The main immigration of Lebanese, entirely Christian, arrived here between roughly 1880 and 1940. They came because Western pressure on the Ottoman government, while it led theoretically to a formal improvement in the legal treatment of non-Muslims in the Ottoman domains, in fact caused great unease among Muslims. The massacre of the Maronites in Damascus in 1860 was one such manifestation. Those Lebanese who arrived, whose papers might describe them as "Syrians" or even as "Turcos," were in fact refugees from Islam and the encroachments of Islam, even if they did not talk of it that way, but were simply seen as economic migrants from the Ottoman Empire.
And in recent decades other Christians have arrived from Lebanon, both Maronites (most keenly aware that they are Arabic-using but not Arabs) and the slightly different case of Greek Orthodox Christians. Some of them are more willing to assume that the imposed use of the Arabic language means that they must -- as Muslim Arabs insist -- think of themselves as "Arabs" and, as "Arabs," naturally identify with the chief gift and identifying characteristic of the Arabs, Islam, even if they are not Believers themselves. They must adopt the views and promote the agenda of Muslim Arabs in order to fit in or to be tolerated.
What has happened in recent years should be transparent, but it is not. Muslim Arabs, who have arrived recently (unlike the Lebanese Christians) have cynically attempted to pretend that there is an identity of interests between the descendants of Arabic-speaking Christians who were essentially fleeing from Islam and its inevitable pressures and menaces, and Muslim Arabs. It is as if some unreconstructed group of German Nazis, having made it to America recently, had pretended to make common cause -- that shared "Deutschtum" -- with the descendants of those who had fled the Nazis, both Jewish and non-Jewish Germans.
Those who think of themselves as descendants of those Lebanese Christian refugees should be aware of how these so-called "Arab-American" groups have been infiltrated by, taken over in many places by, those who are really promoting Islam, and whom their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents would have had no trouble in detecting, and denouncing, and shunning. The "Arab-American" identity is not one thing, but is used by Muslims in this country to backdate their arrival, to appropriate the good reputation of those Lebanese immigrants, and to relentlessly promote their own, quite different and sinister objectives. Those objectives have nothing to do with the enthusiastic acceptance of America, and its equal treatment of adherents for all religions, as well as its political and legal institutions, that was offered by Lebanese Christian immigrants.
They should be very careful, not least because of that handful of islamochristians who are willing to promote Islam's agenda, and thus sully the name, even blacken the name, of those who have nothing to do with that agenda, and deplore it. Muslims in this country have been attempting to exploit, for their own purposes, the good reputation, and influence, of those who are described usually as "Lebanese" in origin, a word that covers all those whose Maronite (or other Christian) ancestors fled present-day Lebanon, or Syria, beginning at the end of the 19th century. These people, or their descendants, make up more than 70% of all those described, quite cunningly, as "Arab-Americans" but is, at least in the case of the Maronites, whose existence in Lebanon predates the arrival of the Arab Muslim invaders, a completely misleading description. They may use Arabic, they may have Arabic names (though of course the fashion in recent decades, to demonstrate that non-Arabness, has been French names -- Georges and Philippe and Antoine and Brigitte and so on). They are not Arabs, but rather Arabic-speaking descendants of those who managed to remain Maronites because the mountainous geography of the Lebanon. And proximity to both Byzantium (not fully under Muslim control until the fifteenth century), and to the Western world by sea, prevented the kind of islamization that, for example, Mesopotamia (also a center for Christianity) experienced, with the last indigenous remnants being harassed, persecuted, and murdered in Iraq today.
The falsity of this "Arab-American" identity is being used by Muslims to establish their own bona fides, to take advantage of the good will that accrues to Christians (and therefore Christian refugees, of one sort or another) from the Middle East, and above all, to attempt to swell the numbers and perceived power of those who may mistakenly be assumed by American politicians to be part of some Islamic lobby whose demands must be met -- when in fact these Lebanese, like the Copts with whom they now are making common cause, have nothing to do with, are the first victims of, Islam.
Perceiving the various methods of Islamic propaganda, and attempts to create a factitious connection between the Muslim who arrives from the Middle East, and the Christian (or Jew) who arrives, the latter being victims of Islam -- requires vigilance.
The victims of Islam, in the Middle East itself, as Bat Ye'or has noted, seldom aided one another, so afraid were they of the circumambient Muslims, and so intent on striking their own deals and pleasing their Muslim masters or would-be masters. That phenomenon can be found among some Christians in the Middle East today. Do the Greek Orthodox Arabs sufficiently side with the Maronites? Or for that matter do the Catholic Egyptians stand up for the Copts? And have not the Copts in Egypt helped to prove their "loyalty" by being, at times, as fierce in their demonstrations of antipathy to Israel as any Muslim, in the vain hope that somehow that will improve their own lot in Egypt?
Whatever false stratagems for survival, both understandable and yet deplorable, were employed within the Middle East, they should not be employed in the Infidel lands. There, and especially in the United States, all the victims of Jihad and Sharia should spend their time making alliances with one another, and above all in alerting the naive indigenes about the real nature of Islam -- lest that Islam follow those Maronites, those Copts, those Assyrians, those Jews, those Armenians from Haleb or Beirut -- right to this country, where they had believed they would at last be safe from the persecutions of Islam, the power of Islam, the menace of Islam.
YES!
A good idea, but unlikely to happen. Individualism being what it is in the West, people are too busy sniping at each other about personal gripes. That's not to say that I abhor individualism--it is part and parcel of what has made the West great and separates it from the abomination that is Islam--but it does present a problem.
Agree that it is highly unlikely - a genocide of black Africans in Darfur by the religion of peace yet what group of people raise the most ire among African Americans (the joos)? Thousands of innocents killed in North America and Europe yet which government is most hated by the world populace (Bushitler)? Amanpour's family flees Iran (with the likelihood of torture or execution hanging over their heads) yet which religion is dealt with most gently in CNN's latest pile?
Seems the policy makers who "protect" the victims of jihad and sharia are sure Islam has been hijacked and more muslims is the answer to the terror problem
Why don't they do that here. Think of themselfs as American Christian- muslims?...
To say they are Christians? Their free will is gone. What Jesus died for. That is nuts!!!!!!
An interesting book, which Hugh has mentioned in the past, is Syrian Yankee , by Salom Rizk. Rizk was a post WW1 Syrian (would now be termed Lebanese) Christian immigrant to the US. He came because he was a US citizen by birth (parent was a US citizen) and because the USA was a land of opportunity and freedom. The opening chapters include some descriptions of the interactions of muslims and Christians in Syria/Lebanon. He was an American patriot.
His life story might make a good movie, although it might not be fashionable in Hollywood.
"...The victims of Islam, in the Middle East itself, as Bat Ye'or has noted, seldom aided one another,..."
...it is why they are victims....it is why Christians and other NonMuslims are now almost extinct in Muslim lands and it is why the European countries are rapidly slipping into the dustbin of history.....
del--
You have a good memory.
Here is that posting that mentions Salom Rizk:
"Many "Arab-Americans" in this country are, in fact, not Arabs at all, but rather, the descendants of Arabic-speaking Lebanese Christians, especially Maronites, who left what was then the Ottoman Empire, from the 1880s on, for the United States,, Australia, South America, even West Africa, because they sensed that they could elsewhere overcome the heavy hand of both Muslim Turkish overlords, and the threats (which in Damascus, in 1860, had resulted in massacres of Christians) of the kind the Christians in Iraq are now facing, and that were for 1300 years a permanent feature of the lives of all non-Muslims under Muslim rule.
Some of these people do not realize this; they confuse the use of Arabic with being an Arab – and linguistic imperialism, which accompanied the spread of Islam (for the Qur’an must be read in Arabic, and the Arabs always regarded themselves as being superior to all other Arabs precisely because the Qur’an was given to them, “and in your language” for “you are the best of people.”
Joseph Farah, in fact, is not an anomaly but a truth-teller who has not forgotten history. He is grateful to America, and in that gratitude reminds this reader of Salom Rizk, author of Syrian Yankee, who like so many who arrived between 1890 and 1930, with the words “Syrian” or even “Turk” stamped on their passports, were in fact Christians escaping from the Christian destiny of dhimmitude.
If one looks at these original immigrants, and their testimonies, one finds nothing like the disloyalty being exhibited by so many Muslims, who identify not with the Infidel nation-state in which they live, but with Islam and only Islam, to which all their loyalty is exclusively given. In the 1930s and 1940s, Lebanese Christians often sided strongly with the Zionists. One might consult the statements of the Bishop of Beirut, Ignace Moubarac, who saw clearly the intertwined destinies of the Jews of Mandatory Palestine, and of the Christians of the Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East. Some of Moubarac’s remarks (and he should not be confused with the sinister islamochristian Abbe Yoakim Moubarac) can be found in Bat Ye’or’s study, “Islam and Dhimmitude.”
In “Syrian Yankee” Salom Rizk, who was an orphan, remembers the difficult lives of the Christians, threatened constantly by the Druse (who also inhabited the mountainous areas of The Lebanon) and of course, by the Muslims of the cities. Rizk remembers the generosity of the American welcome – a generosity that earned his loyalty. His memoir, which in the light of the inculcated malevolence of some now calling themselves “Arab-Americans,” shows his hatred of Hitler, his sympathy for the Jews (including the Jews of the Middle East), his awareness – not based on a knowledge of canonical texts, but on the remembered experience of living with Muslims), and above all, his devotion to the United States. One might compare Rizk’s memoir with the hatred that squirts from under every word of Qutb, who lived in America for several years in the late 1940s and was outraged by everything he saw, not least by the surpassing “immorality” of a church-sponsored square dance.
It is always curious to run across those who have forgotten why their own parents, or grandparents, or even more distant ancestors, left whatever they left, to come to America. I know of refugees from Soviet Russia whose own children know nothing about Communism, and seem to think that Soviet Russia’s wickedness is greatly exaggerated. There are refugees from Iran, living in the major cities of the West, whose own children seem not to know that their parents were persecuted by mullahs, and who have become completely alienated and disgusted with Islam, but find that sometimes their own children, misguidedly seeking some kind of “return to their roots,” will take up Islam with a fanaticism that can only horrify their own parents, who were themselves victims of the belief-system of Islam. Curious that these roots-seekers do not go back far enough, beyond Islam, to the Christianity, or Judaism, or mostly the Zoroastrianism, that predated the bloody arrival of Islam with the victory over Rustum at the battle of al-Qadasiyya.
Farah remains true to the spirit of Rizk. He knows why Christians from Lebanon, and elsewhere, came here – even if some of their descendants do not. When James Zogby heads the “Arab-American Anti-Defamation Committee,” and works to preventing the effective administration of the Patriot Act, he is not acting as his own ancestors would have wished, in making Muslim efforts at subversion, and conversion (da’wa) easier rather than harder. Perhaps he does not understand, or fully appreciate, his family’s history. He might read, with profit, Bat Ye'or's "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam.” He might read any of the essays by the articulate Habib Malik, who has repeatedly explained what Islam means for non-Muslims (Malik is the son of the most celebrated Lebanese Christian statesman, Charles Malik). He could also read the most comprehensive study of the legal status of non-Muslims under Islam, that written by the late Antoine Fattal, “Le statut legal des non-Musulmanes au pays d’Islam.” Zobgy, and those who seem to imitate him, owe a bit more to their own ancestors, and a lot less to the Muslims who did not wish, and do not wish, the Christians of the Middle East well, no matter how cleverly they manipulate and exploit them, as front men in the Jihad – and not only in the Jihad against Israel.
Joseph Farah expresses the views of many people, of course. One does not mean to suggest that he expresses the views only of grateful Lebanese Christians. In fact, his views are those that were once the common currency of all grateful immigrants, and of those of their progeny who had the wit, and the intelligence, to compare life in America with what they would have had, had those ancestors stayed home. But surely he does speak as well for the Arabic-speaking (but in most cases not Arab, for they predate them) Christians of the Middle East. It is he who has things right; Zogby who reveals an ignorance of, or indifference to, his own own ancestors, and their travails over centuries; such an ignorance, and such an indifference, is not pleasant to contemplate. T
And if the Lebanese-Americans should not be tricked, or trick themselves, into supporting “Arab-American” causes which are really promotions of an Islamic agenda (unless they wish to betray their own ancestors), they might also consider a recent doctoral study by Franck Salameh, a Maronite, demonstrates the ways in which "Arabness" was imposed on those who came to use the Arabic language, and who were forced to forget, or made to forget, or tricked inito forgetting, that they were not Arabs -- for how many "Arabs" after all really existed, to settle among the far more numerous, advanced, settled populations of Christians and Jews in Mesopotamia, Syria, Judea, Egypt, and North Africa. This will not prevent many people from thinking that they are partly "Arab" (instead of, say, people whose ancestors were conquered by the Arabs, and forced to use the Arabic language, and then were convinced that they were "Arabs" themselves. When Maronites suggest, perfectly correctly, that they are “Arabic speaking” but not Arabs, rather the descendants of Phoenicians, this is all treated as a joke – but why? The Phooenicians did not die out. Christianity came to Lebanon before Islam. Those Christians did not die out – obviously they were the descendants of somebody, and had it been of the Arabs, they would undoubtedly have been Muslims. No Maronite Christian, whatever his facility with Arabic, is likely to be an Arab, even if he finds that he is called, or has for a time called himself, an “Arab-American.”
When the Zogbys of this world speak more of Damur than they do of Sabra and Shatila, when they wonder openly why the Christians in Iraq are under attack, or remind us that the Arab Muslims in Sudan have killed nearly 2 million Christians, when they recall the massacre, in 1933, of the Assyrian Christians, when they make the cause of the persecuted Copts their own, when they help to educate Americans with no Middle Eastern connecton about the institution of dhimmitude which follows upon the Jihad-conquest, and imposes, or attempts to impose, on all non-Muslims a status of humiliation, degradation, and permanent insecurity – which is precisely why the Maronites managed to survive only by retreating to the mountain fastenesses, and why the Syrian Christians, for example, survive only because they once enjoyed the protection of the French, and now they enjoy the curious protection of the Syrian military dictatorship, because the Alawites who suppy the military caste are themselves regarded as not quite-orthodox Muslims because of their cult of Mary or Maryam, no doubt a holdover from the days when Syria was, like most of the MIddle East outside the Arabian peninsula, peopled by Christians.
Those whose Christian ancestors, a generation ago, or a century ago, left the lands where anti-Infidel persecutions and intermittent riots and massacres put the lives of those ancestors in constant peril, owe it to themselves, and to their fellow Infidel Americans, to listen to Farah and to Salom Rizk before him, and not forget that history, and come to believe that their real loyalties must lie with Islam, and the Muslim agenda that is, in the MIddle East, promoted by those Christians who, especially in the Palestinian Authority, have out of generations of internalized dhimmitude, taken to poromoting the Arab agenda. Naim Ateek, Hanan Ashrawi, Michel Sabbagh, and the gun-smuggling icon-stealing Hilarion Cappucci come to mind.
To identify with those who now run the varous Arab-American organizations, rather than such samaritan and truthtelling groups as the American Lebanese League, to forget or never know what Habib Malik and Antoine Fattal and Antoine Sfeir and many others have offered, in their own way, about how Islam treats non-Muslims (or look at the testimony of Nonie Darwish, or Walid Shoebat, for the testimony of those, even among the "Palestinians," who converted to Christianity in this country, and having sloughed off Islam, began to see things clearly, instead of through the glass of Islam, darkly). How people like James Zogby can turn their back on their own ancestors, or make up a mythical world of Muslim "tolerance" of Christians ("dhimmitude" has nothing to do with Western ideas of "tolerance") to justify to themselves the compromises they have made, in order to salve their consciences and keep receiving their salaries -- well, that is quite a puzzlement. And the descendants of those Arabic-speaking Christians, Copts or Maronites or Syrian Catholics or Greek Orthodox, who may, or may not, be lumped with others as "Arab-Americans," should ask themselves if that is a designation that truly describes them, that fits their own self-definition, or whether it simply imposes, on these shores, the expansive definition, provided by Arab Muslims, that insisted that anyone who used Arabic had, of course, to be called "an Arab." That this was a deliberate act of effacing the histories of non-Arab Arabic-speakers can be seen in the recent (1989) Taif Agreement, by which the Syrians and the Saudis forced the Lebanese to put a clause in their constitution calling Lebanon, for the first time in history, an "Arab country." It stuck in the craws of Lebanese Christians, but they were helpless to oppose it -- and not least because the American State Department, in the person of David Satterfield, present at Taif, seemed to think it was a perfectly innocuous clause. It was not.
Farah cannot be fooled. He knows too much. And that does not exhaust the list of his virtues.
[Posted by: Hugh at August 4, 2004 11:15 PM]