(Translated from Arabic)
The lie began at the outset on September 1, 1920, and is still promoted today!
Lebanon’s Muslims never really wanted to belong to a nation called Lebanon. They don’t even care to be one wing alongside another, Christian, wing. The Muslims prefer to be a tail in any Muslim nation rather than a wing that helps Lebanon soar.
In 1920, Lebanon’s Muslims initially wanted to be subjects of the Arab Kingdom fantasy of King Faysal. But when King Faysal took his fantasy beyond the Mountain and into the desert, Lebanon’s Muslims changed their mind and switched to wanting to be subjects of the new Syrian entity stitched together by mandatory France, after Lebanon had formally become a state on the world’s political map in 1926.
Lebanon’s political map had been firmly established with the election of a president of the State of Lebanon in 1926. That first President was Charles Debbas, of Greek Orthodox confession, duly elected under a new constitution and whose term lasted six years in conformity with the constitution that is still in force in the Lebanese Republic.
But soon enough, the fathers of the 1943 independence, Beshara Khoury and Riyad Solh, announced to the Lebanese that a “gentlemen’s agreement” has been reached between the independence leaders from all confessions. They gave us the famous “no East and no West” slogan which translates into: Lebanon is an independent state in which Muslims reject affiliation with Saudi Arabia and Arabs, especially when the interests of Lebanon are in conflict with those of Muslim Saudi Arabia and the Arabs. They pledged to be Lebanese first and to serve the interests of the Lebanese people before anything else.
By the same token, the Lebanese Christians rejected any affiliation with France and the West, even though they never claimed to belong to any nation or people other than Lebanon. But since a “gentlemen’s agreement” by necessity required two parties, the “No East, no West” slogan was fabricated to satisfy the Maronite Patriarchate’s fantasy image of Lebanon as a bird that needs its two wings, Muslim and Christian, in order to fly.
Not even ten years after the big lie of “No East no West”, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser emerged to spoil the two-wing-equation. The Muslims suddenly mutated from a Lebanese wing to an Arab tail of a United Arab Republic fallacy invented by Nasser. That fallacy rejects the existence of independent Arab nations unless they subscribe to religious racism camouflaged under an Arab Nationalist abaya.
When Lebanon’s Muslims chose to secede from Lebanon to join Nasser, they waged a mini civil war in 1958 that soon failed, and the fiction of Arab unity vanished with it. Nasser retreated beyond the Sinai desert in 1963.
Meanwhile, the newspapers of the time tell us that the Arabs were united around one idea, and one idea only, namely to oppose tiny Lebanon. Lebanon was flying as best it could with its full Christian wing but only a reluctant half a Muslim wing. Yet Lebanon managed to soar to the stars, becoming one of the most prosperous five countries in the world, next to the US, France, Britain, and Germany.
In the 1967 war between Israel and Arab Syria, Jordan and Egypt, the Arabs lost new territories. Because Lebanon maintained neutrality in the Arab-Muslim wars with Jewish Israel, it became the object of a multitude of envious grievances by Arabs and Muslims who resented the fact that this small country, with no natural resources, could emulate greater nations, while Arab peoples and countries were going downhill despite immense natural resources.
Thus, when the Arabs schemed their second plot against Lebanon, the Lebanese Muslim wing refrained from flying to rescue the country. Lebanon was cornered by its own Muslims into signing the infamous 1969 Cairo Accord.
The Cairo Accord, for those who ignore its existence, was imposed on Lebanon by the Arabs not because the Arab League mobilized its massive armies along its borders, but because of Lebanon’s Muslims, including Muslim MPs, Muslim Ministers, and none else than the Lebanese Sunni Prime Minister Saeb Salam. Salam pressured the Christians by abstaining from government for nine months, and by forcing the Lebanese State to surrender its security and sovereignty in the South along the borders with Israel to Yasser Arafat and his terrorist organizations. The same scenario would obtain later in 1990 when the State abandoned its sovereignty in the South and elsewhere to the Iranian terrorist organization of Hezbollah.
Arafat’s Palestinian terrorism in Beirut and everywhere else in Lebanon was initially confronted by the Lebanese Army in a 1973 military operation aiming at disarming the Palestinian camps. In reaction, the Arab countries imposed an embargo on Lebanon. Syria closed its borders to Lebanese commercial traffic into the Arab Gulf hinterland. Sunni Muslim MPs, Ministers and the Sunni street rose against their own Lebanese Army and State.
The Army retreated from its offensive against the Palestinians to prevent a slide into civil war between the Muslim-Palestinian wing and the Christian wing. The Christians felt isolated and threatened for simply trying to uphold the State’s sovereignty. The Palestinian camps were left heavily armed and free to operate on Lebanese soil.
In the face of this existential threat, the Christians mobilized against the Palestinian terror organizations whom the Lebanese Muslims, explicitly and implicitly, adopted as their own militia against the Christians. The problem of state sovereignty was turned into a sectarian issue by the Muslims.
Indeed, the Muslims’ objective of preserving an armed Palestinian movement was no longer to fight Israel. It became a Sunni Muslim taboo that could not be challenged, just as it is still today and just as the Iranian Hezbollah’s weapons have become a Shiite Muslim taboo in our time.
The Muslims linked the illegal existence of the Palestinian weapons with Arab and Muslim causes and the conflict with Israel, in a manner similar to today’s illegal existence of Hezbollah’s Iranian terrorists.
It ought to be recalled that in 1970, King Hussein of Jordan waged a military operation against the Palestinian violation of his country’s sovereignty. The operation lasted a full month, now known as Black September. The Jordanian army mobilized its entire arsenal of jets, tanks and artillery to crush the armed Palestinian uprising on its soil. At no time did the Lebanese and Arab Muslims across the region protest what King Hussein did to the Palestinians in Jordan.
But in Lebanon, the Palestinians continued their violation of sovereignty under the protection of the Lebanese Muslims’ political and popular cover. The Christians had two options: submit to the will of the Muslims and give Israel the pretext of the Palestinian weapons, or fall into a civil war. They are today facing the exact same dilemma: Civil war if they try to disarm Hezbollah or expose Lebanon to Israel’s violence if they let Hezbollah keep its weapons.
Ultimately, civil war broke out in 1975 and lasted through 1990. Assad’s armies entered Lebanon in 1976 to quell the sectarian violence between the Muslim-Palestinian coalition and the Christian community. The defeat of the Christians nevertheless succeeded in preventing Arafat from establishing a substitute Palestine in Lebanon.
For 15 years and around the clock, the Syrian Arab army proceeded to try to tame the Christians by military means, its artillery repeatedly pounding the Christian sectors, while the Muslims watched indifferently as the shells fell on Ashrafiyeh and as the fires were burning buildings and houses in Ayn Remmaneh. No Muslim objected, as if this was happening to a foreign people in a foreign land with whom they had no ties.
The war ended with the 1989 Taef Agreement which delivered all of Lebanon and its people to Hafez Assad’s Stalinist regime. The Sunnis had used the Palestinians and the Syrian army as their own private militia to defeat the Christians. The Sunni Muslim billionaire Rafik Hariri took the helm of the country in the belief that the Muslims had vanquished the Maronite Christians by taking away the constitutional prerogatives of the Christian President. But they soon faced the fact that under Syrian custody they could neither lead nor be the other wing of the Lebanese eagle. They became a mere “tail” wagging to the orders of Hafez Assad and to the Syrian Arab Baath party.
The Alawite dictator of Syria, Hafez Assad, could not allow the Sunnis to dominate in Lebanon. He thus proceeded to ally his Baathist regime with the Shiite Muslims of Lebanon and, through them, with the expansionist Iranian project in the region. As the child of the Islamic revolution, the Hezbollah organization took over the role of perpetuating the Syrian occupation against both the Christians and the Sunnis. Sunni leader Hariri thought that by planting the seeds of corruption in Lebanon, he could by himself make Lebanon prosper under the Syrian soldiers’ boots. It took him a while to understand Assad and realize that his position as the Sunni prime minister was no more than that of a vassal in the court of Syrian Intelligence headquartered in Anjar in East Lebanon. He thus brought his own demise by trying to free himself from Syria and Iran’s tentacles, which prompted the Assad regime to order Hezbollah to liquidate Hariri right in downtown Beirut whose old souks he had pilfered from their owners to the benefit of his own “Solidere” corporation and to his “Saudizing” Hariri family.
The stage was now set: political Sunnism died. Hassan Nasrallah sold Lebanon and its Shiites to the Iranian Islamic theocracy project. Nasrallah never wanted Lebanon to be an eagle soaring with its two wings. Instead, he wanted the country to be a tortoise under whose shell he could hide his deviancy, his lies and the Persian Mullahs’ rockets and missiles. He dragged Lebanon into two destructive wars with Israel just to please the Iranian Khomeinist Satan.
With this history and environment in the background, what solution can I find for myself as a Christian? Since 1958, I have been paying the bills for the Arabs and the Muslims, those of Nasser and Arafat, and those of Assad and his Arab Syria. I find myself today footing the bills for Saudi Arabia and Mohamed Bin Salman, and am under threat of paying the bills of Al-Jolani, a.k.a. Mohammed Al-Sharaa. Worse yet, I have to pay the bills of Iran and the Shiite community that nurtures Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons.
What should I do if Hezbollah’s new chief, Naim Qassem, hidden deep down in his sewer, does not want me to negotiate with Israel terms of an equitable peace? What should I do if Hezbollah continues to insist that any negotiation with Israel, if any, be through a mediator?
What should I do if the Sunni Lebanese are dysfunctional because the Saudis tell them not to negotiate with Israel, neither directly nor through mediators, until and unless His Majesty orders them to do so from behind his desert.
I will put aside my Phoenician identity and say: I, the Maronite Christian Lebanese, child of this sacred land, ask myself again: What should I do? Do I wait for Iran to make a deal with Israel, turning my existence into a card in the hands of the Persians to negotiate with the Jews or over Hezbollah’s weapons in Lebanon?
Should I wait for Mohammed Bin Salman to begin his negotiations with Israel, turning my existence and future into yet another negotiation card, this one in the hands of the Saudis?
These questions no doubt haunt the psyche of the Christians in Lebanon and in the Diaspora. No doubt that individual minds can devise creative solutions for our self-preservation and for our free decision-making for the sake of Lebanon, without any ideological, racial, ethnic or religious considerations pertaining to the other communities of Lebanon.
The sovereignty and safety of my existence are no longer subject to debate. A tipping point has been reached after decades of torment and heartache. I will therefore not hesitate to take a decision, just as a father who cares for his family makes decisions without consulting his minor children, and with the deeply seated conviction that, in the end, this decision will equally benefit both Christians and Muslims in this country.
I have therefore appointed myself as the “savior” of a juvenile underage immature people and on behalf of equally juvenile, and corrupt, politicians and clergymen!
Since I have to give myself a qualification to undertake such an action, I therefore choose to substitute myself for the president who was elected, not to simply be the Maronite President, but to be a Maronite hero, a savior of Lebanon. Hence, to rescue Lebanon I will not consult with Shiite Nabih Berri who represents the criminals of the Iranian terrorist Hezbollah; I will not consult with the juvenile minor Nawwaf Salam in his capacity as representative of a Sunni Muslim community rendered impotent by whoever sits on the Saudi throne.
Again, I will put my Phoenician identity aside and say: What I do as a Lebanese first, as a Christian second, and as a Maronite president of the republic last, is as follows:
- I will contact the United Nations and request its soldiers posted in the South to set up a tent on the border in Naqura, half on Lebanese soil and half on Israeli soil.
- I will contact the United States, France and the UN and request three helicopters to transport my team of military and security experts to Naqura, alongside my ministers of foreign affairs and defense.
- I will issue an invitation to the Israeli Prime Minister to meet me in that tent in Naqura to negotiate, absent any mediator or pre-conditions, all pending issues between the two countries. I will request the US and France to send representatives to supervise and witness the meeting.
From this long tormented South Lebanon since 1969, the Republic of Lebanon can begin to recover its sovereign rights over its entire territory without any challenger or rival.
We have reached the Rubicon and desperate times call for desperate measures. Has there been any worse time for the Christians of Lebanon than the present absolute dissolution which the Muslims have caused the country since 1969?
Edmond Nicolas
Author and publisher,
Out of Rasha: A Christian Phoenician Journey to America
Rasha is Mr. Nicolas’s hometown village in the District of Batroun
