Syria is Lebanon's Enemy Number One

Here are some elements to consider in determining whether Syria is a "sister" country or Lebanon's Enemy number one:

- Since independence from the French Mandate in 1943 (Lebanon) and 1946 (Syria), Syria's successive governments (established by one coup d'etat after another between 1946 and 1970, then under the Assad regime from 1970 to date), have refused to recognize Lebanon as an independent nation. Just as Russia views Ukraine as a renegade province of its empire, or just as Saddam Hussein considered Kuwait a renegade province artificially created by British colonialism, Damascus sees Lebanon as a Syrian territory that was separated from the fantasy of Greater Syria by the French, when in fact Lebanon had freed itself of the Ottoman occupation in as early as 1840-1860 under the internationally sanctioned Règlement Organique. Between 1943 and 2005 (62 years), Syria constantly refused to exchange ambassadors with Beirut, but it was finally forced to do so after its assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and the end of its occupation in 2005 when its troops were evicted by an angry Lebanese population.  

- Syria refuses to this day to delineate the border between the two countries, leaving it as a porous passage for weapons and terrorists, and over the past decade for the smuggling of Lebanese government-subsidized goods (i.e. cheap) into Syria where they are re-sold for higher profits, including flour, gasoline, medicines and the like, while the Lebanese people suffer from the scarcity of these commodities. This disastrous smuggling enterprise is carried out by Syrian pseudo-refugees who move freely across the border, with the support of the Hezbollah militia which also generates profits to fund its illegal activities. Between the 1940s and 1960s, Lebanese leaders used to fear a Syrian invasion and repeatedly called for deploying UN forces along the Syrian-Lebanese border, while the Lebanese-Israeli border was quiet and governed by the 1949 Truce.

- Syria has supported various terrorist groups operating in Lebanon, all of which were created by Syrian Intelligence (Mukhabarat) for the specific purpose of undermining Lebanon. Other than the Fascist SSNP (Syrian Social Nationalist Party) which staged a failed coup d'etat in 1961 against the government of President Fouad Chehab, groups like the Yarmouk Brigades, the Palestine Liberation Army, the Saika, the Aasifa, the Youth of Ali (فتيان علي), the Oppressed of the Earth, and many many others were all creations of the Baathist regime whose job was to stir violence and undermine the stability of Lebanon. They fomented troubles under the guise of Arabism, Islamic fundamentalism, sectarianism, and other ideologies. A Lebanese Baath Party - a direct emanation of the Syrian Baath Party - fielded candidates in Lebanese elections under the Syrian occupation until this latest May 2022 election when the Baath and the SSNP were crushed by a Lebanese electorate and lost all their seats in Parliament to the benefit of a new generation of reformer MPs. 

- The Syrian regime would send these groups inside Lebanon across a porous border whenever it wished to pressure Lebanon. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, these groups would stage attacks against Lebanese police in various parts of the country, and against defenseless Christian villages near the Syrian border, thus stoking sectarian violence and tensions. The villages of Al-Qaa, Beit Mellat, and others (see also: https://www.annahar.com/arabic/article/570540-خمس-قرى-لبنانية-لا-يعرفها-أهلها-القصة-عمرها-59-سنة). In more recent years (2015), an example of the Syrian terror theater consisted of the Assad regime and its ally Hezbollah dispatching a contingent of 20 or so Daesh (ISIS) terrorists to stage a fake attack along the Syrian-Lebanese border on the peaks of the Eastern Lebanon mountain range. The "battle", as it were, between those fake Daesh and the so-called "protector" of Lebanon, the Iranian-Syrian bastard militia Hezbollah, was intended to scare the Lebanese and "prove" to them that Hezbollah and Syria were protecting Lebanon, especially its Christians. In that staged battle, which occurred in an area controlled by Syria's proxy Hezbollah, which raises the question of how could such a group of terrorists manage to reach the border without the assistance of Hezbollah and Syria, a confrontation with the Lebanese Army left many soldiers kidnapped, held in caves, then killed. Then, the heroic Hezbollah (but not the Lebanese Army) "rushed in" to defeat the Daesh numskulls, put them in air-conditioned buses and send them off to... where else? Syria of course. After this masquerade, Hezbollah then, and only then, allowed the Lebanese army to come in and clean up, in a humiliating moment for a sovereign country like Lebanon under the presidency of Michel Aoun.

- Leading up to the 1975 Syrian war against Lebanon, Hafez Assad, the butcher father of current baby butcher Bachar, took over power in Damascus in a coup d'etat in 1970. From that point forward, Lebanon was to become Syria's voodoo doll: blockades, border closings, interdiction of trade between Beirut Harbor and the Arab hinterland, incursions, invasions, massacres, occupation, and attempted coup d'etats.

- Assassinations of Lebanese leaders of all religious denominations. Any Lebanese or foreign politician, journalist, or religious figure who dared challenge Syria's brutal meddling in Lebanese affairs was assassinated. French ambassador Louis Delamare (1976), US ambassador Francis Meloy (1976), the journalist of Al-Hawadess Magazine, Salim Lawzi (1981), whose body was found in a ditch with his right hand melted in acid, Lebanon's Sunni Mufti Hassan Khaled (1989), President-elect Bashir Gemayel (1982), and many others during the years of the 1975-1990 Syrian war against Lebanon when Syrian troops still pretended to be an "Arab Dissuasion Force", then with Lebanon under a formal and direct Syrian occupation (1990 - 2005), then again after its troops withdrew from Lebanon (2005-to the present): Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, for whose assassination in 2005 two Hezbollah terrorists were found guilty in recent months by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon at the Hague, Samir Kassir, George Hawi, Gebran Tueni, Walid Eido, Pierre Gemayel, Francois Hajj, Wissam Eid and others, and more recently Loqman Slim in 2021 etc...

See an exhaustive list in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attacks_in_Lebanon; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_Lebanese_politicians

- After the PLO was evicted from Lebanon by the Israeli invasion of 1982, Syria and with it the new Islamic Republic of Iran (established in 1979) needed another decoy "resistance" to maintain the pretext for harassing Israel from Lebanon. Hezbollah was thus born and immediately engaged in a bloodbath of bombings and assassinations: The US embassy twice, the French embassy, the peacekeeping US Marines (with barracks at Beirut airport) and French Paratroopers (at Drakkar Compound) in simultaneous truck-bomb attacks in October 1983, the hijacking of TWA flight 847 in 1985, the kidnapping of university educators, clergymen, journalists who were chained in dingy basements throughout the 1980s and released one by one every time the West made a concession to Syria. The climax concession came when the US of George Bush Senior, needing Syria in the anti-Saddam coalition, essentially gave Lebanon to Syria which proceeded to bomb (in an unprecedented blind eye by Israeli air force) the presidential palace in Baabda and take full control of the entire country. Between 1990 and 2005, Syria directed all political life in Lebanon, installing puppet presidents, appointing prime ministers, extending the mandates and terms of otherwise defunct parliaments, not to mention the enforced disappearances of tens of thousands of Lebanese citizens, of whom 17,000 have been documented to remain in Syria's notorious prisons where torture is routine. Lebanese inmates would have their names changed, so when relatives inquire about them their incarceration would be denied.

- Syria today wants the 1.5 million Syrian refugees (over a 4 million Lebanese population) it evicted from Syria to stay in Lebanon and change the demographics of the country to its advantage. The vast majority of these refugees are supporters of the Syrian regime while pretending to flee from it. When elections are held in Syria, these refugees vote for Assad, march in the streets of Lebanon voicing their support for Assad, while claiming to be afraid of returning to Syria. Meanwhile, the hypocritical West and its NGOs give $100 a month to every Syrian refugee in Lebanon, which is more than what the average Lebanese makes these days, instead of encouraging the refugees to return to Syria. The NGOs can still pay the refugees $100 a month INSIDE SYRIA. The danger here is that, just as the Palestinian refugees came in 1948 and founded the PLO in 1965 and waged war on Lebanon, the Syrian refugees, now in their eleventh year in Lebanon, will one day wage a war on their host country, which is what the Assad regime wants. It tried and failed with the Palestinians, and now it will try with its own Syrian refugee population.

- One wonders if the West and its NGOs do in fact want to destroy the country of Lebanon, make it a substitute homeland for Palestinians and Syrians, and indirectly help Israel resolve its problem with the Palestinian refugees by eliminating the Right of Return. If the Palestinians and Syrians end up settling permanently in Lebanon, the country will implode because its status as a haven for minorities in this tormented Near East would come to an an end. The vast majority of refugees (Palestinian and Syrians) are Sunni Muslims, and if they permanently settle in Lebanon, this country will become another Sunni Arab country. Lebanon's Christians are the last enclave of free Christians in this Middle East, and is apparently a thorn in the minds of Western liberals whose bleeding hearts always favor their enemies, not their friends. Minorities are a bothersome factor for the simpleton minds of western liberals who cannot compute the complexities of the region. They prefer to reduce the complexity by eliminating all these other "lesser" variables, and so Lebanon must be eliminated. What an easier Middle East it would be if the West had only to deal with Sunni Arab Muslims and Jewish Israelis (as the current love affair between Israel and the Sunni Gulf shows). The West fought against Serbia's Christians to create two new Muslim sovereign nations in the heart of Europe (Bosnia and Kosovo); is it is too much to ask the West to protect the Christian minorities in the Middle East? When Lebanese Christians raise the problem of refugees overwhelming the delicate demographic balance of the country, they are attacked as racists, while the Israeli friends of the West and their NGOs, who have been slowly genociding and ethnically cleansing the native Palestinian population for 70 years, are patted on the back. There are no Christians left in Iraq and Syria, Palestinian Christians are under siege in Israel, and the Lebanese Christians are on their way to disappearing thanks to Western hypocrisy and cruelty. The West no longer needs the Christians of the Near East; it has Jewish Israel.

- The Shebaa Farms charade: The Shebaa Farms (a bald 38-square mile hilltop abutting the Golan Heights at the tri-border junction between Lebanon, Syria and Israel) is Lebanese territory assigned to Lebanon at the border demarcation in the late 1930s. As Riad Solh, the independence Prime Minister of Lebanon, tells us in his memoirs, the harassing Syrians invaded the Shebaa Farms in 1956, killed two Lebanese gendarmes, and seized the small territory. Lebanon, overwhelmed by a host of issues with the Syrian troublemakers, never filed a complaint with the UN about the seizure. Thus, during the 1967 and 1973 Syrian-Israeli wars, the Shebaa Farms were taken by Israel as part of the larger seizure of the Golan Heights. Since Israel technically took the Shebaa Farms from Syria, it can only legally return them to Syria. The only way for Lebanon to reclaim the Shebaa Farms as Lebanese is for Syria to first officially cede back the Shebaa Farms to Lebanon by submitting documents to the UN and officially relinquishing any sovereignty over the territory. Naturally, as part of its "always say no" rejectionist policies, Syria refuses to concede Shebaa back to Lebanon, thus giving Hezbollah the pretext that Israel "still" occupies Lebanese territory, which Hezbollah uses to claim it is resisting the Israeli occupation. Back when he was anti-Hezbollah during his Syrian-imposed exile of 15 years, the now traitor president of Lebanon, Michel Aoun, himself designated the Shebaa Farms as a LIE manufactured by Syria's Assad and the Iranian Ayatollahs to perpetuate the justification for the existence of Hezbollah as a "resistance" militia. Aoun has since made a 180 degree turnabout in exchange for becoming President. He not only is a supporter of Hezbollah, but he has become a Syrian-Iranian puppet President of Lebanon thanks to his erstwhile enemies. Finally, the US has recently recognized Israel's sovereignty over the Golan, and by extension over the Shebaa Farms as well, By not protesting this move, the Syrian regime and its Lebanese puppet government of Aoun have shafted Lebanon by by gifting the territory to Israel.

- Syria is more of an enemy of Lebanon than any other country can be. Counting the 50-year long intervention of the Baathist regime, including a 30-year direct and brutal military occupation (1975-2005), and counting the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese dead, maimed, and kidnapped by enforced disappearance who remain to this day in Syria's notorious jails, any harm done by the repeated Israeli invasions and occupations pales in comparison with Syria's horror balance sheet vis-à-vis Lebanon. 

- The Lebanese Christians must learn their lessons if they are to survive, namely that bravado and macho politics do not work with the West. The Christians have to first win the media war rather than the military war they already lost during the 1975-1990 war. Their losses over the past half a century are mainly due to two facts: 1- The West doesn't care for yet another (other than the Jewish) minority in need of protection, and 2- Lebanon's Christians remain abysmally conservative, ultra-religious, and Fascist to some degree, something a liberal West doesn't countenance. Lebanon's Christians must cease to appeal to the West as a religious minority in need of protection - perhaps change their name - and must instead turn politically to the left and adopt liberal platforms like the environment, social liberalism, women's rights, scientific literacy, and so on. Instead, Lebanon's Christians continue to wallow in antiquated religious beliefs from the Bronze Age. For example, the Maronite Church, just as the Muslim authorities, reject in toto the scientific basis of evolution; they both reject instituting a civil status charter outside the purview of the religious authorities (e.g. they reject civil marriages). Granted that Lebanon's Christians carry a heritage of religious affinities with Europe, but now that Europe has by and large abandoned religion as an identity maker, Lebanon's Christians must evolve and become a secular-minded community. The Israeli Left is an example: Jewish they are by history, but religious they no longer are, and they get much sympathy from the West. 

- Instead of erecting yet another statue of their numerous saints, Lebanon's Christians must erect laboratories and research institutes, they must protect their environment decimated by garbage, chemicals, and pesticides, they must believe their scientists rather than their very popular fortune tellers and religious charlatans. They must protect their forests, rivers and seacoast. They must adopt renewable green energy instead of importing and driving huge gas guzzling SUVs. Lebanese expats are successful in many of these emerging fields in their host countries, but never in Lebanon. Lebanon's religious establishments oppose government-mediated services (schools, hospitals, nursing care institutions, etc.) because if the State were to actually serve the Lebanese people, the religious authorities would lose money and their sway over a credulous population. In fact, the State spends more money on so-called religious charter schools (i.e. gives money to private schools) instead of upgrading the degraded and destitute public education. Lebanon's Christians must not wait for their country's incompetent and corrupt governments; they must implement de facto decentralization by adopting their own programs and policies aimed not only at making fucking money off tourists, but also to bring Lebanon up to par with advanced countries and elevate Lebanon's goodwill and reputation among the international community. Lebanon produces the largest number of Catholic saints per capita than any other country on earth. Two new candidates for sainthood were beatified two weeks ago by the Vatican. This will NOT help the economy, create jobs, fight poverty, clean the environment, and develop new technologies. It will be yet another occasion to erect more plaster statues across a landscape already littered with shrines, statues, churches, all basking in a sea of garbage, plastic bags and bottles, industrial waste dumped every which way on mountainsides, and all of which end up in valleys, rivers, and the Mediterranean ... No one seems to notice the sharp indirect correlation between being a self-declared highly religious community on one hand, and the abysmal state of affairs on the other. The Lebanese excel at looking cool but are very weak on substance. Intellectually they are lazy about details, do not do due diligence and lack humility before proclaiming their superiority, are scientifically and technologically illiterate, and do not read much. Every Lebanese is a general, rarely a soldier. Compounding this aspect is the megalomania they exhibit which rests upon a 3,000-year old Phoenician past they poorly understand and which they have failed to document to the world. All they know to do is sit in cafés, smoke water pipes, brag about their past, and claim that they love life while bathing in garbage. But loving life requires hard work to make/build your own life, not simply import it from the west. The Lebanese are fundamentally ashamed of who they are. Have you ever seen a Lebanese wearing the country's traditional clothing? Every self-respecting country will display their traditional costumes around their head of state, but not Lebanon. Take for example the Greek traditional Cretan Evzonas costume or the Scottish Kilt. They are worn by official guards in front of major government buildings. But the Lebanese are ashamed of wearing the Sherwal and the Lebbede or Tarboush, and an army guard wearing a vulgar military uniform walks the goose step all day long at the gate of the presidential palace. When Lebanese Army troops march in parades, they are made to jump like apes (supposedly in a sign of strength and readiness) instead of simply walking with pride, sobriety and discipline like parading armies do in the civilized world. Take a tour of Lebanon's villages, and you'll see garbage everywhere, illegal quarries that have disfigured the mountain sides, random chaotic constructions of ugly buildings and factories (with all the ensuing pollution and destruction) in the middle of forests and fields. Chaotic driving. Chaotic parking. Chaotic construction without respect for preserving the old and the environment. Lebanon is Chaos itself. And the Lebanese wonder they get no sympathy when they beg for the world's attention and help. Go figure.

The Shiite Mufti of Lebanon, Ahmad Qabalan: We Reject Deviancy; It won’t Happen in Lebanon

Both the Christian and Muslim religious establishments in Lebanon agree on one thing: The compulsion to ferret into and control people’s sex lives. Never mind that they both have for millennia mustered and encouraged untold levels violence, massacres, genocides, wars, and racism during the endless confrontations they have been engaged in against one another. These dinosaurs prefer death to anything. Christianity was built on martyrdom and on massacring non-Christians and “pagans”. Islam continues to elevate so-called “martyrs” who die killing their fellow human beings. The problem with religious people is that they know that sex is liberating, and they will do everything in their power to control their herds by seeking to impose restrictions on everything sexual: No sex before marriage, no marriage for priests [Catholic Church], no contraception, no masturbation, no adultery, no same sex, no display of female skin, etc. It seems that Islam and Christianity have been established for the sole purpose of controlling human sex, which means controlling women while excessive male libido is tolerated and even encouraged [up to four wives in Islam], when in fact human propensity for sex is what has allowed the species to prosper, multiply and dominate all life on earth. Shiite Islam allows “زواج المتعة” (Pleasure marriage) in which a man is legally allowed, in addition to his four wives, a number of temporary concubines.

The following is the translation of an article containing statements made by the Grand Shiite Mufti of Lebanon on the subject of homosexuality. His official title is the “Distinguished Jaafari Mufti” and his name is Sheikh Ahmad Abdel-Amir Qabalan. 

Mr. Qabalan issued a statement addressed “to anyone who wants to change the ethical identity of Lebanon: Ethics is a constituent, indeed existential, necessity for Lebanon, including human morality and the natural system that guarantees social morals. Some of the deviant murderers want to undermine human design and change the natural system to the benefit of the worst kind of human deviancy, and this is strongly rejected, and we will never accept it and it won’t happen in Lebanon. The danger is that judicial decisions are being issued to establish legal protection for the worst moral plague, along with promotional projects to pressure the spirit of Lebanon’s natural morality”.

“In any case, the issue of public morality is not a used car sales business or a game. It is a matter of identity and of human and natural roots touching on human existence. The sexual deviancy crowd are not rights militants but sick people whose natural place is in psychiatric health clinics. And here I say to lesbians and gays drowning in deviancy: Despite all the disasters that have struck Lebanon, the country will not become a tavern for sexual deviants. The solution is in psychiatric health clinics and not in legalizing and protecting deviancy. Whoever thinks that Gilbert Baker is a symbol for their inclinations, let them go to San Francisco where they’ll be closer to him than in Beirut. Whoever insists on practicing deviancy, let them make Manhattan a homeland for their emotional and psychological madness. When personal freedom collides with intrinsic natural laws, it becomes an enemy of nature and humankind”.

“We will not accept changing the laws of nature and man in this country. The matter is one of identity, fundamental laws, and eternal natural morality, far from the coffins of the pink triangle and the rainbow tombs reeking of psychological destruction and emotional madness”.

“Regarding civil marriage, I say: Make your state a secular state but keep the civil status [exclusively controlled by the religious establishments in Lebanon] away from political graves. Let us read together about the graves of civil marriage around the world because the matter is one of humanity and the creation; it is not a fashionable fad, a marketing promotion by fumbling groups who write family law with the alcohol of bars and taverns.”

Poisoning our Food: Former Health Minister Explains

Nader Hijazi
Translated from the Arabic original published on:
https://www.mtv.com.lb/News/مــحــلــيــات/1292854/اللبنانيّون-يأكلون-السموم-وأبو-فاعور-يكشف-معلومات-لموقع-mtv

As the economic crisis tightens its grip on every detail of our lives, food items that are of unknown origin and bad quality, and bearing weird brand names, are appearing in the market. Also, chronic power outages are causing great damage to meat and dairy products.

Recently published reports of poisoning cases have largely attributed these cases to food items whose shelf-life has expired. This includes flour, meats, and other items. One then asks what is the role of the Food Safety National Board that was born out of the Food Safety Act and the ensuing campaign led by former Health Minister Wa’el Abou-Faour between 2015 and 2017. Little has since been done, and scant attention paid to empowering the health inspectors and other human resources. The crisis in which the country has become embattled has created a new set of priorities in which food safety unfortunately appears to be on the bottom of the list. Exorbitant fuel prices and the collapsed purchasing power due to dwindling salaries have prevented the follow-up of reported cases, as happened in the Bekaa Valley earlier this week with the closure of four butcher shops.  

The daily raids and crackdowns that the inspectors used to conduct are virtually non-existent nowadays due to high fuel prices, ongoing strikes, and absenteeism. The greedy merchants of death have a free rein in the market and supermarkets, where they disseminate untested and unregulated brands, and whose poor quality is suspected from their unusually low prices. A simple example is the large size mortadella priced at 20,000 LL whereas other known brands sell at more than 100,000 LL.

Former Health Minister Abou-Faour, who was the star of the 2015-2017 food safety campaign, commented to MTV: “As a political party [with which I am affiliated], we did our duty in the Health Ministry and confronted with decisiveness and determination the greedy merchants and importers, and those ruling class politicians who support them. Before we left the Ministry, I pushed hard in Parliament for the passage of the Food Safety Act, which would institutionalize our campaign and not leave it as a one-off.” Abou-Faour goes on to say, “Unfortunately, the regulatory decrees and the formation of the Board were delayed, because at the start of the acute economic crisis, food safety was not seen as an important matter by the successive ministers, at least not beyond the daily routine, after we had transformed it into the highest priority, given what we witnessed in terms of scandals and crimes against the health of the Lebanese people”.

The former Minister expressed his concerns that the health of the Lebanese people is at risk and warned of the consequences of laxity in allowing these crimes to go unpunished. He urged the National Food Safety Board as well as the Health Ministry to seek the assistance of the international donor authorities in developing and empowering the Lebanese health teams and increasing their staffing, and to cooperate with Lebanese University. He also underscored the need to establish a national laboratory despite the exceptional circumstances in which the country finds itself.

Abou-Faour went on to express his “astonishment that some officials were surprised at the surge in Hepatitis jaundice cases”, adding, “has any of them bothered to look at the catastrophic results of the tests of water wells and public schools water, and even some hospitals? We are indeed giving the disease to our children”.

If You're Going to Lebanon this Summer

If you're going to Lebanon this summer,

Remember that Hezbollah has "granted" the country a temporary reprieve from the coerced compulsion to liberate Palestine. Of course, it did the same in 2006, but that reprieve was short-lived as Hezbollah tried to liberate Palestine by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers, which led to a month-long war of destruction and an emergency evacuation by boat of all westerners and Lebanese holders of dual citizenship.

Hezbollah has removed all the giant portraits of the Iranian Mullahs and other wannabe liberators of Palestine from the Airport Road, so as not to offend your eyes and the other visitors. But don't worry, if you are a lover of Hezbollah, rest assured that the portraits will be back once the season is over.  Now, only one giant portrait has resisted the shame, and that is Nabih Berri's, the dinosaur Speaker of Parliament in power since 1993. 

Nevertheless, as you exit the airport you'll have to negotiate utter chaos, garbage, and anarchic driving in the area leading in and out of the airport, which is under control and the surveillance of Hezbollah. Order and the rule of law seem to be counter to Islamic fundamentalists who prefer the rule of God. By relinquishing order and law to the purview of God, Muslim radicals leave everything into God's hands. For example, there is no need to properly sort and process trash for regular orderly pickup; just dump it right where you stand, and God will take care of it. Respect for pedestrians? What's the point? Their lives are in God's hands, not mine, so I drive like a maniac. 

Note that Maronite Catholics and other Lebanese Christians are not that much better; they too rely heavily on God's plan in their daily lives. Instead of protesting, they pray to the numerous saints that this sick country keeps producing at alarming rates. A few weeks ago, the Vatican beatified two Lebanese monks en route to sainthood. Strange how the worse a country is, the more saints it produces, and vice-versa. Civilized countries, Christian as they may be, rarely produce saints. It must be that the Vatican recuperates desperate people by sedating them with saints to attenuate their suffering. 

If you travel into the Christian hinterland of the Lebanese mountains, you'll also see garbage lining up the roads - garbage such as plastic bags, bottles, household trash "naturally" decomposing by the roadside, waiting for the rains to sweep all of it down the ravines and the gorges to the rivers in the valley, and from there to the sea. I recently took a trip from somewhere in the hills east-northeast of Beirut to the town of Zahle in the Bekaa Valley, and the magnitude of the trash and litter along the roadside is stunning. It has become an integral part of the landscape. I suspect most of the littering in this country is the grateful contribution of the Syrian refugees, not to mention the thefts, murders and other practices these Syrian victims of the Assad regime have brought with them.

Now, where you see clean streets and roads is a symptom of the class structure in Lebanon. Where rich people dwell, where the local political bosses live, or where the local bishop resides... those have to be clean. Municipality workers and garbage collectors will take good care of the upper class. For example, in a village that I recently visited the roads were dug up 2-3 meters deep, supposedly to install a sewage pipe system. Then according to the Municipality Chief, who is a shill for the feudal family that dominates here, the contractor in charge of installing the pipes failed for some reason to complete the project, so he refilled the trenches throughout the village and went home without re-paving the streets. The villagers and visitors have to drive and walk on rubble, potholes and such, except when the feudal boss or the local bishop decide to pay a visit to the village to rally - and pay for - votes in the recent elections. Suddenly, the main artery in the village was asphalted prior to the boss's visit, but not the side roads. Similarly for high-visibility tourism areas (downtown Beirut, Byblos, etc.), and embassy row (example, in Rabieh where many embassies and ambassador residences are located)... Those will have sparkling streets. But for the rest of us, it's Leonard Cohen's song in which "Suzanne will show you where to look among the garbage and the flowers". 

If you go to the beach resorts, know that the real estate on which they are built is public property stolen by affluent and politically-protected proprietors in collusion with dirty politicians. The law in Lebanon forbids the exploitation of public land, especially along the seashore. All civilized nations comply with international law stipulating the public nature of seashores, and guarantees ease of access by all citizens to them. But not in Lebanon. Dirty corrupt politicians have in the past suspended laws of that nature for 24 hours, enough time for their Mafiosi developers to purchase the land, after which the politicians revoke the suspension. Result: The land becomes the property of the developers who proceed to build their resorts right on the water front, between the sea and the highway, which blocks the view of anyone traveling on the highway. They naturally extort huge fees from tourists when their resorts are in operation. For example, valet parking is a form of extortion: You have no choice. There are no self-parking facilities. You have to surrender your car to the operators in exchange for exorbitant fees. The phenomenon of valet parking in Lebanon is tied to the megalomania of the Lebanese who like to think of themselves as Hollywood VIPs.

You'll also notice that filthy rich Lebanese - many of whom have made their money with all manner of corruption such as bribes, kickbacks and so on - will drive huge $50,000-SUVs with 4-digit plates and darkened windows: The message to other drivers is 'do not mess with me'. When these criminals go to their fancy beach resorts, they of course take their maids with them. But the rules of the resort stipulate that the maid - often from Africa, Bangladesh, Ethiopia..- with dark complexion is forbidden from swimming in the pool of the resort, lest her skin color stain the clear white water of the pool.

Be careful what you eat. The meat they serve you may have expired (they re-do the labels) or may not even be beef or lamb but from related bovine, ovine, or equine (e.g. donkey) species not regulated as edible, the vegetables you consume may be laced with chemicals or irrigated with sewer-contaminated water, the agriculture industry being poorly, if at all, regulated. To wit, on June 22, 2022, the Information Bureau of the Public Health Ministry issued the following statement: "After registering 50 cases of raw meat-related food poisoning in the Bekaa Valley, the Health Service performed tests in four butcher shops located in Saadnayil and Riyaq and two shops in Rachaya. The tests revealed that the meats sold in these shops were 'contaminated'. As a result, the butcher shops were ordered shut per warrant from the Attorney General. Thirty-seven cases required hospitalization..."

Finally, and this is the irony of Lebanon, emigrants and expatriates, who fled the country because of the nauseating corruption and incompetence of the ruling class, keep sending money to their resident relatives. In so doing, they keep the rotten economy artificially afloat, which the ruling class exploits by saying that things are just fine. If the expats stop sending money, their relatives suffer but the decaying economy is exposed. Yet, it is morally impossible to ask the expats to stop sending money. And the endemic malaise continues, as it has for 30 years.

Dying Nazis of the Near East

With the heartbreak that Syria has become, it must be getting harder for the followers of the Near East Nazi Party, a.k.a. the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) these days because the entire construct of their Fascist ideology rests upon the artificial country of Syria as its nucleus, and on the racial and cultural superiority of Syrians (i.e. the northern Semites) over the Arabs (i.e. southern Semites). And now in Lebanon's latest parliamentary elections in May 2022, the SSNP Nazis were crushed and lost the only seat they were hanging their future on. They are no longer represented in Lebanon's Parliament. The Lebanese people rejected these Fascist idiots and discarded them in the garbage where they belong.

Lest people forget, this Syrian Nazi Party was founded at exactly the same time - 1932 - that the German Nazi Party (Nazi = Nationalsozialist in German) was emerging in Germany. So, one plagiarist pseudo-intellectual named Antun Saadeh fell in love with Fascism and Nazism, and decided to clone the German Nazis in the Lebanon of the 1930s. You see, the Lebanese are very good at imitating others: copycat monkeys, copy-paste plagiarists. Whatever cultural trash the West leaves behind is picked up by the Lebanese as if it were gold. Too bad they don't pick up the good stuff from the West, the reason being that good stuff requires hard work (democracy, scientific literacy, etc.) and the Lebanese in general don't like hard work that requires thinking. They prefer sitting in cafés, smoking the hookah, stuffing their faces, driving fancy cars, and having others marvel at their "genius".

Here are some parallels between the German Nazis and the Syrian SSNP idiots:
1- Nazis: Racial superiority of northern Europeans over southern Europeans--> SSNP: Racial superiority of northern Semites (Syrians) over southern Semites (Arabs).
2- Nazis: Continuity of a German culture across vast swaths of central Europe --> SSNP: Continuity of a Syrian culture across vast swaths of the Near East.
3- Nazi flag: Swastika with red and black tones --> SSNP flag: Swastika with red and black tones
4- Brainwashed SSNP members salute their leaders with the Hitlerian Nazi salute.
5- Nazis: Worship "leader for life" Adolf Hitler --> SSNP: Worship Antun Saadeh as a "leader for life". Saadeh himself was an admirer of Hitler.
6- The anthem of the SSNP is sung to the tune of Das Deutschlandlied.
7- Nazis: glorified an ancient pre-Christian Aryan past and "One" German Aryan nation that needed to be re-united by force --> SSNP: glorifies an ancient pre-Christian Syrian past and "One" Syrian nation that must be re-united by force.
8- Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf" as a bible for his followers, and of course the plagiarist Antun Saadeh wrote his own bible, "The Rise of Nations".


Flag of the Syrian Nazi Party (SSNP)                      Flag of the German Nazi Party

Now that the artificial fake country of Syria has unraveled into the multitudes of ethnicities, languages, peoples, religions and races from which it was cobbled together, it must be increasingly difficult to sustain Antun Saadeh's fantasy racist idea of a united glorious Syria spanning from Iraq into Cyprus (Yes, Cyprus. The hallucinating Saadeh claims Greek and Turkish Cyprus to be Syrian!). 

There is no "nation" of Syria. There never was a nation called Syria. "Syria" always referred to the geographical desert region beyond the Lebanon mountains. As a desert it always had undefined borders which often overlapped with other historical Near Eastern regions like Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Phoenicia, etc.  Between 1920 and 1945, an artificial state called Syria was stitched together by the French Mandate, joining together culturally disparate desert cities (Damascus, Aleppo, Raqqa, Idlib, etc.). That state has now evaporated to no return. The French Mandate colonials fashioned this Doctor-Moreau monster to satisfy their Arab nationalist lackey, the self-proclaimed King Faysal, as a way to counter British influence. Never mind that the Kurdish people never got their state, even though they were the most deserving of one, and that many of the communities that make up the Near East have nothing to do with Arab or Syrian nationalism.

But just like the infamous Baath party (gone in Iraq, but extant in Syria), the SSNP thinks it can impose a monolithic identity on people, from the top down, by force. Jut read their founding texts: You are Arab because I (Michel Aflaq, founder of the Baath ideology) say so, and you are Syrian because I (Antun Saadeh, founder of SSNP ideology) say so. You have no other identity, and if you dare say that you are anything other than Syrian, then you are a traitor and you deserve death. If you do not know that you are Syrian, then we will make sure to indoctrinate you into knowing that fact. Luckily, the SSNP has never even touched the fringes of political power because it is such a fucked up idea to begin with. It even mounted a failed coup against the Lebanese government in the early 1960s. Unfortunately, however, the Baath Party in power in Iraq and Syria has wrecked these two states into the cesspools they are today, and Syria has been ruled for more than 50 years by the vulgar tyranny of the Assad family regime.

History always has a way to rectify things, and this is happening before our eyes. Forget Arab and Syrian nationalisms, and the Baath and the SSNP. They are as dead now as when they were born less than 100 years ago from the dense plagiarist copycat brains of Aflaq and Saadeh. What these racist Fascists do not understand is that genuine cohesive national identities emerge voluntarily from the bottom up, from local self-governments to larger aggregated federated entities in a willful act of gradual and painstaking unification. That is how civilized nations (e.g the European Union, the United Arab Emirates) with built-in diversity do it, which is why tiny Andorra, Lichtenstein, San Marino, Monaco, Luxembourg, etc. are sovereign nations respected and accepted by their European fellow members of the European Union. Not like Hitler who forced the Austrians, the Scandinavians and others to declare themselves "German" by force of brutality and occupation. Or like the defunct USSR that forced a whole bunch of ethnicities to become Russian. One example of how Arabs tried to unite from the top down is when the idiot dictator Abdel-Nasser of Egypt and his counterpart in Syria decided in the 1950s to unify Syria and Egypt, just like that with a stroke of a pen and over a cup of coffee. Naturally, the experiment failed within a few months. In contrast, the Europeans have been working on their union since the 1950s and they are far from achieving it. It takes very hard work, time, courage, discipline, commitment and most of all the buy-in of the peoples concerned with consultations, elections and referendums.

The heartbreak of Syria has many silver linings, one of them is the evidence of the death of racial nationalism in the politically primitive Near and Middle Easts. Thanks to the French revolution, Christian nationalism is already dead in civilized Europe but is still extant in culturally-backward countries like the US, Brazil and others. One more to go - Islamic nationalism - and perhaps the area will finally begin its journey to civilization and decency.

Sabra-Shatila vs. Damour: The Moral of the Story

[Reprinted from an older post]

Town sign of Damour after the 1976 massacre carried out by the Syrian Army and its Palestinian allies.

A large white X covers the entire sign which is "signed" (top center) with the Arabic word for Fatah, Yasser Arafat's Palestinian organization. In large black letters appearing to drip with blood is the word "moudammara" meaning "destroyed". Dammara is the Arabic verb "to destroy", which sounds close enough to "Damour" for the Palestinian thugs who wax poetic even as they murdered a thousand residents of the Christian town in January 1976.

If you ask anyone in the world today what they remember from the Lebanese War of 1975-1990, they'll say the "Sabra-Shatila" massacres. But ask them about the Damour massacre of 1976, and you'll see a blank stare in their eyes.

Even today on blogs by young people who live thousands of miles away from Lebanon and were born after that war, you'll see the brainwashing about the poor Palestinians and the bad Israelis who allowed the barbaric Lebanese Christian militias to enter the camps and carry out the massacre in September of 1982.

The really offensive and insulting aspect of all this, is that the Lebanese in these events are reduced to mere abstract agents of horrible behavior vis-à-vis the real actors - those who are worthy of our feelings of hatred and sympathy - the Israelis of course and the Palestinians of course as well. But the Lebanese, those who actually did the killing, are generally ignored. They are reduced, even as they were the killers, to a burden on the Israeli conscience which is presented to the world as the real moral dilemma in this one massacre of many that took place on Lebanese soil.

The Lebanese are deprived by the media of any human aspect that may explain their horrible conduct. The subtext is that the Lebanese Christian militiamen are incapable of moral conflict, they are (in the subconscious of westerners) incapable of questioning and doubting the moral value of their actions, and so we, westerners, don't even bother. We take it at face value that the Lebanese Christian militiamen cannot be driven by any human motive; they simply are subhumans and we do not ask the moral question when it comes to them. Just as we would not ask of a tiger who mauls someone at a zoo or a dog that suddenly attacks a baby, and so on.

On the other hand, we present the Palestinian refugees as the ultimate victims of this horrible crime, and here again - because the Palestinians, like the Christian militiamen, are Arabs - we don't even attribute to them any agency as to their fate. They are unwilling victims, and they have no say in their fate as victims, no responsibility, no moral issues behind their status of victims. But it is often left unsaid that the Palestinian refugees were made refugees, not by the Lebanese Christians, but by the European Jewish conquest of Palestine between 1920 and 1947 that evicted hundreds of thousands of Palestinian villagers and townspeople from their homes, demolished their ancestral stone houses and their olive groves, and created the state of Israel over the ashes of Palestine.

And so, the only "serious" moral issue in this entire western construct is: How could Israelis - usually implying morally superior Jews - allow that to happen and watch as the massacre unfolded? Here, the subtext is: Only Jewish Israelis - for a multitude of reasons having to do with western history and guilt, and the macabre relationship between the West and the Jewish people over centuries - are capable of moral judgment, and so they ought to be responsible for allowing the massacres to occur. The Arabs on the other hand are incapable of morality - at least not on the sublime level of morality held by the Jewish people - so neither the killer Lebanese, nor the victim Palestinians, are of interest. They are the guinea pigs in this ethical experiment which only the Jewish Israelis are capable of struggling through and comprehending. In a laboratory, you don't ask the guinea pig for its reflections on being the sacrificial animal, nor do you ask the lab technician for the grand consequences of the experiment. Only the scientist who supervises the whole enterprise is capable of such deep human reflection.

I started writing this with the goal of explaining why the Lebanese people reject the permanent settlement of the Palestinian refugees in their country, or to tell those who forget that the Palestinians caused tremendous pain and harm to their host country of Lebanon over more than two decades. In fact, not one of all those who discuss the Sabra-Shatila massacres of 1982 will ever mention the Damour Massacre that took place in January 1976, in the dead cold of winter, six years before the Sabra-Shatila massacre which was in fact an act of revenge for the Damour Massacre. Revenge seems to be acceptable in today's political arena: Israelis will demolish the home of a Palestinian protester in revenge for his throwing rocks on Israeli soldiers; the US invaded Afghanistan in revenge for the 9-11 attacks. So why are the Lebanese Christians denied the right to avenge the Damour massacre?

In the Damour Massacre, thousands of Yasser Arafat's and the Syrian butcher Hafez Assad's Palestinian fighters converged on the isolated and defenseless Christian town of Damour along the Mediterranean 20 miles south of Beirut, and in an overnight orgy of throat-slitting, raping, cutting open babies in front of their parents, and such other acts of inhumanity visited upon the Lebanese, 1,000 people were killed, and 5,000 were sent fleeing north by boats on a stormy January sea.

Israel in 1976 was not involved in the Damour Massacre, so there was no coverage. Israel's "conscience" was not involved, so there was no moral dilemma. Arab killing Arab is expected and is of no interest because Arabs, again, are incapable of moral thinking. But as soon as Jewish Israelis are involved, even as mere observers - not as killers or victims - and entire encyclopedias and dissertations are written in the most prestigious of academies, movies are made, and pundits discuss it at length in the leading newspapers of the world for decades after the event. Inquiry commissions are formed and judgments are issued. How graceful of the Judeo-Christian West to beat its chest over what lesser humans have committed!

But Damour...remained a ghost town between 1976 and 1990, its old stone houses razed to the ground, its cemeteries desecrated, its citrus and banana groves devastated. By the mid 1990s when the people of Damour began returning, the landscape had changed so much that the town is today unrecognizable. It looks like one of those brand new soulless Jewish settlements built atop a West Bank hill stolen from the same Palestinian refugees who live in the camps of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and yes, Israel itself.

How come is the Israeli so-called moral conscience not called upon to take the Palestinian refugees back to the land it stole from them? Not to Haifa or Jaffa or the villages of Galilee from which they were ethnically cleansed; just to the West Bank where they could be only miles away from the Palestine the European Israelis chased them from.

How come the demographic argument - God forbid the Jewish identity of Israel be disturbed - is so much more important than the morally abhorrent crime of taking one people's land, evicting them from it, and callously asking other countries to give them substitute land? Somehow, the Jewish people can't understand that other people hold their native land just as sacred as the promised land "granted" to the Hebrews by the Big Zombie in the sky some 3,000 years ago.

Lebanon will never forget what was done to Damour, nor will the Lebanese people ever accept any moral responsibility for the Palestinian refugees, responsibility that belongs nowhere else but with Israel. The international community can count on it. The Crusaders came 1,000 years ago to recover a religious real estate they thought was theirs, stayed about 300 years, built colonies, evicted local inhabitants from their villages, and waged endless wars. But in the end, they were defeated and evicted. If the Jewish people ruled Palestine for 300 years some 2,500 years ago, and on this basis claim ownership of the place, isn't it more compelling for the European Christians to claim Palestine if they too ruled it for 300 years, but only 1,000 years ago?

Iran-Israel Negotiations in Lebanon

Strange though it may seem, here are some elements demonstrating that the desperate coalition in power by force in Lebanon - namely Hezbollah's Iranian boss Hassan Nasrallah, the Christian Dhimmi Fascist Party (Free Patriotic Movement, FPM) of Gebran Bassil, and the pro-Syrian Baathist Amal party of dinosaur Nabih Berri - are negotiating virtually directly with their enemy Israel.

This is a huge taboo because all three parties have never ceased to claim their enmity to Israel and their refusal to negotiate anything with it (Shebaa Farms, maritime borders, etc.), lest it becomes a slippery slope toward "normalization", a bad word in the Syrian-Iranian dictionary. You see, the declared goal of these resistors to the Israeli enemy is to uproot the Zionist entity and push the Jews back into the sea whence they came, and restore the dominion of the Islamic Umma - to be honest, they only want the Shiite version of the fucking Umma, not its Sunni edition - over Palestine. Not that they would fundamentally differ in their execution of that dominion, seeing that the lines of conflict between them go back to a 1300-year old quarrel over power. Nothing short of primitive, yet extant Bronze Age vintage. So, it would be anathema for these steadfast resistors to be seen as negotiating with an enemy whose existence they do not even recognize.

Remember that the tripartite coalition has lost its majority in the latest parliamentary elections, that Gebran Bassil is under US sanctions for corruption, that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization per US classification, that the pro-Iran/Syria tandem has so far rejected all compromises with Israel over delineating the maritime borders and has therefore hampered all efforts by Lebanon to begin exploiting the gas and oil reserves that, geography be damned, lies across the Israeli-Lebanese maritime border. 

The reader needs to keep the truth in mind: The tripartite coalition doesn't recognize the existence of what it calls the "Zionist entity", and is therefore not at all interested in an honest deal with Israel. It wallows ideologically behind its rejectionist firewall, yet realizes it must deal with reality. So its objective - let me rephrase, its tactic - is to squeeze concessions from Israel without conceding anything to Israel. Which doesn't really work in negotiations.

Hezbollah has threatened that Israel's extraction of its reserves from the Karish field - which abuts or overlaps (depending on whose side you're on) Lebanon's Block 9 - BEFORE Lebanon begins to extract its own oil and gas, would constitute a casus belli. But since Israel is much farther ahead than Lebanon in its extraction activities, having signed deals with Cyprus, Egypt and now the European Union thirsty for oil and gas after the embargo on Russian oil and gas, Hezbollah's threats represent another facet of the "Always Say No" policy of Iran via-à-vis Israel. In other words, Hezbollah and Iran are determined to scuttle any chances for Israel to exploit its reserves along the Lebanese border, and they do that by preventing Lebanon itself from exploiting its own reserves. But since they don't want to negotiate with Israel (as this implies normalizing with the enemy), then oil and gas extraction anywhere near the Israeli-Lebanese maritime border isn't going to happen unless one of the two sides decides to go to war to secure its rights.

In recent months, the Christians of the coalition (President Michel Aoun and his poodle son-in-law Gebran Bassil, leaders of the Fascist FPM) have shown a willingness to soften their rejectionist attitude, which is likely to displease their ultra-rejectionist ally Hezbollah. This is not out of an ethical desire to see Lebanon rise from its total economic collapse by finally generating revenue from oil and gas, but it stems from more pedestrian concerns.

After standing with Hezbollah's demands for the entire disputed maritime area to be granted to Lebanon, including parts of the Israeli Karish field, Michel Aoun and Gebran Bassil have been sending subliminal messages to the American mediator, the latest of whom is Amos Hochstein. Bassil has hinted that he would consider an eventual peace treaty between Lebanon and Israel, a huge no-no for his ally Hezbollah. Michel Aoun as President has so far refused to sign the decree destined to the UN in which Lebanon claims the entirety of the disputed area (between so-called Lines 23 and Lines 29), and has clearly said that Lebanon should define its border at Line 23, thus giving Israel the entirety of the disputed area. Again, another no-no for Hezbollah. The main reason for this political tango is that Aoun wants to put pressure on, or give incentives to, the US to lift its sanctions off the much beloved son-in-law, the Dear Fascist Leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, Gebran Bassil, something that Amos Hochstein has clearly said is off the table: Lifting sanctions is the purview of the US Treasury and not the US Administration.

The "resistors" (Aoun, Bassil, Nasrallah and Berri) are running like headless chickens: Torn between, on one hand, securing "some" or "any" oil and gas extraction by Lebanon (by conceding the entire Karish Field to Israel) and claiming this as an achievement, and on the other hand, maintaining their principled stance of harassing Israel ad libitum with bellicose threats and refusing to negotiate and normalize with their declared enemy.

What I find interesting is that the US has disingenuously appointed a mediator who is a dual citizen of Israel and the US. Amos Hochstein used to be an Israeli Army soldier who may have fought against Hezbollah in past skirmishes and wars and who became a naturalized US citizen. Thus it appears that Aoun, Bassil, Nasrallah and Berri, as hateful of Israel as they may be, are compelled to negotiate DIRECTLY with Israel. I doubt that Hochstein is keeping his Israeli and American identities separate, and is more likely playing the oxymoronic role of both one of the two parties AND the unbiased mediator. 

The economic pressure of making money from oil and gas is weighing heavily on the anti-American, anti-Israeli, "resistors". The financial and economic collapse of Lebanon is largely of their own making because their illegitimate resistance movement has become a cover for large-scale corruption, including floating the Syrian economy with massive smuggling of Lebanese subsidized commodities across the lawless border between Syria and Lebanon. Hezbollah and Berri want the border with Syria to remain lawless because that is how they bring weapons and mercenaries into Lebanon. They also have always rejected a compelling presence of the Lebanese Army along the Israeli border because this would deny them the pretext of "resisting" against Israel. I find it funny that the US is forcing these numskulls to negotiate virtually directly with their archenemy Israel. 

Amos Hochstein is returning soon to Lebanon for an umpteen visit, and a ship belonging to the power company Energean has reached Israel's waters. Gas is expected to begin flowing some time during the Fall of 2022. Meanwhile, and as is customary of a rudderless Lebanese governance, Lebanon remains unable to make up its mind: Either benefit from its gas reserves with some agreement with Israel, or be shoved again into war with Israel by Hezbollah. Either Lebanon formally concedes the Karish field to Israel so both countries can start making money, or Lebanon continues to play obstruction after obstruction to satisfy Iran, in which case neither country will exploit its reserves and war becomes inevitable. Hezbollah's raison d'etre is to harass Israel and scuttle anything involving Israel. Nasrallah's priority is not for Lebanon to extract its oil and gas, despite the need for the bankrupt country to make some money; Nasrallah's priority is to prevent Israel from extracting its own oil and gas. It is therefore hard to imagine Hezbollah acquiescing to any mutually beneficial understanding that allows both Israel and Lebanon to benefit. As such, I think Amos Hochstein is wasting his time. In turn, the internal dynamics between the pro-Iranian Lebanese Shiites and their Christian Fascist allies of the FPM will increasingly become strained because of the difference in priorities as set by Hezbollah. The FPM has been a lapdog for Hezbollah since 2006, but right now it is weighing the aptness of the Lebanese saying, "Do we want to eat grapes, or kill the vineyard guard?"