“Dr.” Bouthaina Shaaban, the Damascus Butcher’s Jezebel

من هي السورية المقيتة ” بُشْعَنا ثعبان” المعروفة بـ “بثينة شعبان”؟

The piece below is from the archives. It tells the story of the Muslim Baathist maid of the Alawite Syrian dictator-butchers, Hafez and son Bashar Assad. A fake feminist in a backward Syria, where thousands of women are brutalized in Assad’s prisons as political dissidents or otherwise remain the chattel of men, she remains a rabid apologist of the genetically-transmitted Stalinist Assad regime that has been butchering its own people since 2011 and expelled millions of innocent Syrians from their own country into filthy refugee camps in neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, Türkiye and Europe. She defended the 2005 assassination by the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah terror consortium of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and attacked the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon that probed Syria’s involvement in the assassination.

For a while, she made a living in the United States as a visiting professor at Duke University back when the US was colluding with the Syrian dictator (thanks to war criminal Henry Kissinger) to hand Lebanon over to the vulgar Syrian Baath regime (between 1975 and 2005) in exchange for the Assad regime’s abandoning its Golan Heights to Israel. At the time, the US was praising the Syrian dictator as a “man of his word” and a “cunning” dictator who should be trusted as he evicted the West from Lebanon, assassinated politicians, journalists and other dissidents, kidnapped dozens of westerners from the streets of Beirut and supervised the twin truck bombings of the US Marines and French Paratrooper headquarters in 1983 in Beirut.

In May of 1991, the New York Times, a mouthpiece for official US policies (much like in any other totalitarian system), published an op-ed celebrating the return of peace to Lebanon [Keep the Peace in Lebanon, May 7, 1991] after the Syrian Air Force was given permission by Israel and the United States to violently topple the last free Lebanese government (October 1990) and install a Syrian puppet government in its place. Syria was gifted all of Lebanon in exchange for Assad’s joining the US coalition against Saddam Hussein: Simply put, ass-lick one Baathist dictator to topple another Baathist dictator. The New York Times and the entire US media were again to do the same in 2003 when they rallied behind the Bush lies and marshalled the nationalistic fervor of a dumb captive American public in support for the unjustified invasion of Iraq.

At the time (1990) the Arab-oil-addicted Republican administration of George H W Bush and his James Baker the Turd secretary of state had allied themselves with the Damascus butcher Hafez Assad – who ironically topped the US State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism – and the Saudi Arabia’s incubator of Osama Bin Laden against the Christians of Lebanon. The US applauded the Syrian occupation of Lebanon as a “factor of stability”, referring to it as a mere “presence”, not an occupation, right after the Syrian proxy Hezbollah had murdered 241 US Marines and 58 French paratroopers who were keeping the peace in Beirut in 1983. It was only in 2003, after the September 11, 2001 attacks, that Colin Powell first used the term “occupation” in referring to Syria’s brutal destruction of Lebanon and its institutions. Nowadays, some thirty-plus years later, Lebanon is on its deathbed because of that joint American-Syrian-Saudi-Iranian crime conglomerate.

A certain Youssef Hitti sent a letter (text in italics below) to the editor of the NY Times in response to the op-ed. Here is its text (the original was butchered as usual by the New York Times editor):

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A Syrian Dark Age

To the Editor:

As you point out (Editorial, May 7), the Lebanese have surrendered their weapons and disbanded their militias. But a lasting peace will be achieved only when Lebanese sovereignty is restored. Foreign intervention remains the firmest obstacle [to permanent peace]. Every time the Lebanese component of the crisis is resolved, Syria’s and Israel’s intransigence and interventions plunge the country into chaos. The Israelis will not withdraw from the south, arguing that pro-Syrian Palestinian and Shiite guerillas strive to attack northern Israel. The Syrians have broader goals in Lebanon, like Saddam Hussein’s ambition over Kuwait, and entrench their hold.

So-called reforms are enacted [under pressure from the Syrian occupier] to re-arabicize Lebanon and force it to re-enter the brotherly world of Arab nationalism. In education, foreign language instruction is increasingly prohibited. History texts are rewritten to reflect the anti-Western ideology of the Syrian Baath Party. From the country with the highest literacy rate in the Arab world, Lebanon is receding into an educational dark age under the guise of “Arabization”.

The Syrians occupy 90 percent of Lebanon, control the army and foreign policy, and soon will “appoint” a third of the new Lebanese parliament. What Saddam Hussein failed to achieve in Kuwait, Hafez al-Assad is securing in Lebanon, and the Bush administration continues to pat him on the back.

Youssef S. Hitti

Here is the text of Shaaban’s rebuttal to Hitti’s letter:

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Lebanon Returns to Precolonial Heritage

To the Editor:

Youssef S. Hitti expresses concern about Lebanon’s sovereignty, fearing that the teaching of Arabic in Lebanese schools and the dismantling of a confessional, colonial heritage will throw Lebanon into a “Syrian Dark Age” (Letter, May 30). As an Arab woman, I am dismayed to find an Arab man so contemptuous of his people’s history, language and culture, and so proud of the imprints of a colonial past that almost drove the country to its demise. I fail to see how Mr. Hitti connects Arabization with “an educational dark age”. Does Arabic for him mean “dark” and French “white”?

Lebanon will continue to have the highest literacy rate in the Arab world with an important difference: Lebanese will learn Arabic, as well as French, in the schools. Instruction in foreign languages is not prohibited in Syria, so how could Syria act to prohibit it in Lebanon?

What Mr. Mr. Hitti means is that French will no longer be the only language taught at many schools in Lebanon. Is there anything more natural for an Arab country than to have its own language taught in schools? I fear that for Mr. Hitti one can only be educated if one has graduated from an école Française:

If Mr. Hitti is worried about occupation, he needn’t worry about the Syrians. The real occupation is in southern Lebanon where Mr. Hitti cannot go without special permission from the Israeli authorities. I can only feel relieved that not many Lebanese share his lack of pride in his history and culture. As an Arab woman I am delighted that Lebanon is back where it belongs: the heart of Arab writings, publication and culture.

Bouthaina Shaaban, Associate Professor, Department of Asian and African Languages and Literature, Duke University, Durham, N.C., June 2, 1991.

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Miscellaneous comments to “Dr.” Shaaban:

1- Before a recent trip to China where the Chinese dictator laid out the red carpet for the Syrian butcher Bashar Assad, the “advisor” of the latter, the Baathist Bouthaina Shaaban, said the following in an interview with the Chinese state-run CGTN network:

“China wants to end poverty in its rural areas, and to help other countries reach economic growth. It wants to strike partnerships with other countries. The essential difference between China and the West is that the mentality of the Chinese leadership is a mentality of collaboration, a humane mentality, which sees all of humanity as brothers.

Conversely, the mentality of the West is one-sided and racist against all our nations. They do not see us as people who are their equal. Whenever they went to other countries, they did so in order to impose their hegemony and their model. Unfortunately, all the countries they entered ended up in ruin. They had been much better off before [the West] came.”

I’m not sure I understand, but when France governed Lebanon between 1921 and 1943, then after the French left in 1943 and Lebanon became independent, it was not in ruins; it was a successful, prosperous and fantastic country until 1975. That year, Lebanon began its descent into barbarity and ruin when Dr. Shabaan’s boorish Syrian army invaded Lebanon with a license from war criminal Henry Kissinger. Then again, why, I ask, did Ms. Shaaban choose to work at a Western university, namely Duke University in the racist south (North Carolina) of the United States, rather than at a humane Chinese university?

She could have done her “research” for example in the Xinjiang autonomous region where her fellow Chinese colleagues would have instructed her about the humane methods their dictator Xi Jinping reserves to the Muslim Uyghurs. Since she is Muslim, she would have been eligible to be interned, re-educated (out of her US-influenced career) in one of the hundreds of concentration camps reserved for Muslims, and indoctrinated into the greatness of the humane Chinese system. She would have been spared having to work with her racist American colleagues at Duke University. 

2- Syria is an artificial country cobbled together by the French mandate from disparate desert cities that have nothing in common: Turks, Assyrians, Kurds and Armenians in the north, Sunni nomadic Arabs in the east, hybridized Christian-Alawites in the west, some scattered Christians in the southwest, and Druze in the south. Yet, the nearly defunct Fascist Baath Party claims to have united, admittedly coercively, all these communities under the banner of Arab nationalism.

It appears that Bouthaina Shaaban’s reply to Hitti’s letter is an exercise of her imagination fertilized by decades of Baathist indoctrination and vitriolic anti-Western ideology. Her ignorance of the “Arabization” question in Lebanese education is evident in her literal interpretation of the term, in which she implies that Arabic is never taught in Lebanese schools. Let me educate her and dismantle for a change some of the miswirings of her desolate brain, she who seems to have learned nothing from her stay at Duke University in the very America she hates.

“Arabization” is a slogan of Pan-Arab Baathist ultra-nationalists whose ultimate goal is to obliterate diversity in the Arab world, consistent with the Baath Party’s Fascist coercive promotion of a single and monolithic Arab identity, not unlike Nazi Germany’s coercive promotion of a pan-German identity across Europe. In their books, the founding ideologues of the Baath Party, like Sati al-Husri and Michel Aflaq, say the following:

“Every person who speaks Arabic is an Arab. Every individual associated with an Arabic-speaker or with an Arabic-speaking people is an Arab. If he does not recognize his Arabness … we must look for the reasons that have made him take this stand … He is an Arab regardless of his own wishes, whether ignorant, indifferent, recalcitrant, or disloyal; he is an Arab, but an Arab without consciousness or feelings, and perhaps even without conscience. If he does not know he is an Arab, we will teach him to be an Arab…” etc.

This is what a German Nazi would have said during the Nazi expansion in Europe: all you have to do is replace “Arab” in the text above with “Aryan” or “German”, and you wouldn’t be able to the difference between an “Arab” Baathist and a “Nazi” German.

Baathists like Shabaan persist in denying a distinct Lebanese identity based on the country’s religious, historical, ethnic and linguistic background. In their hegemonic “Arabism”, Baathists contradict themselves by arguing for a Palestinian Arab identity separate and different enough from the Jordanian identity to warrant an independent Palestine. Their mindsets, fossilized in the colonial victim syndrome, continue to blame the West for the ailments of their societies torn apart by the opposing tensions between their archaic structures and the modern world. Arabization is analogous to the Germanification of Europe or the Russification of the soviet republics.

Note that Shaaban admits in her letter that the Syrian occupation of Lebanon was actively involved in the “dismantling of a confessional, colonial heritage” which Arab Fascists attribute to Lebanon. Yet, as the promiscuous maid of a 53-year-long inbred genetically-transferred dictatorship, Shaaban does not mind that Bashar Assad and his regime is the monopoly of the Alawite minority sect. The Alawites used to be Byzantine Christians who were forced to convert to Shiite Islam, resulting in an amorphous hybrid Christian-Muslim set of beliefs. The Alawite sect represents 10% of Syria’s total population, yet by terror and repression it dominates the rest of the population, the vast majority of which is Sunni Muslim. Now that Assad has ethnically cleansed his own country by chasing the Sunnis into refugee camps in Türkiye, Lebanon, Jordan and all over Europe, his Alawite sect now has a far greater relative demographic advantage. The charlatan Sunni idiot Shaaban, who claims to want to dismantle the confessional system in Lebanon, should perhaps start by dismantling her own sectarian vulgar system.

When the Baath-doped Shaaban speaks of Lebanon’s “colonial” past, she means the puny 20 years between the two world wars when France was the mandatory power over both Lebanon and Syria. France was granted a mandate by the League of Nations, the forerunner of the UN. Lebanon and Syria were never French colonies as West and North Africa or Indochina were. Those two decades between 1921 and 1943 pale in comparison with the 400 years of the backward and brutal Muslim Turkish Ottoman occupation that preceded it. Yet not one of the Arab nationalists like Shaaban ever complains about it because, despite being Turkish and not Arab and spoke Turkish not Arabic, it was Muslim. Muslims and Jews are alike in that religion overrides national identity. France, on the other hand, gave both Lebanon and Syria institutions and constitutions and then left. Despite constant Syrian obstruction and meddling, Lebanon succeeded in becoming a prosperous democracy between 1943 and 1970, while Syria embarked on an orgy of annual coup d’etats that climaxed with the brutal dictator Hafez Assad seizing power and running the country until his death in 2000, when his imbecile son Bashar was tribally handed power and has taken well to the job of junior dictator butcher. So much for the much-heralded secularism of Baathist Pan-Arab nationalists.

Shaaban also sweeps under the rug the foundational Canaanite-Phoenician identity of both the Lebanese and Syrian Mediterranean seacoasts that lasted from way back in antiquity through 400 AD, when the Phoenicians were forcibly converted to Christianity by the Romans, then to Islam by the invading Arab hordes. The Phoenician homeland, with all its contributions to western civilization, was successively occupied by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantine Christians, Arab Muslims, Frankish Crusader Christians, Seljuk Muslims of Turkestan, Egyptian Mameluke Muslims, Ottoman Turkish Muslims, French Christians, East European/American Jewish colonial settlers (a.k.a. Israelis), and the last ones to be kicked out of Lebanon by a population hurling slingshots of pure Lebanese excrement at them, the Syrian Arab barbarians of Dr. Bouthaina.

As one can see from Lebanon’s long history, the “Arab” occupation interlude is only a speck in the geological time scale of the country’s history. The Arabic language is the only criterion that might suggest an Arab identity to Lebanon. But are the Irish, Australians, Canadians, Americans, Jamaicans, all “Englishmen” and part of an “English World” under an “English” ethnic identity because they share a common language? Or should Austrians, Swiss, German, Dutch and others all be called Germans because they all speak a form of German? According to the Baathist ideology, and to a vast spectrum of incompetent western academics and politicians who are incapable of comprehending the complexities of the Near East, the “Arab World” is a simplifying construct in which a multitude of diverse linguistic, ethnic and religious groups are lumped together as “Arabs” because their people were forced to speak some form of Arabic as a result of the Arab Muslim colonialist conquest and occupation beginning in the 7th century AD.

While Lebanese law protects the freedom of schools to teach in any language, schools must comply with official secondary school requirements and teach the Arabic language and use it as a language of instruction. Hence, all schools – public and private – adopt a bilingual approach in which a multitude of subjects are taught in parallel in two languages, one of which is always Arabic: Arabic -French, Arabic-English, Arabic-Italian, Arabic-Armenian, etc. In general, foreign history, literature, geography and social studies are taught in the foreign language, while the same subjects pertaining to the Arab Muslim world are taught in Arabic. Only math and science are taught in the foreign language.

So, it is disingenuous of the Muslim Baathist handmaid of Baby Butcher Bashar to lie by saying that Mr. Hitti wants Lebanese education to be solely in French, when he was arguing that the Syrian barbarian occupiers of his country wanted to impose Arabic as the sole language of instruction, as it is in backward Syria. I’ve met so many Syrian expat fugitives from the Assad regime who complained that Syria never taught them any foreign language sufficiently enough to allow them to integrate the workforce in the global economy. Instead, Syrian students are brainwashed by daily classes on National Socialism à la Baath flavor and the long vanished Arab glory of 900 AD, with copious injections of hatred toward every other culture and country.

It is worth reminding Jezebel Bouthaina Shaaban that if the Arabic language, which had languished in slumber for 600 years under Muslim Seljuks, Mamelukes and Turks, came back to life, it is on account of those Christian Lebanese whose language skills and openness to the world made them vanguards and pioneers in the re-awakening and modernization of the Arabic language in the late 19th century: It was Khalil Gibran, Mikhail Naimeh, and Amin Rihani, the so-called Prophets of New York, who inaugurated the Nahda (renaissance) of the Arabic language; it was Philip Hitti who introduced Arabic and Islam to the Anglo-Saxon world through his founding of the very first department of Near Eastern and Semitic Languages in American academia at Princeton University. Syrian harlot Bouthaina’s deployment of her veiled Baathist charms at Duke University is a Johnny-come-late poor imitation of what the Lebanese Christians did to the Arabic language. These are only a few of those Lebanese Christians who resurrected Arabic after it had died under Muslim rule. Indeed, it was Lebanese monks in their monasteries of Mount Lebanon who in the 16th century printed the first Bible and the first Quran in the entire Arab Muslim world, having brought Gutenberg’s technology from Europe. It is primarily on account of their exposure to both east and west that the Lebanese, to this day, continue to be at the forefront of change in the Arab world. Unfortunately, primitive backward Syria and its appendages like the Iranian terror organization of Hezbollah, that have dominated Lebanon for the past several decades, have taken the country down a path of brutal Islamization and Arabization that led to it becoming a cesspool of corruption, poverty, illiteracy, wars and mismanagement. Prior to this dark period of the Syrian Arab occupation of Lebanon, the country was a shining beacon in the midst of the Zionist and Islamist darkness around it: prosperous, open, multicultural, multilingual and multireligious, a thriving, liberal and functional democracy without any nationalistic ideologies, in sharp contrast to the Jewish and Islamic barbarities around it.

Finally, unlike the monolith of backward education that Bashar Assad’s handmaid Bouthaina Shaaban wants to impose on Arab youths under the pretext of Arab nationalism, Lebanon’s young people have a choice between Arabic-French-instruction and Arabic-English instruction, often switching readily between the two, in the plethora of public or private schools. This yields tri-lingual individuals who easily assimilate in academic and professional environments in the West and in the Arab Gulf region. If, in the obtuse regressive mind of a moron like Bouthaina Shaaban, such Lebanon-based foreign academic institutions like American University of Beirut (US Protestant), Saint Joseph’s University (French Catholic), Arab University (Egyptian Sunni Muslim Arab), Lebanese-German University (German non-governmental) and many others are shameful relics of a colonial past rather than open cross-cultural bridges, wasn’t it demeaning of this Baathist tart to have earned a living in American academia only to become the handmaid of the Assad butchers’ ruling family in Damascus?