The Big Flop of Iran's Cowards

It has always been the problem for the idiots claiming to be fighting Israel: It's much more powerful than they are, and it has the American behemoth behind it.

Here in Lebanon, we have endlessly advised the Palestinians back in the 1970s, then the Hezbollah thugs since 1991 to date, that smart people fight battles they can win. Had the Palestinians accepted the 1947 partition plan, they might have used the seven decades to build themselves up into a technology-savvy country with a strong economy. Instead, the hostility and threats were exploited by Israel that played the victim so well during those seven decades that it garnered much support from around the world.

But testosterone, Islamic hubris and testicualr integrity makes otherwise sane people act rashly, thinking by that hollering, threatening, wagging their fingers and praying they can somehow overcome the technological superiority of Israel over their own arsenal. Now Israel too is a disguised theocracy based on one religion's supremacy. But there are secular Israelis, mostly the European ones who invent and develop because they are westerners, even though they emigrated to Palestine. Over time, I think, Israel will become just another backward Middle Eastern country, especially now that the religious barbarians have taken over.

Yes, you can parade your phallic missiles and other explosive protruberances in downtown Tehran and in Beirut. Yes, you can impress the credulous idiots who applaud you with your military marches, your flags and your uniforms. But you need so much more to make a difference in your "struggle" against the enemy.

Yesterday's "reprisals" by Iran against Israel for its bombing of the Iranian consular annex in Damascus turned out to be a BIG FLOP. A pathetic display of weakness. Out of 300 missiles and drones fired from Iran towards Israel, 99% were intercepted by stupid machines with fancy names like "Iron Dome" and "Sea Dome". Worse: Everyone with a military presence in the area partook in the Iranian-missile downing festival, including France, Britain and - OMG - the Arab Muslim country of Jordan. 

While their people - the Iranians under the barbaric theocracy in Tehran, and the Shiite Lebanese herd led like brainless sheep by Hezbollah in Lebanon - subsist essentially on religious drivel, the little scientific and technological knowhow they may have is imported from the very West they abhorr and remains insufficient to match the Western-imported wizardry that Israel has. 

Turning the known religious saying on its head, I'd say that "People do not live only by the word of God, but by bread earned by one's own labor". To fight a superior enemy, you first have to have a free people operating within a science-friendly culture, an inventive and imaginative people, a culture in tune with the broader human experience... Reciting archaic religious texts over and over, pretending that religious scholars own the ultimate knowledge, coercing your people into believing and adopting archaic customs...all of this kills any prospect that your people and your country can one day match western capabilities. In fact, the West is where it is today because it abandoned its reliance on God and religion, and shifted to a reliance on reason, science, and objectivity.

You have to dedicate significant portions of your budgets to science and technology research which has to be promoted in environments where research freedom is protected. Bragging about developing weapons and missiles funded by whatever little research you can afford is only good to fool your people.

Yesterday's retaliation by Iran is proof that fighting Israel in these cirumstances is plain stupid: You waste your resources and you never win the war. So why even start a war? 

Also, Iran is now literally begging the West and Israel not to retaliate against it. The Islamic Republic's mission to the United Nations said its actions were aimed at punishing Israeli crimes, but that it now "deemed the matter concluded". Those are the cowards who have dragged Lebanon and the region for decades into violence and wars, supposedly to "erase Israel from the map", and now that they fired their first missiles at Israel, they want the matter concluded? I don't understand, didn't all these ayatollahs and mullahs say over and over that they will one day soon pray in Jerusalem? If you speak with violence but do not have the gonads to live in violence, then you are cowards.

In Lebanon, people are up to their eyeballs in a culture rife with religious superstitions. The most that a Lebanese immigrant who makes it big abroad does to his country is to return to his village and build a church or a mosque. In best cases, perhaps a health center. No wealthy Lebanese that I know of - and they are many, those Lebanese billionnaires we hear about - has ever given money to building a research lab or a technology excellence center. The culture of basic research is non-existent in Lebanon, and it cannot be imported like a case of whiskey. Some try to say they are opening such centers, but in the religious swamp that Lebanon is, it's a waste of time and resources. There are "good" universities in Lebanon, but they are not good at inventing and discovering because they have neither the science culture nor the money. Instead, they are very good at giving their students a general basic education that allows the students to emigrate, settle abroad, and do great things, but only overseas and never in Lebanon. All the successful Lebanese of whom their country is proud and brags constantly about have succeeded OUTSIDE of Lebanon.

This has become the standard foundation of the Lebanese economy: Parents send their children to good schools where the children learn three or four languages and acquire a bare minimum of scientific instruction. Then the children emigrate, follow higher pursuits in their countries of exile, and eventually start sending money to their parents and families in Lebanon. According to the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme; https://www.undp.org/lebanon/press-releases/undp-launch-report-increasing-role-and-importance-remittances-lebanon), Lebanon's remittances in 2022 stood at 37.8% of GDP, which represents the highest ratio in the MENA region. But more than 90% of these emigrants never return to Lebanon to start the kind of enterprises that made them successful in their countries of exile. Why? Because the infrastructure - both the material one and the intellectual one - is lacking. How do you create a science culture in a backward religious environment rife with superstitions and charlatanism?

Right now, there's a popular belief among the people of Lebanon that the Covid shots they received during the pandemic are killing people, or otherwise imparing people's health. An obese, tobacco-smoking, diabetic young fellow in his 30s died last year, and people in his neighborhood are convinced that his death is the result of the Covid shot he received. The religious institutions propagate these lies because they are in a fierce war against science. They try to instill in their followers a mistrust of science, telling people that "science is without morals", that they'd better pray to the multitudes of saints rather than go see a doctor when they're ill. "We don't care for science", they tell their children, "learn just enough to enable you to go abroad and make money to send back home", money that they will spend on 'loving life', which translates into living in an intellectual desert, sitting in cafes, smoking the hookah, buying snazzy cars, and listening to the never-changing laments of Arabic music".

That is why Lebanon continues to function willy-nilly in the absence of any functioning state institution, the collapse of the banking sector and the economy, the catastrophic collapse of the Lebanese Lira, among other calamities to hit the country in the last 5 years. With money expatriates send to their families to spend on foreign-made consumer items in complete disregard for financial discispline, conservation and environmental considerations. Lebanon is a huge garbage dump: All you have to do is drive around the country to start believing that plastic bottles and bags grow on trees.

Hezbollah's ballsy bravados about its 100,000 missiles pointed at Israel might scare Israel. They might deter Israel. But they will never win a war.