Gebran Bassil holding a rocket gifted to him by his Hezbollah buddies for his undying support to Hezbollah's activities and rape of the country. His smile was in response to someone who suggested to him what to do with the autographed toy rocket.
Gebran Bassil is one of many Christian Lebanese leaders. But unlike all the others, he is solely responsible for assisting Hezbollah's rape of Lebanon and for the situation in which the country finds itself today.
1. Bassil reversed the political line of his father-in-law Michel Aoun by forcing the senile old man to become an ally of his erstwhile enemy Hezbollah and signing a 2006 Memorandum of Understanding with the Iranian terrorist organization; and
2. By creating a Christian political party (Free Patriotic Movement, or FPM) that is a rare Christian vassal of Muslim Hezbollah. In so doing, Bassil has provided a Christian fig leaf of respectability and acceptability to the fundamentalist terrorist organization.
Bassil knew all along that his alliance with Hezbollah would be a disaster for the country. Yet he pursued it for the sole objective of using Hezbollah's parliamentary bloc to get his senile incontinent father-in-law Michel Aoun elected to the presidency. Once in the presidency, Aoun's term turned into a do-nothing debacle of financial collapse that climaxed into Hezbollah's near seizure of power (via Aoun), the collapse of the economy and the domestic currency the Lira, and the Beirut Port explosion. Bassil supported Hezbollah's continued warmongering against Israel by pretending to buy into the pretext of a hypothetical Israeli occupation of disputed tiny strips of land along the border, something he used to denounce before 2006.
Then, when it became clear to Bassil that his vassalization to Hezbollah is not turning the country around from corruption and lawlessness, and that the mounting rejection of Hezbollah by the Lebanese population and the international community is putting his political future at enormous risk (he is under sanctions by the US Treasury), he made a shameless U-turn without in the least apologizing to the Lebanese people. Bassil is now, again, kind-of, sort-of anti-Hezbollah.
In 2006, Bassil switched from his denunciation of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization created by Iran and beholden to Syria's Assad to defending Hezbollah's "resistance" charade. Whereas in the past he and Michel Aoun decried Hezbollah as a pro-Syria, pro-Iran terrorist organization, Bassil re-wrote the entire narrative of his party once he signed the MoU with Hezbollah: Syria was no longer an enemy but an ally. Israel was longer an indifferent secondary actor but became the enemy. Hezbollah was no longer an Iranian terrorist organization but a Lebanese national resistance. The Shebaa Farms was no longer a big lie invented by Syria's Assad to maintain the pretext of Hezbollah's resistance, but Lebanese territory that needed to be liberated, etc... The reason politicians like Bassil have the gall to completely reverse their political positions is because the Lebanese people are trained slaves who follow leaders like sheep and never hold them accountable when they veer off the principles for which they were initially voted for. When you speak to the average Lebanese, they curse and criticize the people they voted for, then vote for them again and again....
Some time around 2024, Bassil felt the winds of change: By then the Lebanese people have had it with Hezbollah, and Bassil and his FPM realized that Hezbollah was toxic and that its toxicity was preventing the country from recovering. More to the point, Bassil began losing popularity among the Lebanese Christians because his alliance with Hezbollah brought nothing but disasters to the Christians and the country at large.
For one thing, Bassil himself wanted to lick the boots of his American enemies so they lift the sanctions off him. Some of his enslaved co-conspirators in his Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) began peeling off and quitting the party. They - Ibrahim Kanaan, Simon Abi-Ramia, Alain Aoun (a nepotistic nephew of the senile old man) - are MPs who are as responsible as Bassil for the damage done by Hezbollah to the country because they defended it and used it to scuttle the work of Parliament for years.
But like Bassil, some time around 2024 they began realizing the predicament in which they had put themselves and the country. So Kanaan, Abi-Ramia and A. Aoun slowly and almost silently, so as not to raise the ire of their Christian followers, walked out of the FPM without offering any explanation as to why they were suddenly reversing course, again. Unfortunately in Lebanon, the Semitic tribal-European feudal hybrid sociopolitical system precludes the people from holding their representatives accountable. Even as they hate their representatives' corruption and lack of principles, Lebanese voters are generally morons who continue to vote for the same criminals and corrupt politicians they otherwise criticize and curse.
Other ardent defenders of Hezbollah from the FPM, like Lebanese-American Tony Haddad and Gabriel Issa, joined Michel Aoun and Gebran Bassil in 2006 and metamorphosed themselves overnight into Hezbollah lovers (their argument being that the Muslim Shiite fundamentalist terrorists are "better" than the Muslim Sunni fundamentalist terrorists),. Never mind that they spent decades lobbying some Zionist members of Congress (e.g. Eliot Engel) in Washington DC against Syria's sponsorship of Hezbollah. At this time, these chameleons have suddenly disappeared from the political scene. Issa who was rewarded by M. Aoun with the Lebanese ambassadorship in DC for a couple of years is nowhere to be heard or seen. No one knows where he is hiding now after having once declared that "Hezbollah should multiply its missiles stock in the south by hundreds and thousands in southern Lebanon". It is not known if Issa has recovered the naturalized US citizenship he had to surrender to become Lebanon's ambassador to the US.
For his part, Tony Haddad who owned a gas station in Washington DC for a while tried to shove himself in the Hezbollah-Israel negotiations over the maritime borders and offshore gas explorations along the Lebanon-Israel maritime borders. Apparently, Haddad felt that his owning a gas station made him an expert in offshore gas exploration!! In addition, he believed that his ties to Eliot Engel, the Zionist Congressman for New York, and his rapprochement with Hezbollah following Aoun-Bassil's signing of the MoU with Hezbollah in 2006, made him uniquely positioned to lead the negotiations. But, Bassil is an autocrat imbecile who wanted the gas exploration experience all to himself and hates competition, so he summarily kicked Haddad out of his father-in-law's presidential palace. Again, no one knows what has happened to Haddad and where he may be hiding.
Given the untenable position of the FPM as a supporter of Hezbollah, albeit a more timid one right now, under the present conditions, Bassil is trying to walk a Jesuitic fine line. He cannot get himself to denounce, like Hezbollah, the trilateral (US, Lebanon, Israel) Framework Agreement as an act of treason, nor can he endorse it for fear of alienating himself with Hezbollah. So he showed up the other day at the "palace" of neanderthal Shiite leader, Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri and made some vacuous statements that reflect his non-committal and his fence-sitting. He couldn't clearly endorse President Aoun's negotiations with Israel, nor could he frontally attack it. Instead, he stated that the Framework Agreement between Israel and Lebanon "requires responsible engagement" and emphasized that it "will be beneficial if all our rights are restored, but it will be dangerous if it is a recipe for civil war." You see, Bassil still hopes, like most Maronite Christian leaders in Lebanon, to become President one day. So he has to speak from both sides of his mouth to stay on good terms with everyone, which means he has nothing of substance to say. Like a eunuch, he is willing to give up his Christian balls in order to gain access to the Shiite Muslim harem.
Bassil urged that all parties "must avoid falling into this trap" and stressed the need for "responsible engagement" to ensure the agreement leads to "liberating the lands, strengthening the state and establishing peace" rather than internal strife. He also previously indicated that the MoU he signed with Hezbollah remains a priority "but needs improvements" to address current challenges, warning that failing to implement it could lead to reconsidering the alliance. What a jerk. He cannot get himself to admit that he made a strategic mistake by enabling Hezbollah's destruction of the country, as he fears for his dwindling and nearly extinct popularity among the Christian community. But he tries to buy the little popularity he has left by "threatening" Hezbollah with "reconsidering" his alliance with it. Yeah, there's still time for this idiot at this midnight hour to reconsider an alliance that not only did fail as expected, but that has long been dead. Bassil's failure to admit that failure is as tragic as it is pathetic.
Hopefully, the Lebanese people, the Maronite Christians in particular, will hold this traitor accountable for what his alliance with Hezbollah has done to their country.
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