Lebanon's Fascist Shiites: Frangiyeh or Else

Lebanon’s Fascist Shiites to the Lebanese People:  There Shall be No Other Candidate than Frangiyeh

Freely translated from Omar Rassi's piece in “Akhbar Al-Yom”.

At a time when the opposition and the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) have not yet publicly announced their agreement to back presidential candidate, Mr. Jihad Azour, former Minister and current Director for the Middle East and Central Asia at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Fascists of the two Shiite parties Amal and Hezbollah have declared their opposition to Mr. Azour. The head of the Loyalty to the Resistance bloc [i.e. Hezbollah] in parliament, Mr. Mohammad Raad, categorically declared: “The candidate whose name is circulating is a candidate of a scheming maneuver whose task is to confront  and bring down our candidate [Sleiman Frangiyeh].” Raad called on the opposition to “cease wasting time and prolonging the crisis”.

In an equally rabid statement, the member of the Liberation and Development [i.e.Amal Movement] bloc, MP Hassan Khalil [who is a prime suspect in the Beirut Port explosion] called the agreement of the opposition as “political spitefulness in a logic of obstruction… Domestic conspiracies do not build a nation, and these political forces’ sole agreement is to bring down our candidate.”

Sources of the opposition say, through the Akhbar Al-Yom Agency, that there are three messages that the Shiite duo [Nabih Berri’s Amal and Hassan Nasrallah’s Iranian Hezbollah] is addressing to those concerned by the presidential election, namely that you, the Lebanese people, should know the following:

1- There shall be no other candidate than our candidate, Sleiman Frangiyeh;

 2- Jihad Azour must withdraw his candidacy; and

 3- The head of the FPM Gebran Bassil [an on-off ally of Hezbollah] must reevaluate his position…

The opposition sources further explain that the first message above means that Hezbollah and Amal insist on Frangiyeh’s candidacy and there is no other choice but him as the candidate of consensus and partnership. Any other candidate represents submission and surrender. Raad’s words suggest specifically that the Shiite duo has no problem waiting as this allows it to impose the formula of “either Frangiyeh or open vacancy in the presidency, and there is nothing the opposition can do about it."

The second message is addressed to Azour himself to pressure him into withdrawing his candidacy and not be a confrontational candidate. Should Azour decline to proceed with his candidacy, the opposition is back to the drawing board. The Shiite duo seems to believe that Azour is hesitating as he does not want confrontation with the Shiites, but his withdrawal would place the opposition and the FPM in a bind and force them to look for another candidate.

The third message is a warning to Gebran Bassil that his endorsement of Azour is a hostile act toward Hezbollah, at which point the FPM becomes an enemy of Hezbollah.

It is worth noting that Bassil has been very dilatory in his desperate attempt to extricate himself from his very cumbersome alliance with Hezbollah, often hinting that his 2006 Memorandum of Understanding with the Iranian militia isn't properly working and needs updating, or that Hezbollah has broken its promises [to name Bassil for the presidency], but without ever having the courage to openly divorce himself from Hezbollah.

Another important point to make here is that Hezbollah’s criminal record is replete with assassinations of political opponents, journalists, and others, but more importantly assassinations of former allies who turned against Hezbollah, as was the case with prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. Thus, the third message above to Bassil is more than a warning, it is a threat.

Finally, the logic of the Lebanese Shiite parties is Fascist, just like their masters in Damascus and Tehran. Instead of a democratic process in which more than one candidate fight it out inside Parliament, these Shiite terrorist Fascists want to impose one candidate - theirs - on everyone else. They want everyone to first consent to Hezbollah's candidate (Frangiyeh) then go to Parliament for a stamp vote. They can't stand a fair fight. It is not that they are against the opposition's candidate like rivals do in a normal democracy; they are against the idea of more than one candidate presenting themsleves in the elections. They want one candidate - theirs - and they want to coerce everyone with their weapons to concede the field to him before even voting. Voting is simply a bureaucratic formality, as is done in Baathist Syria, in Communist China, in Islamic Iran and other dictatorships and totalitarian countries. Credit should be given to Turkiye for holding normal elections, even under Erdogan's authoritarian rule.