their existence, but their domination of Lebanese politics.
The question is: Does Trump, who is dangling before the eyes of these Lebanese American morons the prospect of a Christian Lebanon as a copy-paste of Jewish Israel, understand the consequences of creating a Christian Israel-like entity in Lebanon, especially since he won't allow it to arm itself because it might pose a threat to its baby Israel? I think not. How can a Christian-only Lebanon defend itself against the multitudes of hateful Arab and Islamic governments that will undoubtedly emerge once the Trump mirage of this new Middle East vanishes?
Trump makes promises to these Lebanese American imbeciles who know he won't keep them. He has Israel, why would he invest into a Christian clone of Israel? He is driving Lebanon's Christians into the abyss and they are happily rushing to the edge like Moutons de Panurge. Proof is that successive US governments have rejected any empowerment of the Lebanese Armed Forces because, in their fallacious arguments, any strengthening of Lebanon's military capabilities poses a "threat to Israel", as if Israel is a baby in diapers rather than the hyper-militarized American military base that can reach anywhere in the region. "Threats to Israeli security" is a red herring, a pretext to promote Israeli expansionism and land theft. Why would Israel, that can strike Tehran, Dubai and literally anywhere at any time it wishes, be afraid of a demilitarized independent sovereign Palestine free from Zionist occupation, brutality and racism? Why would Israel need a Christian clone next to it that is incapable of defending itself, and which Israel would have to defend?
I started this piece with Ralph Lee Abraham, the conservative American of Lebanese descent from Louisiana. He is a representative of that crop of Lebanese Americans who brought with them stale conservative ideas from the homeland and who adapted well to the primitive ultra-religious conservatism of backward America. Very few Lebanese Americans escape this destiny, notably Ralph Nader who was a progressive thinker who revolutionized American car manufacturing.
Unless and until the Lebanese Christians join the modern world, exit their Bronze Age mindset and stop playing politics with absurd superstititions and emotions, they will continue to fall victim to the promises of republican crooks like Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump. That is at the heart of their many failures over several decades to be united, to chart their own course, and score one victory, rather that beg and beg those who hate them and repeatedly betrayed them to help them against other people who also hate them. Stop reducing your existence to a poisoned choice between Arabs and Americans.
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