How Long Before Lebanon's Christians Take up Arms, Again?

[Post-script to the post below:
https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-woman-from-kahhaleh.html ]
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Back in the mid-1960s when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded, Lebanon's Christians had - since independence in 1943 - strictly abided by the country's basic laws, namely the written constitution and the unwritten National Pact, that divided the highest offices among the three largest communities, the Maronite Catholics, the Sunni Muslims and the Shiite Muslims. Under that system, Lebanon was a successful democracy, had a prosperous economy and a free press, and was a haven and refuge for Palestinian refugees and for all Arab dissidents and freethinkers. But Lebanon's success invited the jealousy and hatred of Arab and Islamic nationalists, often beholden to the military dictatorships and Islamic monarchs around who could not accept the contrast between Lebanon's democratic successes and their own dictatorial failures. An example is Syria: Whereas Lebanon had 6 duly elected presidents between 1943 and 1976 in peaceful transfers of power, neighboring Syria had on average one bloody coup d'état per year during that same period up to the 1970 coup that placed the Assad regime in power ever since. Yet, Muslims and Arabs began accusing Lebanon of being a Christian dictatorship under the ideology of "political maronitism".

The Lebanese Muslims, encouraged by Nasser of Egypt and a rising tide of Arab and Islamic nationalism, began rejecting the country's basic laws to which they had subscribed. Under the banner of Arabism, Lebanese Muslims wanted to turn small and neutral Lebanon into a military front against Israel, just like Syria, Egypt, Jordan and others were. Obviously, given its puny size and avowed neutrality, Lebanon could never win a war against Israel which had defeated all these other powerful Arab countries. But in their rage and crushing humiliation at their defeat by Jewish Israel, Muslim Arabs found solace in turning their vengeance, not against Israel, but against their own "brother" country, the other "alien" in their midst, the semi-Christian Lebanon, which they thought would be an easy target. Under massive Arab pressure that included boycotts and border closings, Lebanon was forced in the Cairo Accord of 1969 to cede its territory south of the Litani river to Yasser Arafat's PLO so it can "liberate" Palestine, while those frontline Arab countries of Egypt, Syria and Jordan had denied the Palestinian guerillas any military activity against Israel from their own borders. Jordan, in fact, had massacred its own Palestinians in September 1970, pushing them to seek shelter in Lebanon.

The intrinsic weakness of a small, diverse, liberal, neutral and Christian-tagged Lebanon invited the hatred and jealousy of the Arabs who believed that Lebanon had to stand by its "brothers" by losing territory to Israel, just like they did. Defeat had become the criterion for being a "true" Arab: Lebanon had to join the "losers" club, otherwise it would be a traitor to the Arab cause. Egypt had lost the Sinai, Jordan had lost Palestine west of the Jordan river including Jerusalem, and Syria had lost the Golan Heights. Lebanon had not lost any territory because it refused to fight Israel and was bound by the Truce Agreement of 1949 following the Lebanese Army's brief incursion into the Galilee.

It took ten years between 1965 (PLO founding) and 1975 (the start of the Lebanese-Palestinian War) for the Christians to lose their patience. During that decade, they did not resort to violence, they tried to negotiate and convince their fellow Muslims that Lebanon's free press was the Palestinians' best weapon in the war of information against Israel, and that violence could not be the answer, at least not from a small and militarily weak country like Lebanon. Lebanese President Sleiman Frangiyeh, a Maronite Catholic, had introduced Yasser Arafat to the UN in 1974, thus propelling the Palestinians on the world stage as a nation, and not as a bunch of stateless refugees. But Arab machismo, honor and dignity, all attributes of primitive societies, doubled by Islamic and Arab Baathist Fascism, overruled. Backed by Syria's Assad regime that conveyed weapons and terrorist groups across the lawless border (that Syria refuses to this day to demarcate), the Palestinians engaged in kidnappings, random killings of innocent Lebanese citizens at nighttime checkpoints, targeted assassinations, hijackings, and all manner of guerilla activity that no sovereign country could countenance without falling apart. The Lebanese security forces had done nothing to the Palestinians, yet they were constantly harassed, kidnapped and occasionally killed on the grounds that they were not fighting Israel. Because the Lebanese president was by custom a Christian, the entire Lebanese state was deemed a pro-western, crusader, imperialist, isolationist, colonial entity whose objective was to hurt the Palestinian "revolution" that was sponsored by the Communist and Soviet blocs and by a Leftist Europe. Yasser Arafat was behaving like a sovereign ruler, inviting dignitaries and welcoming them at Beirut Airport without any consultation with Lebanese officials. Lebanese Muslims, leftwingers, and Palestinians held demonstrations in Beirut against the Lebanese Army because it refused to engage in open warfare with Israel.

With the Cairo Accord bringing calamities to Lebanon, another agreement, the Melkart Accord, was signed in 1972 to regulate the presence and activities of the PLO, but to no avail. Arafat wanted to liberate Palestine by destroying Lebanon first, as captured in his infamous "the road to Jerusalem goes through Jounieh", the latter being the capital of the Christian heartland. The Lebanese state, being a composite of sectarian camps, was paralyzed. Athough the Christian president had the ordinary executive powers that any president has in a democratic system, he could not use them without the consent of the Sunni prime minister and the Shiite speaker of parliament. The army could not be used against the Palestinians without the consent of the Muslims. Force could not be used to impose order, like Jordan's King Hussein of Jordan had done in 1970. And even when it didn't intervene, the army ended up splitting along sectarian lines with a Christian brigade remaining loyal to the central government, while seditious Sunni, Shiite and Druze brigades fought alongside Syria and the PLO against their own country. The Sunni brigade, a.k.a. the Arab Army of Lebanon, was led by a Syrian-paid traitor, Lebanese Army Lieutenant Ahmad Khatib. Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt, PLO's Yasser Arafat and Syria's Hafez Assad formed a coalition known as the "National Movement", a weird assortment of Islamists, Druze, Communists, Socialists, western anarchists (German Baader-Meinhof, Italian Red Brigades, Japanese Red Army, etc.) and Palestinians, among others. The only thing they shared was their hatred of the state of Lebanon and its Christians. Kamal Jumblatt will later pay for his treason when Syria, after using him to undermine Lebanon, assassinated him in 1977.

That is when a Christian resistance became unavoidable. Having founded the Lebanese state in 1920 and having evicted the French in 1943, the Christians agreed with their fellow Muslims on a power-sharing coexistence, even when the latter, well into the 1920s and 1930s, had not ceased demanding to be part of Syria, not Lebanon. The Christians therefore had more of a stake in the fate of the country. As the Palestinians were creating their own state within the Lebanese state and were dragging the Muslims in their wake, the Christian community felt abandoned by a paralyzed state that could no longer protect them against repeated massacres and abuses by the PLO and other Syrian Baath party militias.

The American war criminal Henry Kissinger had sealed an agreement with the Syrian Baath dictatorship in 1974 in which the latter would not challenge Israel's seizure and annexation of the Golan Heights in exchange for a Syrian dominion over Lebanon that would include the settlement of the Palestinian refugees permanently in Lebanon. The Americans, it seemed, favored the destruction of friendly Lebanon and its conversion into a substitute Palestine, thus relieving Israel of its obligations vis-a-vis the Palestinians refugees, most notably their Right of Return to their villages and towns in Palestine-Israel. The Christians of Lebanon were the sacrificial lamb in this devilish plot.

The Christians were faced with the impending collapse of Lebanon, a meltdown of state institutions, and their own disappearance as a community. Both US Presidents Kennedy (1950s) and Bush Sr. (1980s) had offered a "solution" to Lebanon's Christians: Emigrate to America, leave Lebanon to the Muslims who would immediately annex it to Syria; our friends the oil-drenched Arabs would be happy and keep pumping their oil to us, our lapdog Israel would not have to deal with the Palestinian refugees, and the problem would be solved in one example of many dumb American foreign policy blunders. Since WWII when it became a superpower, America had not won any war: Except for the easy Kuwait promenade in the 1991 Gulf War, the US had lost Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and we now realize that the US-mediated solution to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s is one huge disaster. The dumbness of American foreign policy was first introduced on the world stage when US President Wilson introduced his idiotic 14 points at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference after WWI. US foreign policy succeeds only with political assassinations, betrayals, and toppling democratically-elected governments (Mosadeg in 1950s Iran, Allende in 1970s Chile, Lebanon of the 1980s, etc.).

The Christians decided to take up arms to defend themselves and try to salvage a nation-state they had founded. That is how the Lebanese-Palestinian War of 1975 began. The Christians formed a number of militias that confronted the Palestinians in various regions across the country. That war was to last until 1989 when the West, whose own soldiers, ambassadors, clergymen, administrators, journalists, diplomats etc. were bombed, kidnapped or assassinated by the Syrian-Iranian-Palestinian tandem, handed Lebanon to Syria. The West had become indentured to the wealthy Arabs and was fearful of another oil embargo. Thanks to American and western treachery, the Muslims ultimately won the war, demoted the Christian president to a powerless figurehead in the Taef Agreement of 1989, and the last free Lebanese government was evicted from its headquarters in Baabda by the US-allied Syrian Baathist airforce which, with the consent of the Israelis, was permitted to bomb Baabda and dislodge the last free Lebanese government. One Christian leader (Michel Aoun) was exiled, another (Samir Geagea) jailed, and yet another assassinated (Dany Chamoun), not to mention the dozens of other politicians, journalists and dissidents that were killed. This monstrous charade of delivering a democracy into the hands of a vulgar Stalinist tyranny would continue with its killings, kidnappings, disappearances, and abuses through 2005 and even through today via proxies like Hezbollah.

Today, after more than 30 years of Muslim rule, Lebanon is a cesspool of corruption, crime and mismanagment which has led to a virtual collapse of all its institutions: There is no President, there is no Central Bank Governor, the State-owned television channel has stop broadcasting, etc. The country is going through a period similar to the decade (1965-1975) that preceded the outbreak of war in April 1975. There's no war yet, but pro-Iranian Hezbollah has assumed the role of then pro-Syrian PLO in its abuses and willful dismantling of the country's institutions. The Christians are confronted with the same exact scenario: the Iranian militia of Hezbollah is behaving like a state within the state; it has its own territories, its own army, its own banking system (to bypass western sanctions), etc. Hassan Nasrallah, the alpha silverback of Hezbollah, does not hide his distate of the state of Lebanon and openly flaunts his strict obedience to the Iranian Ayatollah in Tehran. The fear of a repeat of the fragmentation of the Lebanese army is real. All it takes is for Hassan Nasrallah to call on the Shiite soldiers in the army to defect, and they'll do it in a split second to join Hezbollah. The Christians are again faced with a slew of problems that threaten their existence. They fear suffering the same fate as the Syrian, Iraqi and Palestinian Christians, all victims of Muslim terror and discrimination in Syria and Iraq, and of Jewish terror in Israel. They fear suffering the same fate as the Christian Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh who are being ethnically cleansed by an oil-rich Muslim dictatorship in Azerbaijan in another chapter of the long-standing Armenian genocide at the hands of Turkey.

Hezbollah is behaving in Lebanon like the American-Zionist settlers of Palestine. The Shiite community of Lebanon, virtually entirely hijacked by Hezbollah, continuously try to steal land from the Christians in order to increase their sway and change the demographics of the country. They forge official property deeds through their operatives who have infiltrated the institutions. In the towns of Lhassa in Byblos District, Rmeish in south Lebanon, Zahle in the Bekaa Valley, and others. In the Christian neighborhoods of Beirut that were destroyed by Hezbollah's ammonium nitrate explosion in the harbor, predatory buyers serving as fronts for Hezbollah are preying on destitute owners to purchase their ruined properties in order to implant a yet non-existent Shiite presence. In another scenario, the Shiites approach the Maronite Church and ask for permission to "temporarily" exploit communal church land for agriculture. The Church reluctantly approves and Shiite farmers begin growing food inside greenhouses. After a season or two, they erect a tent, then a cinder block structure, then a house, and one day a mosque. The communal church-owned land had become a Shiite village flying Hezbollah and Iranian flags. By then, it is too late to dislodge them because they are backed by Hezbollah, and if there are in principle legal or law-enforcement systems to resort to, they are all under Hezbollah's fist.

Hezbollah has since 2016 obstructed the work of the Lebanese Parliament in order to force its own Christian puppet candidate into the presidency, someone it can control and manipulate. In 2016, it took 2.5 years before pro-Hezbollah puppet president Michel Aoun was elected, after the Christian opposition finally gave up trying to have a genuine democratic election. With Aoun's term coming to an end last October 2022, Hezbollah is repeating the same maneuver. The country has been without a president for the past ten months, and every session of parliament that seems to be going against a Hezbollah puppet candidate is scuttled by the Shiite MPs who walk out to break the quorum. Other state institutions, like the governorship of the Central Bank, are being undermined by the Shiite politicians. The Beirut Harbor blast of August 4, 2020 remains outside the reach of the judiciary because Hezbollah-affiliated judges have been blocking the work of the Independent Investigator in charge of the inquiry by filing no less than 40 lawsuits against him, thus forcing him to suspend his work. The Lebanese equivalent of the Supreme Court has also been blocked by Shiite ministers who refuse to sign decrees appointing judges to the Court which would reinstate the Independent Investigator. And the list goes on and on about how the Iranian militia of Hezbollah and its affiliated politicians are literally dismantling the state of Lebanon and its institutions. Just like the PLO was doing back in the 1960s and 1970s.

Syria occupied Lebanon for 30 years (1975-2005). Prior to that, and since independence in 1943, it refused to recognize Lebanon's right to exist as an independent nation. Since 2005 when its occupation army was evicted by an angry population and by a West under the shock of the september 11, 2001 attacks, Syria continues to harass and abuse Lebanon via proxies and now, since the onset of the Syrian civil war in 2011, with 2.5 million Syrian refugees that the international community says it wants to settle permanently in Lebanon on top of a 4-million strong native Lebanese population. In other words, the international community appears to want to eliminate Lebanon by settling Muslim Syrians and driving Christian Lebanese into emigration. The Kissinger plan is still alive and kicking. The world does not notice the flight of Lebanon's Christians because, unlike stereotypical refugees, Lebanon's Christian refugees do not settle in tents in muddy filthy terrains, nor do they beg for handouts. No one notices their plight. But they are refugees nonetheless and their five-decades-long social and psychological traumas are no less devastating than for other refugees.

Christian leaders, politicians and church officials continue day in and day out to call for the rule of law, for Hezbollah to cede its weapons to the regular amy and for its fighters to join its ranks, for the Independent Investigator to resume his work, and to allow the constitutional processes to work instead of bypassing them through what the Muslims call "consensus" and "dialogue". The Christians continue to demonstrate peacefully and, despite multiple assassinations of outspoken critics of Hezbollah, the Christians have not resorted to violence against Muslim Shiites or Syrian refugees, with the exception of defending themselves when Hezbollah's terrorists invaded the Christian neighborhood of Ayn Remmaneh and rampaged through it, just like those radical Jewish-American settlers did in the Palestinian village of Huwara a couple of months ago. Hezbollah is copy-pasting Zionist methodology. In fact, after claiming that its "resistance" against Israel was motivated by what it considers the Israeli "occupation" of some puny territory in the south that technically belongs to Syria, Hezbollah's puppet government signed an agreement last year with Israel over the maritime borders between the two countries. In this agreement, Israel ceded to Lebanon an area that technically belongs to Israel but which is continuous with a prospective oil field in Lebanon's waters. The reason: both sides stand to benefit from potential oil revenues from offshore platforms. But Hezbollah refuses to display similar flexibility on the land border disputes. The reason? If a land border is agreed to by both Lebanon and Israel, then Hezbollah's own existence would become moot. No more resistance against Israel means no more raison d'etre for Hezbollah to remain an armed militia.

The Christians have been sending delegations to western countries trying to get some help in resolving the accumulating and increasingly complex problems the country is facing. But even with the magnitude of the disasters that have befallen Lebanon for the past decade, the West hesitates, wavers, ignores, and turn its head. Only one court in London has issued a judgment on the ownership of the ship that carried the ammonium nitrate to Beirut. Not one country, not one international instance have had the courage to launch an investigation into the Beirut Harbor explosion, despite the fact that the West is facing Iran and Syria with stiff sanctions. But in Lebanon, the Syrian-Iranian proxy Hezbollah is handled with velvet gloves. The reason? The West wants a nuclear deal with Iran and is afraid of confronting Iran in Lebanon, lest Hezbollah launches its hundreds of thousands of rockets on Israel.

Hezbollah is dissolving Lebanon as we know it and pushing the country into a civil war. The West too appears interested in a blowup in Lebanon, particularly the Americans who give the Lebanese army just enough of their second-hand rusty equipment to fight Hezbollah but never win. And lose it will, because the army will fracture again along sectarian lines. For 5 decades, the West has done nothing serious to solve the Lebanese quagmire. In contrast, it has rallied NATO armies to rescue the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo. It has massed an armada to rescue the Christians of East Timor from Indonesian occupation. And now in Niger, the French and the Americans have bases in the country and are willing to join a Pan-African force to counter a military coup and bring democracy back. The UN has had a force - UNIFIL - in south Lebanon since 1978 without accomplishing anything other than the death of hundreds of its soldiers who spend their days counting bullets and rockets in an area in which the regular Lebanese Army is denied entry by, guess who? Hezbollah, a terrorist organization according to a majority of the UN's member states. And the UN, year after year, continues with the very costly charade of renewing UNIFIL's mandate in south Lebanon. Why is Lebanon out of the realm of assistance? Why are the Christians of Lebanon abandoned to their fate? Fifty long years and generations of Lebanese Christians have left the country to settle anywhere they could on the planet. There's something pathological or deeply insidious in the manner with which the international community has been handling a small country like Lebanon, yet a founder of the UN and a co-author of its human rights charter.

What do the Christians do in the face of a potential repeat of 1975? They haven't yet taken up arms. But do they fight again and go through a horrible decade or two with a treacherous West in their back and hostile Arab and Iranian Muslims facing them with a willful objective of dechristianizing Lebanon? Do they give up and submit to Islamic rule and live like a Dhimmi community? A highly unlikely scenario as the Christians have survived centuries of Muslim threats to their existence as perhaps the only free Christian community in the east that has not been crushed. For now, they are exercizing patience and appealing to the world to abide by the legal and ethical standards of international law. In the 1970s, the Christians of Lebanon were accused by both West and East of being radical extremists who hate Muslims, when the reality is that they have sought, and continue to seek, to accommodate their political life with the Muslims by sharing power with them, unlike Jewish Israel which has taken an openly hostile, racist and brutal militarized approach to their shared living with the Muslims.

If there is no change in the current calamitous course of events, the world will soon witness a second Lebanese war in which the Christians will face, not the Arab-Syrian-Palestinian coalition backed by a cowardly and obsequious West as they did in the 1970s, but a Syrian-Iranian-Shiite terrorist threesome that has haunted the West itself for decades. Just consider that the Assad regime of Syria, in power in Damascus since 1970, an ally of Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism, a haven for Jihadists, a killer and ethnic cleanser of its own people, an occupier of Lebanon and an amply documented human rights abuser and war criminal, has just been rehabilitated by the filthy Arab League and probably soon by the West. What are the Lebanese Christians, whose country has been swamped by a second Syrian occupation and an Iranian occupation, waiting for before sounding the alarm and taking action in preparation for war, one more time? I imagine the bleeding-hearted NGOs getting all excited at the prospects of war, because they'll have much to do and much more money pouring in into their coffers.

For more:
https://ia801500.us.archive.org/20/items/invisible-jihad-report/Invisible-Jihad-Report.pdf
https://www.christianpost.com/voices/the-deliberate-and-slow-eradication-of-lebanons-christians.html