Armenia, Western Values and Islam

(updated 01-Oct-2023)

Inside the territory of the Muslim country of Azerbaijan is the Christian Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh where 120,000 Armenians have been besieged by the Azerbaijani army of the dictator Ilham Aliyev.  

A new trauma is unfolding for the Armenian people as Azerbaijan has finally taken over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Most of the Armenians of the enclave are currently leaving their ancestral lands out of fear of ethnic cleansing and atrocities that the Azeris are likely to commit.

For centuries the Armenian people, whose territory was once much larger than the current territory of the Republic of Armenia, have been the victim of the Muslim countries surrounding them: Turkey, Iran and Azerbaijan. After the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks at the turn of the 20^th century, accompanied by death marches across the desert into Syria and Lebanon where Armenian refugees have settled and constitute large communities, Armenian Christians are again the target of genocide, this time at the hands of the Muslim Azeris.

Just as the circumstances of the genocide of 1915 allowed its perpetration by Turkey, with the chaos of World War I, the present world-wide tensions in the Caucasus and the Black Sea region are leaving the Armenians alone in their struggle to survive. For the decades during Soviet rule, the Armenians found protection with the Russians. Now that Russia is itself isolated as a result of its invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territories, it has abandoned the Armenians. The large-scale flight of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh is a continuation of a decades-long process of territorial loss by historic Armenia, a good chunk of which has been annexed by Turkey after the genocide of 1915.

Just as the West abandoned the Armenians during the 1915 genocide, the West today is watching with indifference another chapter in the loss of Armenian territories and an unfolding ethnic cleansing. Azerbaijan is finally integrating Nagorno-Karabakh to its territory, leading to serious fears of atrocities and flight of Armenians from their ancestral lands to join their brethren in Armenia proper.

US secretary of State Anthony Blinken declared that he was “deeply concerned” about the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, like many other Western nations have done. “Deep concern” means in diplomatic language that the West is not going to do anything to stop the Azeris from seizing the Armenian territory and evicting its people out. This posture invites a contrast between how the West handled a similar situation in Kosovo, a Muslim enclave of Christian Serbia.

Kosovo is historically an integral part of Christian Serbia, and the Serbs were among those Europeans who stopped the Muslim Turks who were on their march to conquer and forcibly impose Islam on Europe. In the Balkans, where Serbia is located, the marching Muslim armies managed to convert the populations of today’s Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania, leaving a patchwork of interlaced Christian Orthodox (Serbia, Montenegro), Christian Catholic (Croatia, Slovenia), and Muslim (Albania, Bosnia and Kosovo) communities and territories.

When the Balkan wars of the 1990s erupted, the West sided against the Christian Serbs in defense of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The US administration of Bill Clinton dispatched a malignant and pernicious envoy, Richard Holbrooke, who did all he could to dismember Christian Serbia, leave Serbs trapped under Muslim rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and later forced the seditious secession of the Kosovo province of Serbia to create a new  Muslim State in Europe. In one strike of unexplainable diplomacy, the West created two new Muslim States in the heart of Europe – Bosnia and Kosovo - while Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism were growing and already sowing terror across Europe and the Middle East. The US seems to be on a path of sowing the seeds of future strife in Europe as a way to weaken the Old Continent, prevent it from challenging American hegemony, and manipulate it into submission. Current events in Serbia prove this hypothesis right, as the 1990s US-brokered Dayton Accords are crumbling and threatening another war in the heart of Europe.

Is the objective of this US diplomacy to please oil-rich Arab Muslim states? Is it to appease Islamists for fear of terrorism? How can the West send its NATO forces to forcibly detach a province (Muslim Kosovo) from a sovereign country (Christian Serbia) to create a brand new Muslim country that could be a potential threat down the line? Why doesn't the US apply the same diplomacy to liberate Muslim Palestine from the savage brutality of Jewish Israel? Or to forcibly detach the province of Nagorno-Karabakh from Muslim Azerbaijan and either re-attach it to Armenia or create a brand new Christian Armenian country? Could it be that the US is afraid of nearby Russia? In fact, Nagorno-Karabakh was always a part of Armenia, but the Russian butcher Joseph Staline "gifted" this Armenian territory to Azerbaijan during Soviet rule as a way of sowing division and maintaining Soviet grip. Could the Americans be following Stalin's method by creating two new Muslim countries in the heart of Europe as a way to sow the seeds of future strife, weaken Europe and keep it towing the American imperialist line? At the time of this writing, Serbia is massing its troops along the Kosovo border. Ultimately, the charlatan US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the secession of Muslim Kosovo from Christian Serbia, bears responsibility for his lousy treacherous job that is crumbling before our eyes..

In the same manner, the West handled the endless crises of Lebanon: The Lebanese Christian community has been beleaguered and under siege by relentless Muslim hostility from Lebanon’s Stalinist neighbor, the Syrian dictatorship of the Assad dynasty. Since the 1960s, the Lebanese Christians who had built a liberal, tolerant, and prosperous country, were gradually abandoned to their fate as they fought for their survival against the Egyptian "Arabs" of Nasser in the 1950 and 1960s, the Palestinian "revolutionaries" of Arafat (1960s-1980s), the Syrian "Baathists" of Assad (1970s-2000s), and the distant but effective onslaught of the Sunni Muslim Gulf Arabs who financed the Lebanese War from the late 1960s through the 1990s while also financing mosque building, radicalization with Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and sowing their terror reign in Europe and the Middle East. In more recent times (2000s-present), the Iranian Muslims have taken over the task of threatening the existence of the Christian community through their proxy terror organization of Hezbollah. 

Throughout that period, not only did the US (and its European poodles behind it) show indifference, but it allied itself with the Muslim Arabs against the Christians. In four separate and consecutive crises, American republican administrations (Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.) sold the Christians out to Syria and Saudi Arabia by imposing on the Lebanese Christians exacting solutions that they knew would not work on the long term, simply to appease the Arabs and gain short term benefits (oil, coalition against Saddam Hussein, etc.).

It is therefore not quite a mystery why the West, in places like the Balkans, Lebanon, and now Armenia, has been on a course of appeasement with Muslim nations that are otherwise ideological enemies of the West. These are the same Islamic nations that never stopped attacking the West militarily with terror attacks and the implant of Islamic centers and mosques throughout Europe and the US. In contrast, when the aggressor is Christian (e.g. Russia) and the victim is Christian (e.g. Ukraine), the West adopts a clearer, more or less ethical posture of defending the victim against the aggressor.

And now in Armenia the same scenario is unfolding. Why doesn’t the West demand the secession of Christian Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh (area: 3,170 Sq. Km) from Muslim Azerbaijan and create a new Christian country, just as it forced the secession of Muslim Kosovo (10,900 Sq. Km) from Christian Serbia? While the Bosnia and Kosovo secessions from Serbia could not have been directly driven by mercantile interests like oil, it is the backing of countries like Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations to the Muslims of Kosovo and Bosnia that forced the oil-subservient West to agree to dismember Serbia. Same with Lebanon. But in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, the subservience to interests is flagrantly obvious. Azerbaijan has major oil and gas resources in the Caspian Sea, and neither the West nor Russia wants to alienate the Azerbaijani dictator Aliyev.

I wish that diplomats and officials of certain countries stop claiming that their foreign policies are driven by “values” when they themselves trample those same values for mercantile interests. The enduring torment of Muslim Palestine at the hands of the barbarian Jewish Israelis is another case in point of Mafia-style blackmail politics, and not one of so-called values.

Highly Unlikely Saudi-Israeli Normalization Deal

Chatter is increasing about progress toward a landmark normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The Saudis hope for a defense pact with the US and for help developing their own civilian nuclear program.

Formal recognition of Israel, an American Jewish colony, by the influential Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would usher a seismic shift in the region, keeping in mind that the US presidential elections are a little more than a year away, which may be prompting an oversized mediatic optimism.

Foremost among the hurdles facing such a deal is the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, short of which a deal, assuming it is reached, would face tremendous headwinds against its sustainability on the medium and long terms, and could in fact result in a backlash. The Arab springs of a decade ago have died down with little achievements, but such large scale historical phenomena follow an oscillation pendulum with wide amplitudes of time. At the current state of affairs, Arab governments are still very unpopular with their peoples, with new dictators having replaced toppled dictators. Should a Saudi-Israeli deal be made over the Palestinian cause and seal the fate of the Palestinian people to live forever under Israeli repression, it would add fuel to the fire of popular dissatisfaction among Arab peoples.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is no dupe and he will not fall in the trap of a deal with Israel that would give the Palestinians a few crumbs and diminish the validity and justness of their cause. Even if he is given security guarantees by the US, which it seems include the positioning of US troops on Saudi soil, and even if he obtains help in developing a nuclear program, these two gains might not be sufficient to offset what might be perceived as a treason to the Palestinians who, so far, have not been involved in the negotiations.

The reason for this pessimism is the extremist right-wing and violent government in power in Israel which has not yet shied away from declaring Palestine dead and voicing its ultimate objective of annexing the West Bank and Gaza. Though we don't know how far the Israelis might go in making concessions to the Palestinians, it is very difficult to imagine that government conceding on a full-fledged independence and sovereignty of Palestine. The Israeli government consists of a hodge-podge coalition of extremist religious ultra-nationalist partners who cannot fathom reversing their current violent policies of suffocating the Palestinians and forcing them to surrender the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Netanyahu's granting the Palestinians significant concessions to achieve a deal with the Saudis is a non-starter.

Other hurdles include more greedy demands by the Israelis beyond the current $4 billion a year in U.S. military assistance. Sources say that Israel too wants a defense treaty with the U.S. to match any new treaty with Saudi Arabia. Also, more than half of polled Americans oppose an agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that would commit U.S. soldiers to defend the Saudis in the event of a war.

Then there is Iran. As long as the Islamic theocracy in Iran maintains its hostility laced with a potential nuclear threat vis-a-vis the Saudis, the Americans can leverage the Saudis' fear to force a deal on them that might not rescue the Palestinians. But should the regime of the ayatollas vacillate or fall, then the present deck of cards would be reshuffled.

In New York for the UN general assembly, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed as “delusional” the idea of peace in Israel-Palestine without full rights for the Palestinian people. Nabil Abu Rudeina, a spokesperson for President Abbas said, “Peace begins with Palestine, and stability begins with the Palestinian people obtaining their legitimate national rights and establishing their independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Without that, there is no peace, no security and no stability in the region". An agreement that doesn’t include real concessions to the Palestinians could feed anger in the region, increase sympathy for the Iranians and hatred to the Saudis. Some of the warming relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia (as in opening Saudi skies to Israeli airlines) have been driven by mutual acrimony toward Iran. On the other hand, the parallel Chinese-brokered rapprochement between Riyadh and Tehran may be only for show, and for Saudi Arabia it might simply be a way to poke the eye of the Americans and their Israeli poodles and leverage its negotiating posture.

Bin Salman appears to favor "some" concessions to the Palestinians and he understands the risks involved in doing so. In an interview, he vowed to work with “whoever is there” in the Israeli government as long as the deal ensures the “needs” of the Palestinians. His use of the word "needs" indicates he might be willing to accept Israeli concessions that fall short of satisfying the Palestinian "wants".

All in all, the deal faces so many difficulties that it might falter and fall through faster than expected, despite the US elections-driven optimism. But even if a deal is reached that does not address the core issue of the fate of Palestine, and only offers cosmetic patchups to the Palestinians, the medium and long terms are sure to guarantee its ultimate failure.

 

Student Critics of Apartheid Israel? or Campus Antisemites?

In an opinion posted September 23, 2023, on CNN entitled “When will colleges stand up to campus antisemites?”, Jonathan Greenblatt, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), claims that Jewish students on US college campuses are facing a rise in antisemitism. Mr. Greenblatt says that as a parent he worries about sending his own children to college.

Yet, again and again, Zionists like Mr. Greenblatt hope to continue injecting a false narrative in the national discourse by deliberately degrading legitimate opposition and criticism of the state of Israel's dehumanization policies vis-a-vis the Palestinian people down to baseless antisemitic attacks on Jewish people.

He says, "The threat of antisemitism has been growing across American society, and colleges are not immune. But while antisemitism nationally has diverse causes, often including ties to White supremacy, campuses more frequently witness boycotts and demonization of Israel that lead to attacking or ostracizing Jewish students because of their own perceived or actual support for Israel".

In substance, therefore, Mr. Greenblatt is suggesting that American students stop criticizing Israel for its apartheid repressive regime against the native Palestinian people in the Near East, in order to protect Jewish students on US campuses against attacks and ostracization. This is akin to demanding that US citizens stop criticizing the repressive regimes of Islamic Iran or Saudi Arabia in order to fight Islamophobia here in the US. This is a standard Zionist modus operandi.

Mr. Greenblatt says that his American Zionist organization - ADL - tracked 665 “anti-Israel incidents” at US university campuses during one academic year (2022-2023), including the “vilification of Zionism”. He defines Zionism as the “belief that Jews have the right to self-governance in the historic land of Israel”, which is a belief based solely on Stone Age biblical trash fiction. In ancient Canaan-Palestine, Hebrews (not Jews) had two separate and enemy kingdoms (Judah and Israel) for some 300 years about 3,000 years ago. Before them the Canaanites - ancestors of the Palestinians - were massacred by the nomadic Hebrews on orders from frikin' Yahweh in the first ethnic cleansing campaign in recorded history, though no reasonable person should believe the fictional self-serving ramblings of the Old Testament-Torah. After the Hebrews, it was the successive turns of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Seljuks, Ottoman Turks, British crooks and finally colonial Zionist settlers to establish kingdoms and empires. Modern Jews are not the genetic descendants of Stone Age Hebrews. They are East Europeans and Russians who converted recently (a few centuries ago) to Judaism. Even if we grant that these non-native modern invaders of Palestine are cultural Jews, their claim to Palestine is so puny that any of these other civilizations that have ruled in historic Palestine can make at the very least an equal claim to Palestine. And even if one accepts that modern Jews have some claim to Palestine, it is disgusting to see that such a claim has become a license to kill, displace, terrorize, evict, and otherwise ethnically cleanse the land of its native indigenous population.

As he defends Zionism, Mr. Greenblatt speaks not as a Jew but as a European-American Zionist whose late 19th century colonial project began in 1897 to invade and conquer Palestine, massacre, displace and dispossess its indigenous Palestinian people of their millennial villages, towns and cities, and erect a brand new state over a land that last saw a Jewish person some 2,000 years ago. Not unlike all the other European colonial conquests in Asia, Africa, Middle East and Latin America that reached their climax in that same 19th century when each European state had its “empire”: Invade, conquer, massacre, displace, dispossess the natives and erect a brand new state ruled by the invaders, not by the indigenous owners of the land. With Zionism, European Jews embarked on a me-too mercantilist colonialist enterprise to build themselves an empire like their fellow French, Belgians, Dutch, Portuguese, Spaniards, British and other Europeans.

Is it “antisemitic” to analyze the creation of the state of Israel from the lens of a colonial enterprise like so many others that came out of the Europe of the 19th century? Is merely questioning in an academic setting the historicity of the creation of the state of Israel a crime? Is Israel infallible simply because, though born as a colonial enterprise, it came of age partly - not entirely - as a result of the Holocaust?

Just to be clear to my readers: There is a huge difference between antisemitism and criticism of Israel. Please read carefully and understand the distinction: 

“Antisemitism” is a longstanding hatred of Jews by Europeans based on abhorrent false claims of blood libel, rejection and killing of Christ, conspiracy theories of world control, financial greed and so on. But these are not the arguments that today's critics of Israel put forward;  

"Critics of Israel" make no such nonsensical claims; they simply argue that Israel is a documented practitioner of horrible policies against the colonized Palestinians that include walled separation, harassment, sieges, rampant discrimination, home demolition, dispossession, land theft, identity-denial… all with the openly stated objective by Israeli officials to one day annex the remaining Palestinian lands, declare Palestine dead, and deprive the 4 million Palestinians of their right to a state of their own on their own land. Israel is thus not only a colonialist settler enterprise; it adheres to an expansionist ideology for future land theft and ethnic cleansing. That is why in fact Israel does not have a constitution because writing one would force it to define its borders and legally prohibit it from stealing more land from the Palestinians and its neighbors.

Having not mentioned antisemitism early in his opinion, Mr. Greenblatt moves quickly to amalgamate criticism of Israel and vilification of Zionism with antisemitism, thus insidiously bridging the civilized pillars of freedom of opinion and defense of victimized people with the universally denounced and condemned belief in racist antisemitism. And this is where the crux of the matter is: Zionists continuously conflate a desire for debating the apartheid policies of the state of Israel with hatred of Jews. What does Mr. Greenblatt then call all those Israelis and Jews who condemn Israel for its policies? Is there such a thing as a Jewish antisemite?

According to Univstats, [ https://www.univstats.com ], there are 6,543 colleges and universities in the US. Therefore, the statistic of 665 “anti-Israel” incidents says that 10 out of each 100 colleges and universities have experienced some poorly defined “anti-Israel” incidents, which Mr. Greenblatt himself attributes largely to white supremacist actors, i.e. white anglo-saxon protestant racists who have sympathy neither for the Israelis nor for the Palestinians. Just read further below how a university conference on Palestinian literature is included in Mr. Greenblatt's list of "anti-Israel incidents".

Then the sneaking around the core argument begins with a pretentious waiver: “To be sure, criticism and debate over the policies of the State of Israel, just like criticism of the policies and actions of any country, is part of a healthy campus ecosystem. The First Amendment protects the right to boycott, as well as the right to engage in harsh and divisive rhetoric. Undoubtedly, one can criticize Israel’s leaders and actions without being antisemitic.” How civilized of Mr. Greenblatt! We ought to be grateful!

So I urge Mr. Greenblatt to put an end to the obfuscation and make two side-by-side lists: One list is for actions and arguments that critique Israel without being labeled antisemitic, and another list of actions and arguments that critique Israel and are antisemitic. Many around the world are utterly confused by the Zionist arguments – indeed confusion and obfuscation are probably the objective of Zionists since it allows them to say the same thing and its opposite at once - because it seems that any time someone criticizes Israel, they are immediately attacked as antisemitic by a wide range of Israeli apologists, from paid Zionist trolls on the web to senior officials in the Jewish government. A most recent and flagrant example was accusing the UN, Human Rights Watch and even the Israeli organization B’Tselem of being antisemitic for issuing their 2022 report calling Israel an apartheid state [See: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/01/israeli-apartheid-report-can-critic-of.html ]

Next, Mr. Greenblatt unleashes his dual nature venom. Believing that he has firmly equated antisemitism with Israelophobia, he states, “One of the worst examples of campus anti-Israel activity in recent memory is the Palestine Writes Literature Festival set to take place at the University of Pennsylvania this weekend”. Notice that he labels this activity as “anti-Israel”, not as “antisemitic”, thus contradicting his own supposed welcoming of healthy debate on the Israel-Palestine question.

He then goes through a long list of outrageous extremist statements and positions by anti-Zionists on US campuses, essentially parading a tiny minority of extremist white Christian American supremacists and suggesting that they somehow are representatives of the Palestinian movement for justice. This is the same Zionist propaganda that equated the legitimate Palestinian national movement with a minority of “communist terrorist subversives” during the 1960s and 1970s, then with a minority of “Islamic terrorists” in the 1980s and 1990s. Hiding under these fake arguments, Israel has continued to steal Palestinian land, dispossess the Palestinians, deny them an identity, demolish their homes, expel them to no return, uproot their millennial olive orchards, kill them with indiscriminate bombings and assassinations, dispossess them of property in Jerusalem to the benefit of foreign settlers, etc.

But now that it has ran out of scarecrow labels to attach to the Palestinian national movement, and that the label of antisemitism has worn out its utility, Zionists are promoting an alternative lie and new misleading terminology, namely that criticism of Israel is hatred of Israel or “Israelophobia”, a new term Zionists have coined to malign anyone who dares criticize Israel for its endless torment, racism and hatred toward Palestinians – let's call it, in a tit-for-tat, "Palestinophobia". Zionists hope to surf on this new one for the next two decades or so until they exterminate or expel all the Palestinians and achieve their pure Jewish supremacist colony they call Israel.

But the 2020s are no longer the 1950s and 1960s when Zionists could blatantly disinform and misinform a captive audience with their monopoly on information; the Zionist jig is up. People now can see for themselves through the Zionist lies couched in guilt-infliction on the European Holocaust criminals. Palestine is today everywhere and on everyone’s mind. Sympathy for Palestine is quickly overwhelming the 1950-vintage pity for Israel. The Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement worked very well with apartheid South Africa. Despite outrageous lies and disinformation, the BDS movement will eventually work well to rescue Palestine from the claws of European Jewish racism and religious extremism. Apartheid South Africa did not have an international Zionist movement to lie and misinform on its behalf, but it allied itself with Apartheid Israel and its dumb American sponsors which aided it with finance and weapons. Israel was the only country in the world to defend Apartheid South Africa's dehumanization of the native African population.

The Zionist Movement was founded like many other European corporations, like the British East India Company, the Dutch East India Company and others, whose task was to colonize, subdue and exploit colonies anywhere they could around the world. The Zionist Movement first targeted Uganda in Africa, but later changed its target to Palestine when the British crooks offered Palestine to the Zionists (Balfour letter) in exchange for financial loans to aid the British war effort. The Basel Conference in 1897, which laid the groundwork for the Zionist Colonial Corporation, was a follow-up to the Berlin Conference of 1884 which effectively divided Africa among European powers like Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Italy and Spain. Always "special ones", the non-state European Zionists wanted their share of the pie.

In the post Word War II period, colonialism effectively came to an end. Virtually all former colonies of Europe have gained their independence, which leaves Israel today as perhaps the only British, now American, colony to remain a barbaric foreign racist implant of repression and dehumanization of native indigenous people. To paraphrase Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian people are the only remaining colonized people on Earth who are asked to guarantee the security of their colonial occupier, while Israel is the only colonial occupying country that demands to be protected from its own colonized victims.

Regardless of how long it might take to bring justice to Palestine, injustice will never prevail. As long as this monumental injustice persists in Palestine, perpetrated by foreign invading settlers and targeting a native indigenous population, there will never be peace.

President Biden: Do not Run in 2024

I am an admirer of President Joe Biden, for a number of reasons and regardless of his kiss-ass policies vis-a-vis Israel.

But his more and more frequent awkward moments clearly show that even if he is capable of running a successful campaign and win in 2024, his second term will very likely be very wobbly and will stain his legacy. 

If he remains alive as a second-term President between 2025 and 2028, his term in office will suffer from his declining condition. It is truly a sad sight to see someone you admire failing in front of cameras before the world. Why would he want to go through this ordeal?

If he dies during his second term, VP Kamala Harris will be sworn in as President and she might turn out to be an excellent president. But, for the first woman to become president of the US as a consequence of the current president's death somehow diminishes the achievement. And given the fact that she is not white, the right-wing conservative extremists of the GOP are likely to torment her more than they currently torment President Biden, just as they did with Barack Obama, the first African American president of the US. 

If Biden decides NOT to run in 2024, this opens the door to all sorts of scenarios. The Democratic Party will have to choose a substitute: A brand new candidate or stick with VP Kamala Harris. Of course, another Democrat or independent might contest an automatic Harris nomination. 

Given the convulsions that the GOP is going through because of the idiot Donald Dumb, the entire political landscape is going to start looking like a circus if the Democratic Party too enters a period of instability. 

Joe Biden ensures stability for the Democrats, for now, but not for the next 2-3 years. I'd take the bitter pill now to avoid collapse later. President Biden: DO NOT RUN IN 2024. Let a younger, stronger, more dynamic candidate face off with the equally senescent dumb traitor of the GOP. 

How to Build a Political Family Farm in Lebanon

Most political family farms in Lebanon have been around for generations. 

Some go back to medieval times, like the Jumblatts, whose practices remain truly medieval and feudal. You go to visit the "castle" in Moukhtara and, were it not for some suits and modern attire, you'd think yourself in the 1500s.

The Lord of the Castle stands behind a large desk in a grand square inside the castle, surrounded by two rows of chairs arranged in a circle around the desk. Guards in civilian dress are everywhere, and some of the Lord's representatives in parliament are also around. Some people are dressed in today's attire, but many still wear the traditional Druze garb: bouffant pantaloons, white shirt, a skullcap, and long long white beards. 

Then, upon receiving a cue from the guards who control the flux of "petitioners", one of the latter who are sitting in the circular court get up and move toward the Lord, present him with papers and their case. He, without any emotion, hands over the papers to a scribe/secretary sitting at the desk or to the men, listens to their entreaties, utters a couple of words and dismisses them politely. Then it's the next petitioner, and so on. I do not know what these petitions are about, but they can be about a dispute over land or water, a plea to find employment for a junior member of a family, a request to have a dirt road paved or some other request for help against the Ottoman-vintage bureaucracy in decrepit Lebanon. The institutions of the state (municipality, police, etc.) are for show only: the Lord makes all the decisions and they execute.

Some may find this process romantic or traditional, but it supplants what a modern bureaucracy should be about: equal access, services, institutional independence without the intercession of tribal lords, no begging at the feet of a Lord for crumbs, etc. Yet, this is the daily routine of one Taymour Jumblatt, the 41-year old heir to the Jumblatt dynasty to whom the Druze tribe recently "pledged allegiance" in the Shouf Mountains during a ceremony in which his father, Walid Jumblatt, a warlord during the 1970s-1990s, handed over the reins of power to his son. It is common knowledge that Taymour, when attending American University of Beirut and the Sorbonne in Paris, repeatedly expressed his dislike of  the feudal system and his desire not to follow in the political footsteps of his father, grandfather, great grandfather etc. 

Yet, here he is, his personal wishes and desires notwithstanding, a tribal feudal Lord ruling over a herd of Shouf Mountains peasants. If one looks at pictures of grandfather Kamal, father Walid and son Taymour, one notices that they rarely smile. They have a terse and resigned look in their faces, which makes me think that they all are unhappy with the role they're made to play. As a ruling lordly family, they are all generally well educated, which explains the tension they live with between what the individual ideas that education grants on one hand, and the tribal duties they have to endure on the other hand. Their women are also very modern and educated but rarely play a political role. They are seen at social, charity, art promotion and similar events mingling with the beautiful people of the Lebanese tribal and sectarian elites.

The Shouf Mountains southeast of Beirut have a mixed Christian and Druze population, oftentimes within the same village. In January of 1976, the Druze of the Shouf looked with indifference as the islolated Christians of the coastal town of Damour were massacred by the Palestinian and Syrians. Then the Druze themselves carried out a campaign of massacres and ethnic cleansing carried against their fellow Christian villagers during the 1980s. In spite of two "reconciliations", one in 2000 and another one last week, under the aegis of the religious dinosaurs of both sides, many Christians refuse to return to their homes and villages in the Shouf out of fear of future massacres by the Druze.

There are, of course, many other similar political family farms in Lebanon, and one would have to write an encyclopedia to describe all of them. This pattern of tribal feudal governance is engrained in the Lebanese DNA, regardless of faith, sect or political ideology. The latter, in fact, is used as a camouflage to cover the shame of the tribal structure. For instance, the Jumblatt's political party is known as the "Progressive Socialist Party". Now, there is nothing "progressive" about being a feudal lord of medieval vintage. Second, there is nothing "socialist" about the Jumblatts whose political performance does not seem to be couched in socialism. Economically, the Jumblatts have amassed millions of dollars in many commercial and business ventures and, to the extent that they publicize or promote their ideals, I personally have never heard them talk about workers' rights for example. In fact, on our trip to Moukhtara, our host pointed to a huge hulk of an unfinished cement building next to a roundabout and said that the deal between Walid Jumblatt and the owner of the project (some large department store) fell through because Jumblatt demanded an extravagant payola to allow the project, which the project owner rejected, leading to a stop in the construction. That is the kind of progressive socialism that the Jumblatts hide behind. 

Fast forward into modern times. One army general by the name of Michel Aoun, who is of modest non-feudal background from the destitute southern suburbs of Beirut, had a huge run-in with the political class during the late 1980s. Without going into the details, his venture into the political world was met with lots of condescending derision by the political class that had allied itself with the Saudis, the Syrians and the Americans: who is this plebeian dwarf pretending to be a prime minister? he is a mad man for daring to hinder our collusion with the Saudis who pay us good money to serve their interests, or with the Syrians whose occupation army protects our interests, against payments of course, and the world rulers the Americans whose proclaimed "value-driven" politics is anything but. 

After 15 years of exile, Aoun returned to Lebanon after the Syrian army was washed off Lebanese soil with sewer-water and lots of four-letter words. He had opposed the Syrian occupation during his long exile, so his opportune return was laden with promises of better future, more transparent governance, fighting corruption, etc. If you read all of Aoun's writings (pamphlets, testimonials in foreign parliaments, weekly "Lebanese Bulletin" issues, etc.), you'd think you're reading the words of a prophet whose wisdom will take Lebanon forward into the modern world. But something happened. And that something is based on another thing that didn't happen when Aoun had children: He did not have a son, which is a political death sentence in Lebanon. No son means no perennial family farm in the future. However, Aoun had three daughters, whose French names testify to the Lebanese lack of identity and to their monkey-imitation of the dominant culture of their time. In this case, Aoun (born 1935) named his three daughters at a time when traces of the French mandate were still present: Claudine, Chantal and Mireille. Nowadays, people would be ashamed to use these names on their children. The "trend" as it were is for American movie-inspired names like Kevin, Rebecca, Steve, Angelina, Miley, etc. You get the idea. 

Anyway, the key to a male-dominated culture is to have a male son, or short of one, to marry your daughters to "real" men who could substitute for your unborn son. That is exactly what Michel Aoun did. He married his daughters to promising men. He gave Chantal away to a man of short stature (like Aoun in fact) but of gargantuan political ambition by the name of Gebran Bassil, an engineer by training. His other two daughters also married "important" men, one a former army commando whose physical stature doesn't match his intellect, and the other the current CEO of Aoun's family television station OTV. 

Having made a 180 degree turn in his politics since returning to Lebanon, Aoun allied himself with the Iranian terror organization Hezbollah and his former enemy Syria. Then, after two years of obstruction of Lebanese Parliament by Hezbollah, parliament was forced to elect Aoun to the presidency. Now, everything was in place to start a dynasty, a political family farm. Despite his modest social background, Aoun managed to graduate himself and his family to the club of tribal, feudal, elitist families who run the politics of the country. His daughters became advisors, other sons-in-law became MPs.

Despite declarations that he and his party will be the first "really" democractic party in Lebanon, the structure and inner workings of the Aoun party (Free Patriotic Movement, FPM) have slowly become just like any of the other family political parties. With Aoun old and senile, Gebran Bassil, the son-in-law, hijacked the leadership of the party, having banned anyone else among his party's very capable cadres from running against him. For three terms in a row, Bassil has run uncontested and is essentially bestowed the party's presidency. To preserve a fake image of "democracy", the party goes through marketing acrobatics, with polls of the membership and fake primary elections etc. Even though his performance has been abysmal at best, switching alliances, never committing to a single path, meandering through shady deals, contradicting himself between a declared secularism and a vow to protect Lebanon's Christians against its enemies, real and theoretical, Bassil remains in command of a fast degrading party. Much of its Christian base has switched to its Christian rival, the Lebanese Forces Party, primarily on account of Bassil's close alliance with the Hezbollah terror organization that continues to harass and murder critics, especially Christians, as it has done since the 1980s. In fact, the FPM lost several seats in the latest parliamentary elections (May 2022), and it is only thanks to Bassil's alliances with terror Hezbollah and corrupt Amal (the two leading Shiite parties allied with Iran and Syria, respectively) that he managed to hold on to some seats in parliament. Whereas in 2016, Bassil and Hezbollah obstructed the elections of a president for 2,5 years and succeeded in bringing Bassil's father-in-law, Michel Aoun, to the presidency, they are now still able to obstruct elections but have been unable to impose their puppet candidate.

What a wasted opportunity for Lebanon's Christians to distinguish themselves from the other feudal tribal communities of this miserable country: The FPM represented as much the Christians of the interior as those of the diaspora whose ideas are more progressive. Having promised us a truly modern non-sectarian political party, the FPM is now just another political family farm.

The Jews of Uganda: One of Many Stories of Fake Judaism

There is a community in Uganda called the Abayudaya – which means “the Jews of Uganda” in the Luganda language. It is a Black African community that adopted the Jewish faith some 100 years ago. For the past century, this community has integrated Jewish traditions into their native Ugandan culture. For example, women bake challah, a traditional Jewish bread, in outdoor ovens.

This is a typical community of non-Semitic, non-Hebrew people around the world who converted in recent times to Judaism, including many of the European and American "Jews" who make up the Israeli people today. Though unrelated genetically, historically and culturally to the Near East and Palestine, the simple fact of their conversion to Judaism makes them eligible to rape Palestine, steal its lands and displace its native people, based on the fictional tales of a Stone Age set of writings assembled together in the Torah (Old Testament).

The Ugandan "Jewish" community, for example, was founded by Semei Kakungulu in 1919 who converted to Judaism to spite the English colonial power that was trying to convert him to Christianity. He reportedly tore the Bible in half so that it contained only the Old Testament, circumcised his sons, and declared himself a Jew. Based on biblical accounts, he made a list of rules to be followed, then brought foreign Jews to teach the community Hebrew and prepare Kosher foods.Following in the footsteps of Mr. Kakungulu, the current rabbi serves as the spiritual leader of the community. He was ordained by the Conservative Jewish movement in the United States in 2008, and then he spent a year studying in Israel.

But the community’s relationship with Israel has been difficult – Israel’s Ministry of the Interior does not recognize the Abayudaya’s members as Jews, which means they are denied the right to immigrate. On what criteria does the State of ISrael decide who is Jewish and who is not? Since most modern day Jews are nearly all converts to Judaism, except the so-called "Arab Jews" of Yemen and the Arabian peninsula, what right do the Ashkenazi Jews - East European converts during the 14th-17th centuries - have to decide who is Jewish and who is Israeli? The answer: White racism.

The Ugandan "Jewish" community is growing: a group of converts from northern Uganda has recently joined. Another group of Black African Jews lives in Kampala, Uganda’s capital city. Shmuel Mugisha serves as leader of the Kampala community. He says, "We face the challenge of assimilation", a fake challenge for these native Ugandans who share their own ancestral traditions with the rest of Uganda, but who deliberately changed their culture just to spite the colonial occupier. One would assume that they are de facto assimilated to their native culture, but their decision to convert somehow distanced them from it, and now they claim to want to assimilate?

It is noteworthy that Ugandan people are a very religious bunch, both Christians and Muslims. They are very conservative and reject all social advances that they believe contradict religious dogma. For example, the Lord's Resistance Army ( LRA) is a Christian extremist organization which operates in northern Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its stated goals include ruling Uganda according to the Ten Commandments, in a manner eerily similar to the Muslim Salafist movements like Al-Qaeda and Daesh-ISIS that want to rule under Sharia Law.

In conclusion, religious fervor is only a fine line away from extremism. Judaism is a religion, not an ethnicity, and Israel was founded on the basis of a religious belief from the Stone Age of humanity. The fact that recently converted European Jews were subjected to the Holocaust by their fellow white Christian Europeans does not entitle them to Palestine, let alone massacre a third of the native Palestinian population, displace another third, and rule over the rest with the same abject violence of their own former Nazi tormentors. Israel was founded by a monumental crime against the Palestinian people, and based on Stone Age religious beliefs that any reasonable person ought to find anachronistic.

By the way, when European Zionists initially began their campaign to start their me-too Jewish European colony (similar to the other European colonial empires), they set their eyes on Uganda. But the crooked British found a convergence between the archaic religious argument of a "return" to Palestine by the fake European Jews on one hand, and their own oil-thirsty ambitions over the oil fields of Arabia nearby. That is when Balfour wrote his infamous letter, a simple sheet of paper addressed to the British Jewish community that was not debated in the British Parliament nor was it officially sanctioned, specifically stating that in the process of establishing a Jewish British colony in Palestine, it will be "... clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine". Clearly, the British "Empire" crooks kept their filthy word: Nothing has been done to the Palestinians other than land theft, genocide, displacement, occupation, denial of identity.... Perfidious Albion.

IMF Issues Warning to Lebanon

Lebanon still facing enormous challenges.

Ruling class unwilling and incompetent to enact reforms.

Can one ask the fox to guard the henhouse?

Four years after Lebanon’s historic meltdown began, the small nation is still facing "enormous economic challenges", with a collapsed banking sector, eroding public services, deteriorating infrastructure and worsening poverty, the International Monetary Fund warned Friday.

In a statement issued at the end of a four-day visit by an IMF delegation to the crisis-hit country, the international agency welcomed recent policy decisions by Lebanon's central bank to stop lending to the state.

The IMF said that despite the move, a permanent solution requires comprehensive policy decisions from the parliament and the government to contain the external and fiscal deficits and start restructuring the banking sector and major state-owned companies.

In late August, the interim central bank governor of Lebanon, Wassim Mansouri, adopted stricter measures than his predecessor, Riad Salameh who retired under a cloud of malfeasance and under investigation by a number of European countries.

Mansouri called on Lebanon's ruling class to implement economic and financial reforms. Unlike Salameh, he has refrained from providing hard currency loans to the state, a policy that has stabilized the exchange rate between the Lebanese Lira and the US dollar. He also said the Central Bank does not plan on printing money to cover the huge budget deficit to avoid worsening inflation.

Lebanon is in the grips of the worst economic and financial crisis in its modern history. Since the financial meltdown began in October 2019, the country’s political class — blamed for decades of corruption and mismanagement — has been resisting economic and financial reforms requested by the international community, particularly the International Monetary Fund. 

The ruling class has on occasion said it will turn for help from China, Russia, Iran and other non-Western sources, but that has not materialized. It also hurried earlier this year to strike a deal with its arch-enemy Israel - which it does not even recognize - over maritime borders, with a view to extract gas and/or oil from offshore fields shared by both countries, and thus find a source of funding that would bypass the need for help from the IMF. But the country is in collapse, its institutions are all paralyzed, it has no president and only a caretaker government, and achieving a reliable source of money from gas and oil is ten years away at the very least.

Lebanon started talks with the IMF in 2020 to try to secure a bailout, but since reaching a preliminary agreement with the IMF last year, the country's leaders have been reluctant to implement needed reforms. "Lebanon has not undertaken the urgently needed reforms, and this will weigh on the economy for years to come", the IMF statement said. The lack of political will to "make difficult, yet critical, decisions" to launch reforms leaves Lebanon with an impaired banking sector, inadequate public services, deteriorating infrastructure and worsening poverty and unemployment.

Although a seasonal uptick in tourism has increased foreign currency inflows over the summer months, it said, receipts from tourism and remittances fall far short of what is needed to offset a large trade deficit and a lack of external financing. The IMF also urged that all official exchange rates be unified at the market exchange rate.

The structural deficiencies of the Lebanese political system - sectarian, tribal, feudal - are serious obstacles facing the needed reforms. A boss-client system of governance, and a grip on power by the religious institutions, maintains corrupt sectarian leaders in power against the wishes of the population. The private system by far overrides the public sector in the economy, education, and other sectors. When the public sector manages to steer itself away from the greedy and equally corrupt private sector, it often falls short of providing adequate modern services and is beset with politically-appointed incompetent civil servants who perpetuate the endemic corruption.

Unlike Greece, Sri Lanka and other countries that have benefited from IMF aid in recent years, reforms in Lebanon are unlikely to happen because the international community is asking the corrupt barbarians in power to reform themselves. Like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. It is rumored that Riad Salameh, the previous governor of the central bank, detains secrets of mismanagment, corruption and pilfering of public funds by the ruling political class. The question is: Will he open Pandora's box and reveal these secrets, at least to save his own legacy? Or does he fear retribution (in Lebanon this often takes the form of a car bomb or of assassination at close range by the thugs in power)?

 

Cyprus to EU: If Lebanon Collapses, Europe will have a problem

Update 28-Sept-2023:

As the Syrian regime of the war criminal Bashar Assad (who was recently re-admitted to the Arab League by his fellow Arab dictators, and was welcomed like a king by the Chinese Communist dictator) is sending thousands of illegal Syrian migrants across the lawless Lebanese Syrian border, it is a certainty that some these migrants will try to ride boats en route to EU member state Cyprus.

His occupation army having been evicted like dirty rats by an angry Lebanese population in 2005 for the assassination of dozens of Lebanese journalists, MPs, and critics of the Syrian occupation, including then-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, Assad is retaliating with a "demographic" invasion and occupation. In addition to these illegals migrants, networks of criminals (Syrians and Hezbollah operatives) along the border are issuing fake Lebanese ID cards to these illegals. Meanwhile the UNHCR is issuing refugee cards to Syrian illegal migrants who are not refugees. With the beginning of the school year, Lebanese education authorities estimate that Syrian students now number 700,000 attending Lebanese schools and colleges, alongside some 1,250,000 Lebanese students. 

The EU and the UN are willfully trying to keep these Syrian illegals inside Lebanon for two objectives: 1- they fear a new massive wave of Syrian migration into Europe via Turkey, Cyprus and Greece, and 2- they want to force Lebanon (4 million native population) to settle upwards of 2.5 million Syrian illegals, a number growing every day, to deliberately change the demographics of the country and bring an end to Lebanon as we know it. 

Instead of dealing with the problem by forcing the dictator Assad to take his people back, this criminal policy of the EU, the UN and international non-governmental organizations is spreading the problem to all the countries of the region. They refuse to aid the refugees if the refugees decide to move back to Syria which has now large parts of its territory safe for return. Syrian families that settle in Lebanon get paid thousands of dollars, with an increase of the aid for every newborn child, thus not only giving the Syrians an incentive to stay in Lebanon, but also an incentive to have more children. The average Syrian woman of child-bearing age gives birth to 8 children in the illegal migrant camps, compared with 3 for her Lebanese counterpart. Which means that in one generation, the Syrian population inside Lebanon will outnumber the native Lebanese population. EU member states like Cyprus are raising the alarm.

Add to the growing influx of illegals moving into Lebanon to benefit from European and UN financial assistance, the economic collapse of Lebanon caused by the Syrian regime's proxies, namely the Iranian-Syrian Shiite duo Hezbollah-Amal, is in turn causing the emigration of thousands of Lebanese citizens. 

In sum, it seems that the international community appears to have taken on the job that Henry Kissinger failed to accomplish: During the 1970s and 1980s the American war criminal Kissinger, in collusion with the Syrian Baathist regime and the Zionist colony of Israel, sent the PLO and the Syrian army to occupy Lebanon with the objective of dismantling it and turn it into a substitute Palestine in order to relieve Israel of the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees who were ethnically cleansed out of Palestine by Jewish terrorism when the artificial state of Israel was fabricated.

Now the UN and the EU have embarked on a similar scheme: They are deliberately trying to decimate what remains of the State of Lebanon, force the Christian population to flee, and create a new Muslim majority Lebanon that would more readily integrate the Syrian and Palestinian refugees who are Muslims. Just like the international community did with the creation of the artificial Muslim state of Kosovo in the heart of Europe at the expense of Christian Serbia, and just like the international community is doing with the ethnic cleansing of the Christian Armenians from their ancestral lands in Nagorno-Karabakh in order to appease and buy gas and oil from the Muslim dictatorship of Azerbaijan.

EU member Cyprus continues to warn Brussels that it, Cyprus, will be the prime destination of these illegals who will seek to continue on to Europe. Cyprus is asking the EU to offer financial and technical aid to Lebanon to help it cope with the influx of Syrian illegals and keep them from reaching the island, its interior minister said on Wednesday.

Constantinos Ioannou also said Nicosia had offered to donate speedboats and conduct joint patrols with Lebanon after recent arrivals by sea suggested trafficker routes had shifted away from Turkey and towards the Lebanese coast.

"It's estimated that there are about 2.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon so you can imagine the scale of the problem Lebanon itself faces, with a population of 5 million and which isn't even receiving technical or financial aid from the EU," Ioannou told Cyprus state radio.

In retaliation for the existential threats caused by EU and UN policies, Lebanese security forces have issued a warning that they will no longer intercept boats carrying illegal Syrians and Palestinians out of the Lebanese coast en route to Cyprus or Greece. Cypriot authorities say they expect new inflows of Syrian and Palestinian illegal migrants based on interviews with recent arrivals from Lebanon.

Some 800,000 Syrians are registered with the UNHCR in Lebanon, but Lebanese authorities say the real number of Syrian refugees in their country is 2.5 million.

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

Cyprus asks EU to Allow it To Repatriate Syrian Faux-Refugees.

"Lebanon is a barrier. If Lebanon collapses, then all of Europe will have a problem" (Cypriot Interior Minister Ioannou)

The European country of Cyprus - divided between Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks since 1974 - said Friday it has asked the bloc to review whether Syria really is an unsafe country. Cyprus wants to rid itself of the thousands of Syrians, the vast majority of whom are not refugees but economic migrants. It needs the approval of the EU to begin repatriating asylum-seekers.

Whereas Cyprus is reeling under massive Syrian migration which has led to a rise of racially-motivated attacks on foreigners in recent weeks amid growing anti-migrant sentiment, Lebanon's calls for the UN to officially publish the numbers of Syrian refugees registered with it have been ignored, and UN officials of various agencies have called for the permanent settlement of the Syrians in Lebanon. The number of Syrians entering Lebanon in recent weeks has reached levels which, combined with the very high birth rates among the "refugees", could turn Lebanon into a majority Syrian country.

Lebanon's native population is 4 million. There are 2.5 million Syrians present on Lebanese soil, and these numbers are increasing by about 3,000-5,000 a day - mostly young men who did their military service in Syria - through illegal entry across a lawless border controlled by Hezbollah and the Syrian regime. Of these 2.5 million Syrians on Lebanese soil, only about 800,000 are eligible refugees. The rest are economic migrants, terrorists, Syrian regime-informants, smugglers, and affiliates of the terrorist Hezbollah organization. More dangerously, there are rumors that the Syrian regime, which occupied Lebanon militarily for 30 years, is dispatching these militarily-trained young men into Lebanon for the ultimate objective of "demographically" occupying the country, mobilizing  them for war, and Syrianizing Lebanon's population. 

Cypriot Interior Minister Constantinos Ioannou said he would try to persuade the EU and the United Nations to end Syria’s status as an unsafe country for refugees to be returned to. "We, as Cyprus, consider and find it conducive, along with other member states, that the status of Syria should be re-evaluated," he told reporters. He said the EU has had Syria's status unchanged for 11 years, and a review is needed to declare many areas inside Syria as safe for the migrants to be deported back there.

"There are already two areas recognised by the EU Asylum Agency (EUAA) as safe areas," he said. “.... it must now also be recognized at the level of the European Union [that it should] allow us to deport or return people to Syria. At the moment, no country can do so.” 

Lebanon for its part has often been accused by the EU and the UN of being a racist country because it is suffocating economically as a result of the large numbers of Syrian refugees and migrants. The UN and the EU have turned deaf ears to Lebanon's appeals for help, considering the alarming demographic threat to the existence of Lebanon. If the Syrian population in Lebanon becomes equal to, or suprasses, the native Lebanese population, the country stands to disappear by becoming a province of Syria: A major ideological platforms of the Syrian Baath Party is the "reunification" of Lebanon with Syria. The other more likley possibility is that Lebanon, again, descends into conflict. During the 1970s, the Palestinian refugees tried to turn Lebanon into a substitute Palestine (with help from the Americans, Saudis, and Syrians), but they have failed to defeat the Lebanese resistance. Right now, many Lebanese are calling for dividing the country into separate entities (with terms like "decentralization" or "partition"), some of which might want to integrate the Syrians while others reject the idea.

In a letter to the European Commission, Cypriot Minister Ioannou did not mince his words regarding the disaster facing Lebanon. He said he raised the urgent need for aid to Lebanon, where it is estimated that 2.5 million Syrians have taken refuge. "The information we have from the authorities in Lebanon is that there is an increase in Syrians moving to Lebanon".

"Lebanon is a barrier. If Lebanon collapses, then all of Europe will have a problem," he said.

In recent months, Cyprus has seen a surge of asylum seekers, most of them Syrian, arriving by sea from Syria and Lebanon.

The government argues that Cyprus is a "frontline" country on the Mediterranean migration route, with asylum-seekers making up six percent of the 915,000 population in government-controlled areas - the highest proportion in the bloc.

 

Hasbara: Zionist Fake News Propaganda

Be very careful about what you read. Fake news are everywhere, and are not just a recent development in the dissemination of false information. Like the Russian misinformation campaign of our time, Zionists have been at it, lying to the gills, for more than a century. And they continue today to dehumanize the Palestinian people by denying them a national identity, while inventing a new one for the haphazard multi-faceted bastards who illegally migrated to Palestine, killed its people and stole its land. 

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

1- I happen to read the following piece of news today:

"Archaeologists in Israel have unearthed a mysterious Canaanite arch and vaulted stairway sealed inside a well-preserved mud brick building that dates to 3,800 years ago, during the Middle Bronze Age. The archaeologists have no idea why the arch was built. "Of course you never know what you find at a site that has never been excavated, but I can say with confidence that nobody … expected to find what we did," one aracheologist said.

The ancient Mesopotamians are known for using bricks to make such corbelled construction, but it's never been found in the southern Levant, the region east of the Mediterranean, from this time, he said. Not long after the corridor and stairway were built, ancient workers backfilled both with sediment. However, it's unclear why these structures were sealed off, and it deepens the mystery as to why the Canaanites erected it in the first place.

"Why the passage went out of use so soon is a matter of speculation, fact is that it was done with full intent, and not because there was some imminent danger of collapse," Martin said. "For us archaeologists, the quick backfill is the most lucky piece of the whole story, since it is the only reason the feature is so incredibly well preserved almost 4,000 years later."

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

2- "Hasbara" Zionists are paid workers who are hired by Zionist propaganda agencies and whose job is to troll chat rooms and news outlets and disseminate false information serving the Zionist colonialist project of destroying Palestine and replacing it with a purely Jewish state. For more details on Zionist deception, see: [ https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/the-art-of-deception-how-israel-uses-hasbara-to-whitewash-its-crimes-46775 ]. They've been at it since the founding of the colonial project in Basel in 1897 and have largely succeeded because they had a monopoly over the information. Unfortunately for the Zionists but fortunately for the Palestinians, the Internet has liberated information from the Zionist monopoly and the truth is now out for everyone to see. Here is the response to the above article by a Zionist Hasbara troll going by the name of "Boo". Notice that his reply is unrelated to the newspiece; the Hasbara have pre-packed texts that they just randomly insert into the conversation without even reading the subject matter. Their only object is to denigrate the Palestinians and deny them an identity:

"Lol. The ultimate in cultural appropriation. The Canaanites were not even of a single ethnic group but, somehow, the present day “Palestinians” are descendants of all of them. Lol. Plenty of archeological evidence that Jews had a prominent presence in the Levant and no evidence that Palestinians of today are anything but nomadic tribes from Arabia. " 

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

3- Here is what one reader responded to Boo:

Zionist propaganda, Boo. Just as Phoenicians or Arabs or Hittites or Europeans or Slavs etc. do/did not form a single ethnic or national group, Canaanites weren't one either. The Hebrews and today's Jews do not form a single ethnic group either: Jews can be Black Africans, blond blue-eyed East Europeans, Mediterranean northern Africans, Arab Jews from Yemen, Persian Jews from Iran, etc... they constitute a religion but cannot make up an ethnicity. Remember that back in the Bronze Age, one "polity" was a walled city, not a country as we think of it today. It is disingenous of you to deny a Palestinian identity and suggest that they are nomadic tribes when they have lived in their cities for millennia. As Israeli scientists have not been able to find evidence of a massive Jewish migration after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, today's Palestinians are the direct descendants of the Jews who stayed under Rome's occupation, became Christians when Rome became Byzantine Christian, then Muslims when the Arabs arrived. After all, Jews are themselves an Arab tribe that Abraham led out of Ur, a suburb of Baghdad today, and wandered as a nomadic tribe in the desert before plundering Canaan and ethnically cleansing it of its original inhabitants, the Palestinian Canaanites. Of course, the neighboring Phoenicians, Arameans, Nabateans, etc. were all part of the larger Canaanite group in the Near East. Canaanites were also part of the even larger Semitic population stretching from Iraq in the northeast all the way down to Ethiopia. Hebrews, and "genuine" Jews (not the fake europeans pretending to be Jews), are also part of that same Semitic family.

4- Here is what another reader responded to Boo (addressed to the Palestinians):

Zionists, who for the most part are east European caucasians and not Semites, and are new converts to Judaism, want to deny you an identity and want to portray you as "outsiders". Israeli scientists have never found a shred of evidence of the exodus and return from Egypt, hard as they tried. There was once two sworn enemy Jewish kingdoms, Judah and Israel, in the historic land of Palestine (ca. 900 BC) - they weren't even united - some time during the first millennium BC, that barely lasted 300 years after the Assyrians conquered the land, followed a series of other occupiers (See below). These Hebrew kingdoms, who fought bloody battles with one another and sided with the occupiers against one another, were themselves initially built by plundering nomadic tribes who ethnically cleansed Palestine of its original inhabitants, the Canaanites [Just read about Joshua's bloody campaign in the Torah itself]. After the Hebrew kingdoms, Canaan-Palestine was successively occupied by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, pagan Romans then Christian Romans, Arab Muslims, Crusader Christians, Seljukid Turks, Ottoman Turks, British colonial crooks, and finally these East European barbarian colonists from the Russian steppes who had converted to Judaism a couple of centuries prior and pretending to be "true" Jews. Therefore every one of these civilizations have at least an equal claim to the land than the fake Israelis of today.

 

Syria-Hezbollah Captagon Smuggling to the Gulf Continues

 

UAE police say they have seized $1 billion worth of Captagon amphetamines hidden in doors

Excerpts from Associated Press report

September 14, 2023

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Police in Dubai seized 86 million tablets of the amphetamine known as Captagon hidden in a shipment of doors and decorative building panels, authorities said Thursday, estimating its street value at just over $1 billion. The bust comes as sales of the amphetamine have become a Mideast-wide problem during Syria's long war. 

A surveillance video released by the Interior Ministry in the United Arab Emirates shows suspects trying to bring the Captagon tablets through Dubai's massive Jebel Ali Port. They were hidden in five shipping containers of doors and panels, with the drugs themselves weighing over 13 tons, authorities said.

Authorities did not identify the arrested suspects but described their operation as an “international criminal organization,” without saying the source of the drugs. A Dubai police anti-narcotics official said the drugs were to be transferred to an unidentified third nation.

The value of the seizure given by authorities put the price of a pill at nearly $12. Costs can be as high as $25 a pill in neighboring Saudi Arabia.

Syria has become the world’s leading trafficker of Captagon, a highly addictive amphetamine, during the war. Hundreds of millions of pills have been smuggled over the years into Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries, where the drug is used recreationally and by people with physically demanding jobs to keep them alert.

Syrian President Bashar Assad, his family and his ally, Lebanon’s Iranian Hezbollah group, stand accused of facilitating and profiting from the trade. They say that has given Assad’s rule a massive financial lifeline at a time when the Syrian economy is crumbling. Hezbollah has been documented to manufacture the drug in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley. Manufacturing sites exist also in Syria from where they are transferred through the lawless Lebanese border into Lebanon, then smuggled by air from Beirut Airport or by sea from Beirut Harbor, often inside oranges or other fruits, or other commodities destined for the Arab Gulf.

Gulf Arab nations, after backing rebels trying to overthrow Assad at the start of the war, have since resumed diplomatic relations with Damascus. Analysts suggest that's likely in part due to their efforts to stem the flow of Captagon regionally.

Fake Palestinian “Resistance” in Lebanon’s Refugee Camps

* The Palestinian “resistance” outside Palestine is long dead and buried.

* The remaining armed Palestinian movements inside Lebanon’s camps are the fringe extremist Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who freely and illegally travel out and into the camps, while the Fatah Movement representing the Palestinian Authority, has repeatedly declared it no longer needs to be armed, as long as the Lebanese Army protects the camps.

* The fundamentalist Islamists occasionally launch rockets at Israel under the direction of the Iranian terror organization of Hezbollah, for the specific objective of sending messages to Israel or inviting retaliation then complain about Israeli aggression.

* The current infighting between secular Fatah and Islamist Hamas proxies inside the Ayn Helweh Camp near Sidon is ample proof that the Lebanese Christian war against the Palestinian militias in 1975 was justified. Operating outside the legitimate purview of the Lebanese State, Yasser Arafat (and his Lebanese Muslim and Druze allies) was given the green light by Henry Kissinger and Assad of Syria to dismantle the Lebanese State, evict the Lebanese Christians out of the country, and create for himself a substitute Palestine. In which case, Israel would not have to worry about the "Right of Return" of millions of Palestinian refugees back to the Palestine that the Jewish invaders raped to create Israel. The Lebanese Christian resistance put an end to the Syrian-American-Palestinian-Saudi plot, though it emerged bruised from the 15-year conflict (1975-1990).

* Palestinians have now mostly wised up, except the fundamentalist Islamist proxies of Hezbollah. The current infighting inside Ayn Helweh Camp is perhaps a reminder from Hezbollah to its many Lebanese enemies that it can ignite problems. As it is cornered politically into an impasse, Hezbollah is obstructing the election of a president and is dismantling the institutions one after another. It might feel that inviting the Lebanese Army to crush the Palestinians, like it did in Nahr Bared camp in 2007, might create new facts on the ground that would relieve Hezbollah of some of the pressure it is reeling under.

* First, by threatening the security situation with its Islamist friends inside the camps, Hezbollah is trying to force the Lebanese to comply with its Iranian agenda. Second, it aims at undermining the state’s sovereignty by attacking both the Palestinian and Lebanese legitimate authorities. Third, it sends a message to the international community, which is heavily involved in trying to break through the stalemate and the collapse of the Lebanese state, that it – Hezbollah – controls Lebanon’s stability and that it will not accept that its dominant position, based on its standing army of terrorists and weapons, be in any way threatened.

A reminder that the Lebanese Parliament had abrogated the Cairo Accord of 1969 with Law 25/1987, followed by the Taef Agreement and UN resolutions 1559 and 1701, as well as the resolutions of the many Lebanese Dialogue conferences, all of which placed the Palestinian weapons, both inside and outside the camps, under the authority of the Lebanese State and its Army. Yet, Hezbollah’s outlaw posture in Lebanon is aided by an equally outlaw Palestinian posture, and thus Hezbollah’s enabling of radical Islamist Palestinian groups allows it to maintain the justification for its own outlaw posture.

The Palestinian cause has in the past served many dictatorial Arab regimes to keep their own populations in check under the pretense of fighting Israel and recovering Palestine. Now that the Arabs have largely abandoned the Palestinian cause to its owners, the Palestinian people, it is Iran’s turn to abuse it to promote noxious and primitive notions of ultra-religious Muslim governance in the Middle East, in which it ironically meets its nemesis Israel, itself governed by ultra-religious fundamentalist Jewish barbarians.

Israeli Academics are Anti-Semites

Hundreds of Israeli academics and artists who are urging U.S. President Joe Biden and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres not to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to New York next week, have been accused of anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred by members of the far-right government of Israel.

In their open letter, the critics of the Netanyahu government said that “Netanyahu incites citizens against each other, threatens the country’s security and economy, and turns his face away from the historical conflict that tears Israel apart – the forceful domination of the Palestinian people".

Israel's Jewish fundamentalist right-wing government under Netanyahu is ultranationalist and religiously conservative. Its push to overhaul the country's judicial system, weaken the High Court and give more power to the extremist Jewish government, has drawn strong criticism from Washington already frustrated with with the Israeli government's continued illegal settlements in occupied Palestine.

Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an outspoken racist member of the Netanyahu government has accused the anti-judicial reform protesters and the authors of the open letter as being self-hating Jews and anti-Semites. It is extremely rare that a Jewish person be accused of anti-Semitism.

While the protests against the judicial reforms have gained traction over the past weeks and months, very few of the protest movements or their leaders, including the authors of the open letter, have called for an end to the illegal occupation of Palestine and the continued assassinations and killings, house demolitions and other abuses that the Israeli government has carried out for decades. The dehumanization of the Palestinian people have long been a staple of Israeli governments, both right-wing and left-wing, long before the latest and current right-wing government of Netanyahu. The critics of Netanyahu are themselves guilty of keeping silent for decades while their governments were abusing the Palestinians and stealing more of their lands. It is only now that they are paying lip service to the end of the occupation, simply because it gives them some credibility with the international community in their fight against Netanyahu. The vast majority of the international community has been for decades denouncing Israel for its illegal occupation of Palestine, but nothing has ever been done to bring an end to the occupation. There is a world-wide fear of opposing Israel publicly because of the US's blind support for Israel. Any critique of Israel could be tagged as anti-Semitic and lead to US sanctions. 

The BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement against Apartheid Israel has been vehemently opposed by the United States, to the point where anyone expressing support for BDS stands to lose their jobs or go to jail in some US states. The same BDS movement was extremely effective in the 1980s in bringing an end to the Apartheid regime of South Africa, with overwhelming support from much of the western world. Yet, with the Apartheid system in Israel, which is by far worse than it was in South Africa, many countries are fearful of embracing the BDS movement. In South Africa, Apartheid meant simply the segregation of whites and blacks, without land theft, assassinations, home demolitions etc. Charming Israel, on the other hand, has taken Apartheid to new heights of racism, land theft, home demolitions, uprooting millenial olive orchards, and dehumanizing an entire population by denying its very existence: Israeli governments have long denied that there exists a Palestinian people: Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1969 "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people".

What is Palestinophobia?

"Hard as they try to deny a Palestinian identity, Zionists have a huge credibility problem"

In the West, thanks to Islamic terrorism and to Zionist propaganda, Arabs and Muslims are viewed as "bad" people. While Islamic terrorism by itself is sufficent to justify anti-Muslim stereotypes, Arabophobia (as opposed to Islamophobia) is all the exclusive doing of Zionist propaganda.

One of its insidious aspects is what Israelis and Zionists say about Palestinians. They never refer to them as Palestinians, but as Arabs. Of course, Palestinians are Arabs, but being Arab does not deny one's identity as a Tunisian, a Syrian, an Iraqi, etc. There are many different types of Arabs, just as there are many different types of Europeans. Not all Arabs speak Arabic. Not all Arabs are Muslims. When Israel was born out of the violent terrorist seizure of land and extermination of Palestinians, Zionists claimed, and continue to claim, that they were defending themselves against attacking "Arabs". That was true only insofar as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan declared war on the nascent Jewish country of Israel in 1947-1948. But long before that 1948 war, there had been a defensive war by the native indigenous Palestinians against the invading hordes of east european barbarians throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. That war was conducted by no one but the Palestinians against the invading Jewish colonialist settlers. No Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese or Jordanians were involved. That was not an "Arab" war against the illegal Jewish terrorist colonists. That was a Palestinian war. But the Zionists claim that their persecution of the native Palestinians is justified because the Arab countries attacked Israel as soon as it was formed. Yes, perhaps these Arab countries tried but failed to assist the Palestinians in 1947-1948, but these attacks cannot be used to deny the long-standing Palestinian resistance and delegitimize the decades-long fight of the Palestinians for their country and their identity.

Just as illegal migrants cross the US border every day in our time, back in the 1920s-1940s, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and other eastern europeans disguised as poor migrants illegally poured into Palestine. As barbarian illiterate peasants from the east european steppes, these illegal migrants could not tell a Palestinian from a Lebanese or a Jordanian or an Egyptian, all next door neighbors of Palestine. To these backward europeans, they were all Arabs. Just as numskull British colonial invaders would make no distinction between the various African countries and cultures and would refer to anyone on the continent as "African" or "negro", or for that matter how today's Muslim migrants into Europe do not see any difference between the English, the French or the Italians... to them they're all Europeans.

As the poorly equiped untrained Palestinians (just liberated from Turkish ottoman occupation) defended their land against the war-trained and British-backed illegal migrant Europeans, Zionists soon began to realize that the "Arabs" of Palestine are different from the "Arabs" of Egypt, Jordan, Syria or Lebanon. They each had its unique character, languages, dialects and traditions, just as Europeans differ from one another yet constitute a general ethnic group.

With Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria gaining their respective independences during the 1930s and 1940s from their French and British mandatory occupiers, the Zionists feared that conceding to a unique identity for the Palestinians would also lead to Palestinian independence and obstruct the Zionist goal of exterminating the Palestinians and stealing their land. Which is why, to this day, Zionists continously deny the existence of a Palestinian people, as stated by Golda Meir's famous "there is no such thing as a Palestinian people." Logically, Palestinian nationalism would not only undermine the foundational lies of the state of Israel, but it would be very dangerous to the expansion of the Zionist colony and to its Jewish "purity". As a result, and beginning in the mid-1960s when the Palestinians finally asserted their identity, after being mere nameless refugees, by organizing themselves in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other national groups, the Zionists deliberately began to never refer to the Palestinians as Palestinians, but only as Arabs, or Arab Israelis, or Arab refugees. 

Even today's Palestinian citizens of Israel (i.e. those who stayed and did not flee the exterminating Jewish terrorist rampages) are referred to as "Arab" Israeli, not as Palestinian Israeli:

• There are 1.9 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, or 21% of Israel’s population. At the time of the fabrication of the state of Israel, these 1948 Palestinians were separated from their fellow citizens of the West Bank (3 million-strong) and Gaza (1.8 million-strong). Together, the "resident" Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories total 6.7 million people. There are also millions of Palestinians who live in refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, in addition to the expat Palestinians living around the world.
  
• Most Palestinian citizens of Israel live in three areas: the Galilee in the north, the so-called “Little Triangle” in the center of the country, and the Negev/Naqab desert in the south.
• There are more than 60 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel.
• There are 60,000 to 70,000 homes (as of 2020) belonging to Palestinian citizens of Israel that are threatened with demolition by the government because they were built without official permits that Israel deliberately refuses to issue them. Why does Israel deny its own Palestinian citizens building permits? Is home construction or expansion a "terrorist" act? Of course not. But this is exactly the sort of criminal scheme that a colonial ethnic cleansing authority like Israel would engage in if its goal is to stunt the natural growth of the native Palestinian population. All actions by the oh-so-respectable Israeli government, hiding behind a colluding justice system that often invokes Ottoman era (i.e. before Israel was even fabricated) laws, aim at de-Palestinizing Palestine and thus, by default, make it more Jewish.  By denying the native Palestinians their natural growth as a community, Israel wants to suffocate them, force them to leave, and replace them with foreign settlers.
  

If you check any of the widely visited news and chat rooms, you will always have the same Zionist trolls injecting their lies and fake information into the conversation. Examples: 

- There is no Palestine. 

- Palestinians do not exist, they are Arabs. 

- As Arabs, they can go anywhere in the Arab world. They do not need Palestine.

- Arab countries are bad because they do not assimilate and integrate their "Arab" (understand Palestinian) refugees.

- If these Arab countries integrated their Arab (understand Palestinian) refugees, there will be no "Right of Return" for these refugees to go back to their native villages, towns and cities in historic Palestine. How convenient for the Zionists!

- These "Arabs" (understand Palestinians) are not native to Palestine. They are squatters from the surrounding Arab countries who came to Palestine AFTER the east european Jewish invaders conquered Palestine to create Israel.

- Palestine had no people. It was a land without people for a people without land.

The denial of the existence of a Palestinian people, and the denial of the existence of Palestine (even though that was the name of the country for millennia, including when it was ruled by Rome and when Jesus walked the earth in Jewish Palestine) has been the mantra propaganda of Zionism. It is part of the dehumanizing and identity-denial strategy that Israel has adopted for decades because it knows that Palestinian nationalism would be the death sentence for Israel. Hence, there are no Palestinians, there are only "Arabs", and these "Arabs" are all Muslim terrorists.

The reality is that there are no generic "Arabs" in Palestine; there are first Palestinians who happen to  secondarily be part of the wider ethnic Arab stock. The Palestinians' only connection with the other "Arabs" is that they speak a form of Arabic. Just as there are French people living in France who happen to secondarily be members of the wider European stock that includes other French-speaking countries like Belgium and Switzerland.. 

Finally, historically and anthropologically the Hebrews are really just another Arab tribe. According to Jewish biblical trash, Abraham came out of Ur, near Baghdad in Iraq, he fathered Ismail, the progenitor of the Arabs. He then abandoned that "Arab" Ismael and his mother in the desert and favored his "Jewish" brother Isaac, the progenitor of the Hebrews. Though this religious bullshit is completely made up by smelly old nomads as they wandered in the desert, science says that Arabs and Hebrews were once one and the same Semitic people who spoke the same proto-Semitic language. Just as the Germans, the Dutch, the Scandinavians etc. were once one people speaking proto-German who diverged into speaking slightly different but related languages, the proto-Semitic people later diverged into Arab and Hebrew tribes who spoke slightly different languages, Hebrew and Arabic, that remain today nearly identical languages. 

So for Zionists to keep trying to distinguish themselves from Palestinians stems first from their racism, but second from the fact that virtually ALL Jews of Ashkenazi or European stocks are NOT genetic descendants of the Hebrews. Rather, they are relatively recent European converts to Judaism (some time betwen the 11th and the 16th centuries). Their genetic traits are completely different and quite opposite to the generic Semitic stock from the Near East. With their Germanic names, their blond red hair, their blue and green eyes, their Russian-steppe anti-freeze furry hats and coats, they cannot possibly have any connection with the Near East. 

The only "true" Jewish descendants of the Hebrews are those Jews of Yemen, Saudi Arabia (before it became Muslim), and the East Coast of Africa (Ethiopia). These are the Arab Jews who migrated to Israel under pressure from the Jewish Agency and other Zionist agencies, and not because the Arab countries expelled them as Zionists claim. These people might be of genuine Hebraic stock, but they Jews never lived in Palestine. They come from the multitudes of Arab Jewish tribes that lived in and around the Arabian peninsula since time immemorial: Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, etc. For their part, North African Jews are essentially those Jews who were kicked out of France, Spain and Portugal along with the Moorish Muslims around 1492 by the Spanish Reconquista. Where did these Spanish Jews (Sepharads) come from in the first place? Not a mystery: They fought alongside their Arab brothers during the Muslim conquest of North Africa, Spain and southern France between the 7th and 8th century AD. That is why they coexisted peacefully during the Arab Muslim occupation of Spain, and were both evicted together by the Spaniards in 1492. 

Most Arabs of the Arabian peninsula around the 7th century were Jewish tribes, some of them having converted to Christianity when Rome adopted Christanity as its official religion around 400-500 AD; it is therefore absolutely possible that these same Arab-Jewish tribes later followed Mohammed's call, became Muslim and participated in the Islamic conquest. So when the Spaniards kicked them out of Spain, they did not distinguish between Muslim and Jew; to the Spaniards, they were both foreign Moorish-Arab invaders. Indeed, there were essentially no differences between Arab and Jewish tribes in Arabia, as they all practiced the same traditions and worshiped the same gods. It was only in time that Arab Jews gradually adopted a stricter monotheistic view than their other sister Arab tribes. Which explains why Islam in its genesis was a reaction against the perceived polytheism of Christianity that erupted into Arabia with the Byzantine Roman Empire. Traditions between modern Judaism and Islam are nearly identical. Islam may therefore be seen as a "reform" movement against the new Christian religion and a "return" to the strict roots of Jewish-Arab monotheism. [See: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2023/06/kinship-between-islam-and-judaism.html ]

In conclusion, hard as they try to deny a Palestinian identity, Zionists have a huge credibility problem. They themselves are not genetic descendants of the Hebrews. They are recent converts to Judaism and cannot have any claims to being "authentic" Jews nor any claims to Palestine, except on the basis of a dubious and tenuous religious connection through the fictional biblical garbage. If one makes an effort and grants, for the sake of argument, that biblical garbage is correct history, then the Zionists have to subsume themselves under the broader Arab Semitic identity of which they are merely a branch. Otherwise, by betting too much on being more "western" than Arabs and desperately attempting to distance themselves from Arabs, they undermine and continue to erode their claims to historic Palestine.

Palestinophobia has long being injected by Zionist propaganda into the mainstream. This strategy has generally worked through the 1960s when the Palestinians were still picking up the pieces of their identity and country after the Nakba of 1948, itself the culmination of 30+ years of Jewish European terrorism; they hadn't yet spoken up: To the world they were mere refugees that the Zionists deprived of not only their homes, lands and villages, but also of their identity as Palestinians. Since the 1960s, when Palestinians regrouped as a nation, their nationalism was first a secular revolutionary movement without a hint of religious fervor in it. Some of it later mutated into Islamic movements under the influence of a broader world-wide rising Islamic nationalism. But today, the bulk of Palestinian resistance is still a patriotic nationalism without any Arab or Islamic bent. Zionism has succeeded in stealing the land, but has failed at eradicating the Palestinian identity. Zionists have now embarked on a new strategy couched in a new code word, "Israelophobia", to serve as a new and improved Zionist scarecrow (since antisemitism has worn out its abuse) that is meant to scare you or anyone else who criticizes Apartheid Israel. Good luck with that.