Dinosaur Berri and America's Hatred of Lebanon's Christians

Nabih Berri has been Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament for 30 years. He is a Shiite Muslim, leader of the pro-Syrian Amal militia, and was first "elected" to the post in 1992 when the Syrian occupation forces of the dictator Bashar Assad had completed their takeover of Lebanon. 

Prior to the 1990s, Berri spent much of the 1980s massacring Palestinians (during the War of the Camps) in their refugee camps, attacking western forces and embassies in collusion with the other Shiite Muslim militia, the nascent pro-Iranian Hezbollah that was formed in the Bekaa Valley by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Berri also fought Hezbollah, in a fratricidal Shiite war over control of the Shiite Muslim herd. 

During his long tenure as Speaker, Berri flouted all the rules, made shady deals, acted on behalf of the Syrian dictatorship to repress any pro-democracy uprising in a Lebanon that had been vanquished by a collusion between the US and the West on one hand, and the autocratic repressive regimes of Syria and Saudi Arabia on the other hand. Under the impulse of the US whose sole concern is Israel's happiness, the international community agreed to place Lebanon under the Syrian Gulag with its assortment of human rights abuses, kidnappings and enforced disappearances, silencing of any opposition to the Syrian occupation, assassinations, and other forms of American-style hypocritical peacekeeping. Through the three decades as Speaker, Nabih Berri was the puppet of the Assad regime, serving as the Syrian coordinator with the Iranian theocracy and its local agent Hezbollah. 

The crushing and silencing by the US-Syria-Saudi alliance - sealed under the Taef Agreement signed in 1989 in the Saudi city of Taef - of the Christian community in Lebanon was a harbinger of what would be the worst twenty years for all the Christian communities of the Middle East. 

In Iraq, the Christians were displaced, massacred and evicted under the watchful eyes of the American occupation of the country.

In Syria, the civil war has all but eradicated the Christian community.

In Israel, the Christians of Palestine suffered the most from the Jewish occupation, particularly in Jerusalem where Christians are made to live in an open air concentration camp whose purpose is to slowly let the community die off: No passports, if you leave you can't go back, home demolitions, denial of building permits, cession of Palestinian homes to new Jewish colonists, etc. The last Israeli achievement was to kill the Palestinian Christian journalist Shireen Abu-Aqleh with a well-targeted Israeli sniper bullet to her head right between her helmet and her Press flack jacket.

In Egypt, the dictator Sissi is a friend of the US and Israel, so his persecution of Egypt's Coptic Christians is a no brainer. Killings, church destructions, harassment, forced conversions to Islam, murder of Muslim converts to Christianity, assassinations and imprisonment of journalists and civil society activists, etc. are a daily occurrence in Egypt.

There are no Christian communities to speak of in the US- and Israeli-friendly countries of the Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and others in the Gulf, so the relationship is smooth and unburdened by an annoying Christian community.

In the 19th century, the "Middle East problem" was the persecution by Arab and Turkish Ottoman Muslims of their Christian communities: Massacres and discrimination were rampant. Europe at the time intervened and secured some protections for the Christian communities. Nowadays, the "Middle East problem" has become the preservation of the ultra-religious Fascist artificial country of Israel, itself constructed over the corpses of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and millions of Palestinian refugees displaced both inside and outside Israel, to make way for European and American Jewish colonists who build their colonies over the ruins of nearly 600 Palestinian villages and cities. 

It seems that the United States has assumed the European guilt for the Holocaust and will acquiesce to any policy the pro-Israel lobbies impose on it. So it has decided to clear the Middle East of any native Christian presence, because it simplifies the otherwise difficult to comprehend complexities of the region: By eliminating the Christians - at least the traditional Catholic and Greek-Orthodox communities - the savant idiots of State Department can more easily intellectually fathom a simple Muslim-Jewish divide, without those bothersome Christians to muddy up the waters for them. Of course, the only Christians to thrive these days in the Middle East are the dumb American Southern Evangelical missionaries whose head is right up their Israeli bosses' caudal aperture. They are opening schools, converting thousands, and lobbying on behalf of all the atrocities Israel has been perpetrating.

What do the US Evangelical Missionaries want? They want the artificial and colonial enterprise called Israel, built over the cadavers of millions of Jews murdered by French, German, Italian and other European Fascists, and over the cadavers of millions of Palestinians, to succeed. Why do they want Israel to succeed? Because God says so in their trashy bible: Apparently, according to biblical garbage, in order for the Messiah Christ to return from his celestial vacation, he needs a Jewish Palestine, which is in the making in the form of the filth that is Israel. Once he is back, however, American evangelicals expect all Jews to convert to Christianity and accept Jesus as the Messiah. Those who don't accept Jesus will indeed be put to the sword. So the Israeli Jewish-Evangelical Christian love affair is predicated on a dangerous understanding for the Israelis.

I digressed from Nabih Berri, the pro-Syrian dinosaur who is about to be "elected" today for a seventh term as Speaker of the Lebanese parliament. His 30-year fornication with the Syrians and the Americans has given him sustainability, typical for traitors who work on the unprincipled fence of politics. We have not mentioned that his long tenure has allowed him to amass immense wealth, not from his salary as Speaker obviously, but from all the corruption and pilfering of public funds.

Congratulations, Mr. Berri. You have proven that bandits can become politicians, but while some bandits (like Robin Hood) steal from the rich to give to the poor, other bandits like you steal from the poor to enrich themselves.