From AP via The Guardian:
BEIRUT, Lebanon - A bomb Tuesday killed a politician who was a harsh critic of Syria's power in Lebanon, police said, the second slaying of an anti-Syrian figure this month.The explosion that killed former Communist Party chief George Hawi as he rode in his car came two days after elections that gave the anti-Syrian opposition a majority in Lebanon's parliament, breaking the hold of Damascus' allies.
Opposition figures quickly accused Syrian agents and their allies in the Lebanese security services in Hawi's assassination, as they did in the June 2 slaying of opposition journalist Samir Kassir and the Feb. 14 killing of former prime minister Rafik Hariri...
``Yes, it's the Lebanese security system - the remnants - the tutelage,'' Farouk Dahrouj, another former Communist Party leader, said on New TV. ``Tutelage'' is a reference to Syria's influence in Lebanon.
Walid Jumblatt, a leader of the opposition coalition that won the elections, which ended with a fourth and final round on Sunday, implicitly accused Lebanon's pro-Syrian president and the security agencies he heads. Jumblatt said the agencies must be ``completely purged'' before security is restored.
The bomb that killed Hawi was detonated by remote control, similar to the one that killed Kassir in his car nearly three weeks ago, Justice Minister Khaled Kabbani said, touring the blast site...
Hawi, a Greek Orthodox Christian, frequently spoke out against Syrian intelligence and interference in Lebanese affairs.
He was a prominent leader during the 1975-90 civil war, and his followers fought alongside Muslim and Palestinian militias against right-wing Christians and also battled Israeli forces. But in recent years, Hawi espoused Christian-Muslim dialogue...
Syria filled Lebanon's security and intelligence agencies with its allies to help implement its control for nearly three decades. Although Syria withdrew its military in April and some Lebanese security chiefs have been replaced, many pro-Syrians remain in place. The opposition also says Syrian intelligence agents continue to operate directly in Lebanon.
"He was a Communist.."
-- from a posting above
But a "Communist" in the Middle East may mean different things from what a Communist would be in Soviet Russia, or Hungary, or East Germany, or for that matter France or the United States.
Among Iranian exiles in Europe, some of the stoutest opponents of the regime, and of Islam, call themselves "Communists." What they mean by that is unclear; it may be no more than a desire to have a strong non-Islamic identity, and "Communist" is the best they could come up with, for those who have jettisoned all religious belief.
A "Communist" in Baghdad may well be much more favorably inclined to the United States, and to American soldiers, than almost anyone else, certainly than any fervent or deeply observant Muslim.
And if we were rewinding the tape, and doing it all over again, is it so clear we would have worked with Muslims in Afghanistan to defeat the Red Army, collaborated with Saudi Arabia, given aid to Bin Laden, ignored the machinations of Pakistan, and believed that Islam was good because it was a "bulwark against Communism" instead of thinking that, just possibly, Islam was a greater long-term threat, and that wherever Communist power could be used against Islam -- as in Central Asia during the basmachi revolt -- it should not be opposed by other Infidels.
Nelson Mandela was a communist.
He saw the light.
I don't see many Muslims having this same potential for transformation.
So give me a 'communist' who can change over an Islamicist who will only lie about it until he can regroup, and attack again.
The main difference is:
there is no communist eternal, punishing God behind their viewpoint, just a man-made earthly paradise in the ever-receding future, to be built.
Thus they will not "destroy the Earth to save it", because then they would have no place to reign over.
They were blood-thirsty realpolitik despots.
Who wanted to preserve the planet, if only to rape it.
Islamicists, however, do not care if the Earth, itself, is obliterated -and all life on its killed off, because the Muslim true believer is aimed at heaven, and so can afford to sacrifice our lovely world and all on it to their malignant dogma.
Extinction would be a virtue.
If the Muslims had had the soviet's arsenal (10,000 nukes), do you think they would have relinquished this (apocalyptic) power as benignly as the russian communists finally did?
That's the essential point.
We may still find allies in those who can change, but not in those who are walking off the cliff's edge of dogma -like hashishim assassins in the thrall of the Old Man of the Mountain.
Commies were nuts, but not that nuts.
BigSleep: Nelson Mandela was a Communist who saw the light--my hind end. Any light he saw was the same light Hirohito saw when Nagasaki went up in nuclear smoke. Had his Soviet sponsors and backers still been going high, wide, and handsome with every benefit of the doubt given by the Western media, Mandela would've instituted a bloodbath on gaining power (it's called "revolutionary catharsis" in the corrupt jargon of the 1960's and '70's) and lived long enough to be dismayed at how his good friends in the north managed to advise him into the ruin of Africa's strongest economy. No, something tells me that Mandela getting out of prison when the Soviet Union was goin bellyup suggests that God was looking out for the southern third of Africa.
And, I'm not so sure a Communist in the Middle East is any different from one anywhere else. Their fights with the Fascists in Spain and WWII were cases of two tribes of cannibals eating each other. They gave the model of dictatorship that Nasserites and Ba'athis have been following for years; and propped up the sort of ugly regime like the old Algerian one in which the only possible opposition was one that was just as hard and vicious.
Sorry, BigSleep. Don't be so sure there's a live-and-let-live rationalist in every secularist fanatic and a "doomsday freak" eager to push that red button in every hard-core theist. Neither Vladimir Ulyanov, Lev Bronshtain,Iosip Dzhugashvili, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, nor Saloth Sar ever gave a rat's ass about what single-minded pursuit of military victory and "revolutionary catharsis" would do to their countries--otherwise they'd have looked before leaping. If the Communists in the end kept their finger off the button, it was because they recognized that the faith for which they lived and fought was untenable.
To give you a little peek into the "true believer's" mind, how'd you like to stand before a judge who can be neither bribed, fooled, cajoled by a good lawyer, impeached, nor misled and hear him say, "Now let's just talk a little about the millions of human souls--MY property--whom you so cavalierly sent to their doom."? Frankly, this "fanatical" Abrahamite feels that rather than to ever have to answer to that kind of charge, it would be a very great comfort to know that one could finally flee into an endless, unconscious sleep of death.
This isn't to deny for a minute there are lots who are quick to take the name of God in vain (remember that this sin is Big Number Three for millions of us, even in this endarkened age); but it is to confess that the FEAR of YHWH is the beginning of Wisdom (and I don't soften King James' translators' choice of words).
"Hawi, a Greek Orthodox Christian, frequently spoke out against Syrian intelligence and interference in Lebanese affairs.
He was a prominent leader during the 1975-90 civil war, and his followers fought alongside Muslim and Palestinian militias against right-wing Christians and also battled Israeli forces. But in recent years, Hawi espoused Christian-Muslim dialogue... "
Hmmmph. Once again, Christians get into bed with Marxism and very rightly end up the only ones getting screwed. It's interesting that the Ba'athi Syria he ended up at odds with was one of the USSR's ("a new Christ has been born in Russia", as Nikos Kazantzakis' father once said) key allies in the Middle East--along with Hizbullah and the Air-and-fathead gang of terminally destructive Philistines. And, I just wonder how Hawi reconciled the beliefs of the Christian community with which he identified with the Marxism that always held religion to be the opiate of the masses?
Sounds to me as if the man was one very confused puppy, and his confusion led him to become one of the architects of the long bloodletting that undid one of the most sane Middle Eastern societies. Given who his best allies were in the past, can people truly be shocked that he died violently?
Kepha-
We beat the the Communists. Be glad. (Except in the failing Communist Chinese hybrid. And it will fall as its people learn more of liberty.)
No one nowadays is enamored with the delusional promises of Communism - except for an extremely small pack of laughable fringe nutjobs. (Ward "Chief Sh*tting Bull" Churchill, ad absurdum.)
I don't think they're a real problem.
Islam, however, is.
I never liked Mandela, but he didn't ultimately trying to advocate a Cuba in Africa once he got power. He played at being a statesman of reconciliation. Be glad for small favors.
Our eye needs to be on 'turning' to allies those people who held tight to these follies in the past, and steer them toward opposing the Absolute theocratic Muslim despotism of the future.
Former communists should be encouraged to leave their philosophical mistake and join the effort for true freedom.
Their failure is the 20th century's bloody lesson.
We don't want it repeated on a Total Scale via Islam.