On the dawn of Sunday October 23, 1983, Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist arm of the
barbarian theocracy of Iran, simultaneously blew up the US Marines compound near
Beirut airport and the French Drakkar Paratrooper compound a couple of miles away
as the soldiers were still sleeping.
Iran and Syria were behind a plan to void Lebanon of all Western presence in the early-
mid 1980s: Kidnapping and killing of western hostages (clergymen, educators,
journalists…), hijacking of TWA flight 847 and the murder of navy diver Dean Stethem,
the twice bombing of the US embassy, the bombing of the French embassy, and the
first ever twin truck bombings of the US Marines barracks and the French Paratrooper
compound in Beirut, among other assassinations and acts of violence.
The Iranian reach into Lebanon is at its climax today and could not have been possible
without the collusion of the Assad regime in Syria which served, and continues to
serve, as a bridge between Tehran and Beirut. Thanks to the Damascus airport from
which smuggled arms and terrorists could sneak across the lawless border into
Lebanon, and to the US-approved Syrian army’s occupation of Lebanon, the road was
open for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to establish Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The immediate reaction of Western nations to the Syrian-Iranian onslaught against the
West in the Lebanon of the 1980s was to flee like filthy cowards and hand over
Lebanon to two of the most barbaric regimes on earth. The Marines and the
Paratroopers were part of a peacekeeping Multi-National Force (MNF) – French,
American, British and Italian – that was dispatched to Beirut to supervise the
evacuation of Yasser Arafat’s PLO that had plundered Lebanon since 1970 and
dismantled the Lebanese state with the help of Syria and its local traitors – the
Lebanese Sunnis and Druze – and international terrorist groups like the German
Baader-Meinhof, the Japanese Nihon Sekigun or Red Army, and the Italian Brigate
Rosse. All these fine people, groups and countries were funded and armed by the likes
of the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, and Libya. Somehow, groups as
disparate as brute Russian Communists, dumb American imperialists, fundamentalist
Sunni Muslims, European anarchists, Syrian Baathists, Palestinian “revolutionaries”,
Druze neanderthals, Iranian barbaric ayatollahs, and Israeli Jewish Zionists, found common ground against tiny, liberal, multicultural and diverse Lebanon. They agreed
to fight their wars inside Lebanon, lest these wars spill over into their own countries.
Ronald Reagan, the spineless US Republican president at the time, packed his 241 body
bags and remaining Marines and fled like a rabbit before the joint Iranian-Syrian
terrorism. The very next day, on October 24, 1983, he invaded the Caribbean island of
Grenada to deflect attention away from the carnage unfolding in Beirut. The British
and Italians quickly fled as well, followed by France whose force stayed a few months
longer than the other cowards.
Before Reagan, Richard Nixon had his State Department Secretary, war criminal Henry
Kissinger, sign a deal in 1974 with Assad of Syria in which Syria would not bother Israel
on the Golan (it hasn’t, having accepted its annexation by Israel) in exchange for Syria’s
takeover of Lebanon (it did between 1975 and 2005). After Reagan in the 1980s, Bush
Sr. and his Jim Baker the Turd’s State Dept Secretary handed over to the Syrian butcher
the remaining Lebanese government’s pocket of resistance to Syria in 1990, thanks to a
joint operation by Syria and Israel (which lifted its red line against Syrian aircraft flying
over Lebanon) in exchange for Assad’s joining the anti-Saddam coalition in 1991. Funny
how “ultra-patriotic” Republicans turn out to be the filthiest colluders with America’s
enemies.
Had the West stood its ground at the time and defended tiny, tormented, abused
Lebanon by all these rogue states, terror organizations, Islamic theocracies and
Baathist brutes, the region would be a very different place today. Hezbollah was still in
its infancy. The West thus willfully handed Lebanon over to Iran and Syria, a crime of
monumental proportion because both these countries continue to wreak havoc
around the world and the region.
To deflect the shame of their cowardice, some, like the British crooks, tried for a while
to soothe their guilt by pretending that there were separate “political” and “military”
wings of Hezbollah to justify their jaundice at condemning the terrorist organization.
France to this day, through its envoy Yves Le Drian, continues to pretend to be a
mediator in the Hezbollah-manufactured presidential stalemate in Lebanon, acting
effectively in the capacity of Iran’s ambassador: Le Drian first supported the Syrian-
Iranian-Hezbollah appointed puppet candidate Sleiman Frangiyeh, then faced with
opposition by much of the Lebanese political establishment, Le Drian started calling for
“dialogue” between the Lebanese parties, which is Hezbollah’s demand.
For decades, “dialogue” has been a Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah code word for
circumventing the constitution of so-called Lebanese “consensual democracy”: In this charade of a disfigured constitution, people do vote in legislative elections for MP
candidates appointed by the religious and political Mafia bosses. But then the bosses
meet behind closed doors and make decisions based on deals involving bribes, favors,
paybacks and other corrupt practices, regardless of what the electorate wants.
Decisions are then given to the appointed MPs who vote in a fake ballot in Parliament.
That is the essence of Lebanon’s phony “democracy”, a veneer of modernity over a
putrid feudal-religious-tribal substance.
In the current presidential election stalemate (since October 2022), Hezbollah MPs
continue to walk out of parliament after a first round of voting in which their candidate
doesn’t win, break the quorum and void parliament of its constitutionally mandated
obligation to elect a president in a continuous session. Hezbollah and its backers know
that if a president is elected who opposes Iran and Syria’s diktat, he will be a threat to
their terror grip on Lebanon.
France, one of those western “beacons” of democracy and human rights “values”, is
bending over backwards to give Hezbollah the benefit of the doubt. But which doubt?
It’s been 40 years of mayhem, killings, terrorism, assassinations of prime ministers,
MPs, journalists, wars with Israel…. And a cowardly West continues to succumb to
blackmail and the threat of violence. Last October, the US exchanged five illegally
detained Americans by Iran for billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets. The West
behaved the same way in Armenia, where it allowed the ethnic cleansing by the
Muslim autocracy in Azerbaijan of a historic 120,000-strong Christian Armenian
presence in Nagorno-Karabakh in exchange for gas and oil.
If there is still any doubt as to the responsibility of Iran in the eviction of the West from
Lebanon, here is the representative of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in
Lebanon, Sayyed Issa Tabatabai, admitting for the first time the Iranian regime’s role in
the mass murder of American, French and other western military and diplomatic
personnel in the early 1980s in Beirut.
In an interview with the Iranian News Agency INRA, Tabatabai said, “I quickly went to
Lebanon and provided what was needed in order to carry out martyrdom operations
in the place where the Americans and Israelis were.” He added, “The efforts to
establish Hezbollah started in Lebanon’s Baalbek area, where members of Iran’s
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) arrived. I had no part in establishing the
political party Hezbollah, but God made it possible for me to continue the military
activity with the group that had cooperated with us prior to the Islamic Revolution’s
victory.”
According to reputed sources, the part of the interview in which Tabatabai
acknowledged receiving Khomeini’s fatwa ordering attacks on American and Israeli
targets in Lebanon was immediately removed from IRNA’s website shortly after
publication. This is because no official representative of Khomeini or Khamenei had
ever said that Iran had any involvement in ordering, planning and carrying out the
massive bombings in Lebanon against U.S.
Tabatabai also said during the interview, “With the victory of the Islamic Revolution in
Iran [in 1979], Hezbollah was established in the summer of 1982 [to replace the
Palestinian PLO]. For two years, Hezbollah’s military base was located in my home.
The group signed a contract declaring their willingness to become martyrs. Perhaps
more than 70 of them signed this contract in my home.”
Michael Rubin, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said “Americans
have astonished both Iranians and the victims of Iranian terrorism with the
diplomatic contortions undertaken to avoid holding Iran to account. Now that the
supreme leader’s representative has confessed, the questions are:
(1) Will the Americans who still carry water for Iranian terrorism apologize?
(2) Will Iran pay compensation to the victims of their terror? If President Biden prices
five live Americans at $6 billion, the U.S. should demand no less than $289.2 billion
from Iran today.
The U.S. State Department has classified Iran’s regime as the worst international state
sponsor of terrorism. Iran has always vehemently denied any role in the bombings. It
submitted no defense in response to the 2001 U.S. lawsuits filed against it by families
of the hundreds of Americans killed or wounded in the barracks bombings.
Baathist Syria of the Assad regime, for its part, was the inaugural member of the State
Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, yet State Department kept telling the
Lebanese who were reeling under Stalinist Syria’s occupation that “Syria was a factor
of stability” and its army was a “presence” not an occupation. For decades, the Arabist
crooks of State Department (Edward Djeredjian, James Baker the Turd, Richard
Murphy…) worked hand in hand with the Syrians to prevent the emergence of a free
Lebanese government. What lies beneath the State Department’s love for Syria’s
Assad? Assad’s acquiescence to Israel’s gobbling up his Golan Heights in exchange for
his dominion over Lebanon.
Lebanon today is in a bottomless free fall, thanks to this US-driven policy that the
French and others follow like poodles. One can only surmise that the US deliberately
wants Lebanon to disappear, so as to give the 1948 and 1967 Palestinian refugees, and
now the 2011 Syrian refugees, a substitute homeland, transform Lebanon into a Syrian
province, finish off the last free Christians in the Middle East, and relieve Israel and
Syria of the Right of Return of their expat refugees. Alternatively, Lebanon is perhaps
so complex for dumb US bureaucrats and think tank dweebs that they prefer to reduce
the world to a simple binary equation: Bad Muslim Arab and good Jewish Israeli. It’s
easier to comprehend. It’s easier to leverage by scaring off the Arabs and using Israel
as the cudgel. Arabs hold the US by the balls with their oil; Americans hold the Arabs
by the balls with the Iranian scarecrow; and Israelis impale the US where the sun don’t
shine with the guilt-inflicting Holocaust shaft. Everybody else in the region who is not
pure Jewish or pure Muslim ruins the simplicity of this binary equation.
According to Banafsheh Zand, an Iranian-American expert on the Iranian regime, “Issa
Tabatabai’s admission is a sign of serious divisions among the regime’s top brass. No
one within the ranks of either the clergy or the Revolutionary Guards would confess to
such an action unless the infighting among the leadership of the Shia Mafia was
escalating. For Tabatabai to acknowledge and take responsibility for that hideous act of
terror, he must be sure that his superiors would not or could not punish him,
otherwise he would have self-censored and skipped over major details.”
Zand continued, “But he didn’t. He has laid it all out – before the editors cut out swaths
of his interview. So, it’s either that, or he feels he has nothing to lose. Either way, given
the desperation of US president Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron for
any facsimile of a deal with the Khomeinist regime, they will likely sweep this under
the rug.”
Potkin Azarmehr, a British-Iranian expert on Iran, says, “It seems no matter how many
times Western leaders see the consequences of their appeasement with terrorists
they are still resigned to continue the same doomed path they have in the last four
decades.”
Meanwhile, Amos Hochstein and Yves Le Drian’s job is to put lipstick on the pig in the
Western appeasement and collusion with the Fascist, rogue and terrorist states around
Lebanon.
Originally published October 2023
