FURTHER COMMENTARY ON MARK 7:24

[Addendum to my post:

https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2023/02/jesus-jews-are-masters-of-phoenician.html]

I have asked several Christian clergymen about their interpretation of the story of the Phoenician-Greek-Syro-Canaanite woman, in which any common sense reader can see that Jesus was at the very least prejudiced against non-Jews and clearly declared his mission to be the salvation of the Jewish people and not anyone else. Their embarrassed response generally plays on word meaning and translation issues. Many translations from the original Greek suggest that the Church in general was not comfortable with this passage, as it shows Jesus as a Jewish racist supremacist who really didn’t care about delivering his message to non-Jews.

Some try to minimize the shocking impact of acknowledging Jesus’s Jewish nationalism and perhaps racism by resorting to translations and interpretations. One Catholic clergyman from Poland tried to explain his way out of the dilemma by saying that when Jesus compares Phoenicians to the dogs of the Jewish masters/children, he means “cute little doggies” or pets as a term of endearment and did not intend to disparage non-Jews. I am not surprised by this priest who idiotically equates a modern day "western" attitude to pets with the attitude of Bronze Age Near Eastern people. He's Polish after all: Stupid and ultra-conservative Catholics who, not long ago, declared Jesus to be King of Poland [See re-posted piece from 2016 archives: [https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2023/04/2016-archives-poles-turn-right-back-to.html ]. 

Indeed, several English translations of this passage deliberately and unethically insert the adjective “little” before the word “dogs”. Fact is, to the present day, a “dog” in the Semitic Near East is a derogatory term. Calling someone a dog in this part of the world could get you in trouble. It is injurious and insulting and generally refers to someone who is submissive, without dignity and honor, capable of base and vile actions. That is, in my opinion, what Jesus meant: To disparage the Phoenicians, at the time the neighbors of the Hebrews, to show them as lowly creatures who come begging him, the supreme Jewish lord claiming to be no less than the son of God, for a few misery crumbs of his supposed “divine” powers. Note that the Phoenicians are also a Semitic people, probably the closest to the Jewish Hebrews in their culture, language and religious practices, and that poor "dog" woman apparently spoke the same language, Aramaic, as the arrogant Jewish "master" Jesus. Imagine if that woman was an African or an Asian or a European... Jesus might have ordered his disciples to stone her to death per Jewish tradition.

So, to dispel any ambiguities, I have researched the original Greek text and placed side-by-side a literal English translation next to the Greek text, specifically to avoid any embellishment or alteration of the text for aesthetic or grammatical reasons, but instead to leave the text as raw and as close to the intent of the author as possible.

Mark’s gospel was written in Greek, and many agree that it was written some 100 years after the supposed existence of Jesus (certainly after 70 AD when the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem). Also, there is consensus that it was written anonymously (i.e. no one knows who the author is), and the name “Mark” was made up by the early Church to grant the text some authority. [see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark] for details. For the Greek text below, I have used the “Berean Greek New Testament 2016” out of several options available on the site shown below. I do not read Greek, but I am flabbergasted that all these church experts and bible scholars cannot even agree on the original Greek text as it was written. I suspect they disagree perhaps on translating from ancient to modern Greek? It’s mayhem, I tell you, that the so-called “word of God” is so metamorphic that one wonders about the fallacy of it all. 

(Matthew's version of the story is even worse. See: Matthew 15:21-24)
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From https://biblehub.com/texts/mark/7-24.htm

Mark:7-24
Greek:
Ἐκεῖθεν δὲ ἀναστὰς ἀπῆλθεν εἰς τὰ ὅρια Τύρου. Καὶ εἰσελθὼν εἰς οἰκίαν οὐδένα ἤθελεν γνῶναι, καὶ οὐκ ἠδυνήθη* λαθεῖν·

Literal English:
From there also, having risen up, he went away into the region of Tyre and Sidon. And having entered into a house, no one he was wishing to know, and not he was able to be hidden.

Mark 7:25
Greek:
ἀλλ’ εὐθὺς ἀκούσασα γυνὴ περὶ αὐτοῦ, ἧς εἶχεν τὸ θυγάτριον αὐτῆς πνεῦμα ἀκάθαρτον, ἐλθοῦσα προσέπεσεν πρὸς τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ·

Literal English:
But immediately, having heard a woman about him, of whom had the little daughter of her spirit unclean, having come, fell at the feet of him.

Mark 7:26
Greek:
ἡ δὲ γυνὴ ἦν Ἑλληνίς, Συροφοινίκισσα τῷ γένει· καὶ ἠρώτα αὐτὸν ἵνα τὸ δαιμόνιον ἐκβάλῃ ἐκ τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτῆς.

Literal English:
Now the woman was Gentile, Syro-Phoenician by race, and kept asking him that the demon he should be cast forth out of the daughter of her.

Mark 7:27
Greek:
Καὶ ἔλεγεν αὐτῇ “Ἄφες πρῶτον χορτασθῆναι τὰ τέκνα· οὐ γάρ ἐστιν ⇔ καλόν λαβεῖν τὸν ἄρτον τῶν τέκνων καὶ τοῖς κυναρίοις βαλεῖν.”

Literal English:
And he was saying to her, “permit first to be satisfied the children, not for it is good to take the bread of the children, and to the dogs to cast it.”

Mark 7:28
Greek:
Ἡ δὲ ἀπεκρίθη καὶ λέγει αὐτῷ “〈Ναί〉, Κύριε· καὶ τὰ κυνάρια ὑποκάτω τῆς τραπέζης ἐσθίουσιν ἀπὸ τῶν ψιχίων τῶν παιδίων.”

Literal English:
- but she answered and says to him, “Yes, Lord, even the dogs under the table eat of the crumbs of the children.”

Mark 7:29
Greek:
Καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῇ “Διὰ τοῦτον τὸν λόγον ὕπαγε, ἐξελήλυθεν ἐκ τῆς θυγατρός σου τὸ δαιμόνιον.”

Literal English:
And he said to her, “because of this – word, go, he has gone forth out of the daughter of you the demon.”

Mark 7:30
Greek:
καὶ ἀπελθοῦσα εἰς τὸν οἶκον αὐτῆς εὗρεν τὸ παιδίον βεβλημένον ἐπὶ τὴν κλίνην καὶ τὸ δαιμόνιον ἐξεληλυθός.

Literal English:
And having gone away to the home of her, she found the child lying on the bed, and the demon having gone out.

Lebanon on the Brink

IMF warns Lebanon at 'very dangerous moment' 

For decades, Lebanon's militant civilian organizations both inside and outside the country  warned the international community that the Mafia nowadays in power was itself the maker of the 1975-1990 civil war, that it amnestied itself of the war crimes and crimes against humanity it committed, then was backed into power under the Syrian occupation by crooks in the international community (Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, George W Bush, Jacques Chirac, among others). The international community was driven by either political stupidity, intellectual jaundice, simple cowardice in the face of regimes like the Syrian Assad regime and Islamic terrorism, or was simply trading Lebanon to appease the Muslim Arabs and keep siphoning cheap Arab oil.

Money in the billions was knowingly poured into the corrupt pockets of the ruling establishment as aid to Lebanon. Year after year, we reminded the world of its obligation to support genuine grassroots agents of change, and back a new generation of educated economists, scientists, jurists and others in order to lift Lebanon out of the morass of ultra-religiosity, tribalism, feudalism and sectarian identities. But it was all "blowing in the wind". Convenience, just as the French are doing today, drives Western posture vis-à-vis Lebanon: "Let's put a temporary lid and get 'stability' for a while at any cost". So they bribe the ruling Mafia into hurriedly signing half-ass deals, without a shred of due diligence, like the Taef Agreement (1989), the Doha Agreement (2008), and other similar band-aid solutions which they know provide only a temporary reprieve and do not address the fundamental structural problems of the country.

To address these fundamental problems requires imagination and courage, neither of which it seems is available in the minds of western decision-makers and definitely not in the minds of the feudal-religious-tribal cabal in power today.

So when we hear a visiting International Monetary Fund delegation Thursday saying that Lebanon is "at a very dangerous moment",  and criticizing slow progress on reforms needed to unlock billions in loans, we are not surprised, neither should the IMF and other international instances like the UN and its various agencies or the global West (US, France, etc.) be surprised. For decades they had many opportunities, including two major uprisings by a desperate Lebanese population (2005 and 2019) demanding real change, but each time - like right now - the "convenient" and "I have no time for this Lebanese crap" attitude leads again to pushing for a temporary respite, only for the problem to surge back in another decade or so. 

Right now, in the midst of the stalemate over the presidential election, there are several good candidates - successful civilians from the educated, professional, non-sectarian segments of Lebanese society. Yet, the international community, including perfidious France, is trying to impose a "compromise" feudal president with a "compromise" sectarian government, a tune that has never worked in the past and which in fact has led the country to its present demise. The Lebanese people are NOT asking the international community for money, like the ruling class is doing. We are asking the international community to do one of two things:

1- Either endorse, with diplomatic pressures, good marketing, and protection the advent into power of representatives from that educated, professional, non-sectarian segment of Lebanese society, which is standing against the ruling feudal-tribal-sectarian class, since this is the only long-term solution for the new generation of Lebanese;

2- Or fuck-off and get off our backs. Refuse to provide any assistance so long as the current ruling class remains in power. Name the corrupt politicians, investigate them, shame them... instead of sending envoys to negotiate with them.

Corrupt Lebanon and the IMF reached a conditional agreement in April 2022 on a $3-billion-dollar loan needed to save the country's economy, in free fall since 2019. But nearly a year after Beirut signed the agreement, these corrupt officials have yet to enact the substantial changes required to kick-start the 46-month financing program.

"We think Lebanon is at a very dangerous moment, at a crossroads," said Ernesto Ramirez Rigo, the genius head of the IMF delegation in Beirut, warning that continued "policy of inaction is going to leave Lebanon in a never-ending crisis .... Time has gone by. It's almost a year since we have reached an agreement," lamented poor Ernesto, as he urged the corrupt leaders to implement the reforms swiftly, knowing that the corrupt do NOT want, will NOT, and canNOT reform themselves. So why does the IMF continue to negotiate with thieves, criminals and murderers?

In September the IMF had already condemned Beirut's "very slow" progress on implementing these reforms. "The country is in a significant crisis. One would have expected a lot more in terms of implementation," Nobel Prize for Intelligence candidate Ramirez Rigo said. How does he expect more reforms from the same corrupt people his institution and allied institutions have backed for decades, knowing they were stealing the money and were not willing to do any reform? 

Why do these things take geological time in Lebanon? Years go by while the cesspool continues to ferment in this vicious cycle of "collapse-aid to the corrupt who steal the aid-leading to collapse, etc.". Why is it that Sri Lanka got assistance from the IMF and reformed itself within a few weeks after its Chinese-infected economy collapsed? I think we all know the answer: Since it has no resources, Lebanon is a sideshow, a toy country where as long as the economic-financial stakes don't matter, all the protagonists around the globe play a risk-free game: Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, France, Turkey, Russia, the US, etc... Except the Lebanese people who have been tormented for five decades by this dynamic between an indifferent international community and a barbaric ruling class. Lebanon is like Afghanistan, minus the turbans and the burkas. Every asshole country around the world has a hypothetical interest in this finch's ass of a country that has no resources to offer them.

Lebanon's meltdown has pushed most of the population into poverty while the political elite, backed by the international community for decades and widely blamed for the country's financial collapse, has failed to take action. Since last year, the country has had no president and only a caretaker government, amid persistent deadlock between rival factions -- while the country plunges deeper into a crisis dubbed by the World Bank as one of the worst in recent global history.

Ramirez Rigo said any solution for Lebanon must include an adjustment of fiscal policies, address banking sector losses and strengthen anti-corruption measures. Lebanese banks have imposed draconian withdrawal restrictions -- essentially locking depositors out of their life savings. "Adjustment"? "Address losses"? "Strengthen anti-corruption measures"? I think qualifiers like "radical, in-depth, complete makeover, upside-down, inside-out, revolutionary, etc...." are more appropriate. The Lebanese people have had it with temporary dainty measures. If the primary interest of Europe and the West in "assisting" Lebanon is to prevent hundreds of thousands of refugees from taking the sea and land routes to Europe and the West, the half-ass tiptoe measures the IMF and its consorts are proposing will lead to an even worse civil war that will drive millions of people into refugeedom. 

Just like the International Court of Justice has, within a year of his invasion of Ukraine, issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin (who inspires Lebanon's rulers with his macho criminality, except they don't have nuclear weapons), we want the international community to go after everyone of the petty little dictators who control this tiny tormented country and who have stashed their money in Europe and the West !! It should be really easy to do so. After 20 years of proceedings, the Special Tribunal of Lebanon in the Hague found two lowly individuals "associated" with Hezbollah guilty in the 2005 killing of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, himself an imposing part of the corrupt establishment. But the cowardly justice of STL did not frankly name Hezbollah and Syria themselves as the operators behind the guilty individuals. Fear of terrorism? Cowardliness? Avoidance behavior? Who the hell knows. The two guilty individuals remain free under the protection of Lebanon's Hezbollah government itself, which in principle should arrest them and hand them over.

Lebanon has been hijacked and kidnapped by a cabal of sectarian blood-thirsty feudal merchants of death who keep the Lebanese people herded inside tightly-controlled religious concentration camps. We implore the international community to deal with real agents of change and not with the traditionalist feudal criminal warlords whom it should track and prosecute. This is no time to, again, make deals with the fox over whether it should continue to guard the hen-house: It is time to shoot the goddam fox and liberate the hens.

Ireland Invests in Beirut Airport Next to Private Rooney's Hezbollah Killers

[Updates June 2023]: 

- One Saudi businessman was kidnapped for ransom on Airport Road, but was freed in a Lebanese Army operation.

- A Lebanese court has charged five Hezbollah terrorists in the killing of Private Sean Rooney of the Irish contingent of the UN Peacekeeping Force UNIFIL. One is under arrest, four are hiding under the protection of Hezbollah. 

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Lebanese officials said on Monday, March 20 that Lebanon will soon begin the construction of a new terminal at the country's only airport, which has not undergone an expansion since 1998, and which is right next to a sprawling Hezbollah encampment known as the Southern Suburb. Every traveler in and out of the airport runs the risk of a deliberate accident, a clash with local thugs and hoodlums, and when security is down, a shutdown of access, kidnappings, assassinations, and other such threats. Remember Hezbollah's truck-bombing of the US Marines compound in October 1983? It was right there. This is where the Irish government is investing - under a cloud of illegal backroom deals with corrupt Lebanese officials - in the expansion of the airport.

Lebanon’s only international airport had a major facelift after the country’s 1975-90 civil war. Caretaker Minister of Public Works and Transport Ali Hamiyeh - who represents the terror organization of Hezbollah in the corrupt Miqati government - said Terminal 2 will bring in private sector investments worth $122 million and will handle 3.5 million passengers annually when operations begin in 2027.

There are other airports in the country that could be rehabilitated to serve other regions in the country, but the Muslim-dominated Lebanese governments have constantly rejected these other options for fear of losing the financial benefits and the control they have over who goes in and out of the country. It is a known fact that Iranian planes land routinely at Beirut Airport carrying matériel and weapons to Hezbollah. The airport has often been the scene of massive drug smuggling operations of Captagon which is manufactured by Hezbollah in areas it controls in the Bekaa Valley.  The airport is located in a very dangerous security nexus under the control of the Hezbollah terror organization in what is known as the Southern Suburb. This is the area where all the western hostages of the 1980s were kidnapped by Hezbollah and then killed or traded for concessions from a cowardly US. This is the same area that was bombed to smithereens during the Hezbollah-Israel war of 2006. 

Building a second airport somewhere north of the capital would reduce the chaotic traffic and the risks of criminality and terrorism against foreign and domestic travelers. During times of insecurity, the  airport has been the scene of many hijackings, Israeli attacks, Palestinian guerilla actions, Hezbollah kidnappings of foreigners, etc. Areas north of the capital are much safer than the Hezbollah neighborhood where the current airport is located. Since the country is nearing collapse with mounting tensions between Christians and Muslims, airport road could again become the scene of anti-Christian and anti-Western terrorism. The current government is a caretaker government that has no money and that oversees a country in total economic collapse. The pro-Hezbollah forces in Parliament have obstructed the election of a new Christian president for the past 5 months, giving the Muslims a free hand in running the country ... running it down the mud, that is.

Why is the Irish government backing this deal? Is investing $122 million a priority when the average Lebanese citizen makes $60 a month, much less than a Syrian refugee's $200 a month pay from Western NGOs? One wonders why Ireland’s Minister of State James Browne attended Monday’s ceremony in Beirut to sign a deal with Hezbollah representatives, but without demanding answers and accountability from Hezbollah for the December 2022 assassination of Private Seán Rooney, an Irish soldier in the peacekeeping UNIFIL force? Looks like the Irish have learned perfidy and greed from their English tormentors.

The project comes as Lebanon is in the throes of its worst economic and financial crisis in its modern history, rooted in decades of corruption and mismanagement by the country’s political class, including by the current Sunni Muslim Prime Minister, Najib Miqati, who has monopolized, among many other examples, the postal system after it was privatized to his personal benefit. For decades, Miqati has not paid what his Liban-Poste monopoly owes the government, thus contributing to the bankruptcy of the state coffers. 

Indeed, the Irish-Hezbollah airport deal is so one-sided to the Irish advantage that many here sniff a corruption stench out of it. In fact, the Irish company stands to retrieve its $122 million investment within 3 years of operation, and then it's pure profits (estimated at $800 million) for the next 22 years during which not a dime goes into the depleted Lebanese treasury. Which means that the Hezbollah ministers, Miqati and Hamiyeh, have sold their own country's resources really cheap to the Irish company, which in turn suggests that the Irish company may be "back-paying" these two ministers for their "service" of signing this bad deal for Lebanon. This is the sort of deal that Lebanon's corrupt ruling class has been doing for decades, leading to today's collapse and insolvency of the country. WHY IS IRELAND BACKING A CORRUPT DEAL?

Lebanon’s economic crisis that began in October 2019 has left three quarters of the country’s 6 million people, including 2 million Syrian refugees, in poverty. But the refugees get lots of money, healthcare, schooling, etc. from a hypocritical West, while the Lebanese continue to sink without any aid. And the Western NGOs and some governments (e.g. the fucking British who caused the heartbreak that is Palestine today) have no compunction demanding that the Lebanese accept to settle the Syrian refugees permanently. Would they similarly advise Ireland, for example, to suddenly permanently admit and settle 3 million Ukrainian refugees on top of its 6 million population? Really? With such policies, the West is either working on deliberately eliminating the last free Christian community in the East, or it is pushing for yet another civil war that will push even larger numbers of refugees to seek a life in Europe. How smart is that?

Lawlessness in Hezbollah-held Parts of Lebanon

A second report (update) has now been posted below the first report.

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First Report

The following incident is a sample of the chronic lawlessness that Hezbollah deliberately allows in the regions it controls (South Lebanon, the Bekaa and Hermel districts, and the southern suburbs of Beirut).

A patrol of the Lebanese Security Forces was directed to check on a suspected illegal construction on public land in the south Lebanon village of Tefahta. As the foot patrol approached the site, a mob of Hezbollah thugs began pelleting the patrol with glass bottles and rocks, forcing the patrol to shoot in the air as it retreated to avoid a more serious confrontation. You'll notice in the video in the link below that the mob was ready for the confrontation, that it dispatched two men to see what the policemen wanted, and that when the policemen told them they were tasked with checking on an illegal construction on public land, the two young men ran back toward the mob and gave it the signal to begin their attack against the policemen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkbIwJcu_Tk

This is typical of the inability of the State to enforce the laws in areas controlled by Hezbollah which argues that its "resistance" requires it to keep government off those areas it controls. But these areas are entire villages and towns where lawlessness is rampant, including drugs, weapons, illegal constructions, etc., and those are the real reasons why Hezbollah wants to keep the security forces and the army out of them. In other words, Hezbollah runs a canton of corruption, illegality and criminality of all kinds under the pretense of 1) its Shiite Muslims are "dispossessed, poor, disenfranchised, ..." when the reality is that the Shiite emigrant diaspora (Africa, America) is by far wealthier than any other Lebanese community (just tour south Lebanon and see for yourself the castles, the villas and other ostentatious displays of wealth),  and 2) it is a "resistance" against the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory, a fallacious pretext that gives Iran a beachhead on the Mediterranean and a border with its archenemy Israel.

In fact, the area where the confrontation occurred is the very same area where a Hezbollah critic by the name of Loqman Slim was shot dead in his own house in 2021. This is the very same area where Hezbollah operatives shot at a UNIFIL (UN peacekeeping force monitoring the Lebanese-Israeli borders) patrol killing one Irish soldier and injuring several others a few months ago.

In the 1970s and 1980s, and prior to the enactment of the Taef Agreement which transferred the executive powers of the Christian president to the benefit of the Muslim Prime Minister, whenever the government tried to enforce the laws in areas controlled by Palestinians and Muslim militias (for example in 1984 when President Gemayel tried to clear the shantytowns along the road leading to Beirut Airport), the Muslims attacked the move as "discrimination" by the Christian president against Muslims. Gemayel had to back down, leaving Airport Road to become the most dangerous road in Lebanon, rife with gangs on motorcycles, haphazard illegal construction, killings, kidnappings and blockages of access to the airport.

Now that the executive powers are in the hands of the Muslim Prime Minister and the Muslim Speaker of Parliament, who's doing the "discrimination" you see in the video? Hezbollah thrives on lawlessness, and therefore cannot operate its many unlawful activities inside a normal functioning state under the rule of law. Over the decades since the 1970s, the Lebanese Muslims, backed by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya, Egypt, and other Arab countries, have convinced the world that the Christians of Lebanon were some sort of dictators who oppressed the Muslims in what they called "political Maronitism" at the time, as if the "political Islamism" of both the Shiites and Sunnis on display today is a harmless phenomenon. The reality is that the Christians never engaged in terrorism in contrast with the Muslims. The Christians have been for centuries and to date on the defensive against a permanent campaign by the Muslims to subjugate and tame this last free Christian community in the East into a Dhimmi community. But puritan Western media always back their enemies against their friends as a way to "prove" their impartiality, and the lies perpetrated against the Lebanese Christian community continue to be taken as facts by a credulous and Arab oil-tarnished West.

It is also worth noting that the Muslims of Hezbollah have been trying - just like wealthy European Jews did with Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s and continue to do today - to steal (through illegal registrations in the Land Register), illegally occupy and build (like Israeli settlers in Palestine), or buy via third parties lands owned by Christians in an attempt to infiltrate those areas and change the demographic distribution across the country (recent examples: the village of Lassa in Byblos District, the Hadath town in south Beirut, Rmaysh in the south Lebanon district of Bint Jbail, etc...).

The areas under control of Hezbollah have seen skyrocketing illegal constructions on public and private lands, and these constructions often do not meet any safety specifications, at a time when the government has decided to undertake a survey of buildings about to collapse as a result of the increased seismic activity in the region. 

When the government tries to enforce safe construction laws, Hezbollah's mobs attack the police. When an earthquake brings down these illegal settlements, Hezbollah will say that it is poverty and anti-Muslim discrimination that are the cause. 

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Follow up report:

The General Directorate of Internal Security - Public Relations Section - has issued the following:

"A video has circulated on the social media showing individuals confronting a patrol of Internal Security officers in the town of Tefahta by throwing rocks and shooting firearms in the air.

After inquiry, the facts are that around 2 pm on March 15, 2023 we received information that bulldozers have made their way to the outskirts of the town of Tefahta in Nabatiyyeh District to plow a 40-dunum (40,000 square meters or about 10 acres) hill of public land with the objective of undertaking construction work. All entrances to the site had been blocked with earth mounds, cars and motorcycles by about 150 individuals divided into groups.

A patrol from the Police Station of the nearby town of Zefta that was dispatched to the area was intercepted by a group of young men, which required reinforcements to be also dispatched. Upon arriving to the site, firearms shots were heard coming from the area of the bulldozers - prior to recording the video in question - and as the police force approached the site, it was met with a barrage of rocks, to which the Station Chief reacted by firing warning shots in the air, and the patrol retreated to avoid casualties among the civilians.

Afterwards, the patrol was reinforced with troops in vehicles and with Lebanese Army troops, and was dispatched at nighttime to the site, which was empty of people, but the patrol was targeted by firearm shots from a distance. The patrol persisted, bypassed the earth obstacles on foot, and proceeded to put a stop to the activities by sealing and disabling the bulldozers in accordance with a warrant. Another Police Report was also filed with regard to the obstruction of the patrol.

Attempts to infringe on public and private property have been persistent in more than one site in the area. The Police is determined to enforce the law, despite the insistence by some on violating the law in the worst possible manners.

We call on the municipalities and its chiefs, as well as the local authorities and political parties, to uphold their national responsibilities and contribute to putting an end to these crimes instead of ignoring them. We are sorry that some Lebanese are exploiting the current situation, and using force to impose a fait accompli. These acts do not build nations, they only destroy them."

The Two Lebanons

We hear that the French have a plan for the presidential stalemate in Lebanon: a Syrian puppet for president (Sleiman Frangiyeh) and a Saudi puppet for prime minister (Nawaf Salam). Nice balance, but no, thank you, Mr. Macron, because this means continued obstruction and impasse. You may have so many other problems to deal with that you have no time for the Lebanese cesspool. But it is time for the Lebanese to come to terms with real democracy, i.e. field as many candidates for president as there is, go to parliament and vote on the basis of the existing rules and laws. And whoever wins gets to serve for the next 6 years. If the cerebral density of the Lebanese people is beyond repair, then they get who and what they deserve.

Unfortunately, there are two Lebanons on this tiny piece of useless real estate, each the result of hundreds of years of history and cultural development. These two Lebanons occasionally seem to fuse into one homogeneous country, but the religious phantoms of our archaic past have a long shelf-life and continue to undermine such a convergent evolution.

One Lebanon, which I'll call, for lack of a better term, Patriot-Lebanon, is based on a sense of self-identity. This Lebanon is heir to a nucleus of former leaders who, since the mid 1500s, sought and managed to snatch independence from the Ottoman Turks, with important milestones in 1840, 1860 and up to 1919. This is the Lebanon that strove for accommodation and power-sharing, and that remained faithful to the National Pact by dissociating itself from Western custody and becoming a country with one self-defined identity. This is the Lebanon that gained independence in 1920, then kicked out the French in 1943 with the same vigor it displayed in previously kicking out the Ottoman Turks.

The other Lebanon, which I'll call Anti-Lebanon, views itself primarily as part of the wider Islamic Arab world, and sees Lebanon only as a temporary transitional identity definer. This is the Lebanon that originally did NOT want to be part of the independent Lebanon born after WWI, preferring instead the rule of King Faysal's fantasy Arab Kingdom of Syria. Although it reluctantly joined the post-WWI Lebanon, it eventually agreed - or seemed or pretended to agree - to the National Pact according to which it said it would dissociate itself from the Syrian/Arab world, in exchange for Patriot-Lebanon rejecting a western-leaning identity. It was hoped that, together, these two dissociations would by default establish a neutral country, develop over time a strictly Lebanese identity, and keep this small and diverse country stable and prosperous. 

While Patriot-Lebanon demonstrated goodwill - though grudgingly and under Arab pressure - by reaching out to Anti-Lebanon and adopting most of its political platform, becoming a full-fledged Arab country with no Western affiliations, in the hope of forging a common identity, Anti-Lebanon did not reciprocate and did not follow the same convergent path of seeking a unique Lebanese identity. To the contrary, it saw in Patriot-Lebanon's wilful compromise posture a weakness to be further exploited. Instead of rewarding Patriot-Lebanon, Anti-Lebanon dug its heels deeper and instead of neutrality it adopted a hardline posture of further arabization, islamization, and alienation from the West. For example, while Anti-Lebanon never complained about the 400 years (1516-1918) of harsh Muslim Turkish Ottoman occupation, yet it continues to date to nag about the 20-year-long French mandate as an imperialist colonialist enterprise. The reality is that Lebanon was a Turkish colony for 400 years, but it was never a French colony like, say, African French colonies. In fact, Patriot-Lebanon led the charge during WWII to evict its French protectors: the Vichy French first, then the Free French, bringing an end to the French Mandate and gaining full independence in 1943. But no sooner had Patriot-Lebanon chased its French protectors out of the country to demonstrate its thirst for genuine independence and its goodwill for compromise and neutrality, that Anti-Lebanon began reneging on the National Pact and driving the country further into a pro-Arab, pro-Muslim, anti-Western posture. Every time an Arab cause raised its head in the region, Anti-Lebanon waged a domestic war against Patriot-Lebanon: 1958 with Egypt's Abdel-Nasser Arab unionist movement; 1961 with the coup d'état fomented by the fascists of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, the SSNP; 1965 with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO of Yasser Arafat, that devastated the country; 1979 with the Hezbollah terror organization as the military arm of the Iranian Revolution in Tehran. 

This history of the country in the second half of the 20th century clearly shows that Lebanon's Muslims never really intended to build a cohesive neutral country with the Christians. Their occasional "nationalistic" stances (e.g. Rafik Hariri's pretenses) were lies behind which was a hidden, then with time overt, objective to turn Lebanon into a primarily Muslim country that tolerates its Christians as second class Dhimmi citizens, to be used as mere powerless storefront dummies with which to pretend to be multicultural and inclusive.

Patriot-Lebanon has been on the defensive since the inception of the country, while Anti-Lebanon has been on the offensive to violate the agreed-upon National Pact. Patriot-Lebanon managed to steer the country to prosperity between 1943 and the early 1970s, yet the continued assaults of Anti-Lebanon against the National Pact and against Patriot-Lebanon eventually succeeded in dismantling that prosperity and openness. Today's failure and collapse of Lebanon as a state and the stalemate it faces in electing a president are the direct result of the cumulative victories of Anti-Lebanon. The chasm between these two Lebanons continues to widen to the point where the experiment of attempting a fusion appears by all measures to be headed for an utter failure. 

The French proposal for a "cohabitation" of the two camps as a way out of the crisis will only prolong the crisis and continue the disintegration of whatever is left of the country. I don't think the French deliberately seek this path for Lebanon, but theirs is a "I have no time for this pathetic tiny piece of shit called Lebanon" posture, and its proposal is an off-the-cuff idea without any serious consideration for long-term consequences. In fact, this has been the western modus operandi vis-à-vis Lebanon for the past 5 decades. It's just too complex and too uninteresting (no oil, no rare earth metals, etc.) for the mercantile and Cartesian western mind to comprehend and deal with. So nothing serious was ever undertaken by the West to lift Lebanon out of its miseries, a good measure of which is externally caused.

Georges Naccache understood the deep chasm between the two constitutive elements of modern Lebanon that were forcibly joined together in 1920, when he said, "Deux négations ne font pas une nation" (Two negations do not a nation make). By attempting to build a nation out of two rejections (Patriot-Lebanon rejecting Western references and Anti-Lebanon rejecting Arab references to identity), the two Lebanons never really converged and it is time to admit that they failed to become a nation. Unless the Lebanese abandon their religious references in the constitution and in the conduct of their public affairs, there is little hope that the long-desired convergence will materialize. Like in a bad marriage, it is perhaps better to separate, at least for a while and until the two sides are mature enough; if only to save the children from further abuse.

American Hypocrisy and Barbarity of the Assad Regime

The U.S. State Department on Monday banned entry into the U.S. of a Syrian intelligence member who appears in a video showing him fatally shooting people during the country’s 12-year conflict. With such a severe punishment (the Syrian executioner can no longer go to Disney World, the poor sap), the US State Department is sending a strong signal to others who dare murder dozens of people!! No calls for international justice for human rights abuses, crimes against humanity and war crimes, as the US and its Euro-poodles are doing in Ukraine. Just a ban on entry in the US, as if the criminals of the Syrian regime are all dying to get a US visa to go visit Disney and Yosemite Park and go eat lobsters in Maine.

To watch the painful video and read an English transcript of the "conversations" between the criminal Syrian soldiers of Bashar Assad and their victims, go to:

https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/04/barbarity-of-syrian-regime.html

(You'll notice in the video that the victims of the Syrian Army criminals are well dressed, clean cut individuals who do not seem to have been fighting or engaged in any kind of armed activities. In other words, innocent civilians!)

Despite all the apparent "holier than thou" language of State Department below, be reminded that for the past 53 years, successive US administrations and State Department hypocrites, beginning with the criminal Henry Kissinger, have adulated, protected, and made deals with the Assad regime (Hafez Assad the father 1969-2000, then Bashar Assad the son, 2000-present), in which Lebanon was handed over to a brutal Syrian army occupation (1976-2005) among other concessions made to the Assads in exchange for the liberation of hostages that the Assad regime itself had kidnapped. Of all Arab dictators, only the Assad dictatorship remains extant. After Bashar Assad, backed by the equally brutal Russian army of Vladimir Putin, destroyed all the cities of his country, killed upwards of half a million of his own citizens, and sent close to 12 million out into refugee camps, there is a current movement to rehabilitate the Assad regime back into the ranks of pro-US Arab countries.

Here in Lebanon, we fear that the US and its European poodles are preparing to make another concession-compromise with the Syrian dictator by handing over Lebanon AGAIN to the Syrian regime by supporting a Hezbollah ally and Syrian puppet agent and former warlord Sleiman Frangiyeh to become the next president of Lebanon. The US either fears that the Syrian-Iranian proxy terrorist group Hezbollah will unleash its missiles on Israel, or the US is simply in bed with Assad who has protected the Israeli border and conceded to the Israeli annexation of his own Golan Heights by never firing a single bullet of "resistance" against the "Zionist enemy" during all these 5 decades, while shoving tiny and weak Lebanon into becoming the only Arab war front against Israel. Bottom line: The US will sell and backstab any so-called friends it has in the region for the sole objective of protecting the racist supremacist American colony in Palestine called the Jewish Theocracy of Israel.

The State Department's ban against Amjad Yousef, a member of Syria’s notorious Military Intelligence Branch 227, includes his wife and immediate members of his family. Yousef was one of several Syrian security agents who appeared in the video in which dozens of blindfolded, bound men were shot and thrown into a trench. 

The decision comes a week before Syria’s conflict entered its 13th year. The war has killed nearly half a million people and left large parts of the country destroyed. “As a result of today’s action, Yousef, as well as his wife, Anan Wasouf, and their immediate family members, are ineligible for entry into the United States,” the State Department said. In the logic of the con artists of the US State Department, this is a punishment that fits the crime! How painful it must be for a mass murderer like Amjad Yousef to not be able to take his wife and children and go to the US!

The 6-minute-43-second video clip stamped with the date April 16, 2013, shows intelligence members with a line of around 40 prisoners in an abandoned building in Tadamon, a suburb of Damascus near the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk. For much of the war, the district was a front line between government forces and opposition fighters. The prisoners are blindfolded, with their arms tied behind their backs. One after another, the Branch 227 gunmen stand them at the edge of a trench outside the building filled with old tires, then push or kick the men in, shooting them as they fall.

In a cruel game, the agents tell some of the prisoners that they are going to pass through a sniper’s alley and that they should run. The men tumble onto the bodies of those who went before them. As bodies pile up in the trench, some still move, and the gunmen shoot into the pile. Then the gunmen set the bodies on fire, presumably to erase evidence of the massacre.

The State Department said Yousef, a warrant officer in the Syrian security services, was involved in “gross violations of human rights" for his involvement in the killing of 41 unarmed civilians. The statement said the U.S. calls on President Bashar Assad’s government “to cease all violations and abuses of human rights, including but not limited to extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, and torture.” The hypocritical US has been calling on the Assads for five decades to cease their gross violations of human rights, but without ever taking any dissuasive action like those they take on a daily basis in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and others.

Calls have been rising in recent months on the part of the US allies in the region for Syria’s return to the Arab League. Really? Does this mean that the US will one day embrace Putin and bring him and his criminal Russian regime back into the fold of the America-European western alliance?

A Bit of History: Abu-Jamra and Aoun

Some time in 2002, when the Free Patriotic Movement of Michel Aoun was founded in Paris, I met Issam Abu-Jamra. Along with Edgard Maalouf, Abu-Jamra constituted what was left of the transitional government of Prime Minister Michel Aoun. In 1988, Parliament failed to elect a new president and departing president Amine Gemayel appointed then-Army Chief Aoun to head that government at the last minute of his term. Aoun appointed three Christian ministers and three Muslim ministers to his cabinet with the objective of managing the country until Parliament elects a new president. Obviously, the Muslim asshole ministers immediately resigned from the government

Some background before returning to Abu-Jamra.

The obstruction in Parliament at electing a new president was largely the doing of the Americans, then deep in political fornication with the Saudis and the Syrians. The Americans, who love to kiss oily Arab asses right and left, supported a Syrian puppet candidate by the name of Mikhail Daher who would continue doing the bidding of the Syrian dictator whose army then occupied Lebanon with much human rights abuses, kidnappings, killings, shelling and all manner of Syrian "peacekeeping". The American envoy, a typical US State Department prick by the name of Richard Murphy, had announced to the Lebanese Parliamentarians his infamous, "Either Mikhail Daher or chaos!", by which he meant 'you Lebanese either continue to suffer the Syrian occupation or I will unleash the Syrian artillery and airforce on your already demolished homes, towns and villages'.

Why, you might ask, were the Americans so eager to satisfy the Damascus Butcher Senior, Hafez Assad, by backing a Syrian puppet candidate to the presidency of Lebanon? Simple: Assad and his many proxies in Lebanon - Islamic terrorist organizations of all kinds, including Hezbollah, had kidnapped dozens of western hostages (Americans, British, French, Indians, Irish....) on behalf of Syria and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Throughout the 1980s, these Syrian-Iranian terror organizations had blown up the US Embassy (twice) and the French Embassy in Beirut, blown up the peacekeeping US Marines and French Paratroopers compounds (killing 243 US servicemen and 58 French soldiers), hijacked a TWA plane flight 847 in which Navy diver Dean Stethem was savagely beaten, killed and his body dumped on Beirut Airport tarmac, etc... All of this with the imbecile Ronald Reagan in the White House. Reagan couldn't care less about abandoning Lebanon to Syria and Iran, as long as he could get the hostages released.

And so it was, for every ass-bending concession the Americans made to Iran and Syria, Hezbollah would release one hostage who, instead of being driven 5 minutes to Beirut Airport to be flown out of the country, would be driven 3 hours to Damascus, Syria, to be paraded to the western press under giant portraits of Assad and Khomeini, in a blunt acknowledgement by the Americans that their friends the Syrians and the Iranians were running the terror show in Beirut.

One of these concessions the Americans were willing to make was to secure the election of the Syrian puppet Mikhail Daher to the Lebanese presidency. But the Lebanese resisted America's betrayal of its so-called values and principles, and chaos they got. The following two years 1988-1990 were absolute madness, shelling and killing, leading to the Syrian takeover and occupation of the entire country of Lebanon, the demotion of the Christian President of the country to a figurehead and the transfer of his powers to a Muslim. Thank you America for the Taef Agreement and for transforming the country into the hellhole of corruption and barbarity at the hands of your Muslim and Arab friends.

Thank you, America. Today in 2023, some 40 years later, America is supposedly still fighting the Iranian-Syrian stranglehold over Lebanon by inflicting more pain on the Lebanese people. America could have brought an end to all this mess in the early 1980s when Hezbollah was still in its infancy and did not have 150,000 missiles pointed at Israel from the Lebanese south. But American foreign policy has, since the end of World War II, become a massive failure enterprise built on ignorance and short-term reflexive maneuvering with no clear strategy based on principle. No wonder the US lost Vietnam after murdering 50,000 of its own soldiers, after losing the war in Korea which continues to hound it, losing in Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. It is hard to defend America against the qualifier of "dumb ugly American".

I digressed, but I needed to vent.

In Paris, Abu-Jamra invited me to dinner, seeing in me a wide-eyed rookie Lebanese-American militant. Over dinner, he politely critiqued Michel Aoun's conduct on matters I did not well understand, mostly in the realm of the tactics rather than the fundamentals of the cause.

It is only now that I comprehend some of what Abu-Jamra might have been talking about. Only last week, Abu-Jamra has publicly accused Aoun of pilfering millions of dollars from a donation given in the late 1980s by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein who supported Aoun against Syria's Assad. Although Assad and Hussein were running their dictatorships from the same nauseating Arab nationalist Baathist ideology, they hated each other. So Saddam Hussein's gift to Aoun was to help the latter in his fight against the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Instead, Aoun fled the American-backed Syrian invasion of his presidential palace first to the dingy basement of the French embassy, then to exile in France, taking with him those untold millions of dollars which he stashed in his wife's name in some bank somewhere.

Has anyone wondered how come Baathist Saddam Hussein has been "fatally relieved" of his duties as dictator in Iraq by no less than a massive US invasion in 2003 (he was in power between 1979 and 2003 or 24 years total) even though he fought the Iranian theocracy, while his alter ego, the Baathist Assad regime, is still in power since 1969, is a friend and ally of the Iranian theocracy, funds and arms numerous terror organizations, including the terror organization of Hezbollah, has killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, has bombed to shreds many of his country's cities and towns, has occupied and brutalized Lebanon for more than 20 years, and remains the only obstacle to peace with Israel...?? What kind of American foreign policy is this?

I still have enormous respect for Issam Abu-Jamra for standing to principle then, and now. 

Check this link to a 2003 press release by a Lebanese-American organization based in Boston critiquing Mr. Richard Murphy's mercantile betrayal of Lebanon and his own country:

http://www.10452lccc.com/clao.rpl.colco/NEAL030112_Murphy.pdf

 

 

Both Secular and Extremist Israelis To Expel Remaining Palestinians from Palestine

Israel Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called yesterday on the state to “erase” the Palestinian town of Hawara, already destroyed in a rampage by racist Jewish European terrorist settlers over the weekend, in the aftermath of a Palestinian militant's attack that killed two intruding foreign Jewish settlers of the nearby illegal settlement of Har Bracha which was built on the ruins of a previously "erased" Palestinian village. During the terrorist Jewish rampage, a Palestinian indigenous native, Sameh Hamdallah Mahmoud Aqtash, 37, was shot and killed by the European Jewish terrorists who set several Palestinian homes on fire and burned dozens of cars.

Israeli security forces, who usually stand by while the Jewish terrorists commit their racist crimes against defenseless Palestinians, were searching the Hawara area for the Palestinian fighter when the Jewish terrorist settlers stormed the village.  Smotrich - a common American last name of Russian origin - is the chairman of the extremist barbarian Jewish Zionist Party and is in charge of Israel’s policies in the illegally-occupied West Bank. Imagine how fucked up this guy must be: Russian (barbaric) immigrant to America (dumb and ugly), then to Israel (where he became a Jewish Nazi).

About 700,000 Jewish extremist settlers have illegally seized Palestinian lands in the West Bank and east Jerusalem after terrorizing and forcibly expelling the native indigenous Palestinians over the past five decades, in the heart of the ancestral homeland of the Palestinian people who have lived there for thousands of years.

Anyone wonders why the extremist Muslim Iranian theocracy also wants to "erase" the fake British-American colony called Israel? And now, both terrorist nations -Iran and Israel - are inching closer to war, perhaps a nuclear war, all in the name of their barbaric religions.

Just as the so-called "moderate" Muslims around the world protect the radical Muslim terrorists by providing them with a cultural and ideological incubator, the so-called "moderate-secular" Jewish colonists protect the Jewish extremists and allow them to continue invading, occupying and ethnically cleansing historic Palestine of its aboriginal indigenous Palestinian people. In fact, the "moderate-secular" Jewish colonists and their descendants who live today in Haifa, Jaffa and all the other ethnically-cleansed Palestinian villages are themselves guilty of the rape of historic Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s by means of terrorism, the establishment of the British colony of Israel in the heart of the Arab world, and the displacement of millions of Palestinians who live today in refugee camps inside and around Israel. Today, these fake "moderate" Israelis say they are against the fundamentalist ultra-religious Jewish barbarian colonists and settlers, yet for decades they have provided them with the legalistic cover to continue the rape of whatever is left of historic Palestine.

That a Minister in the extremist government of Benyamin Netanyahu calls for erasing a Palestinian town after his followers burned half of it is not surprising. The goal of the Jewish colonists - both the fake seculars and the radical ultra-religious terrorists - is to expel all the remaining millions of Palestinians from the West Bank into neighboring Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, and thus establish their pure supremacist Jewish Theocracy in the land that, according to their Torah garbage fiction, God gave them some 3,000 years ago. Is there anything more Bronze-age barbarian than this?