Do the Lebanese, the Christians in Particular, have a Unique Identity?

Muslims have a lessened sense of national patriotism, regardless of the country they may live in. Just like Jews. The religious identity of these two “peoples” – the Muslim people and the Jewish people - is at least as strong, if not stronger than their national identities.

This explains the absurdity of the creation of a special - and ultra-violent - state for Jews, namely Israel. This also explains why millions of Muslims in Pakistan descend into mayhem and plunder if a Swedish Muslim burns the Koran.

Christians are by and large just a tad better. Many still harbor entrenched ideological convictions about their religion that border on the cruel, intolerant, and violent. You have the Evangelical biblical literalists who believe every garbage myth and made-up stories in the bible. You have the institution of the Church itself that decided in its early centuries to select 4 gospels out at least 20 existing ones (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gospels) and arbitrarily declare them the sacred “word of God”. For example, Mary Magdalene’s gospel was ignored because, among other things, it said that Jesus had brothers and sisters, and that he married the prostitute Mary Magdalene and had children with her. So much so that when Martin Scorsese made his “Last Temptation of Christ” movie in which he imagines a different version of the Church-marketed life of Jesus, based on these non-canonical gospels, throngs of Christians – Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox – demonstrated in the streets calling to ban the movie and thus proved their intolerance. They did not smash windows and burn cars, but the fact that they couldn’t countenance a dissident opinion, based on facts, to the man-made Christian mythology is ample proof of their narrow-mindedness.

For Lebanon’s Muslims, their Muslim identity by far trumps their national identity which they cloak themselves with for convenience and not out of conviction or genuine patriotism. How did the Muslims become Lebanese citizens was an act of greedy stupidity on the part of the Lebanese Church, the Maronite Church to be precise. For several centuries, Lebanon – or Mount Lebanon as it was known – was overwhelmingly Christian with a minority of Druze. In the 1860s, the Lebanese rebelled against the Turkish Ottoman (Muslim) occupier, kicked the Turkish army out and secured an autonomous semi-independence. This lasted until 1914 when, under the clouds of WWI, the Turkish army re-invaded and exacted revenge against the Lebanese with public hangings, confiscation of food and animals, and a massive starvation of the population (similar to what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians today).

With the end of WWI and the defeat of Turkey, the Maronite Church got greedy and decided to expand the borders of Mount Lebanon to areas that had heretofore been considered Syrian and Muslim majority. Against advice from the French mandatory power, the Church gained the expansion of the autonomous Governorate of Mount Lebanon to an independent Greater Lebanon that persists to date. From an 80% majority, the Lebanese Christians suddenly became a barely majoritarian 50%. From the slogan of a “homeland for the Christians of the Near East” (copied in 1897 by the Zionists and their “homeland for the Jews” in Palestine idea) that was the initial impetus for an independent Mount Lebanon, the Christians had to change their tune to accommodate the Muslims: No longer a “homeland for the Christians”, Lebanon became the country of “tolerance and coexistence” between Christians and Muslims. With the Christians of Lebanon on their last leg, having committed suicide with their own stupidity and barbarity and having been betrayed by a vaguely Christian West, Lebanon would soon become a Muslim country with a Christian zoo that Muslim tourists would visit to watch the Christians "perform" for them, just like the Louisiana Cajuns whose "frenchiness" has become a mere curiosity and a tourist attraction for Anglo Americans.

Problem is that the Muslims were essentially coerced to join Greater Lebanon, which they did reluctantly and never really liked the idea of sharing power with the Christians, for the reasons stated in the introduction above. It is anathema for a Muslim to be ruled by a non-Muslim. Throughout the 20^th century, the Christians kept making concessions to the Muslims to keep them leashed onto the idea of Lebanon. They gave them the premiership of the cabinet and the speakership of parliament. Every time some Arab or Muslim nationalist emerged in the region, the Lebanese Muslims prioritized him and his cause over Lebanon and caused a crisis or civil war in the country: Abdel-Nasser of Egypt (1958 crisis); The Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party of Syria (1961 coup d’etat); The Palestinian Revolution of Yasser Arafat (1965’s founding of the PLO and the coerced cession of South Lebanon to Arafat’s hordes); the Baathist Assad regime in Syria and its invasion (which led to the 1975-1982 war in which the Lebanese Muslims allied themselves with the Syrians and the Palestinians against their fellow Lebanese Christians); and the last nail in the coffin of the Greater Lebanon Dr. Moreau monster was the founding in 1982 of Hezbollah and the ensuing Iranian-Syrian occupation of the country which, to this day, continues to dig deeper the grave of the country.

For the Christians of Lebanon, history did not begin in 622 AD when Islam was born. The Christians see themselves as the living Phoenicians of antiquity. They do have a problem, however, with connecting their Christian identity with their Phoenician one: The early Church was a brutal criminal regime. After being persecuted by the Romans, the ascendant Christians now in power (after Christianity was declared the Romand Empire's official religion) began persecuting those who refused to convert. And in many ways, that early Christian Church was a clone of today’s Afghani Taliban or the Iranian Ayatollahs: Intolerant, cruel, savage, barbaric… forced conversions, destruction of Phoenician temples, banning of the worship of Phoenician gods, and the trashing of Phoenician traditions and rituals, etc.

The Lebanese Phoenicians had survived more than a millennium of invasions by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Hebrews, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans. But once pagan Rome became Christian, there was no place for ethnic or national identities: Everyone had to become a Christian, the only identity tolerated by the new emperors of Rome, the Pope and his court.

Some Phoenicians fled the Lebanese coast to preserve their identity and hid in the mountainous hinterland. Those who stayed along the coast were forced to convert to the Orthodox version of the religion with its capital in Byzantine Constantinople (today’s Istanbul). In the highlands, the Phoenicians managed to hang on to their traditions and language for another two centuries, but eventually converted to Maronistism, a Christian sect founded by a Syrian monk by the name of Maroun. Unsurprisingly, and in defiance of the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople, the Phoenicians who became Maronites decided to affiliate themselves with Western Rome, i.e. the Catholic Church to spite the Byzantines. They preferred the Italian Romans to the Greek Orthodox out of spite.

Western historians - hellenocentric barbarians - don't like the idea that European culture has roots in places like Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt (the Semitic crucible). They regularly claim that European culture sprung up de novo - by spontaneous generation - in Greek islands along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean, even though Europe was the name of a Phoenician princess from the city of Tyre who sailed there and gave her name to the continent. Thus, in their pathetic efforts to deny any contribution by Lebanon to western civilization, those historians claim that the Phoenicians, whose civilization had mostly peacefully conquered the entire Mediterranean Basin where they founded cities and other civilizations, suddenly vanished from existence without leaving a trace. Archeological evidence of the Phoenician presence in every European country on the Mediterranean is referred to as an "orientalizing" phenomenon, i.e. to be discarded into trashbin of the vast and vague Orient just to avoid saying Phoenician or Lebanese. To admit that European culture might have had its roots in an "oriental" geography like the Levant would be demeaning for racist white Europeans.  The Phoenicians perhaps disappeared in name, because they became the Christians of Lebanon, and the Phoenician label became a dirty word. But the legacy of the Phoenicians remains extant to this date in the genetics, the linguistics and the traditions of the Lebanese people, be they Orthodox, Catholics, or Muslims. Those Phoenicians who were forcibly converted to Orthodox Christianity by the Byzantines and stayed on the coast, were again forcibly converted to Islam when the Arabs arrived on the Lebanese coast in 638 AD.

Because of pressure by both the Christian Roman Empire and the Muslim Arab Empire, the Lebanese people were forced to hide their genuine identity as Phoenicians. Monotheistic religions are fundamentally Fascist and barbaric and demand the absolute relinquishment of people’s national or ethnic identity in favor of their Christian, Muslim and Jewish religious identities. That has been the hallmark of the missionary activities of all these religions: recruit new members by forced conversions, colonialism, and eradication of indigenous cultures and religions.

One of the victims of religious colonialism is language. Because religions often demand the exclusive use of their own languages (e.g. Latin for the dinosaur Catholic Church, Greek for the neanderthal Orthodox Church, or Arabic for the radical Muslim religion), the native indigenous languages of the invaded and occupied populations are usually banned or ostracized.

Lately, the Minister of Culture in the abject Lebanese government of Hezbollah, a suave sleazebucket Hezbollah lover by the name of Mohammad Murtada, issued a decision in which he established the so-called “Arabic Language Academy in Lebanon”. The mission of this august institution is to Arabize modern terms and concepts that emerge from the advances in the West in such fields as technology, science and the arts. This newly coined terminology will be used to replace western words that have infiltrated Arabic in toto, and hence in Murtada's opinion, tarnished the sacred Arabic language. A simple example is to replace the word “computer” currently borrowed as is -كمبيوتر – with a word drawn from the roots of the Arabic language, in this case “hasoob” حاسوب.

Such efforts reflect stupidity and ignorance, because throughout the history of human civilizations, peoples and cultures have exchanged linguistic elements (words, phrases etc.), usually but not always from the dominant occupier to the dominated occupied culture. Only the barbarian Turkish invaders who occupied much of the Arab world took more from the Arabs than they gave. For instance, both the French and English languages have exchanged enormous amounts of material between one another, depending on when either one was dominanting the other. When France and Rome were dominant, the English language absorbed French and Latin elements. Now that the Anglo-Saxon world is the dominant, the French language absorbs on average 100 English terms per month, according to the French Académie Française, the custodian of the French language.

But Arab and Muslim rulers don’t get it. They feel insulted because their pride rests in their testicles not their brains. Whereas their own peoples are more concerned with daily survival and keep borrowing terms from foreign languages, the rulers are so full of themselves that they do not accept any cross-cultural intercourse with other cultures.

In Lebanon, because of the history described above, the Lebanese Christians laugh at such vain efforts. For one, they feel they are Canaanite Phoenicians and Arabic is still the foreign and imposed language of the invading occupier. The Lebanese language which they speak on a daily basis is a hybrid of Arabic, Aramaic, Turkish, Italian, Greek, Persian, French and increasingly English. Very few Lebanese can utter complete sentences in just the Lebanese language: They mix and match distorted Arabic words with French and English terms, which suggests that the Lebanese culture is a superficial hybrid of other people’s cultures. But that is not true. The Lebanese have a unique culture and a unique language, but they are so obsessed with money and have a disturbing inferiority complex vis-a-vis the West that they would give up anything of value, including their own culture, to make money and appear "modern".

The latest form of the ancestral Phoenician-Aramaic language is used in church rituals and its is called Syriac. But unlike the Irish who kept their Celtic Language and traditions alive despite being occupied and oppressed by the English crooks for hundreds of years, the Lebanese have abandoned their language and traditions in order to better integrate countries where they can make money, namely the Arabian Gulf and Europe/West. The Lebanese have become the masters of cultural copy-paste. They “look” western in their clothing and habits and they “sound” western in their hybridized bastard language. The quintessential outward expressions of one’s culture no longer exist in Lebanon, having been sequestered to occasional and superficial entertainment venues. It is very rare to see a Lebanese villager dressed in his or her traditional costume. For an objective and unbiased eye, the "look" of a Lebanese is a watered-down western monkey-me-too look.

But as soon as a Lebanese Muslim makes a claim to Arab culture, the Christians either join the effort in a kiss-ass move promising financial rewards, or they vehemently oppose it but without offering a compelling alternative cultural referent other than the western monkey-me-too culture. Despite having always been at the vanguard of Arabic language and literature (the first printed Arab text in the 1600s, the Arabic Language Renaissance – An-Nahda – of the 19^th century etc.), Lebanon’s Christians rightfully reject an absolutist Arab identity but fail to put forward their own authentic culture at the forefront. By presenting themselves as fake westerners, they alienate the Arabs and are the object of scorn by Westerners.

Lebanon’s Christians should emulate the Irish. They should first stop calling themselves “Christian” as an identity qualifier. Use Maronite instead; it’s less “religious” and more ethno-national. Start teaching Aramaic in their schools and eventually use it alongside Arabic, like the Irish have done with the Celtic language which they prioritize over English in which they nevertheless excel. Or like the Israelis who resurrected the dead Hebrew language from the dusty synagogues to make it their national language. The Lebanese Maronites do have a specific identity with deep historical roots but they are either ashamed of it (because they do everything they can to hide it) or they shove it aside to the benefit of other cultures where they make money. Perhaps they feel that by imitating the West they endear themselves to it. But the largely secularized liberal West has no interest in a conservative religious tribe that doesn't know its own identity.

Bottom line:  You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t brag about being a Phoenician when you don’t do anything to look like one or sound like one. Put your Phoenician identity to the fore, wear it, celebrate it, hold festivals about it, sing it, re-enact it, speak it…. As long as you are sedated with your Christian faux-western identity, which is harming you with the largely secular west with whom you claim affiliation, you will remain an Arab, and a sad one to boot.