Michel Aoun: The Petain of Lebanon

On October 13, 1990, Israel gave the Syrian air force permission for the first time ever to fly over Lebanon and dislodge General Michel Aoun from the presidential palace in Baabda, east of Beirut. Michel Aoun escaped by fleeing to the French Embassy basement, while his soldiers were being gunned down with Syrian bullets in the back of their heads.

 

Syrian soldiers in the presidential palace on October 13, 1990 after evicted Michel Aoun fled to the basement of the French embassy

 

 

Since Lebanon's independence from the French mandate in 1943, Syria refused to recognize Lebanon's right to exist as an independent nation and refused to exchange embassies; it finally was forced to do so in 2009 after the Assad regime assassinated Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, which led to the eviction of the Syrian occupation forces by an angry Lebanese population. To this day, Syria refuses to delineate its land and maritime borders with Lebanon, continues to undermine Lebanon's stability via its proxies (e.g. Hezbollah), holds thousands of Lebanese citizens in its jails after their enforced disappearance from the streets of Lebanon at the hands of Syrian Intelligence Services, and drains the Lebanese economy with large-scale smuggling across the lawless border of fuel, medicines, flour and other necessities. The Baathist regime of Assad believes that Lebanon is not a country or a nation, but merely a Syrian province. Syria does to Lebanon exactly what Putin of Russia does to Ukraine.

After destroying various regions of Lebanon in his "War of Liberation" against Syria between 1988 and 1990, Michel Aoun went into exile in France in 1991 and returned to the country in 2005. In 2006, he switched camps: From an enemy of Syria and a discreet friend of Israel, Aoun became an ally of Syria's Assad and Hassan Nasrallah's Hezbollah and an enemy of Israel. After using the Lebanese Army to crush his enemies domestically, the new Syrianized Aoun declared that the Lebanese Army was "incapable" of defending the country in a nod of approval to Hezbollah's weapons.

Michel Aoun with Syrian butcher Bashar Assad whose regime assassinated dozens of Lebanese politicians, journalists, civil society activists and clergymen, whose army occupied Lebanon for 3 decades, and who continues to hold thousands of Lebanese citizens in his jails.

Thanks to Hezbollah's forced paralysis of Parliament for close to two and a half years, Aoun became Syria's candidate to the Lebanese presidency and was elected as president in 2016. His term is coming to an end this October 31, 2022, leaving behind him a devastated country: Dysfunctional institutions, no government, Hezbollah again paralyzing Parliament and preventing the election of a new president, absolutely non-existent infrastructure (no running water, no electricity...), a decimated national currency, paralyzed judicial investigation into the Beirut Port explosion caused by Hezbollah's storage of explosive materials, lawless border with Syria: incoming mercenaries, weapons and drugs, and outgoing medicines, flour, fuel, etc.

And the only thing that Aoun has time to do as he is packing is, this past Tuesday October 25, 2022, to award Syria's Ambassador to Lebanon, Ali Abdel Karim Ali, the National Order of the Cedar at the rank of Senior Officer, on the occasion of the end of his duties "in appreciation of his efforts in consolidating relations between the two brotherly countries". Since his appointment in 2009, the Syrian ambassador has done absolutely nothing to repatriate the 2 million Syrian refugees his own government has savagely displaced into Lebanon. He has not helped in locating the 17,000 kidnapped and jailed Lebanese in Syria's notoriously brutal prisons, etc. NOTHING. Yet, the Syrian puppet President of Lebanon, Michel Aoun, is giving him an award.

Michel Aoun (right) awarding Syrian ambassador,  Ali Abdel Karim Ali, the National Order of the Cedar, Senior Officer rank

During the Aoun rebellion against the Syrian regime from exile in the 1990s and early 2000s, he was compared to French president de Gaulle facing the German occupation from his exile in London.

As the sun sets on an aging Michel Aoun, history will more likely retain the more apt comparison of Aoun with French Maréchal Philippe Petain who, after becoming a national hero for his victory at the Battle of Verdun in World War I against the Germans, became an ally and a puppet President serving the occupying Germans during World War II. After the war, he was tried in a court of law and convicted of being a traitor to his country.

There are no functioning courts of law in Lebanon to try Aoun. Only history will be his judge.

Money and Resistance

As long as money was not in the picture, "resistance" was the modus operandi of Hezbollah. Suddenly, money appeared on the horizon, and Hezbollah's resistance fell by the wayside. With the possibility of extracting gas and making money - despite the fact that the "enemy" too stands to make money out of its own gas fields - who cares about a resistance that was going nowhere anyway.

Other than the monopoly that Hezbollah exercises over the term by calling itself "The Resistance", the term itself conjures up a broader meaning in the Lebanese psyche. In Lebanon's political jargon, "resistance" is a constitutive posture, a built-in state of mind the Lebanese inherited from the Syrian occupation which is the real master in the discipline. Over the decades of its pseudo-"struggle" against imperialism, colonialism and zionism, the Syrian Baath regime of the Assad dynasty has expanded the vocabulary of the discipline by dedicating specific terms to the fight against specific enemies. If the enemy is Israel, then "resistance" is the term. If the enemy is America, the applicable term is "rejection" (رفض), and so on and so forth.

Some of the Baathist terms that percolated into Lebanon during the Syrian occupation include steadfastness (صمود Sumood), confrontation (تصدي Tassaddi), reactance (ممانعة Mumana'a), rejection (رفض Rafd) etc. You resist and confront anything, everything, at all times, for no reason whatsoever. It is a permanent posture which makes you doubt even the best intentions of not only your enemies, but also your friends. Hence the pathological proclivity of the Lebanese to always see a conspiracy in any event or development that may in fact be a solution to their chronic problems. With this denial of the possibility of goodness in the world, you immediately attribute ill-intention to any interlocutor that approaches you. That is why the Lebanese love their saints and their supposed miracles. Even Muslims flock in large numbers to Christian shrines where relics are exposed, in the hope of curing suspiciously cryptic and scientifically un-testable diseases. "Trust no Human" should be the motto of the Lebanese people who are thus Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist disciples, because they unknowingly abide by his famous line, "L'enfer c'est les autres" (Hell is other people).

This posture instills in you and your followers a sense that everyone is your enemy, everyone is out to get you. No one is to be trusted. Indicative of a Lebanese (and Syrian) populations that have been so abused by their systems and their rulers for such a long time that they have become like a wounded animal that refuses even a helping hand. Welcome to the culture of victimhood. You are always a victim of everyone else, of some conspiracy or plot. 

Instead of a psychological posture of "let me trust first, then see", it fosters a permanent attitude of suspicion toward others. Instead of "let me first analyze the proposition and see if it has merits", my constant state of alert makes me immediately doubt the proposition without even analyzing it.

Something happened in the "Hochstein" maritime border agreement between Israel and Hezbollah, whereby Hezbollah suddenly abandoned its resistance posture and adopted a more conciliatory stance, which led to the agreement. For decades, Israel was never named by its name. It was such an alien entity that it had no name, like G-d for Orthodox Jews. It was referred to as "the enemy" (العدو), the "Zionist entity (الكيان الصهيوني), the "usurper" (المغتصب), etc. So much so that it was a shocking surprise to see Hezbollah agree to a deal with Israel. Of course, it will claim that the deal is between the Lebanese State and Israel, not between Hezbollah and Israel, but we all know that Hezbollah with a militia stronger than the Lebanese army is the actual ruler of the country, having placed a puppet president by the name of Michel Aoun as a shiny storefront in the top office. 

It may be that the circumstances in Iran, which is hovering between civil unrest at best and regime change in a worst case scenario, enlightened Hezbollah to the dangers ahead should its boss in Tehran be seriously weakened, and so it sought to compromise before it is too late.

Of course, Hezbollah will keep its weapons, for now at least. It's like old clothes that one keeps wearing out of habit and attachment, even though they are falling apart. Hezbollah's weapons are like the "stash" of the addict who is in rehab. 

The following is the ever-changing statement of purpose of Hezbollah over the decades since its inception. It started out in the late 1970s-early 1980s as a radical Shiite Muslim organization whose objective was to turn Lebanon into another Islamic Republic, copy-pasted on Iran. It didn't want to be a political party, only an armed militia. 

Then it rallied the traditional mantra of all Shiites around the world: Victimhood. Like the Jewish people, Shiites thrive on being victims, oppressed, dispossessed, etc. Hezbollah tagged its Islamic Theocracy plans with a claim of being the dispossessed community of Lebanon (المحرومين).

Then it realized that turning Lebanon into another Iran was a silly far-fetched unreachable objective, so it morphed itself into a "resistance" movement against the Israeli occupation of the south of Lebanon. When the Israelis withdrew in 2000, pulling the rug from under Hezbollah's claims of resistance against the Israeli occupation (never mind that it wasn't bothered by the parallel and longer Syrian occupation), it adapted itself by inventing the Shebaa Farms fallacy. 

After the 2006 destructive war, which Hassan Nasrallah admitted "he didn't mean to happen by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers", Hezbollah again saw that it couldn't "resist" without causing enormous harm to itself and to Lebanon, so it drastically reduced its military imprint (not one cross-border attack since 2006; what kind of resistance is this that takes a 16-year long break) to flying a few harmless drones and became a political party, running in elections and serving in governments. 

Now that it subscribed to the non-agression pact with Israel that is implied in the Maritime Border Agreement, and to try and remain relevant, Hezbollah has changed its tune and is saying that it will keep its old, probably deteriorating, weapons to "protect Lebanon's oil and gas platforms" against the very hypothetical, yet eternal, Israeli aggression. The semantics could not be clearer: Hezbollah is committed now, per the Hochstein agreement, to maintain peace and security along the Lebanese-Israeli maritime border, which obviously extends to the Lebanese-Israeli land border. In other words, forget the verbal diarrhea over the liberation of the Shebaa Farms! Hezbollah is now the guarantor of Israel's security on it northern borders, as agreed with the Americans and the Israelis.

But why would it want to keep its weapons? Since it has used them for three decades to terrorize the corrupt political establishment into submission, why not keep them? Hezbollah is like the only thug in a gang of hoodlums that has a gun.

But there is yet a better explanation for Hezbollah's sudden metamorphosis into a protector of Israel's oil and gas industry along the Israeli-Lebanese maritime border: MONEY. With its guns, Hezbollah hopes to forcibly embezzle whatever profits Lebanon stands to make out of its gas and oil.

The Lebanese, regardless of their religious or political creeds, worship money. I've often felt that the average Lebanese loves money so much that he would sell his own mother if she fetches a good price. For Hezbollah's politburo, the possibility of extracting gas and making money by far outweighs any of its pleiotropy of ideological posturings like resistance, confrontation, reactance, opposition, etc. Just pay a visit to the southern regions of Lebanon under Hezbollah's control and you'll see castles and villas with grandiose architectures. From its diaspora in Africa (where it illegally trades in diamonds) to their manufactures of Captagon in the Bekaa Valley (which they export to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, among other places), the Shiites of Lebanon are very well-to-do these days. But the tatoo of impoverished, dispossessed victims is hard to wash off, especially if it generates sympathy from an idiotic left in the West and provides cover to generate, you guessed, lots of MONEY.

Amnesiac and Blind Amnesty International

Update (October 25, 2022): If you view Amnesty's introduction to its Lebanon page on its website (https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/lebanon/), you'll read this:

Authorities [Lebanese] continued to deport Syrian refugees back to Syria, despite risks of egregious human rights abuses there [by the Syrian Assad regime]. Allegations of torture of Syrian refugees [in Lebanon] documented since 2014 were still not investigated, even when raised in courts.

If Syrian refugees are tortured by the security services in both Lebanon and Syria, then why do Amnesty and other caring Mother-Teresa-like organizations insist on keeping the refugees in Lebanon? If the refugees are exposed to the same risks in either Lebanon or Syria, what advantage is there therefore to insist on keeping them in Lebanon?

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In its October 14, 2022 statement [see: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/10/lebanon-stop-the-so-called-voluntary-returns-of-syrian-refugees/], Amnesty International calls on Lebanon to stop its program of returning the Syrian refugees back to their home country.

Here are Amnesty's main arguments:

1- "... it is well established that Syrian refugees in Lebanon are not in a position to take a free and informed decision about their return... due to restrictive government policies on movement and residency, rampant discrimination, lack of access to essential services as well as unavailability of objective and updated information about the current human rights situation in Syria."

-Iznogood replies: It is well established that Syrian refugees illegally cross the border by the thousands on a daily basis, transporting goods, drugs, weapons, potential terrorists and money. They siphon precious dollars from the Lebanese economy by buying subsidized fuel, flour, medicines and other items, smuggling them into Syria, and selling them there for a profit. Is Amnesty condoning these violations of international law? Does Amnesty have any means at its disposal able to alter this situation?

2- Amnesty says, "...the Lebanese authorities are knowingly putting Syrian refugees at risk of suffering from heinous abuse and persecution upon their return to Syria."

-Iznogood replies: The Syrian "refugees" are not refugees. They are economic migrants at best and illegal invaders at worst. The proof is that during Muslim high days (Adha, Ramadan etc.) these "refugees" travel from Lebanon to Syria through illegal ports of entry, celebrate in Syria with their families, then return to Lebanon. How can these people be refugees? They apparently have no fear of the Syrian government which benefits from the money and goods these "refugees" smuggle back and forth across the border.

The Lebanese have themselves long suffered from the brutality, persecution and heinous abuse of the Syrian regime before, during, and after its 30-year long occupation of Lebanon. The Syrian refugees who are today in Lebanon are themselves (or the progeny of) the barbaric soldiers and intelligence services that killed, kidnapped, forcibly disappeared, tortured, shelled, assassinated with complete impunity hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens. In its cold, faceless, inhumane detachment from reality, Amnesty's "objective" approach to large-scale horrendous actions contributes to further alienating people from rallying themselves to Amnesty's mission. By ignoring the root causes of what makes people flee and become refugees, by ignoring the tremendous pain, despair and fear that the Lebanese feel about their country's future, by ignoring the vast and deep reservoir of hatred that exists in Lebanon on account of what Syria had done to Lebanon for decades - including refusing the very right of Lebanon to exist as an independent nation - Amnesty is laying the ground for another war in Lebanon. It behooves Amnesty to learn lessons from the Palestinian refugee saga and the tragedies it caused in Lebanon. How can Amnesty not understand the psychological traumas that drive the Lebanese to take action today before it is too late? If Amnesty refuses to consider the political factors behind the causes it claims to blindly defend, it becomes a willful accomplice to the crimes against humanity it decries. 

3- Amnesty says, "Amid the country’s [Lebanon] spiralling economic crisis, the international community must continue to support more than one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon to prevent a further rise in unsafe returns."

-Iznogood replies: There may be up to 1 million Syrian refugees (at least those registered with UNHCR), but estimates of the Lebanese government bring the number of Syrians currently on Lebanese soil at 2.5 million. Which means that there are 1.5 million Syrians illegally present on Lebanese soil, who take jobs away from the Lebanese, who commit untold numbers of petty crimes, who smuggle money and goods across the border, and who hide behind legitimate refugees. The best way for the international community to support the refugees is to militarily ENSURE their safe return to Syria. Establish safe corridors, create protected safe zones inside Syria where the refugees can reestablish their camps, no-fly zones, issue credible threats to the Syrian regime and/or give it financial incentives, cut off diplomatic relations, remove Syria from all international/UN instances, etc. Ultimately, the use of military force against the Syrian regime, a mini-me of the Putin regime, must be considered. Why is it that the international community has taken immediate and concerted action against mighty Russia's rape of Ukraine, yet it allows a vulgar tyranny like the Syrian regime to go on raping Lebanon unchecked for more than 50 years? 

4- Amnesty says, "As per the bilateral agreement, the Lebanese General Security also sends lists of names of registered refugees to the Syrian government for pre-approval before their return to Syria."

- Iznogood replies: If the pro-Syrian government of Michel Aoun and his security services are in agreement with the Syrian regime over repatriation modalities, Amnesty should encourage and incentivize such bilateral cooperation instead of complaining and wailing about the anxiety Amnesty might suffer should the refugees return home and leave Amnesty without a job.

5- Amnesty says, "For the return of refugees to their country of origin to be truly voluntary, it must be based on their free and informed consent. However, the dire conditions in Lebanon raise doubts about the ability of Syrian refugees to provide truly free consent."

- Iznogood replies: Are the terms of "free and informed consent" well defined? Many of the Syrian refugees are poor rural illiterate people who can't even read and understand what informed consent is. Is Amnesty reducing a decision with enormous consequences to millions of Lebanese and Syrian people to a bureaucratic procedure like a patient's informed consent for enrolling in an experimental drug trial? This cold detachment from the harsh reality of people's lives and the future of nations smacks of totalitarianism. In contemplating Amnesty's approach to these matters, I would never want to live in a world governed by Amnesty International's Kafkaesque bureaucrats.

In conclusion, Amnesty needs to understand that the Syrian refugees, if allowed to remain permanently in Lebanon, will eventually with their prolific demographics and high birth rates overcome the native Lebanese population, thus destroying the very foundation of the country. Unless, of course, in its absolutist ideology, Amnesty International believes that nation-states are an aberration and should be freely tampered with and dismantled.

Amnesty should lobby countries of traditional immigration into accepting and resettling the Syrian refugees. A few million refugees over populations in the hundreds of millions are easily assimilated. But 2 million refugees over the country's population of 4 million is a recipe for future heartache and war. Perhaps Russia, a very friendly country with the Assad regime and a huge territory with large Muslim populations, should take the Syrian refugees. Many Syrians in fact do love Vladimir Putin and are actually fighting on his behalf in Ukraine.

Relative to the 4 million strong Lebanese population, a refugee cohort of 1.5 - 2 million Syrians will undeniably and inevitably alter the very nature and identity of Lebanon. Is Amnesty willing to accept this probability? Lebanon is not Germany, France, Italy or the Americas or any of the democracies in which Amnesty thrives, with their vast territories and large yet aging populations. The capabilities - and demographic needs - of these countries make them much better candidates for a permanent re-settlement of the Syrian refugees than Lebanon. Why is Amnesty so determined to settle the Syrian refugees a mere few meters away from their home country? Why doesn't it call on the governments of its own countries of operation (UK, US, Europe, Australia...) to take the refugees, thus sparing the Near East several more decades of catastrophes and wars?

Treacherous Arabs and the Agony of Lebanon

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Arab nationalism, anti-Israeli hostility, and pro-Palestinian sentiment were at their zenith. Islamic fundamentalism was still to come later in the 1980s, after the Arab debacles in their wars against Israel and the failure of Arab nationalism. With their feebleness and incompetence, the Arabs in general, in particular Egypt and Syria along with the Gulf Arabs (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait primarily) found that tiny and vulnerable Lebanon with its "alien" Christians was a good avatar for "alien" Israel and a fertile ground to demonstrate that they still had some testosterone in their gonads.

So they sent their hatred, their money and their proxy armed hordes of Palestinians, Syrians, Libyans and multitudes of other Arab mercenaries to prove that Arab nationalism was capable of something, of anything, after their defeat by Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars. When they couldn't defeat Jewish Israel, they turned their hatred onto Christian Lebanon, which had not joined the wars of 1967 and 1973 because it would have been suicidal for it to do so. They propped up Yasser Arafat with weapons and money into establishing the headquarters of his PLO and satellite organizations in Beirut. They forced Lebanon to cede its southern border with Israel to the PLO in the Cairo Accord of 1969. The PLO began shelling northern Israeli settlements, giving Israel the pretext to retaliate by bombing Lebanese villages. This cycle would continue until 1982 when the PLO was evicted from Lebanon by the Israeli invasion, leaving newly created Hezbollah to take over the enterprise of "liberating Palestine" with its disastrous consequences on Lebanon. Imagine how the liberation of Palestine by the Arabs, as grand and sublime as this objective was, became concentrated to a tiny border strip of the smallest, yet the only democratic and only partly Muslim, Arab country among all the cowardly Muslim Arab dictatorial regimes.

There's too much history to be exhaustive here, but every attempt by the Lebanese to put an end to their torment by regulating Palestinian guerilla activities (e.g. the Melkart Accord) was met with accusations of being anti-Arab, imperialist, pro-Zionist, and isolationist. In the twisted hateful minds of Arab Muslims, Lebanon (being only partly Muslim) had to over-prove its Arab identity by sacrificing itself to the Palestinian cause. Because they're not Muslims, Lebanon's Christians are by definition suspect of "westernism" and must therefore meet a higher standard of Arabity than all the Arab scum around them, which means that Lebanon must go to war alone against Israel to prove itself, while other Muslim Arab countries are under no pressure to prove themselves and have the luxury of making peace with the enemy. Meanwhile, Syria, Jordan and Egypt closed their own borders and denied Arafat and his thugs the right to liberate Palestine from their own borders with Israel, while Lebanon was forced by the Arabs to cede its southern territory to Arafat in the 1969 Cairo Accord. 

Jordan had crushed the PLO in the 1970 Black September massacres, but that was OK because King Hussein was a Muslim. But how dare the Christian President of Lebanon try to rein in the PLO and deny it freedom of action on Lebanese soil? Meanwhile, Syria signed a truce with Israel in 1974 in which it effectively ceded the Golan to Israel, followed by Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) who signed peace treaties and normalized their relations with the Jewish state. Lebanon to this day remains the only active Arab war front with Israel, thanks mostly to the perfidy of the Syrian Assad regime which maintained calm on its own occupied and annexed Golan, while inciting Quixotic and disastrous liberation wars right next door along the Lebanese-Israeli border.

Lebanon at the time was the free press center of the Arab world. Every Arab author, poet, journalist, academic or dissident who had fled the drab totalitarianism of the Arab dictatorships of the time had found freedom and shelter in Beirut. From Beirut, the Arab press and dissidents (e.g. Nizar Qabbani, Adonis) were free to criticize the inept and cruel Arab regimes of Syria, Iraq, Egypt and others, and some of these dissidents were hunted down and assassinated by Syria's Mukhabarat services (e.g. Salim Al-Laouzi, editor of Al-Hawadess magazine, who was kidnapped, his hand melted in acid, and his body found in a ditch in 1980). Yet, Lebanon made up for its military weakness with a strong pro-Palestinian press. In 1974, it was the Christian president of Lebanon, Sleiman Frangiyeh Sr., who introduced Yasser Arafat to the United Nations in New York, which paved the way for the eventual recognition of the PLO by Israel and the international community. Up to that time, the world had thought of the Palestinians as mere refugees and not as a nation trying to salvage the land that was forcibly taken from them by the Jewish terrorism of the 1930s and 1940s.

As the 1975 war between the Lebanese and the Palestinians erupted, the Arabs poured money, mercenaries and weapons into the country to support the Palestinians. At the same time, under the cover of opening up to the world and with their newly found oil money, the Sunni Muslim Arabs engaged in a campaign to Islamize the West: They founded mosques and Koranic schools in every European capital, sent hateful preachers to the West who began brainwashing people, and funded terrorist activities (plane hijackings, assassinations, bombings). By 1979, Shiite Muslim Iran too had fallen to Islamic fundamentalism with the anti-Shah revolution and the advent of the Islamic theocracy. Iran joined in the Islamization campaign and immediately engaged in anti-Western terrorism. It founded Hezbollah in Lebanon (1982) which proceeded to chase all western presence out of Lebanon by bombings (US Marine and French paratroopers headquarters, and US and French embassies), kidnappings (the Western hostages saga), hijackings (TWA Flight 847) and multitudes of killings and assassinations. In fact, Iran was doing the same thing in Paris in the early to mid-1980s.

Lebanon was abandoned by the West who couldn't wean itself of Arab oil. A cowardly West took the blows and the attacks against itself without complaining, so why would it try to rescue a friendly but insignificant Lebanon that was suffering the same fate? Lebanon traveled the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s in the Syrian Gulag that the West had colluded to assign it to for fear of upsetting the Arabs. Today, Lebanon is still reeling from the Syrian occupation which left behind it a culture of malfeasance, crime and corruption.

Fast forward to the late 2010s: Today the Arabs are where Lebanon was back in the 1960s and 1970s. They are for the most part allies of the West, they are promoting themselves as beacons of cultural openness, they have made peace with Israel, and have shelved the Palestinian cause into their darkest closets. And Lebanon is today where the Arabs were in the 1960s and 1970s: In absurd military trenches for the Palestinian cause on whose altar it was sacrificed. Israel remains the eternal enemy of Lebanon while most Arabs have opened Israeli embassies in their capitals. Economically it is a ruined country when it was as prosperous in the 1960s as Dubai is today.

This is not irony. It is not the outcome of mistakes or the meanderings of politics. The descent of Lebanon into the hell it finds itself today is a crime initiated by the "brotherly" Arab countries who then dumped its decaying cadaver into the hands of Iran, the Shiite alter ego of the Sunni Arabs, to finish off the mutilation. And now the Arabs are blaming Iran for what it is doing to Lebanon, without expressing any regrets for what they themselves did to the country long before Iran joined in the macabre ritual. It really doesn't matter whether it is Sunni or Shiite Islam that is the butcher. Whether Lebanon as we know it survives this crime remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: The survival of the last free Christians in the East is at stake and the treacherous West and its perfidious Arab allies know it. 

Michel Aoun's Scary Translation of the Maritime Border Agreement into Arabic

As we speak, President Michel Aoun and his advisors have uploaded the English text of the Maritime Border Agreement between Israel and Lebanon to GoogleTranslate in the hope of obtaining an Arabic translation.

This prospect scares me because the fate of the agreement could be at stake. While it is clear that Aoun and his advisors are mediocre in the English language, their reliance on GoogleTranslate to produce English versions of Aoun's presidential speeches (see below) is worrisome. See for yourself a post on this blog from 2016:

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

President Aoun and his bad translators

President Aoun’s Independence Day speech is posted in both its original Arabic version and its English translation on the Office of the President's own Web page. I think President Aoun should "reform" his own entourage, many of whom are family members and antique aides and bureaucrats that have surprisingly survived intact his exile and the Syrian occupation. For one, the President should hire young trained translators to provide quality translations of his Arabic texts and present a professional image of his presidency. Below is one tiny excerpt of his Independence Day speech and two gems I found in the English translation provided by his office on its web site. If you have the time and patience, you'll find dozens of similar funny gems.

Original Arabic:

أيها الجنود،

 ويبقى الاستقلال الأمانة الكبرى في أعناقكم، هو قسمٌ تعهّدتم فيه الذود عن الوطن، والبذل في سبيله، حتى الفداء، فلا تترددوا أبداً في إطلاق صرختكم: لبيك لبنان.

 

Official English translation by the Office of the President

(as seen on: http://www.presidency.gov.lb/English/News/Pages/Details.aspx?nid=23882]:

My Fellow soldiers,

Independence remains the greatest embezzlement trusted in you. It is an oath you took to defend the country and scarify yourselves for it, till redemption. Never hesitate to cry out: Here we are, Lebanon!

Note:

“embezzlement” is defined as: The theft or fraudulent misappropriation of funds placed in one's trust. Perhaps, the translator is subliminally faithful to the traditions of corruption?

“scarify” is defined as: Make shallow incisions in (the skin). Perhaps the translator thinks that a shallow incision in a soldier's skin constitutes a "sacrifice".

January 1, 2017 at 8:02 AM

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Maritime Border Agreement with Israel: Not so fast

You can see it on the faces of the Lebanese politicians: They are drooling over the millions they stand to skim off the profits of any gas production process that may follow the maritime border agreement between Lebanon and Israel. 

Yet, they have to wait. It may take a couple of years before the Cana gas field reveals what it has underneath the ocean surface. It's a field that straddles the still poorly defined maritime border and which Israel agreed to cede entirely to Lebanon in exchange for some mysterious compensation that the Lebanese puppets of Hezbollah are hard pressed to hide. God forbid that Hezbollah be seen as paying Israel. Cana may have no gas. It may have gas which may be difficult or impossible to extract. But should it turn out to be a rich field, the more pressing challenge right now for the Lebanese people is not Israel, but how to prevent their corrupt political culture from ripping them off and pilfer the profits.

Then, there's the geopolitical side of the coin. Yes, Europe needs gas, be it Lebanese, Israeli or Egyptian. Yes, both Israel and Lebanon won't mind making money. But there's the shadow of Hezbollah and Benyamin Netanyahu looming over the festivities of the moment.

Hezbollah is the arm of Iran. It will do whatever Iran tells it to do, including scuttling the agreement. The Iranians (Shiite Muslims) have never hidden their goal: The destruction of Israel and the seizure of the Islamic holy sites of Mecca and Medina from the hands of the Saudis (Sunni Muslims). Whether the Iranian regime collapses as a result of the ongoing uprising of the Iranian people is still not a certainty. The regime is very powerful and can muster as much violence as it needs to bring the country back under its full control. 

But assuming a continuity of the Islamic regime in Tehran, a small agreement between Lebanon and Israel over gas extraction does not mean the end of Hezbollah's perennial warmongering. Just as it invented the Shebaa Farms lie after Israel's withdrawal from the south in 2000 to maintain its assets and perpetuate its hyper-militarization strategy and unadulterated hostility to Israel, it will probably do the same thing here: A maritime agreement between Lebanon and Israel will not modify Hezbollah's modus operandi and won't make it depose its arms to the benefit of a stronger Lebanese state. Any signal from Tehran - Khamene'i to Hassan: please send a suicide drone over the Karish field platforms - and the happy gas extraction hour will quickly come to an end and raise the hostility level back to pre-agreement levels. It doesn't take much to sink the agreement, even though part of the agreement stipulates that Hezbollah will NOT threaten Israel's security. In other words, Iran and Hezbollah have agreed to protect Israel's northern gas fields. This is a repeat of Hezbollah's pledge to protect Israel's northern land border in exchange for Israel's withdrawal from the Lebanese south [See https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/05/hezbollah-israel-collusion-big-lie-of.html]

Meanwhile in Israel the radical Likudniks of Benyamin Netanyahu are already wailing their unhappiness at the agreement. Regardless of the merits of the agreement, they, of course, hate Democrat Joe Biden who mediated and sponsored the agreement and whom they cannot manipulate as they did with Donald Dumb Trump. Just like the radical fundamentalist Islamic Hezbollah, the radical Jewish fundamentalist Israeli far right does not like peace agreements because they set back its racist policies, warmongering, Palestinian land grabbing, and ultimate objective of erasing Palestine from the map. The Israeli fundamentalist terrorists also adulate Donald Dumb, not because he's smart and friendly but because he's the dumb American president who was easily manipulated into recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving his embassy there. Netanyahu may in fact, should he score a win in the November legislative elections, walk out of the Lebanon-Israel maritime border agreement, just like Donald Dumb did with the JCPOA nuclear agreement between Iran and the international community. 

The US mid-term elections, also slated for this coming November, may also weaken Biden's hands domestically if the Republicans gain seats in the House and Senate. If the Democrats maintain or increase their share in the Congress, then a Biden-Netanyahu relationship is likely to be rocky.

In sum, all cards are up in the air pending the results of the upcoming presidential election in Lebanon (deadline: Oct. 31), and legislative elections in Israel and the US (first week of November). The Saudi turnabout in the OPEC+ decision to reduce oil production (and raise oil prices) has irked the Americans who see in it a stab in the back at the onset of a winter with gas shortages and high prices. The Saudi leader, Mohammad Bin Salman, evidently hates Joe Biden as well and will side with the Israeli far right against the maritime border agreement between Lebanon and Israel because it signals a strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon and a weakening of the American position vis-à-vis Iran. 

As far as Lebanon is concerned, everything hinges on what happens in Iran over the next few weeks because the disintegration of Lebanon - now in its third year - is largely the doing of Hezbollah which has seized or undermined every institution in Lebanon, including even the Army which keeps a low profile and gives Hezbollah a lot of breathing room. The Lebanese Army and Hezbollah are the only two militarized entities in the country. In the contest between the US and Iran, the US backs the Lebanese Army, while Iran backs Hezbollah. If Lebanese Army Chief Joseph Aoun is elected as a "strong consensus president", as has become a norm in the cesspool of Lebanese political culture over the past decades to bring Army chiefs to the Lebanese presidency, then the odds of a military confrontation increase, especially if the maritime border agreement ends up failing for one reason or another. And there are many reasons why it might.

NGOs and Cholera in Syrian Refugee Camps

Non-governmental organizations have been attacking the Lebanese people as racist and xenophobic because the Lebanese have repeatedly asked the NGOs and the governments that fund them to amiably begin repatriating the 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon back to Syria.

Lebanon has drawn a long list of problems arising from the presence of the refugee camps all over the country. The NGOs reply that they are compensating the Lebanese government for the burden caused by the Syrian refugees, ignoring the fact that the Lebanese government is corrupt and dysfunctional. The NGOs also give money directly to the refugees to the tune of $100 per month per registered refugee. This is more than the minimum salary of the average Lebanese or Syrian, so it is an incentive for the refugees to stay in Lebanon, instead of returning back to Syria where the hostilities have significantly died down more than 3 years ago.

In addition to bona fide refugees, the camps also shelter hundreds of thousands of illegal (i.e. non-registered) Syrians who engage in all manner of illegal activities and crimes, including but not limited to theft of public property like infrastructure items such as pipes, electric cables, manhole covers, or other items containing metals that can be sold. For example, Major General Tony Saliba, Head of State Security, said in an interview that one refugee was caught carrying about 500 bank cards (provided by the NGOs for Syrian refugees to withdraw their welfare US dollars) from Syrian individuals residing in Syria proper (i.e. they are registered as refugees in Lebanon, yet live in Syria). He'd withdraw those monies from Lebanese banks and take them back inside Syria. In other words, the NGOs are funding criminal activities without even knowing who is a refugee and who is a criminal.

The Syrian refugees engage in all kinds of businesses, open shops etc. right next to Lebanese-owned businesses. There have been several riots across the country over such instances where the refugees unfairly compete with the Lebanese.

The refugees use the country's infrastructure - electricity, water, etc. but do not pay any bills.

The refugees have never been sensitized to environmental issues. The roadside garbage one sees all over the country is the product of refugees who either do not care for their host country or litter on purpose to spite their hosts. The Syrian refugee truck driver who picks up the garbage in the locality where I live, decided one day to get rid of wild and stray animals who come at night to eat from the bins. He laced the area with poisoned food, and killed dozens of semi-feral cats, dogs, foxes, coyotes (those are the ones I saw with my own eyes), and other wild animals who probably went back to die in the woods.

The refugees claim to have escaped from the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad and say they are too afraid to return. Yet, thousands of them demonstrated for Assad in the streets of Lebanon at the last Syrian elections, riding buses, cars and motorcycles and hurling insults at the Lebanese people.

The subsidies of the Lebanese government for such basic items as fuel, flour, medicines and other items make these items cheaper in Lebanon than they are in Syria. A golden opportunity for the hundreds of thousands of unregistered Syrians who hide inside the refugee camps and run profitable smuggling businesses across the lawless border. In doing so, they deprive the local population of those basic goods, drive their prices higher, and essentially turn the subsidies in favor of the Syrian economy of Bashar Assad. 

Syrian refugees also run human trafficking operations people in tandem with operatives inside Syria proper in the north along the Mediterranean coast near the city of Tripoli. Hundreds of Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians are dying trying to cross the ocean and reach Europe. No NGOs are seen rescuing the migrants, like they do in Turkey and Libya and other points of illegal migration to Europe.

And now, the Syrian refugees who cross the border have brought cholera to Lebanon. A couple of weeks after the infectious disease first appeared in Syria, it crept into Lebanon, carried by the friendly yet unhygienic Syrian refugees.

Given all of the above, what the NGOs are doing is to further this state of affairs by refusing to do anything at all other than maintain the status quo. Lebanon is not Germany or France or Italy with large populations and territories. The Syrians represent nearly half of the resident Lebanese population, and they are all Sunni Muslims likely harboring Al-Qaeda and Daesh cells. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens have emigrated, which means that the NGOs and the international community are actively seeking to replace highly qualified educated Lebanese individuals - a brain drain that is most beneficial to their own countries with declining birth rates - with uneducated and unqualified Syrian refugees, thus furthering the decline of Lebanon, not to mention the demographic upheaval that is taking place. The West appears therefore to encourage replacing the few remaining Christians in the Middle East with large numbers of Muslims, thus leaving the Middle East as a place for only Muslims and of course Jews (Israel). This segregation of the Eurasian region into a Christian  Europe and West versus a Muslim-Jewish East in antithetical to western claims of welcoming diversity. The Europeans are either bigoted hypocrites or ignorant idiots.

Lebanon has been patiently asking for assistance in elaborating a program for the dignified return of the refugees to their cities and villages. But all this beseeching has fallen on deaf ears. Instead, merely asking for the return of the refugees is met with accusations of racism and xenophobia. One ought to remember that the Lebanese War of 1975 was masterminded by the Assad regime that sent its troops into Lebanon, where it kidnapped, killed, shelled, bombed, and assassinated at will. As we speak, there are 17,000 Lebanese citizens who were "forcibly disappeared" (i.e. kidnapped in Lebanon and transferred to Syria where their whereabouts are unknown). No one knows if they're dead or still in prison, and the Syrian regime will not acknowledge their existence. The Syrian army and its intelligence services stayed in Lebanon for 30 years (1975 - 2005). There is a huge reservoir of hatred in the Lebanese population toward Syrians in general because of that history. The future may even be more somber if the Syrian refugees end up staying longer and perhaps permanently.

If the argument is that the Assad regime will seek revenge on the refugees if they are made to return, then the NGOs are in reality working to settle the refugees permanently in Lebanon. The Assad regime is a Alawite Muslim regime that has been in power since 1969, and may in fact remain in power for several more decades. Given the economic windfall from smuggling operations, the Assad regime has no incentive to take back its citizens; they are a great source of goods and money. In addition, by keeping the Sunni Syrians out his country, Bashar Assad is altering the demographics of Syria in favor of his own minority Alawite sect.

What the NGOs can do is stop funding the refugees to entice them to go back home. By refusing to do anything to repatriate the Syrian refugees back to their country, the NGOs and governments behind them are in effect responsible for laying the ground for future wars between the Lebanese and Syrian populations.

 

Theocracies of the 21st Century

The word "theocracy" is from Greek theokratia, literally "the rule of God," from theos "god" and kratos "rule, regime". In other words, any country, nation or state that claims to be "ruled by god" is a theocracy.

According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition, a theocracy is:
1. Government ruled by or subject to religious authority.
2. A country or state governed in this way.
3. A form of government in which God is recognized as the supreme civil ruler of the state, and his laws are taken as the statute-book of the kingdom.

Because theocracies can hide themselves behind a veneer of pseudo-democracy (as in holding futile and inactionable elections, for example), the definition above should be broadened, i.e. a theocracy can therefore be simply be defined as:

A theocracy is any country founded on the basis of a religious identity. By defining itself as belonging to a religious belief, such a country will automatically exclude members of other religious or non-religious identities and set them to second-class status.

As such, a theocracy does not have to have a clergyman, a pope, an imam, or a high priest at the helm.

The United States: God is not mentioned in the US constitution. Only the far-right evangelist fringe of American society wants the US to be a "Christian Nation", while all other political currents (including conservatives, center, and progressives) reject this definition. That is why the United States is not a theocracy, even though radical southern evangelists want it to become so.

Saudi Arabia: The king and his government are not clergymen. They are civilians belonging to one family, the Sauds. As such it may appear not to be a theocracy. Yet it is founded and deeply rooted in Islam. Its constitution promulgated in 1992 (https://www.the-saudi.net/saudi-arabia/saudi-constitution.htm) sates in its Chapter 1, Article 1, "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a sovereign Arab Islamic state with Islam as its religion; God's Book and the Sunnah of His Prophet, God's prayers and peace be upon him, are its constitution, Arabic is its language and Riyadh is its capital."

Iran: The Iranian constitution (https://www.shora-gc.ir/files/en/news/2021/6/2/468_245.pdf) states in its Article 1, "The form of government of Iran is that of an Islamic Republic, endorsed by the people of Iran on the basis of their longstanding belief in the sovereignty of truth and Qur'anic justice" [Notice how questionable is the pairing of truth with Qur'anic justice]. But wait, the gems are in the first five provisions of Article 2:

"The Islamic Republic is a system based on belief in:
1. The One God, His exclusive sovereignty and the right to legislate, and the necessity of submission to His commands;
2. Divine revelation and its fundamental role in setting forth the laws;
3. The return to God in the Hereafter, and the constructive role of this belief in the course of man's ascent towards God;
4. The justice of God in creation and legislation;
5. Continuous leadership (imamah) and perpetual guidance, and its fundamental role in ensuring the uninterrupted process of the revolution of Islam.

Israel: There is no question that the "Hebrew State" or "Jewish State" is a theocracy. It is no secret to anyone that the country is founded exclusively on one specific religion, Judaism. In effect, Israeli leaders have never ceased declaring Israel as a Jewish country club exclusively for Jews. For example, Benyamin Netnayahu in 2019 said that "Israel is the national state, NOT for all its citizens, but only for the Jewish people". Israel has two Chief Rabbis, one for the Ashkenazim (European Jews) and one for the Sephardim (Arab and North African Jews). The Sephardi Rabbi, Yitzhak Yosef, refers to Africans as "monkeys" and holds enormous sway over the extremist terrorist settlers. In 2007, Israel's former chief rabbi, Mordechai Elyahu, called for the Israeli army to mass-murder Palestinians, which the Israeli army obediently and devoutly does on a daily basis.

Accordingly, Israel is a theocracy disguised as a democracy because it fools the world by holding elections. As I have said before about Lebanon, democracy cannot be reduced to holding elections. Like in all theocracies or autocracies, elections are a facade. Democracy is not only about a fight between right and left, between loyalists and the opposition. Democracy is also about human rights, respecting minorities, upholding the law, maintaining strict independence of the executive, legislative and judiciary, etc. At least the Iranians and the Saudis are frank about what government they have, but not the Israelis.

According to a post by John Clark on Quora.com, "the Zionists who originally promoted the 'return to Palestine', were for the most part secular. The problem is that all definitions of 'jewishness' require a religious aspect, and so, one cannot have a Jewish state which is truly 'secular'. In most modern 'secular states' there is a negative view of such appeals as 'the US is a Christian Nation'... in fact, only the extreme right or religious zealots of the US tend to hold such a view. This view is extended to 'islamic' states. The Zionists wanted it both ways, a 'Jewish' state, but somehow avoid the association with religious zealotry that comes with using 'religion' as a defining element of the nation's self image".

As usual, ambiguity, bigotry, lack of commitment to stated ideals, and sitting on the fence, are hallmarks of Israel. By pretending to be a democracy, it attracts sympathy from genuine democracies that, truth be told, were themselves the butchers of the Jewish population of Europe during the Holocaust and support Israel only out of guilt, not conviction. In fact, modern-day Europeans are Nazis in disguise who are happy to have rid themselves of their Jewish populations (wealthy and sophisticated) which they dumped on the hapless Palestinians (poor and rural). Israel's extremist Jewish terrorist colonists murder Palestinian civilians every day, steal their lands, uproot their millennial olive groves, AND form significant parts of the Israeli government. Indeed, in Israel, civilian law and religious law are confounded, which is the very definition of a theocracy.

Lebanon: The ultimate farce of a democracy (see my post: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/09/lebanons-presidential-elections.html). With its constitution recognizing 18 religious sects (and no others) as constitutive of the republic, civilian laws are again intertwined with religious laws. Every night on Lebanese television news, men in strange headgear (turbans, mitres, skulcaps, etc.) and long robes deliver statements about the political developments. These statements are in fact instructions to their affiliated politicians and followers. Some of these clergymen (Hassan Nasrallah) even have militias (Hezbollah) affiliated with, and funded by, foreign countries (Iran) with which they terrorize the rest of the population. 

Basically, Lebanon is a federation of mini-theocracies. No wonder that religious problems are all over the place: Disputes about alcohol sales, interference of the religious into civilian and political affairs, distribution of political and administrative posts on the basis of religion, the religious courts take precedence over civilian courts in personal status matters (marriage, divorce, child custody, etc.) As such Lebanon is, like Israel, one huge bigoted theocratic system hiding behind a facade of democracy.