Lebanon’s Fools

Following the joint Syrian and Iranian actions toward a coup in Lebanon, and the resultant danger of yet another civil war, the blame of it all on last summer’s “Zionist war of aggression on Lebanon” has been swift to come. This is to defend from the accusations.

Lebanon has been a delicate mixture ever since its independence in 1943. The peace there, worked out by dealing key positions according to sect, depends on a demographic balance that, as Mark Steyn shows, cannot be taken for granted even in Europe. The country is split among the four main sects of Christians (Maronites), Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims and Druzes. By now, the Shia have been tipping the demographic bucket through higher birthrates, especially in comparison to the Christians, who like their European counterparts have succumbed to the modern fashion of regarding children as a burden and luxury.

This constant precarious situation has made Lebanon helpless in the face of outside threats, leading to the occupation of their whole south by the PLO from the 1970’s, after king Hussein of Jordan booted them out from his country, and until 1985, when the last of their strongholds was wiped out by Israel. The south was taken by Hizbullah, a Shia organization, and the rest of the country was put under the de facto control of Syria.

Syria was able to use “the danger of Zionist occupation” as its excuse for its own occupation of Lebanon. With the Israeli evacuation of all of Lebanon in 2000, the excuse no longer had even the semblance of reality; subsequently, the movement for Lebanon’s independence from Syrian rule started, culminating in the Cedar Revolution in February 2005, after the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Syria and Iran had been using Lebanon as their playground ever since 1982, with no possibility of redemption for Lebanon, torn by internal strife. Truly, the only force that could ever drive the foreign elements out, especially Hizbullah, Revolutionary Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, was Israel. But Israel, contrary to the turnspeak of its Muslim enemies and their dhimmi helpers, has never had any interest in Lebanon beyond keeping the border quiet. Even the most expansionist rabbi would say nothing about the land of Lebanon, it being outside the bounds of the Holy Land. So in both 1982 and 2006 when Israel invaded Lebanon, it was for the purpose of destroying terrorist organizations that had been lobbing missiles upon the north of Israel. Any other state would do the same upon being confronted with such a situation. But Israel isn’t any other state, it gets called an aggressor even when defending itself.

The IDF did what it had to do, and no more (more on that later). It was, if but Fouad Saniora and his men had taken advantage of it, a heaven-sent chance for Lebanon to be rid of its Iranian occupation as well as the Syrian one. Instead, they chose to protest “the Zionist destruction of Lebanon” to the world, and that idiot Saniora, who is now crying to the world to save him from the Syrian/Iranian takeover effort, sobbed in front of the cameras and exclaimed, “We are all Hizbullah now!” For that idiocy, which led the world to pressure Israel and thus led to Prime Minister Olmert’s own idiocy of accepting a brand new (but unimproved) UN ceasefire agreement, Saniora is now paying the price of being marked for ousting at best, and Lebanon is at the verge of having the Cedar Revolution completely undone. Let them not, therefore, blame their current predicament on their Zionist neighbors to the south, which are the only ones who could ever have secured the permanent success of the Cedar Revolution; let them recognize that their caving to the anti-Israel fashion played into the hands of Damascus and Tehran, and that that may actually have been the intent behind Nasrallah’s initiation of the war.

Force suicide martyrdom by proxy. By Chip Bok of Townhall.com, sometime during the war.

No doubt some of the damage caused by the Israel Air Force raids reminded the Lebanese of their long civil war (1975–90). However, beyond the similarity any damage to civilian areas will necessarily hold to another instance of it, there was the big difference, entirely hidden by the reports of TreasonMedia, that the destruction wrought by the civil war was everywhere, indiscriminate, done for its sake, while the IAF raids were surgical, striking only where Hizbullah was operating, to the best knowledge of Israeli Intelligence.

Map of the areas of Beirut affected by IAF raids. From Vital Perspective.

The map above shows the truth unreported by Reuters, CNN and the rest. Of course, from most of the Lebanese themselves came the same sob as Saniora’s, lending greater credibility to the reports coming from our digital-image-manipulating news agencies.

Yet even here, there are clear signs that things weren’t necessarily as the filtered testimony made them to look. Consider those two photos from the war, which made me go “Hmmmmm…” from the moment I saw them:

A man standing on one of the rooftops of Beirut, viewing the smoke from the IAF raid on a southern neighborhood of Beirut.

Two men sitting on one of the rooftops of Beirut, viewing the smoke from the IAF raid on a southern neighborhood of Beirut.

These photos are of the type that could be captioned with the cliché, “What’s wrong with this picture?” To give an idea what’s wrong, consider the following scenario:

Moshe Cohen lives in a western neighborhood of Tiberias, and in the course of a war with Syria there are air raids on it (G-d forbid). He has the hunch, and some of his friends may think and tell him as much, that Syria is in it for taking out an IDF control center in the eastern section of Tiberias. So, theoretically, since he’s on the other side, he can stay in his house and watch the air raid from it. And that’s what he’s going to do, right?

Wrong. Although carrying out the air raid on the eastern part of Tiberias alone would be the action borne out by reasonability and pragmaticism, the Syrians cannot be trusted to be reasonable and pragmatic. At the most pragmatic, their planes would be out for the IDF control center first, but it would be foolish to assume they would never touch the other areas, whether before or after taking out the strategic part.

The above was a “what-if” scenario. In the real world, we had air raids on Beirut by the planes of “the brutal Zionist aggressor”. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I were in Northern Beirut then, I’d go down to a bomb shelter without giving a second’s thought, because those planes are of a brutal aggressor. The fact that I lived in the northern areas of Beirut and the Zionists were only after the Hizbullah strongholds in the south of the city wouldn’t make me act any differently, because, again, it’s a brutal aggressor.

Yet, as you can see, those men above are watching the smoke from the southern quarters while standing on the roofs of their houses… in the same city of Beirut, just a different area than the one from which the smoke was coming! And how can that be, unless… unless those people knew only too well that “the brutal Zionist aggressor” could be trusted to focus on Hizbullah, and only on Hizbullah, as the above map indeed shows?

The fact is, then, that despite the propaganda efforts, each neighbor of Israel knows only too well that it is the neighbor from which it has the least to fear. So too the “Palestinians”, they know that they have only to send some women and children into the front line so as to make the IDF stop shooting at escaping Hamas terrorists. And in the Lebanon War itself, Hizbullah reaped the greatest mindshare benefits by mingling with the civilians and by putting women and children in buildings that the IAF was about to bomb. As with Vietnam, so in Lebanon, and so in Iraq, the Muslim enemy has mastered the art of getting the media to weave the twisted moralism (not morality) of our age and, consequently, the nations to press upon their leaders to abort their efforts to combat the onslaught of Islam. I am not discounting the hellishness of war, but this punishing of Israel’s, and America’s, and then also, internally, Europe’s, efforts to show sensitivity to the other side, to do unnice things only as far as is necessary and no more than that, will end up bringing much more brutality and remorselessness to the world in the future, when the non-Muslims of the world will be concerned with survival and therefore will have to dispense with all the niceties of people at ease.

And so, Saniora and his men chose the fashion of “resisting the Zionist invader” upon the truth portrayed by the people standing on the roofs watching the smoke during the air raids, and thus, instead of bringing about the glorious conclusion of the Cedar Revolution by having Iran’s proxy removed from Lebanon, may well have sealed the fate of that revolution to vanish in smoke. If so, Lebanon will be plunged back into civil war, complete with the all-encompassing destruction of its cities; or, if too tired for another round, brought into ruin by the absence of tourists, for no one will want to visit the former “Paris of the Middle East” after it has turned to a duplicate of Qom.

I weep for Lebanon. But, I know that it’s not Israel’s fault—it’s the fault of Saniora and all the rest of Lebanon’s fools.