Lebanon as Sancho Panza

With their proclivity for bragging, and even as they're up to their eyeballs in garbage, corruption, religious voodooism, backwardness and ignorance, the Lebanese make gigantic claims about their country. Here are some examples from the mouths of political, religious and social personalities:

"homeland of culture and enlightenment" - وطن الثقافة والتنوير

"homeland of culture, art and literature" - وطن الثقافة والفن والادب

"homeland of culture, learning/science, and freedom" -  وطن الثقافة والعلم والحرية

These statements might have had some relative veracity perhaps 50 years ago when Lebanon was at the vanguard of the Middle East in bridging east and west and adopting liberal social norms. Even conservatives were open to, and tolerant of, evolving ideas in matters of personal freedoms, even though some barbarian feudals pretending to be progressives, like Kamal Jumblatt, were banning rock music groups from landing at Beirut Airport in the 1960s. Imagine how deep in backwardness he must have been to think of rock music as some kind of threat to public decency. You can argue that those were the times and their norms. But how about today and its norms?

Like Don Quixote on his horse with his grandiose illusions, the West today leads the human herd in a constant battle against the windmills of established norms. It is as though the West, thanks to Voltaire, Rousseau and Charles Darwin among others, no longer believes in a stagnant human civilization and is convinced that boundaries must constantly be pushed. What may have been perfect or acceptable has become imperfect or unacceptable a generation down the line. What may be have been seen as indecent has become normal and encouraged. Issues like slavery, colonialism, the oppression of women, racism, persecution of homosexuality, etc. were standard norms a few generations ago, but now the West has upended all of them and is promoting equality, non-discrimination, women's rights, and gender diversity, despite the opposition of reactionary conservative movements on display around the world.

The striking thing is that most people view their world and their norms as immutable, like a one millisecond snapshot in an hours-long rolling movie. They do not understand that theirs is a constantly changing world with a history, a present and a future. By ignoring their history (where their journey has been), people are stuck in the present and cannot imagine and try to shape their future. But in this interconnected world, underdeveloped societies like Lebanon's are akin to Sancho Panza, riding their donkeys and trailing behind Don Quixote by a few decades. 

For example, New Zealand was the first country to give women the right to vote in 1893, but it took the US another two decades (1920) to grant them that right, and Lebanon several more decades (1952). With every social and political development that was pioneered by a western country, less developed nations start by rejecting it as a manifestation of a decadent west on its decline. Then, once the "new" norm proves itself in the west to be harmless or even beneficial on the ground, it is imported to our countries by expatriates and younger people (and today via social media) back to their country of origin, and after minor objections it becomes accepted and laws are passed. After the revolutions in the US (1776) and France (1789), democracy was initially rejected by virtually all countries around the world, including Europe itself. Nowadays, even the staunchest monarchies feel guilty and conflicted about their role in the world and have become constitutional monarchies. Other autocratic regimes and dictatorships embark on developing fake forms of democracy (e.g. with pseudo-elections) with which to maintain their dominion: Egypt, Russia, China, Myanmar etc. - come to mind.

Perhaps trailing societies need time to digest and adapt to new developments coming from leading societies. But when I hear government officials proclaiming their steadfast opposition against cultural incursions from the West, even as 95% of their lives are directed by the West (communications, industrialization, commerce, fashion, etc.), I cannot but feel derision at their arrogance, imbecility and ignorance. For example, the current Acting Minister of Interior and Municipalities in Lebanon, Mr. Bassam Maulaui, who oversees a defective universe of corruption, filth, garbage, polluted rivers and ocean front, etc. - not of his making of course since he inherited the cesspool - is pontificating about how he is protecting his otherwise deeply bigoted people against the new international norm of homosexual rights. In this, he joins the former Iranian president Ahmadinejad who once declared emphatically that there were no homosexuals in Iran. Or the scientifically-moronic Chinese ruling Communist Party who is fighting Covid-19 one virus at a time. To wit:

[English translation. Arabic original below]:

The Acting Minister of Interior and Municipalities in the caretaker government, Mr. Bassam Maulaui, met with a delegation of representatives of independent rights associations and activists, and discussed with them the matter of conferences and gatherings promoting homosexuality. 

The delegation thanked the Minister for his positions and demanded that he "takes dissuasive measures against this phenomenon before it spreads, with the objective of ensuring the security of society, just as the Minister is keen on the country's security and enforcing the laws pertaining to public decency".  

إستقبل وزير الداخلية والبلديات في حكومة تصريف الاعمال بسام مولوي وفداً من ممثلي جمعيات وحقوقيين مستقلين، وتم البحث في مسألة المؤتمرات والتجمعات للترويج للمثلية الجنسية.

 

وشكر الوفد وزير الداخلية على مواقفه وطالبه بـ"إتخاذ التدابير الرادعة لهذه الظاهرة قبل انتشارها، وذلك من باب الحرص على الامن الاجتماعي تماما كحرص الوزير على الامن في البلد وتطبيق القوانين المتعلقة بالاداب العامة".

Zebran Basij: Purposeless Scheming

DO YOU REALLY WANT THIS FACE FOR PRESIDENT?

Zebran Basij has no plans for the country. His only objective is to become president, like his father-in-law Michel Aoun did, without any idea of what he wanted to do with the presidency. It turned out, unfortunately, that Aoun, prompted by Zebran, wanted revenge, take the country back to the 1980s and 1990s, and somehow cleanse the stains of his many defeats by doing a tit-for-tat to the Sunnis.

For some reason, Aoun and Basij, like most Lebanese politicians, are professional politicians in the dirtiest sense of the word. Intrigue, backstabbing, maneuvering, scheming, blocking, deception.... without any foundation in ideology or ideal. For decades, we thought that Aoun had big ideas about moving Lebanon forward, not backward. But then Zebran Basij entered the stage and turned what could have been a hopeful renaissance (out of the country's stinking feudal tribal sectarian cesspool) into a vulgar act of revenge in which he displayed the same thuggish conduct as his enemies. Basij in fact turned the person Michel Aoun into a political family farm just like the Hariri, Jumblatt, Frangiyeh, Gemayel, Karami etc. farms.

No one knows what, if any, vision Zebran has for Lebanon or for the Christians whom he claims to want to protect. His is a mindset of a minoritarian victim whose only outlook is to further shrivel and wallow in the victim rat hole. 

His latest act of cheap pedestrian politics was to try and drive a wedge between his two Shiite allies who are like Siamese brothers. With Hezbollah having chosen their candidate for the presidency in the person of Sleiman Frangiyeh, another feudal tribal warlord allied with Syria's Bashar Assad, Basij feels slighted since he, not Frangiyeh, crawled at the feet of Hassan Nasrallah and signed his Memorandum of Surrender between Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement and Hezbollah. As a mediocre politician without any vision, he thought that an alliance with the Shiites could help him in his revenge against the Sunnis. He got the Shiites to back Aoun for the presidency, at the price of paralyzing parliament (by killing the quorum) for 2.5 years. What a miserable petty strike of imbecility.

Aoun became president, but since he owed his self-labeled "strong" presidency to Hezbollah, he was ineffectual and weak and could not confront the Iranian militia. Instead, pricked by everyone else for this utterly stupid alliance, Aoun and Basij found themselves at odds with Hezbollah's Siamese twin, the Amal movement of Nabih Berri. For all those years, Berri and Nasrallah, screwed Aoun at every bend in the road. They owned him, and he couldn't risk losing them. Isolated as they have become from the other Christians, from the Sunnis and the Druze, Aoun and Basij again began scheming to force a wedge between Amal and Hezbollah. Last week, Basij met his hated ally Berri in secret, after securing the meeting thanks to Berri's daughter who is, nepotism oblige, the Lebanese ambassador in Qatar.

The meeting with Berri did not go well. Basij wanted Berri to intercede with Hezbollah to change its preference for Frangiyeh and adopt him instead as a candidate for the presidency. He also went to Paris where most French politicians refused to meet with him, and where he hoped the French would intercede with the Americans to lift their corruption-related sanctions imposed on him. And that did not go well either.

Berri bluntly told Basij: You have a memorandum of understanding with your ally Hezbollah. Why are you asking me to mediate between two allies? Go talk to Hezbollah.

The French told Basij: We cannot lobby the US Treasury Department to lift sanctions because its decisions are technical, not political. 

In other words, Basij has no friends left because of his abrasive second-rate discourse against anyone that disagrees with him. He is left with one friend, Hezbollah, who has opted for Sleiman Frangiyeh as a candidate for president. And that is making Basij really hurt, he who has bent over backward and burned his bridges with everyone else to provide the Iranian militia with a Christian fig leaf.

I've said it before: Lebanese politics lacks higher order thinking. Politics in this country is not about leading with a lofty goal of improving the lives of people or uniting the disparate elements of the country behind such a lofty goal; it is more about how to prick a rival, how to backstab a friend, how to make money with backroom deals, how to insult, how to rally your followers by scaring them into hating everyone else, etc. 

Again, Zebran Basij has no plans for the country. If he becomes president, the Lebanese people know that his only modus operandi would be more of the pathetic low-level moronic revenge by blocking any step forward on issues that really matter, just like his "strong" father-in-law did. By denying any success to non-Christian segments of Lebanese society, Aoun and Basij are behaving like the filthy republicans of the US: Block, stall, stir up anger, etc... for the sole reason of denying Obama or Biden any success. In such cases, the only victims of this vulgar way of governing are the people of the country. Aoun came in as a self-labeled "strong" president. Indeed, he displayed strength by obstructing everything and everyone that came his way. By the time he left office, the whole country was obstructed to the point of a calamitous collapse and disintegration of all its institutions. Aoun led the country into becoming the most failed country on earth for a century. Zebran Basij, as the engineer  of Aoun's political career after Aoun's return from exile in 2005, is likely to do the same and further decimate Lebanon to the point of extinction. Maybe that is their ultimate goal: The dismantling of the Greater Lebanon mutant-hybrid so that Christians can separate themselves from the Muslims. But wouldn't it be more courageous and statesman-like to openly declare their objective?

Without Michel Aoun's residual aura in his watermark, Basij will likely keep flailing about to remain relevant. He knows that his only salvation can come from only one specific near-suicidal act: Divorce Hezbollah. And fast.

Pro-Hezbollah Christian MP Alain Aoun Loves Sitting on the Fence

Hezbollah ally, pro-Syrian, pro-Iranian MP Alain Aoun is a fence-sitter par excellence. He is Michel Aoun's nephew, and together with Michel Aoun's son-in-law Zebran Basij, they form the political family farm's nepotistic nucleus. He is afraid of naming a candidate to the presidency and is waiting for Hassan Nasrallah to tell him what to do. Problem is that Nasrallah seems to have made his bet on the Syrian dictator's favorite candidate, Sleiman Frangiyeh, discarding Basij in the trashbin and with him their infamous Memorandum of Understanding.

Hezbollah wants the presidential election stalemate over soon, hopefully before the Iranian regime falls apart, and has no time for Basij who is traveling the world capitals begging for forgiveness and for the lifting of sanctions imposed on him. Basij knows that unless he severs his satanic ties with Hezbollah he has no chance of ever becoming president. That is how a deal with the devil comes around demanding your soul in exchange for the fake eternal life he gave you.

Alain Aoun's problem is that he is the weak element in the inner Aoun family sanctum. He obviously is afraid of saying no to an over-achieving, abrasive and domineering Basij, but deep down he himself wouldn't probably mind becoming president. We all know how these things work inside politically-inbred families. Still, and until Hezbollah tells them what to do, they have no favorite candidate and will continue dropping blank votes and blocking the quorum for a second round of voting. That Memorandum of Understanding between the FPM and Hezbollah is full of misunderstandings, and like the Taef Agreement, was never really intended to be implemented. It merely gave Hezbollah a Christian fig leaf of pseudo-respectability, while propelling by the force of Hezbollah's weapons Michel Aoun to the presidency where, over 6 long and abominable years, Aoun botched everything and never achieved anything except oversee the collapse of the country and its institutions. 

Now a chasm has formed within the Syrian-loving ménage à trois (Hassan Nasrallah, Zebran Basij, Sleiman Frangiyeh): Hassan and Basij got married in February 2006, but now the turbaned-bearded Casanova is in love with pretty boy Sleiman "Sam" Frangiyeh, and Zebran is losing his mind over this betrayal. He wants to change his name back to Bassil, after Hassan lovingly nicknamed him Basij during a make-out session in honor of the brutal thugs of the Iranian paramilitary militia established in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Here are excerpts from Alain Aoun's interview with "Free Lebanon" in which he explains, like the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping would,  that democratic competition is bad for the country. Alain wants a "consensus" president whose farce of an election is pre-cooked in a backroom deal, then revealed to the Lebanese people, just as the Chinese Communist Party selects its country's president. Alain Aoun does not want a real election because there is a chance his horse might lose. So he wants the new Lebanese president to be "chosen" the way his heroes in dictatorships and autocratic regimes (China, Iran, Syria, etc.) choose their leaders: The big boys sit down for a soiree with cigars and drinks, and barter favors and money until they find a suitable political eunuch slave whom they install and begin tormenting for the next 6 years. They are terrified at any candidate with political testosterone.

Alain says:

Our choice is we do not want to vote as a mere formality, but rather we want to prepare for the vote with the other blocs. We have a right to use blank votes, but not to block the quorum at the sessions [to elect a president].

In an interview with “Free Lebanon”, MP Alain Aoun, Michel Aoun’s nephew and a prime example of the Aoun dynastic nepotism, said, “it doesn’t appear that there is a candidate who has a serious chance at getting elected, and even the candidacy of Michel Mouawwad is treading water”.

“We are not insisting on Zebran Basij or anyone else. We want to develop the possibility of a consensus candidate without entering into a bazaar of names, and whether this candidate is from our bloc or from somewhere else, we will support him”.

Aoun criticized the opposition for fielding Mouawwad as a candidate in order to withdraw his candidacy later, like it was done with Line 29 [in the maritime border delineation with Israel]. He pointed to the fact that “no one has announced Basij’s candidacy to the presidency”, adding, “He has the right to present himself, and at the present time the conditions are not favorable to his candidacy. These conditions could change, but for now the political circumstances are bad”.

Aoun claimed that “the [Change and Reform] Bloc is open to an agreement over names”, rejecting the equivalence between candidates who are open to options and those who have no options”.

Aoun said that “we cannot go on ad eternum with a vacuum in the presidency [a vacuum he himself is creating by refusing to vote for a candidate]. The problem today is political. The vacuum cannot last, and we won’t be part of it”, clarifying that his beloved uncle Michel Aoun “waged a partnership battle to correct the way in which the Christians are dealt with in the political system as a whole while today there is a Christian representation balance. If the two Christian blocs can agree and embrace one candidate, no one can beat that candidate”.

On the question of Hezbollah’s weapons, the Jesuitic French-educated Alain Aoun said, “We need to complete the discussion on this matter and remove it from the lines of division across the country. We disagreed with the various forces on many political issues. We must seek understandings to produce a president, and we are looking to communicate with everyone and reconcile with everyone because we need to open new channels in order to deal with them”.

Each party has the right to obtain guarantees from its candidate. As the Free Patriotic Movement [Tayyar], we want a president with whom everyone feels at ease and who reaches a realistic and responsible understanding with Hezbollah over its weapons”. Aoun was adamant that “the Tayyar has not named a candidate to the presidency, and it may be that Ziyad Baroud is one of the options over which the bloc could agree if the circumstances are made favorable.”

Aoun concluded that “domestically Hezbollah is a representative and a partner in the country; it is part of an axis in which it is difficult to separate the various arenas from one another.”

Hezbollah's Christian FPM Slaves Want Dialogue, not Elections

Alain Aoun, Pierre Raffoul, Simon Abi-Ramia, and all the composting old farts of Michel Aoun and Gibran Bassil's slaves assigned to Hezbollah, are calling for "dialogue" after deliberately breaking quorum in Parliament for the 6th time (as of Thursday Nov. 17) in a row last Thursday.

Like they did in 2014, 2015 and 2016, they boycott or walk out of the general assembly - which ought to be in continued session to elect a president - for the specific objective of preventing a vote. They are afraid of what a vote could do to their vanished power, now that the old man is gone, and are clinging by their nails to the robes of Hassan Nasrallah, stroking his turban, and kissing his feet.

Why are they afraid of a vote? 

Because they have no viable candidate. 

Because the only candidate they might have is under international sanctions for corruption, and even if elected, he will be an identical repeat of the disastrous experience they've had with Michel Aoun. 

Because the other side's candidate has proven he can muster the majority required, assuming a vote is allowed to go through.

When the dinosaurs of the ill-named Free Patriotic Movement - slaves are not free, Iranian agents are not patriotic - call for dialogue while blocking Parliament from electing a president, it is in the hope of getting the other side, which is playing by the constitutional rules (it has a candidate and is not blocking Parliament), to sit down and agree on a "consensus" president, i.e. a weak president who can be manipulated and coerced by the Iranian mullahs and the Syrian tyrant into tolerating the outlaw Hezbollah organization and keeping Lebanon as a hostage to a satisfactory conclusion, if any, to the Iranian nuclear program stalemate and other regional problems.

The Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) is afraid of elections. Since elections are the pillar of democracy, the FPM is turning its back on democracy and is adopting the type of pre-packaged elections typical of dictatorships and autocratic regimes. Remember when the FPM used to fight against the same practice of appointing a neutral, neutered, feeble, "consensus" president by the Syrian occupation? Now the FPM has adopted the same approach and essentially wants Hezbollah to appoint a new president. On the ground, the practices of the FPM have also taken a Baathist, Fascist slant by terrorizing their opponents with an armed black-shirt militia they call "the Old Guard" which burst onto a TV program last week and beat participants and audience members, something they cloned from the Syrian and Iranian regimes. Either they stay in power by coercive "dialogue" or they stay in power by the force of weapons and terror. 

In a democratic system, people vote. If the vote is in your favor, you get to rule for a limited period of time. If the vote is against you, you just stand aside and let your opponent rule for a limited period of time. But thanks to the Iranian-inspired, Syrian-trained FPM, Lebanon has become like many Arab or African countries where transfers of power are never civilized: riots, coup d'etats, civil wars... Dictators don't like to step down when their term ends, they cling to power even as they are on their death beds and their people are tired sick of them. 

And this is precisely what the FPM is doing: Since they couldn't keep Michel Aoun in Baabda because he's too old and can barely walk and talk, they are trying to replacing him with his abrasive son-in-law, Gibran Bassil, a younger clone of Aoun. But they know Bassil as President is out of question for both domestic and international reasons: He is the most disliked politician in Lebanon, and he is under US sanctions on corruption charges. Since they cannot mount a coup d'etat or impose their will by bloodshed, they have decided to go back to a practice they themselves have decried for decades and which was imposed by the Syrian occupation: A weak and insignificant president, and the only way to get to a weak and ineffectual president is through what they call a dialogue. Instead of voting and living like civilized people with the consequences of their vote, they want to hide their filth behind a "consensus" president.

The FPM has become a backward, Fascist, tyrannical party similar to the Syrian Baath Party, a party afraid of real elections, afraid of being in the opposition. And we all know why: As long as it clung to power by the force of weapons and terror - via Hezbollah - the FPM could make do without what it believes to be useless democratic elections. Elections may bring someone who can do well for the country, and that would be a disaster for the protectors of Hezbollah and slaves of Iran and Syria. They don't want a stable normal country, because a stable normal country by definition must renounce the unlawful world-labeled terror organization of Hezbollah, and since the FPM cannot survive without Hezbollah, it abides by its diktats regardless of consequence. It is as if Gibran Bassil and his imbeciles have sold the FPM's soul to the devil in exchange for eternal political life. They are cornered into their political rat hole, like Hassan Nasrallah is physically cornered into his hideout.

The call for dialogue - instead of elections - by Alain Aoun, Pierre Raffoul, Simon Abi-Ramia, and their ilk is in fact their fear of the democracy that would automatically reject them. At its founding, the FPM was rich in decent, intellectual, professional members with integrity. Now, with the advent of Gibran Bassil who turned the party's founding principles upside down and hijacked the party from his once-decent father-in-law Michel Aoun, only the vulgar arriviste scum politicians have remained whose obedience to Bassil conjures up the meek compliance of the subordinates of the likes of Stalin, Putin, Assad, and Kim Jong-un. Many decades of struggle for freedom have been wasted; Those who used to be freedom fighters serve now as maids to the wannabe autocrat dictator Bassil. It's happened before: Once they smell power, dictators become addicted to it. Nicaragua's president Daniel Ortega once was the leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front and fought for decades to remove the dictator Somoza. After his own accession to power, Ortega has become a dictator with his wife as his vice-president and represses any dissent with the same violence that Somoza directed at him. Likewise, the dinosaurs of the FPM were once freedom fighters against Syria and Hezbollah's hijacking of the country, but now they have picked up the scent of corrupting power and are today the castrated eunuch slaves of Syria and Hezbollah.

Jumblatt's Realism: the Chameleon Wants to Play

Jumblatt’s realism: Cavorting to the Captagon Party
(Translated from Arabic)

Elias Bejjani
Lebanese expatriate activist
Phoenicia@hotmail.com
http://www.eliasbejjaninews.com

08 November 2022

Mr. Walid Jumblatt is one of the most dangerous politicians, not only to Lebanon but to his own Druze community. He allows to himself whatever agrees with his own personal interests, but not with the national interest or that of his community. Looking back at his terrifying past full of twists and turns, reversals and turnabouts ever since he entered the political fray, one sees his flagrant opportunism, lack of principle, and careerism. His loyalties and friendships are fleeting and capricious. He has no scruples whatsoever about changing his positions at any time and replacing them with their complete opposite under the slogans of “pragmatism” and "realism".

Jumblatt’s ever meandering language about the stalled presidential elections was evidence of the above when he met last Sunday with his dear friend and partner, Nabih Berri. He was essentially laying the ground for his umpteen surrender and political switcheroo which relies, as always, on the tactic of submission to whomever - Lebanese, Palestinian, Iranian, Saudi, Libyan, Russian, American, Egyptian, etc. - happens to be the stronger at the moment, regardless of principle. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat (C) shown in a picture dated 30 August 1982 in Beirut, shakes hands with his Lebanese supporters, Nabih Berri (L), leader of the Shiite Moslem Amal movement supported by Syria, and Walid Jumblatt (2nd R) leader of the minority Druze community and head of the Socialist Progressive Party, in a farewell before the Palestinian leader escaped from Israeli-occupied Beirut. Man (R) is unidentified. EDS NOTE: B/W only. AFP PHOTO DOMINIQUE FAGET (Photo credit should read DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP/Getty Images)

Jumblatt “Bek”, a title his feudal family received from the Ottoman occupiers, is a merchant, a feudal lord, a militia warlord who waged war against his own fellow Lebanese using the Palestinians, the Syrian Assads, Qaddafi, Nasserism, leftwingers, communists and every other mercenary and dictator he could find, then turn against them overnight when their stars faded.

He exploited the March 14 movement, then stabbed it in the back, just as he betrayed the Cedars Revolution. He is now using the pretext of the stalled presidential elections to cavort to the Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri to protect him from the wrath of Hezbollah, the Captagon Party. He did the same thing during last May’s legislative elections, when Nabih Berri and Wafiq Safa guaranteed to Jumblatt significant successes in the ballot. We should remember also how Jumblatt, by his own admission, conspired against the Hariri government and participated with Michel Sleiman, Najib Miqati, Nabih Berri, the Syrians, the Iranians, Berri and Hezbollah in imposing the “Black Shirts” government. The Bek will surely turn against Berri and Hezbollah one day when events turn against them.

The Bek was the first profiteer from the Syrian and Palestinian occupations, and he remains the most active trader with the commodities of Arabism and the Palestinian cause.

In sum, one should not pay any attention to what Jumblatt does or says. Nor should one trust any of his theatrical displays, such as the one he made at the 33d commemoration of the Taef Agreement at the UNESCO palace in Beirut a few days ago.

Any alliance or partnership with Jumblatt is destined to turn into betrayal and backstabbing. Jumblatt is neither enemy nor friend nor ally; he should be kept away from any patriotic or sovereign program for the future of the country. Jumblatt is indeed a national shame, a great disaster for his country which he will surely betray for his own personal interests. I ask the sovereigntists: Isn’t it time for them to learn that Jumblatt can never be trusted? 

-----------------------------------

For more on Jumblatt:

https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/02/kamal-begot-walid-and-walid-begot.html

 

Why Lebanon Cannot Elect a President

Update (November 17): For the 6th time in a row, the coward FPM slaves of Hezbollah were so afraid of the turbaned, bearded Captagon Chief that they once again dropped blank votes at this 6th session to elect a president. They insist on violating the constitution by walking out of session just before the mandatory second round, thus breaking the fallacious 2/3d quorum imposed by their ally, Speaker Nabih Berri, and following him and his Syrian and Iranian sponsors like pathetic dogs. They claim to want to protect Christian rights, while elevating Shiite Muslim abuses of the country to new heights.

------------------------

At the fifth session today (November 10) of the Lebanese parliament, no president was elected. This is likely to go on for several weeks and months as has become the practice in Lebanese politics. Here's why:

- The opposition parties (Lebanese Forces, Kataeb, and others) have named a candidate since the first session, Michel Mouawad. They have voted for him at every one of the previous presidential election sessions. Between sessions, they try to convince independents and others to join them and vote for Mouawad.

For background, Michel Mouawad's father, René Mouawad was assassinated in November 1989, 18 days into his presidential term, probably by Syrian Intelligence, like all other political assassinations in Lebanon. Anyone in Lebanon who doesn't submit to the diktat of Damascus becomes a pending target. The 1988-1990 time frame was one of battles between those who wanted to rid Lebanon of the Syrian occupation and those who submitted to, and collaborated with, the Syrian occupier. In the end, the Syrians won and their occupation persisted until 2005. So candidate Michel Mouawad is considered "anti-Syrian", which explains why the pro-Syrian loyalist camp is against him and is doing everything it can to scuttle his election, as is described below.

- The loyalists (Hezbollah, Aoun & Bassil's FPM....) drop a blank vote in the ballot box every time. They have no candidate because they know they'll lose if they field a candidate. They keep calling for "dialogue" and for a "consensus" president. For the past 30+ years, no dialogue has ever yielded any result since Lebanon's establishment politicians began holding dialogues as a way to go around constitutional provisions. And for the past 30+ years, every "consensus" president elected has been a failure.

Here are the many ways that the dinosaur Speaker of Parliament, Nabih Berri, who is in the loyalist camp, violates the constitution at every one of these sessions:  

Per the constitution, 

1) Once the current presidential term ends, Parliament becomes a de facto electoral body (and is prohibited from serving as a legislative body) that should remain in permanent session until it elects a new president; and 

2) When the session to elect a president is convened, and assuming a quorum, a first round of voting takes place. If a candidate gets 2/3d of the vote, he becomes president and the election is over. If no candidate gets 2/3d of the vote in the first round, a second round (and more rounds, if necessary) is immediately and automatically held in which whoever gets 51% becomes president.

This is not happening as we speak. What is happening is that Berri calls for a session of Parliament to elect a president. In the past 5 sessions so far, a quorum is achieved, a first round is held, opposition candidate Mouawad gets anywhere from 40 to 50 votes (out of total of 128 MPs), which is not the 2/3d required in that first round. Hezbollah and Bassil-Aoun's loyalist camp votes with blank or frivolous votes. But here, instead of the Speaker immediately holding a second round for a 51% majority ballot, he instructs his allies (Hezbollah and Aoun-Bassil) to walk out of the session, killing the quorum and with it the second round of voting. The Speaker then adjourns the session and calls for another session to be held a week later. And so it goes, week after week, another one of these months or years on end during which Lebanon remains without a president or without a government. THIS IS WHY LEBANON IS A FAILED STATE. Unlike normal democracies, Lebanese democracy is one in which the players of both camps do not play the game; instead, they argue over the rules and tamper with them. Instead of discussing the substance of the problems facing the country, the politicians spend their time arguing over the rules they themselves established and swore to upheld.

By "consensus" president, the loyalists mean someone who is no one, someone who usually may be an otherwise professionally qualified individual but who is politically weak, without political or popular backing, someone they can manipulate and impose conditions on. The loyalists do not want an independent president who is likely to confront them and confront Syria's continued grip over the country. 

The whole "consensus" paradigm of the Lebanese political class - broadly referred to as "consensual democracy" - is a charade of democracy. Simply put, people vote for their representatives from all camps, including most prominently the loyalist and opposition camps. But then, instead of whoever wins forms a government, and whoever loses becomes the opposition, the loyalists and opposition politicians sit down and form a government together. Such governments never work. They are not to be confused with what genuine democracies know as "coalition governments"; Lebanese consensual governments are not coalition governments formed over a compromise over policies, they are an aberration. If one camp makes a proposition, the other camp blocks it, and so no decisions are made at the level of the government. ANOTHER REASON WHY LEBANON IS A FAILED STATE.

Furthermore, and regardless of whether the Lebanese constitution as enacted in the Taef Agreement of 1989 allows it, the norm has been set to allow a member of parliament to be a government minister AT THE SAME TIME, which is a ridiculous and common practice in Lebanese politics. So imagine the conflicts of interests inside such a political system: Both opposition and loyalists sit in the same government, which means that the opposition is not really an opposition anymore; AND those MPs who become ministers in the government are supposed to hold themselves accountable for their own failures. This is how the Lebanese political establishment operates, and this why Lebanon is a failed state, rife with corruption and abuse of power.

Back in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, Lebanon was a normal country with clearly defined prerogatives and responsibilities between the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judiciary, AND these responsibilities were actually enforced under the law, such that decisions could be made quickly and executed. That was before the Taef Agreement. When the Muslims of the country won the 1975-1990 War with the backing of the Americans, the Europeans, the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Libyans, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis and every other f----- Arab, European, and Asian mercenary and terrorist they could find, the Taef Agreement was signed as a new constitution in 1989. In this new constitution, the head of the Executive - the Christian President - was castrated, became a figurehead, and his responsibilities distributed to the Muslim Prime Minister and the Muslim Speaker. As a result, the country became governed by a three-headed monster with conflicting and overlapping authorities such that no decisions could be made. Each of the three "presidents" created his own domain, his own mini-state rife with corruption, clientelism, cronyism and nepotism. For instance, there are numerous "security forces" bodies in Lebanon, each belonging to each of the three "presidents": Internal Security, General Security, State Security. After 30+ years of Syrian occupation, Lebanon's Muslims essentially cloned the Syrian Baathist model of governance. And to add insult to injury, the new Muslim rulers exercised - Islam oblige - a specific practice in which they surrender to God's will every decision they are incapable of assuming themselves - Inshallah (God willing) is a phrase you hear all the time from the mouths of Muslim MPs and Ministers. It's all in God's hands anyway, so why bother trying to improve people's lives? This is why personal and collective responsibility is more lacking among Lebanon's Muslim communities than in its Christian communities.

Religions as Political Cultures

There is no hiding the fact that the United States is on a campaign to convert Latin America away from Catholicism to Evangelical Protestantism in what may be called "Religious Colonialism", as opposed to military or economic colonialism. It is already established, for example, that Brazil has now, or will soon, become a Protestant majority country that is losing its Catholic character. This trend can be witnessed all across Latin America and Africa, and to a lesser extent in Europe and Asia.

The repercussions of such a shift are enormous. For example, if the Latin American migrants to the US have been converted prior to their arrival, then they'll swell the ranks of the extremist Evangelical Protestants once they enter the country. This will also mitigate the fear that WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) have of losing their own demographic dominance, as it is projected that by 2050 they will no longer be the majority but merely the largest minority group.

In Brazil, a sizable voting block behind Fascist extremist Jair Bolsonaro was the Evangelicals, as we saw them on television raising hands to the sky and swiveling their hips in their way of "worshiping", and denouncing the moderate Lula Da Silva as the "devil". In the US, the bulk of southern Evangelicals stands behind Donald Trump's populist platform. He tells them that he is going to restore America's "glory", a word he borrows from the Evangelical dictionary. He, in fact, moved his embassy to Jerusalem and recognized the city as Israel's capital in line with the Evangelicals' aspiration to see the Hebrew State welcome the return of Christ and bring about Armageddon, at which time, unfortunately for the radical extremist Jewish Israelis who are allied with them, the Evangelicals' current love for Jews would come to an end if the latter do not 'finally' admit Christ as the Messiah.

These days politics has become enmeshed with religion. As the liberal political order that developed after World War II is eroding around the world, people resort to religion and religious conservatism to find a sense of certainty. It is the history of humanity: Religion is a universal implement of all human cultures, and "culture" in its broadest meaning is itself an escapist but futile way to assuage our disgruntlement in the face of our mortality. Our brain needs answers to all it sees in its environment, and the most profound angry question humans have always pondered is the one directed at our mortality. Our brain doesn't understand why we must die, so it invents fantasy stories to alleviate this anger, and these stories are what we call "religion" and by extension "culture". When science provides the facts for a reasonable answer, humans abandon the magical explanations of religion. In the Middle Ages, people attributed the Plague to God's dissatisfaction with human conduct. Today, we no longer attribute epidemics to God's wrath; we know it is the bacterium Yersinia pestis causing the plague or the SARS-CoV-2 virus for the Covid pandemic.

That is why Pharaohs erected their entire civilization around the notion of continuing life in the afterlife. The only function of mummification and pyramid building was to ensure the immortality of the concerned. Christianity offers "eternal life" and "resurrection", and Islam promises paradise and postmortem life, in exchange for faith. Humans cannot fathom why they have to die. Of all other living beings on earth, we live beyond our biological means. Sex is no longer strictly for reproduction (as it is in biological terms), it is now a cultural phenomenon: the search for pleasure. When an animal is irremediably sick, we "put it down humanely", but we deny an irremediably sick human the same "humane" treatment because we can't accept that a human dies. Religion makes us sacred beings, when the reality is that we are no more sacred than any other animal or plant. We are born by biology, and even though we reject our death, we always end up dying because our biology fails, even when the drive to death is cultural or religious. A soldier who dies in the battlefield was motivated by his love of country (cultural), but he dies only because his body fails from an injury (biological). In sum, "human culture" is a pile of horse manure and magical illusions destined to blind us to our mortality. Everyone wants to be remembered long after they're dead: Mad generals, artists, kings and queens "by the grace of God"; we all try to leave behind us something to be remembered by. The reality is that some day on this earth there will be another dominant species that wouldn't even know that the human species once existed. Our destiny is oblivion. Life has no purpose. Better accept it, live with it and enjoy it while it lasts. It brings a sense of liberation and weightlessness. 

In the Christian religion, the Catholic Church always lags behind scientific developments: It first rejects them, then slowly comes around to accepting them. Is the Earth at the center of the world (geocentrism) and is it flat? The Church killed people for believing otherwise. Is evolution by natural selection the mechanism by which humans came to be? It took the Catholic Church 100 years to state in its typical convoluted language that "evolution by natural selection is not incompatible with the teachings of the Church". 

The Evangelical Protestants, who ought to be more liberal than the Catholics since they originated in a more rational view of the Christian religion with the reform of the 1500s, have become the most backwardly conservative. They endorse autocratic dictators and have allied themselves with the most fanatic groups of the apartheid state of Israel. They are constantly debating matters that really belong in the domain of the fantastic, not unlike the recent generation of Hollywood movies with superheroes and science fiction, all based on the garbage fiction of the bible: End of times, Armageddon, the Apocalypse, Antichrist, etc. Every decade or so, a southern US preacher declares that God has whispered in his ear a specific date for the end of the world, but then nothing of the sort happens.

Looking at the trajectory that religion has taken from the earliest human civilizations to our time, there clearly is a vector of a numerical reduction in the numbers of gods. It begins in earlier cultures with thousands of gods everywhere (rocks, soil, plants, stars, etc.), a number which then shrunk to a few hundreds of gods during the Bronze Age and the Greco-Roman period, to one god in monotheistic Egypt and Hebrew Palestine... and I let you project where it is going nowadays. But as struggling religions fight this trend, they go through upheavals, dissent, and lots of ups and downs, and extreme reactionary postures. The most caricatural manifestation of such a convulsion is the Southern Evangelicals of the Southern United States in the area known as the "Bible Belt".

To help you understand (if at all possible) the rubbish with which religious conservatives are trying to buck the trend of advancing reason, science and technology, here are some Christian theological terms and their definitions which I received by e-mail from a linguistic source (whose name I cannot recall).

eschatology [ĕs'kə-tŏl'ə-jē] 1844, from Gk. eskhatos "last, furthest, remote." - As a theological term it means the study of "last things," i.e. death, judgment, heaven, and hell.

parousia [pär'ū-sē'ə, pə-rū'zē-ə] -A Greek term that means "arrival" or "coming." It is usually used to mean the Second Coming of Christ.

Millennium [mə-lĕn'ē-əm] from L. mille "thousand" + annus "year," hence a period of 1,000 years. - In Christian theology it denotes a period of 1,000 years during which Christ rules on Earth, a golden age, a time of universal peace.

Amillennialism - The "a" is a negative. This is the teaching that there is no literal 1,000 year reign of Christ as referenced in Revelation 20. Instead, it teaches that we are in the Millennium now. At the end of this millennium Christ will return. The final judgment will take place and the heavens and the earth will then be destroyed and remade.

Antichrist - a figure who opposes God. The word is used to describe a spirit of rebellion against God. Taken literally it refers to a specific future person who actively opposes Christ. He is able to perform miracles. Some believe he will be an incarnation of Satan. Christ will defeat him in a final battle.

Armageddon [är'mə-gĕd'n] - the battle in which Christ destroys Satan, hence any complete disaster resulting in the end of the world.

Tribulation - a seven-year interval when a world religious-political leader called the Antichrist takes power.

Rapture - from Medieval Latin raptura, "seizure, rape, kidnapping" from Latin raptus "a carrying off." An eschatological event in which "true Christians" are caught up in the air to meet the returning Christ.

NOTE: There is disagreement as to whether the "Rapture" will take place before, after, or during the "Tribulation."

Historical Premillennialism - a belief held by a large percentage of Christians during the first three centuries of Christianity. It is the belief that the Antichrist appears on earth and sets off the seven-year Tribulation. At the end of the seven years Christ comes, the saved are "raptured," and his Church rules the Earth for a Millennium. During this thousand years of peace the faithful live in Jerusalem, occupying spiritual bodies. After this period, all people are judged. The faithful will spend eternity on a new earth, not in heaven.

NOTE: After Christianity became the official religion of Rome in the fourth century CE, this belief was declared a heresy and suppressed. The belief reappeared in the 19th century and, with several variations, has again become widespread.

Post-millennialism [pōst'mə-lĕn'ē-ə-lĭz'əm] - the belief that Jesus established the Kingdom of God in the first century and that we are already in the Millennium (not an exact 1,000 years, but "a very long time"). The Second Coming will occur after (post) this current Millennium.

Pre-millennialism [prē'mĭ-lĕn'ē-ə-lĭz'əm] (1844) - the belief that the Millennium lies in the future. Christ will come, bind Satan and his helpers, and rule over a peaceful earth for 1,000 years. At the end of that time Christ will release Satan and his angels who will raise an army which Jesus will destroy in the Battle of Armageddon. The Last Judgment will occur and a new heaven and new earth created.

 

The Many Faeces of Zebran Basij

Open Mouth...Dangly Gonads فاتح تمّو ... راخي بيضو

Kataeb in 1975 ... Tayyar in 2022

Lebanon's Christians are facing their most existential threat since 1920. They survived the 1975 war but were defeated. Why? Because they behaved like the very same barbarian enemies they were facing and presented themselves by their actions to the international decision-makers as a bunch of nagging barbarians. What will they do if the present challenges develop into another war? Will they behave as a civilized people and thus gain the sympathy of the world - just as the Ukrainians are doing these days? Or will they again lose the war primarily because they lost it in the media?

When the Lebanese War of 1975 erupted on April 13, 1975, I was one block away from the intersection in Ayn Remmaneh where Kataeb Party leader Pierre Gemayel was targeted for assassination as he participated in the opening celebration of a church. Four people were killed, including Gemayel's bodyguard, but Gemayel himself was not hurt. Later that morning, in the heated atmosphere caused by the assassination attempt, the young men of the area, mostly Kataeb Party members, were on high alert when a bus carrying Palestinian fighters perched on the bus roof with their Kalashnikovs pointing in every direction, decided to go through Ayn Remmaneh as they commuted between the Sabra-Shatila fortified camps to the west and the fortified camps of Jisr El-Pacha and Tal-Zaatar in the east. Either they were unaware of the morning's event, or they deliberately crossed through, no one knows. But as they went by an intersection three blocks west of the church where the earlier assassination attempt took place, they fell to the fire of the neighborhood's Kataeb members and somewhere between 22 and 28 Palestinian militants were killed.

For the previous several years prior to that April 13, we had grown accustomed to seeing Palestinian fighters brazenly driving around with their guns, setting up checkpoints, arresting and kidnapping people including members of the Lebanese police and army, holding them hostages, etc. But it was rare for the Palestinians to actually enter residential areas they knew were potentially hostile to them, as they typically drove along major roads and highways that went around such residential areas.

Who knows why on that fateful Sunday the Palestinians decided to go through the very same area of Ayn Remmaneh where the earlier shooting targeting Pierre Gemayel occurred. They usually went around the area, taking the Damascus Road to Hazmiyeh or the Chiyah-Galerie Semaan road then the Camille Chamoun Boulevard. 

With the war slowly ratcheting up in what were known then as "rounds", each round of fighting (1-2 weeks) separated from the next round by a lull of a few weeks, until September 1975 when the old souks (markets) of Beirut and its downtown were ravaged by a fire caused by the fighting. 

The object of this post is not to recount the history of the Lebanese War of 1975. But this was the context in which the immediate trigger of the war took place. Of course, tensions were building up since 1967 as a result of several incidents and events in Lebanon and the region. There was the 1968 attack by Israeli jets in Beirut Airport in which 13 airliners of the national Middle East Airlines carrier were destroyed on the tarmac in reprisals for an attack on an Israeli Airliner two days earlier by a Lebanon-based Palestinian militant organization. There was the 1970 migration of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters from Amman to Beirut after King Hussein massacred his own Palestinians in September of that year. There was the 1972 assassination of Palestinian leader Ghassan Kanafani by a car bomb in Beirut, in reprisals for the Ben Gurion Airport massacre by the Japanese Read Army organization earlier in May of that year. There was the May 1973 assassination by Israeli commandos of three Palestinian leaders in Beirut, Kamal Adwan, Kamal Nasser, and Abu-Yousef Al-Najjar. Then the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war in which Israel further defeated the Syrians and the Egyptians. Lebanon stayed out of that war.

This tit-for-tat had nothing to do with Lebanon per se. Lebanon at the time was a thriving prosperous cosmopolitan place. It just happened to host the Palestinian refugees and their militant organizations, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also migrated to Beirut. But as expected, it wouldn't be long before the Lebanese themselves got involved in spite of themselves. The Ayn Remmaneh incident above was the climax of several incidents between the Lebanese Armed Forces, Security Forces, and ordinary Lebanese citizens on one hand, and the armed Palestinians on the other. Obviously the Palestinians were very nervous, suspecting anyone and everyone to be an infiltrated Israeli agent. I recall one incident where the Palestinians had set up a checkpoint at night near the Shatila camp. A newly married Lebanese couple were returning from a night out on the Raouche seafront, did not see the checkpoint and drove through it, prompting the Palestinians to shoot them dead.

The Lebanese State was completely overwhelmed by this build-up of tensions, and as it tried to respond diplomatically (the 1969 Cairo Accord, the 1973 Melkart Accord) and militarily (I personally witnessed from the town of Hadath the Lebanese Air Force jets bombing the Sabra-Shatila camps in 1973), the Sunni Muslims saw in this an opportunity to score points by undermining their fellow Christian Lebanese. Boycotts of the government by the Sunnis, demonstrations against the Lebanese Army, forcibly removing the teaching of the "Civic Education" subject matter from high school programs (thus undermining the awareness by young Lebanese of their country's constitution and laws), backing the Palestinians against the Lebanese State, etc. 

As the State became paralyzed and unable to restore order and clamp down on the Palestinians like King Hussein of Jordan successfully did (because Jordanians and Palestinians are both Sunni Muslims, the divide had no sectarian dimensions), the Lebanese population, in particular the Christians, slowly began to fill the void left by a handicapped State. The Kataeb Party of the Gemayel family became the leading opponent of Palestinian activities that were jeopardizing the stability and future of the country. 

Following the Ayn Remmaneh incidents of April 13, 1975 and as the war became part of people's daily lives, the Kataeb were joined by several other parties and groups with their own militias. The Christian leadership formed the joint Lebanese Front, while the Sunnis grouped around them the Druze, the Shiites, and the Palestinians into the National Movement.

For us, ordinary non-partisan Lebanese, and notwithstanding the fact that the Kataeb were facing off forces we clearly perceived as hostile to us, we gradually saw a deterioration in the Kataeb's conduct of the war. From defenders of the Lebanese cause and of Christian areas, the Kataeb became murderers, rapists, thieves, and gangsters. Neighborhoods were dominated by small groups who went about terrorizing their own people with extortion, hashish dealing, robbing abandoned properties, seizing businesses, etc. all under the justification of defending their people. We were their people, but they were robbing us, terrorizing us, etc. I recall the summer of 1978 which we spent under the constant shelling of the Syrian occupation army. Every morning, there was a lull in the shelling and people came out of their basement shelters to go find bread, check on their properties etc. My father and I would walk out  to the abandoned outskirts of our neighborhood in an area under construction and slated to become a highway. There, we'd see the burned out bodies of people killed the night before. We'd later learn that these were people who were stopped at checkpoints, or suspected of communicating with, or spying for, the other side. Most often, these were lies and pretexts to cover up for other crimes, like robbing, raping, etc. I remember the calcined body of a woman with a huge cross shoved into her abdominal area. Our own apartment, which was on the front line and which we had abandoned in 1975, was broken into and robbed. The Kataeb took everything, and those items of furniture they could not carry, they smashed. One time, I went in to inspect the apartment looking for salvageable memorabilia, and saw a Kataeb fighter cutting glass panels with a diamond knife. Down the street from the school where I had finished my high school years, there was a grocery store where we purchased sandwiches and drinks and which was owned by a certain George. I later learned from George's wife in the 1990s, after I had left the country and was back for a visit, that the Kataeb thugs of the area had shot George dead point blank because he refused to pay them protection money. 

This type of behavior made the Kataeb very unpopular among the Christians. Other groups were no less criminal in their behavior, with the exception of the Guardians of the Cedars militia who were known for their decency and integrity. But they were a minority. Later all these groups were forcibly united into one militia known as the Lebanese Forces by one Bashir Gemayel. 

The Kataeb were essentially an ultra-nationalist Fascist party. They were founded in the 1930s by Pierre Gemayel who adulated Mussolini and the other European Fascist movements and cloned Italian Fascism into his own Kataeb party. The word Kataeb is Arabic for Phalanges, like the militias of Francisco Franco, the Fascist dictator of Spain. The avowed enemy of the Kataeb was the SSNP - The Syrian Socialist National Party - which advocated unifying many countries of the Near East into a Greater Syria, just like Hitler wanted to unify all German-speaking populations into his Third Reich. The SSNP was a clone of Hitler's Nazi Party (For astonishing details of this political cloning, see https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/06/dying-nazis-of-near-east.html ). 

Today, the Kataeb remains the same party owned and run by the Gemayel family. Who knows how the Kataeb will behave in case of a repeat of the 1975 war. But there are two new players on the stage that are likely to face the dilemma of how to conduct a war without the past criminality and brutality of the Kataeb in the coming years: The Lebanese Forces (LF) which were born out of the coerced unification of the Christian militias by Bashir Gemayel circa 1981 and which were initially dominated by the Kataeb until they emerged as a separate force around 1985; and the Tayyar party (or Free Patriotic Movement, FPM) of Gebran Bassil and Michel Aoun. While the LF have so far shown no propensity for violence, the thugs of the Tayyar are already demonstrating their skills. They attacked a funeral procession in Sin-El-Fil last week because it simply passed by their headquarters with the flag of a rival party draping the coffin. Last night on the MTV television station during a political conversation show, the so-called "Old Guard" militia of Gebran Bassil's Tayyar, dressed like Hezbollah's Black Shirts and armed to the hilt, and with premeditated planning, broke into the television station and assaulted people in the live audience. Perhaps inspired by the Iranian theocracy's virulence and violence, Bassil should change his last name to Basij, the name of the Iranian paramilitary organization operating under the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

The Tayyar is today what the Kataeb was in the 1970s: An up-and-coming Fascist Party that cannot tolerate difference. Michel Aoun is out of office, and with the attrition of all the decent elements from the Tayyar, the bottom of the barrel is what constitutes Zebran Basij's following right now. Just like Pierre Gemayel who founded the Kataeb with good intentions, yet his political heirs turned the party into the scum that was on display during the 1975 war, Michel Aoun founded the Tayyar with good intentions and ideas. But Aoun's political heir, Zebran Basij has now decided to transform the Tayyar into a Fascist militia. Maronites NEVER learn from their own history.