Not only has the Lebanese government shown it won't challenge Hizballah's increasing presence, it has allowed the group veto power in governmental decisions, and has shown the depth of its support for Hizballah's jihad by giving Samir Kuntar a hero's welcome, even in Beirut. If it is trying to liquidate any and all international sympathy it garnered due to the Hariri and Gemayel assassinations, its efforts to shake off Syrian influence, and its brief resistance to Hizballah in May, it's doing a fine job.
"Hizbullah moves into 'every town'," by Yaakov Katz for the Jerusalem Post, July 18:
Hizbullah is bolstering its presence in south Lebanon villages with non-Shi'ite majorities by buying land and using it to build military positions and store missiles and launchers, The Jerusalem Post has learned.
The decision to build infrastructure in non-Shi'ite villages - where Hizbullah has less support - is part of the group's post-war strategy under which it has mostly abandoned the "nature reserves," forested areas in southern Lebanon where it kept most of its Katyusha rocket launchers before the Second Lebanon War.
Behind the change is the mandate given to UNIFIL by the United Nations after the war in 2006. According to the mandate, the peacekeeping force can patrol freely throughout southern Lebanon but cannot enter villages or cities without being accompanied by soldiers from the Lebanese Armed Forces, which regularly tips off Hizbullah ahead of the raids.
News of the change in Hizbullah strategy came as Israel is trying to persuade the UN to strengthen UNIFIL's mandate to give it the right to patrol the villages freely.
"Hizbullah is moving into every town that it can," a senior defense official told the Post. "This is in order to evade UNIFIL detection."
On Thursday, Lebanese complained they were receiving recorded phone messages from Israel promising "harsh retaliation" for any future Hizbullah attack. The automated messages also warn against allowing Hizbullah to form "a state within a state" in the country....
I suggest making a point of not referring to Samir Kumtar without a descriptive epithet to remind people of what Hizballah represents, perhaps "little -girl killing pig Samir Kumtar".
And yet another country falls to Jihad.
This is why immigration of muslims into non-muslim countries is civilizational suicide. Lebanon was once a non-muslim land and prospered. Now Lebanon is a muslim land and ruined.
How can we sit and witness before our very eyes as the muslim armies take yet another nation and destroy it with their stupid Jihad and even more stupid Islamic culture of sexual retardation, violent misogyny, slavery, and ignorance?
Our leaders are stupid men and stupid women.
First the Christians of Lebanon were left to their own devices by their historic protector, France. For a while they continued to hold onto the power they had once had in their only redoubt in the Middle East. In the 1950s, the great statesman Charles Malik, who knew exactly what Islam was all about, was the most famous face of Lebanon, at the U.N. and elsewhere. The Christians were more advanced, and being more advanced, they also uplifted, in an unintentional mission civilicatrice, the local Muslim Arabs. The Maronites were conscious of themselves as using Arabic, and even possessing Arab names, but they would be careful to preserve, in the first names, their non-Arab identity -- Georges and Antoine were the Maronite equivalent of those Iranians who wished to hark back to the pre-Islamic past of Iran, with names such as Cyrus and Darius rather than one more Ahmad or Mohammad or Ali.
But slowly, they lost power slowly. True, Eisenhower sent in the Marines in 1958 to help "stabilize" Lebanon. But they lost because of demography, lost to the other tribes of Lebanon, mainly to what at the time, in the 1970s and 1980s, was seen as the undifferentiated mass of Muslims, Sunni and, lower down on the socioeconomic scale, but higher on the procreation scale, the Shi'a. The so-called "Palestinian" Arabs in the so-called "refugee camps" -- really cities, with everything that cities have, just as in Gaza, "poor" Gaza, you can find DVD stores in those places called "refugee camps," were largely Sunni Arabs, and while they were prevented from becoming Lebanese citizens, the Lebanese state could not prevent them from becoming well-armed, and causing all kinds of trouble, especially to the Christian villagers in the south, far from the Christian heartland, and also, as it happens, to Shi'a in the south.
What happened is that just as Muslims outbred Christians in Lebanon, so the Shi'a outbred the Sunnis. And the Shi'a were, historically, the poorer people in rural areas, while the Sunni merchant class in the cities did much better. Berri's Amal movement among the Shi'a, though it still exists, has been superceded by Hezbollah, and Hezbollah does not want merely greater rights, econoomic and social, for the Shi'a, but wants to take power in Lebanon. And right now Hezbollah, with the support of Iran and, for very particular reasons, of the Syrian Alawite regime (not to be confused with the Sunni Arabs who constitute 70% of the people in Syria) both support Hezbollah, and supply it with money and weaponry of all kinds.
Now the Hezbollah members are fanning out, across Lebanon. Recently they tried to take a Druse village or two and were repulsed; their attack did have the effect of persuading those Druse who, unlike Walid Jumblatt, had made an alliance with Hezbollah, to return to the Druse fold, and regard Hezbollah with suspicion. The same thing happened, or at least has been reported as happening, with those Christians who, blindly following General Aoun, had taken Hezbollah's side, but now, as Hezbollah has shown to all sane Lebanese what it is about, those Christians too may abandon Aoun, and cease to support Hezbollah.
Long ago, in 1947, Bishop Moubarac of Beirut wrote an amazing letter tying the fate of the Christians in Lebanon to the fate of the Jews in the yet-to-be-declared state of Israel. You can find that letter in an appendix to Bat Ye'or's "Islam and Dhimmitude." He understood what so many of Islam's victims have not understood: that they have been separated, picked off, threatened and blackmailed to make separate deals with their Muslim overlords, when their only real hope, as he saw it, was for all non-Muslims to recognize their shared destiny. It may be too late for the Christians of Lebanon, and the best they can hope for is not to retain power in the state, but cantonization, as with the Druse and the Sunni Arabs in Tripoli, all of them perhaps united, at least, against Hezbollah and not, as the unseemly behavior of the Lebanese state this past week seemed to demonstrate, a desire to mollify or pacify Hezbollah by joining in the disgusting display of admiration for that new "hero" of Hezbollah, the child-killer Samir Kuntar.
We'll see how intelligent the enemies, the victims, of Hezbollah turn out to be, and how strong is their will to survie, and even, possibly, prevail. But they won't do it, and certainly won't continue to get American sympathy, if they pretend to rally around or support -- here I feel the need to borrow a phrase -- the malignant and turbaned nuremberg-rally leaders of Hezbollah.
"the Lebanese state could not prevent them from becoming well-armed, and causing all kinds of trouble, especially to the Christian villagers in the south, far from the Christian heartland, and also, as it happens, to Shi'a in the south."
by Hugh
Could not, or "would not"?
Did they really cause trouble to the Shia or were the Palestinians welcomed as fellow Arabs and fellow Muslims with a common foe - Israel?
Were the Shia incapable of resisting them, if they had chosen to?
How many of the Sunnis in Lebanon today really oppose Hezbollah, the same group that attacks Israel with impunity?
How long would a Sunni Arab/Christian cantonization last? No doubt only until the Sunnis no longer felt threatened by Hezbollah or by the Shiites, and then the "truce" between them would be brought to an abrupt halt.
Hizballah now moving into Lebanese towns without Shi'ite majorities
..................................
Why should this surprise anyone?
Here is a description of the actions Lebanon's Sunni leader, just two days ago:
"Prime minister Fuad Saniora stood at the Beirut's military airport shoulder-to-shoulder with Naim Qassem, Hezbollah's deputy leader, to greet Kantar and four Hezbollah fighters captured during the July war with Israel two years ago"
It's the same old "...my brother and my cousin against the neighbors, and all of us against the foreigners". For "foreigners", one may substitute the word "Jews", if one wishes, or perhaps just "Infidels".
Iran is enjoying its growing influence in the heart of the Sunni world, twitting its traditional rival Shari'ah state, Saudi Arabia. Syria is enjoying Iran's support through allowing free-rein to proxy Hizb'allah (although the Alawite powers-that-be may come to regret this), and Lebanon, in a crude, but memorable, sign I saw in a picture taken at a pro-Hizb'allah rally, is "Syria's bitch". As for the Sunni "Palestinians", they will take support for their genocidal cause wherever they can find it.