The piece below was written on April 10, 2005 as the barbarian Syrian army was being evicted from Lebanon after 30 years of occupation. Now (in 2023) that the Lebanese army is beginning to evict some of the 2 million so-called Syrian "refugees" (who, unlike real refugees, commute daily between their host country and the country they supposedly fled from, with loads of smuggled goods and their European-gifted US dollars to keep them from going to Europe), the criminals and thugs of both Bashar Assad and his enemies of the Free Syrian Army are spewing their Baathist venom on this Lebanon that will always reject their racist and Fascist Arab nationalism.
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From Syria with Love: The Children
of Ghabey
Gone are the shabby checkpoints and the haggard Syrian soldiers manning them.
Gone are the green arches made from pine and palm
trees downed to raise the portraits of the Assad dynasty:
from Hafez to Basel and Bashar. Gone are the statues of the dictators erected
“in your face” of the Lebanese people, for nowhere at
their checkpoints or the office buildings they confiscated
or the dungeons they ran did Syria's men – over thirty years in their host
country – have the decency to raise a Lebanese flag
next to the Syrian flag. What more did the Lebanese people
need to understand that Syria was in Lebanon not to liberate, protect or
defend, but only to subdue, erase, and eliminate by
repression and oppression?
Gone are the drab green Soviet-vintage trucks. Gone are the civilian-dressed
Mukhabaraat men lounging at Beirut Airport and
casually checking their registers for the names of the “wanted” Lebanese who dared a homecoming. Gone are the cars with
shaded windows, the vulgar and sadistic killers, murderers,
kidnappers, hoodlums, vengeful men who hated Lebanon and its people
to the bone. Gone are all these men who were trucked in from remote desert
villages of the Syrian interior, after being
brainwashed to hate Lebanon as a renegade and decadent province
that needed to be “re-educated” into the fold of true Arabism. A strayed
province of a once glorious Arab Syria that, truth be
told, never really existed except inside the megalomaniacal
minds of the Baathist criminals whose only source of pride in this world in which they utterly failed is their delusional nostalgia for an
antiquated fantasy. For the Syrian reality remains a
terribly miserable one, and the only escape from the Syrian Gulag is to feed
off the illusions of a past that has been mythicized
and exaggerated in logarithmic proportion to the misery
of 20th century Syria. They
are all finally going home to that land beyond the green Lebanon
mountain range and the barren hills of the Anti-Lebanon range where the Syrian
desert begins.
To those of my generation, however, the departure of the Syrian men from
Lebanon will never erase the pain, the fear and the
hurt of three decades. From the jewel of the Middle East, resplendent
in the glimmer of its joie-de-vivre by the Mediterranean, where East met West around every street corner and in the myriad of cafes and
restaurants, clubs and theaters, beaches and mountain
retreats, Lebanon was brought down like a calf to the slaughter by the Arabs – every one of them, the Palestinians, the Saudis and
the Kuwaitis, the Libyans and the Egyptians, the
Somalis and the Sudanese, and most of all the Syrians – because it stood as a thorn in the side of the totalitarian drab of the Arab
World. Lebanon violated every taboo and every norm of
that Arab World. It had Christians, Druze, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Armenians, Shiites who intermarried and lived as equals side by side
next to Sunnis. Worse yet, it had Westerners living
with all those people – not in walled compounds – but anywhere they wished. It had church bells that tolled next to the Muezzin at the
mosque. It had mini skirts in the streets and bikinis
on the beaches. It had Arak-drinking Zajal poets dueling with words on television. It had a free press that poked fun at kings and
queens, presidents, sultans, and Emirs alike, often
with the pens of the same Arab writers and intellectuals who had escaped from
their home countries to the refuge of Lebanon.
This was too much decadence and diversity to handle for the pan-Arab Baathist
nationalists who preferred homogenized compliant
societies to diverse and rebellious free people. Lebanon had too
many colors. It had Arab, French, American and Lebanese universities. It had a
British High School, an American International
College, a secular Lyçée Français and a religious French Jesuit school, and German, Italian and other schools, all
coexisting next to a plethora of Lebanese private
religious and secular schools, as well as a full-fledged Lebanese public school
system. It had veiled women who watched streakers
cross Hamra Street in the early 1970s.
It had a red-light district where wealthy Arabs – from the kingdoms and
emirates of the Gulf – mingled with equally drunken
sailors from around the world to defuse their repressed libidos. In the words
of a young Kuwaiti student I met once at Brown
University, when Saddam occupied and was brutalizing
Kuwait, as I tried to compare his Kuwait under Saddam to my Lebanon under
Hafez, “We went to Lebanon to f--- your sisters and
your mothers...You deserve to be occupied by Syria,
but we do not deserve to be occupied by Iraq”. Such was the gratitude of the
Arabs for a country they claimed as one of them, often
against its own wishes, a country to which they escaped
from the boredom and repression of their own countries, and then only to turn
around and spit at it in hatred.
And so, thirty years ago, as Lebanon was moving forward into the modern world
by keeping its doors open to the world, money, mercenaries,
and weapons began flowing in from Egypt, Libya, Syria
and elsewhere in the Arab World. A rabid Arab media turned against small
Lebanon because it dared to say no to Arafat and his
PLO. Never mind that the Palestinians had been muzzled,
massacred, and locked up in their camps in every other Arab country, and all
the Arab rulers wanted was to contain the Palestinians
inside Lebanon for fear of a revolution at home. And
never mind that the Palestinian Cause was merely a commodity in the market of
Arab principles for the dictators to maintain their
grip on power and their boots over their people.
Maggie Abou-Jaoudeh's death in the Spring of 1976
epitomizes what the Arabs did to Lebanon. I personally
witnessed this one of many untold atrocities during the mis-named “civil” war
between the Syrian-Palestinian Arab cabal and the
Lebanese people, when the war moved from the streets of Beirut along the fortified PLO terror camps to the Mountain. Maggie
was a 5-year-old with
curly blond hair who was killed by a single shell
fired by the Syrian paramilitary Al-Saika organization from the other side of the mountain facing Broumana on a glorious spring
day of 1976. A single
shell. Not a volley. Not a battle. Not an artillery
exchange. Just one mortar shell. There had been no clashes
for weeks, and spring on the hills was erasing the memory of the misery of that
cold winter we spent in Ghabey near Broumana as
refugees from Beirut. It was not hot enough yet for
the cycads to begin their daytime rap on the trunks of the pine trees, but the
air was light and sweet. The war had followed us from
Beirut, and the Battle of the Mountain was underway. But
we were enjoying a lull in the fighting. The children of Ghabey, a small
village down the road from Broumana going south
towards Salima and Qornayel, were playing in the village square up the hill from our house, and I could hear them from my room
as I lay on my bed reading. My mother was having
coffee with Sayydeh, Maggie's mother, in the living room. The voices of the children filled the village.
Then, there was a thud. One mortar thud in the distance. The echo quickly
reverberated across the valley beneath the Knaisseh peak,
and I knew the mortar was launched from the other side, as
we had grown accustomed to instinctively listen and gauge the origin and
direction of shells. It took several seconds for the
shell to fly overhead, with the nervous roar of its tail vrrrooming over the house. And it took us a split second to realize
that the shell was going to strike near us. And then
the blast. Fifty yards from the house, up the hill in the middle of the village
square where the children were playing. The children's
voices went silent, like a school of sparrows on a tree
when their singing frenzy is disturbed. From the living room, Sayydeh's scream
rose in a fast crescendo, the primal scream of a
mother's heart who knew her child had been harmed...MAAAAGGGIIIEE....
and my hair stood on my neck before I could jump out of the bed. We all ran up the hill. I was one
of the first people on the scene, as everyone was converging on the square.
Maggie's sisters – Nana, Hamo, Zeezee – were there....The crater, and the
little grey bodies melded into the blackened rubble
and pavement...the colors of their clothes muted...mixed into the monotone shade of burned explosives and ravaged
asphalt...motionless...just lying there...I don't recall seeing
the faces...just these still little bodies...like Guernica's children, and I
recalled a Joan Baez song that says, “and God filled
their bullet holes with candy”... A single shell fired by the heroes of the Arab Cause on the children of Ghabey on a spring
afternoon...for no other reason but to kill the children...for
no other reason but to inflict deep pain...For the road to Palestine and the
Golan and all the lost Arab causes, as Syria still
wants the world to believe even today, had to go through
every Lebanese village, all the way from Beit Mellat and al-Qaa in the north, through
Damour and on to the Shebaa Farms in the south, and
over the dead bodies of Lebanon's children. The death of
Maggie and the children of Ghabey sums up the agony of Lebanon at the hands of
the Muslim Arabs. Wanton and barbaric, driven by
hatred, jealousy and the frustration at their impotence against Jewish Israel.
And so, they chose Lebanon as the substitute enemy
because on the scale of their racist view of the world,
Christian Lebanon ranks pretty high in the degree of its “otherness”. Lebanon
was the proxy “Crusader”, the isolationist, the Arab
who does not want to be an Arab, the renegade, the whore who
went astray.
What purpose, I ask today, as we near the thirtieth anniversary of the start of
the Lebanese War in April 13, 1975,
has the Lebanese War served the Arabs and the Palestinian Cause? How can anyone find a shred of credibility in Hezbollah's claims to
resistance and liberation when that organization's
objective has been, and still is, to fight a war that the majority of the
Palestinians themselves abandoned more than 13 years ago in
Oslo and Madrid? I say to Hezbollah, Palestine belongs
to the Palestinians, and the Lebanese should no longer die for Palestine. Like
Jordan, the Lebanese people have chosen a “Lebanon
first” policy. The Lebanese of the South have been led
like sheep to the slaughter, first by the PLO between 1970 and 1982 and, after the PLO was evicted from Lebanon in 1982,
by Hezbollah which was created, armed, and financed by Syria and Iran specifically to replace the PLO as the instrument of
destabilization in the hands of the Assad regime.
Hezbollah has never served Lebanon. It has served Iran and Syria, and like
these two countries, Hezbollah has spilled Lebanese
blood for the sake of other causes except the cause of Lebanon.
And to disguise its objectives, Hezbollah has assumed the cloak of a social
welfare organization after hijacking those functions
from the Lebanese State to whom it continues to deny
access to the land of the Lebanese south. The Lebanese people have to wake up
to the truth and understand the Big Lie and the sham
liberation ideology of Hezbollah that has been shoved
down their throats for close to two decades. Why, I ask Hezbollah, isn't there
a Syrian Hezbollah fighting the Israeli occupation –
worse, the annexation – of the Syrian Golan Heights?
And now, as another April 13
comes to remind us of when, thirty years ago, that “uncivil War”
between the Lebanese and the Palestinians broke out, now that Lebanon is ending
that era of its history, I will never forget Maggie
and the children of Ghabey, and will remind myself that their
death, in its inhumanity, was also the death of my country. If Lebanon is
becoming alive again, it is because all the children
of Lebanon who were made to die for many years, like Maggie
and the children of Ghabey, have finally decided to come out and play on all
the village squares of Lebanon, including that big
square in downtown Beirut. They no longer fear that their voices
will ever again be silenced by the shells of hatred or the drab totalitarian
regimes of the Arab World.
Hanibaal Atheos
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