Barbarity of the Syrian Regime

The Assad regime's brutality in Syria has been amply documented. Ironically, lucky are the Syrian people because these days Assad's executioners film themselves. 

For us, the Lebanese who lived 30 years under Syrian occupation (ca. 1973 - 2005), though this occupation continues today via the Syrian-Iranian proxy terror group Hezbollah, there were no cell phone cameras, no CNN, no live coverage of events such as we experience today. Yet, the brutality you will see in this video has been visited upon tens of thousands of Lebanese citizens who disappeared in Lebanon only to be found in Assad's abject prisons. 

To date, there are 17,000 Lebanese citizens who are believed to have ended up in Syria's dungeons, never to be heard from again. Dead? Still alive? No one knows. And the Lebanese government of Michel Aoun, a puppet of Syria, does not dare ask the Syrian regime about them.  In fact, Syrian jailers have a practice of changing the names and identities of those they hold, so that visitors or Red Cross officials can't track them. Not even the prisoners themselves remember who they really are after decades of torture and incarceration. 

Audio transcription of the video.

All victims are middle aged (30 - 60 years old) men. They all wear civilian clothes that appear relatively clean, as if these men were captured recently and did not spend time in prison or appear to have been tortured. They are all blindfolded with tape and have their hands tied behind their backs. It is clear they have no idea what is going on. They show no panic, they don’t talk or complain or beg for mercy. They obey and do as told. Their only indication of what awaits them is perhaps the gunshots they hear before their turn comes.

0:00:04               [Soldier]:            Come, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid

0:00:06               [Soldier]:            Stay there …. Stay there [inaudible]

0:00:13               [Blindfolded man in civilian clothes is pushed into a pit with dead bodies and tires]

0:00:17               [Soldier]:            Hey, hey …. [Two gunshots]

                           [Victim still moving]

0:00:22               [Soldier]:            …Son of a bitch didn’t die

    [Another gunshot]

                           [Victim is now motionless]

0:00:30               [Soldier walking 2nd blindfolded man in civilian clothes]:   Careful, careful

0:00:33               [The man is pushed into the pit]

                           [Gunshot]

0:00:41               [Inaudible]

0:01:02               [Footage of soldier walking a 3d civilian victim to the pit]

0:01:03               [Soldier]:  This way, this way…

0:01:05               [Soldier]: A salute to the Master [Al-mouallem = المعلم = Master is possibly the nickname of the immediate officer ordering the murders, or is a reference to Bashar Assad, the butcher of Damascus]

0:01:07               [Soldier facing the camera]:        Most pleasant salute to the Master

0:01:09               [Same soldier]:  This is for his beautiful eyes and the olive-colored suit that he wears

0:01:15               [Soldier walking a 4th man to the edge of the pit]

                           Right here… don’t move… don’t move

0:01:21              [Soldier kicks the man in the back pushing him into the pit]

0:01:25               [Gunshot. Man appears dead]

0:01:30               [Inaudible]

0:01:35               [Voice]: You confuse me, swear to God, you’re here and he’s there [inaudible]

0:01:40               [Sound of footsteps on rubble]

0:01:51               [5th man is pushed in the pit… followed by a gunshot]

0:02:00               [Camera scanning dead bodies in the pit]

0:02:06               [Gunshot into one of the bodies]

0:02:12               [voice]: Come up, come up, come up, come up….

0:02:15               [Soldier dragging a blindfolded 6^th man in white shirt]

0:02:25               [One soldier lifts his gun, while another pushes the 6^th man in the pit. Inaudible]

0:02:27               [Gunshot hits victim before he lands in the pit]

0:02:40               [6^th victim still moving. Another gunshot]

0:02:50               [Inaudible voices, followed by gunshot]

0:02:53               [Voice]: you wanna die? [Inaudible]

0:03:04               Come on, come on, come on…

0:03:06               [Footage of soldier marching a 7^th blindfolded man in civilian clothes]

                           Come on, quickly, quickly, come on, run, [louder]: I SAID RUN

0:03:10               [Man is pushed into the pit]

0:03:11               [Man utters a groan of pain]

0:03:14               [Gunshot into the 7^th victim]

0:03:19               [Footage of soldier aiming his machine gun into the bodies in the pit]

0:03:21               [Gunshot]

0:03:29               [Soldiers yelling…]: When I say run, you run, come on

                           [Inaudible]: Let this one go by the wall … Let him run

0:03:35               [Soldier]: Come up, come up, come up … come up, come up

0:03:44               [Soldier to another soldier]: Ok, let’s get it done, we can’t stay any longer

0:03:46               [Soldier]: Get up, get up, get up… get him up

0:03:48               [Footage shows soldier marching an 8^th man, holding him by the back of his shirt]

0:03:56               [Soldier is seen letting the 8^th man bump into a wall at the edge of the pit,

then letting him tumble down into the pit]

0:03:59               [8^th victim is heard groaning and is moving]

0:04:04               [Gunshot]

0:04:11               [Voice]: Come on, climb, up, up

0:04:14               [Footage of one soldier handing a 9^th blindfolded man to another soldier]

0:04:20               [Soldier positions the 9^th man facing the pit]

0:04:28               [Soldier directs the 9^th man to walk; he falls in the pit and is shot while falling]

0:04:34               [9^th man is still moving. Second gunshot]

0:04:40               [Another gunshot]

0:04:42               [Voice yelling]:  Get up, climb, come up here, up here, up here

0:04:55               [Footage shows soldier with a 10^th blindfolded man]

0:04:57               [Footage shows soldier directing the 10^th man to walk]

                           [10^th man appears to acquiesce and walks into the pit]

                           [The 10^th victim is shot during his fall and is heard screaming]

0:05:07               [Gunshot]

0:05:14              [Inaudible voices]

0:05:17               [Voice]: no, leave him

0:05:20               [Voice]: … with me, with me, come on, with me, with me

0:05:28               [Voice]: … Come on, up, up, come up, come up

0:05:35               [Inaudible voices, while an 11^th man is led to the pit]

                           [Voice]: Come on, quick, quick

0:05:42               [Footage shows soldier walking the 11^th victim to the edge of the pit]

0:05:45               [Soldier makes the man face the pit and instructs him to walk]

0:05:52              [Soldier]: Ok, one, two, three [11^th victim starts walking and is shot while falling]

0:06:00               [Two successive gunshots]

0:06:08               [Gunshot]

0:06:12               [Gunshot]

0:06:22               Go ahead, climb, come up, up, up … [inaudible]

0:06:29               [Voice]: Ok, come on you jerk [inaudible]

0:06:32               [Gunshot]

0:06:35               [Voice]: Any others?  Huh?

How the Lebanese Lost their Phoenician Identity

Phoenicia was part of the Roman Empire during the early centuries when Christianity was a growing religion. Beirut was the seat of a major Roman Law School where many famous Roman jurists taught and practiced law. The Law School was destroyed by a tsunami circa 550 CE, when a quake in the Mediterranean sent a massive wave that completed covered the city. To this day, in downtown Beirut, you'll see the Roman city still buried under about 100 feet of sediments on which the modern city is built. The city of Beirut today has retained its Roman motto, "Berytus, Nutrix Legum" (Beirut, nourisher of law).

Three ways by which Lebanon lost its Christian identity:

One: The Early Christian Church* Killed Lebanon's Phoenician Identity

In 313 CE, Emperor Constantine issues the Edict of Milan, which granted Christianity legal status. Yet, traditional Roman beliefs remained dominant. 

 

In 325 CE Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicaea, which was a gathering of Christian leaders to determine the formal beliefs of Christianity.

 

In 380 CE, Emperor Theodosius issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. This is where the Christian establishment turned into a dictatorial theocracy that began persecuting all other religions, including most other Christian sects, as heretical. Roman gods were substituted for Christian gods, statues and temples were destroyed, prominent pagans were crucified, and properties confiscated by the Roman state.

Soon after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire (380 CE), the leadership of the Church in every corner of the Roman world adopted a radical, extremist, and brutal approach in converting the people of the Empire, not very different from what the Islamic State (ISIS, Daesh) does today: Vicious anti-paganism, persecutions, destruction of Phoenician temples or their conversion to churches, abandoning the Phoenician-Aramaic language and adopting Latin and Greek because these two languages were the official languages of the Roman Empire… One example of the brutality of the early Church is what happened to Hypatia of Alexandria, a woman scientist, philosopher and mathematician who was killed by a Christian mob in 415 CE because she defended heliocentrism (Earth orbits around the sun) against the Church's idea that the earth is the center of the world. Well into the Renaissance, the Age of Reason and up to the French Revolution, the Church was still persecuting scholars or scientists who made discoveries that ran counter to backward and primitive Church principles: Galileo in the 1600s is one example.

In other words, I blame the Christian religion and the early Church for destroying Lebanon's Phoenician identity. Instead of “bad” Phoenicians, we were forced to become “good” Christians. Our temples were destroyed or became churches, our gods became Christian saints, etc. The Lebanese landscape, from the narrow seacoast up the highlands, is dotted with abandoned Phoenician sites, temples and places of worship. More for political reasons than for dogmatic differences, the Phoenicians were despised by the old school Jews of the Empire (who rejected Christianity), as well as the new Jewish movement called "Christianity"; the Phoenicians were constantly berated for having carried out human and animal sacrifices, while the Romans were still crucifying prisoners, holding slaves, feeding  Jews to wild animals in the arena, among other "civilized" accomplishments of the Empire. Then when Islam arrived in the 7th century, things got even worse, as we were forced to adopt Arabic and abandon the use of our Phoenician language, the last shreds of which remain in a few rituals in the Maronite church. Even today, the Maronite Church pays only lip service to our original identity. It prefers that we remain only “Lebanese Christians”, because awakening the Phoenician heritage poses a threat to the Church. A re-awakened Phoenician identity might push the Christian identity to second rank, enhance civilian secular rule (at the expense of the Church’s authority and power), and possibly unify the Lebanese people, Christians and Muslims behind it, thus diminishing the role of the religious establishments (Christian and Muslim alike) in controlling their people. The Church in Ireland faces the same problem: A Celtic identity revival will unify the Irish people, weaken and potentially end the Catholic-Protestant divide, and relegate religious identity to second class, thus taking away from the Protestant and Catholic church institutions the power to control their respective herds by keeping them divided and separated.

For instance, why doesn’t the Church in Lebanon teach Syriac/Aramaic/Phoenician in its schools to promote the Phoenician identity? A simple comparison between Lebanon and Ireland shows that the Irish were made Christians by Saint Patrick in the 5th century, just as Saint Maron did with the Maronites. Yet the mostly Catholic Irish people retained their Celtic identity, their Celtic traditions, and their Celtic language for centuries, despite their later occupation and oppression by the Protestant English. Even today, the Irish teach Celtic in their schools and use it as an official language, they celebrate Celtic rituals, use Celtic names etc. while at the same time learning and using English. The Irish Catholic Church has lost a lot of ground because of this Celtic revival. The Irish kept their ancient identity alive while adapting to changing circumstances. Lebanon’s Phoenicians (and their language and culture) began disappearing the moment they became Christians, and the little bit of the Phoenician left in them was eventually completely erased by Islam. Today, Lebanon’s Christians pride themselves on learning and speaking Arabic and do not find it “useful” to learn Aramaic. Why? They can make money with the Arabs, while learning Aramaic as a part of their identity is considered a waste of time.

Two: Antisemitism. After Napoleon invaded and "re-discovered" Egypt (taking with him scientists, engineers, linguists, archaeologists, historians etc.) in the early 1800s, there was a renewed recognition by Western academia that the Near East may have been the precursor of European culture, while the Greeks and the Romans were mere recipients and transformers of Near Eastern culture. However, the wave of antisemitism that was spreading in Europe due to the rise of nationalism, made it difficult for scholars to admit to themselves that Semites (Egyptians, Jews, Phoenicians) could be the progenitors of Western civilization. Therefore, any evidence of Phoenician, Hebrew, or Egyptian contributions to European culture were denied, hidden, rejected. Two fascinating books detail this phenomenon: 1- "Black Athena" by Martin Bernal, and 2 - “Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean” by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz”.  

In this second book, the author attacks what she calls “Hellenocentrism”, i.e., the idea that Greek culture (and by extension European and western culture) spontaneously arose in the Mediterranean, without any contributions from Phoenicians and other Near Eastern civilizations, and this despite overwhelming linguistic, agricultural, genetic and historical evidence. Lopez-Ruiz promotes the idea that the Phoenicians, long before the Greeks, established themselves across the Mediterranean and laid the foundations for what later became Greek civilization. Suffice it to mention the phonetic alphabet which was developed by the Phoenicians (who in fact borrowed the idea from an early phoneticization by the Egyptians of their hieroglyphic writing), then passed on to the Greeks, and the recognition by the Greeks themselves that Europa, a Phoenician princess from Tyre abducted by Zeus and taken to Crete, gave her name to the European continent.

Three: The Silence of the Phoenicians. For a not-so-mysterious reason that is difficult for the Lebanese to admit today, our Phoenician ancestors themselves did not leave any recognizable body of literature. It is possible that they did and that those texts never came down to us. But the fact we have to deal with is that the Phoenicians, unlike all other contemporaneous civilizations, did not seem to have written about themselves or their own history; they perhaps were more busy trading and traveling. They left us no known book or books that speak to future generations. Only a few inscriptions here and there. By contrast, the Assyrians wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Jewish people wrote their own mythology in the Bible, the Greeks left us the Iliad and the Odyssey and a monumental record, and so did the Romans. The Egyptians left monuments, manuscripts, and wall writings. But the Phoenicians left very little, which does not help us, their descendants, to assert their contributions to human history and civilization. 

* By "Church" is meant the broader universal Catholic Church, but more specifically in the case of Lebanon, the Maronite Church which is an Eastern Catholic Church that is dogmatically independent of, but politically-affiliated with, the Roman Catholic Church.

Zelensky and Trump

 A picture is worth a thousand words....

America might re-elect the dumb crook Donald Trump in 2024. If you think, as I do, that Ukrainian President Zelensky is a hero for standing up to Trump's idol, Russian dictator Putin, just look at Zelensky's stare and see what he thinks of the dumb crook Trump.

Fellow Lebanese: Vote for Total Strangers

1988-1990: Lebanese Christian strongmen, Michel Aoun and Samir Geagea, destroy Christian Beirut in an internecine fratricidal war for dominance over Christian leadership. Aoun is against the Taef Agreement, while Geagea supports it. Aoun is against the Syrian occupation, while Geagea tolerates Syria's occupation of Lebanon.

34 years later....

2021-2022: Lebanese Christian strongmen, Michel Aoun's son-in-law Gebran Bassil and Samir Geagea, are still fighting for dominance over Christian leadership. Aoun now supports the Taef Agreement, while Geagea is now against it. Aoun is a puppet of the Syrian regime, while Geagea is against Syria's interference in Lebanese affairs.

Same people, same politicians (or their sons, daughters, wives, brothers, sons-in-law...), same problems, except the politicians have reversed positions on these problems.

Yet, the Lebanese people, educated though they may be, are essentially uncultured, uncivilized, and hold beliefs from the Bronze Age. At least within the Christian population, people are still divided over Aoun and Geagea - imagine, 34 years later - and over who is pro-Syrian and who is anti-Syrian.

Naturally, the huge waves of emigration and the attachment of expatriate Lebanese to their country of origin, provide some relief from the barbarity and backwardness of the resident Lebanese. The resident Lebanese believe more in miracles, saints, fortune tellers and such other charlatans than in modern ideas from science and societies. They are rude, have no idea what waiting in line is, or what a lane on a road is, they drive like aggressive maniacs, and have little respect for their environment, their roads and streets are littered with garbage, their soil and air are heavily polluted...And they continue to vote for the same politicians who were the warlords that killed and destroyed their country 34 years ago.

On the other hand, expatriates and emigrants learn from their new countries how societies are managed and how governments work. They become cultured and civilized (e.g. they wait in line, are courteous with strangers, drive with respect, obey the law, etc.). They become scientifically literate and bring in new ideas from technology, science, governance, and cultural advances in general. They become more sensitive to issues of racism and sexism. They understand the relationship between a clean environment and their physical and economic health....And they represent the only hope left for the country to emerge from the cesspool of religions and sects and tribes and feudal parties. Which is why their vote, if they are allowed to cast their votes in the upcoming legislative elections, is so important.

So the message to the resident Lebanese imbeciles: For once, only once in your lifetime, try to be creative and unpredictable:

VOTE FOR A COMPLETE STRANGER. On the ballot, ignore all names you have heard for decades like Jumblatt, Gemayel, Chamoun, Frangiyeh, Aoun, Bassil, Miqati, Karame, Geagea, Arslane, Mouawad, Hariri, etc... and choose a name you've never heard before, the name of those who might - just might - change how this tormented country is run. 

With the old corrupt political farm families, you know for sure that your miserable lives won't change, your children will continue to emigrate, you'll still have to beg and bribe to get anything done, your businesses will continue to falter....

With a new crop of strangers in parliament, there is a chance that things might begin to change. These strangers hail from a whole range of backgrounds, and many are professionals (teachers, engineers, managers, doctors, researchers, lawyers, etc.). 

DON'T FALL FOR THE LIES OF THE ESTABLISHMENT POLITICIANS. They are incapable and unwilling to change. VOTE FOR COMPLETE STRANGERS, and try them for just 4 years. If these strangers can't turn the country around, you can go back and vote for your favorite dinosaur and neanderthal from the political family farms.