The US could easily bring the Syrian Alawite leadership to heel by threatening to provide encouragement (both moral and material) to Syria's Sunni majority. The prospect of one's head affixed to the end of a pike always concentrates the mind.

As to Christians in Lebanon, two notes: first, demography is destiny. Second, Michel Aoun and the other Maronite leaders who have no interest in the preservation of the Christian community. Can't help people who won't help themselves.

Posted by: sonomaca at May 15, 2008 10:41 AM

"The US could easily bring the Syrian Alawite leadership to heel by threatening to provide encouragement (both moral and material) to Syria's Sunni majority. The prospect of one's head affixed to the end of a pike always concentrates the mind."
-- from a posting above

The most incredible of American policy failures in dealing with Syria is to ignore the Alawites, their vulnerabilities, and how they can be deeply disturbed, and threatened. But in order to do that, one has to know their history, beginning with their use (along with Druse and Armenians) as part of the French "troupes speciales," and how they gradually formed a military caste, and why their cult of Mary renders them permanently suspect to orthodox (especially, but not exclusively, Sunni) Muslims. They constitute 12% of the population. They and their courtiers take what they want of the national wealth. They are ruthless.

And they are keenly aware, especially after the massacre of 82 Alawite cadets at a graduate ceremony at a military academy, and after other attacks by the Ikhwan, that they have to respond in two ways. One way is mass murder: the destruction of Hama, with tens of thousands killed. And then, the dragging of Sunni corpses through the streets of Haleb (Aleppo), and other cities, where everyone was ordered to stand outside, or at their balconies, and applaud the spectacle, and those who did not, or those who dared to shout "Allahu Akbar" were killed on the spot.

The second way is for the Alawites to obtain whatever legitimacy they can as Muslims, and they have found that Iranian clerics were willing to issue a fatwa declaring them to be full-fledged Muslims (of the Shi'a variety) and this is important to them. But if the governments of Egypt, Jordan, and especially Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikdoms, were to start conducting a relentless propaganda campaign against the Alawites as "Infidels" that would hurt them. Iran has made sure that Al-Jazeera, or raather the Al-Thanis who rule Qatar and support Al-Jazeera, will not broadcast such attacks, but possibly the Al-Thani can be made, by all of their Sunni
Arab neighbors, and also by the United States, that maintains a base there, to see the light.

As for that base that the American government is so naively grateful for ("they like us, they really like us"), it is there for the same reason that Kuwait allows the Americans a base: fear of a resurgent Iraq, fear of Saudi Arabia, fear of Iran, in other words, an American base is just what the sheikdoms need to protect themselves from neighborhood bullies. They should be paying tens of billions of dollars for this privilege, but instead it is the Americans who pay (and who= pay and pay) and are so naively, so unnecessaril, grateful, to the governments of Kuwait and Qatar. Apparently, the learning curve for Washington in dealing with meretricuous and cunning Muslim Arab governments and peoples is nearly flat.

Oh, the Alawites of Syria can have their foundations shaken, and themselves sufficiently rattled, so that they will stop serving as Iran's henchman, and stop permitting the resupply of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

But the Americans haven't recognized Syria as being run not by Muslims but by Alawites, with their pictures of Mary and their dangerous syncretism. This is the key that unlocks Syria. It's a key that has been consistently ignored.

Posted by: Hugh at May 15, 2008 11:36 AM

It has come to my attention that the Alawites have permitted, even encouraged, Iranian Shi'a missionaries to descend upon Syria and attempt to convert the Sunni population. In this effort, they have apparently had some success. This prospect must certainly alarm the Sunni rulers in Saudi, who increasingly find themselves surrounded by vassals of Iran. If Iran successfully proselytizes in Syria (and who knows where else, Gaza?), Sunni dominance is certainly threatened.

Might this presage a Saudi-Israeli alliance.

Posted by: sonomaca at May 15, 2008 11:58 AM

But who in the Western world now thinks of saving the Christians through such intelligent, and in another day, obvious population transfer?
by Hugh

Only those who believe that populations need to be saved. But even for them, the only PC answer would be to move the Christians to the US and Europe, further Islamizing the Middle East.
The rest will see it through the lens of what happened in Yugoslavia and elsewhere throughout history: as cleansing - in this case, religious.
It goes against the current norm of multiculturalism. People decry the self-segregation that has happened in Iraq since the US invasion, pointing out how everyone "lived in harmony under Saddam". Iraq was supposedly a model for many sects and cultures living peaceably, even if under Arab Sunni Muslim rule.
It also questions the legitimacy of the American creed. E pluribus unum will be rendered meaningless. If Muslims and Christians can't live together in the Middle East, why should we assume they can in the US and Europe? There goes the melting pot (or the salad bowl or the beautiful mosaic, whichever you prefer).

Posted by: PMK at May 15, 2008 12:02 PM

Elites in the West have moved beyond salad bowls and, certainly, beyond melting pots. I think the effort now is actually to encourage Islamic domination in the Middle East, but also in the West. I believe there will come a time, in the not too distant future, when elites actually promote the "reversion" of Christian populations in the West to Islam. We have already seen examples of Muslim political and religious figures allowed access to school age populations in the West. Of course, this is done under the rubric of cultural understanding, but the real goal is shepard the vulnerable toward the mosque.

Posted by: sonomaca at May 15, 2008 12:24 PM

As an addendum, I believe the now-famous Red-Black (or Red-Green) alliance which we have seen in the West, all over Europe but also, increasingly, in parts of the United States (most particularly on college campuses) will eventually become a Red-Green synthesis. By this I mean that some of those on the left sympathetic to Islamists will "revert" to Islam. We have seen this in Europe, in Germany in particular, where reverts are not found predominantly among ethnic minorities (as in the UK and France) but rather among educated ethnic Germans of leftist persuasion.

Posted by: sonomaca at May 15, 2008 12:33 PM

sonomaca,
But what do the Western elites think they will accomplish by Islamizing the West?
I understand some of might them think they will be rid of the more bothersome people who actually question what they do and vote against them when given the opportunity. But do they really think they themselves will be able to rule or even continue to exist in an Islam-dominated West? It's crazy! Our ancestors fought the Islamic scourge for the better part of a millenium and now here we are putting the gun to our own heads.

Posted by: PMK at May 15, 2008 1:14 PM

The view among Western elites is that, because Western Civilization is vile, racist, oppressive, pick you epithet, that civilization and the Judeo-Christian ethic which created it, must be obliterated. The alternative must be superior, and the alternative is Islam. Hence the efforts to prettify Islamic Civilization, to attribute to it all the noble qualities which really belong to Western Civilization.

Western elites make no distinction between European Christianity and European Judaism, on the one hand, and the Middle Eastern and African versions on the other. An Iraqi or Lebanaese Christian and a Morrocan or Iranian Jew are just as despicable, in the eyes of Western elites, as his American or European counterpart, which explains why the (primarily but not exclusively leftist) Western intellectual actively promotes the obliteration of Israel (and all its Morroccan and Iranian Jews), and the destruction of Christian communities in the Middle East.

Posted by: sonomaca at May 15, 2008 1:33 PM

The Western elites which seek to eliminate Israel and Christian communities from the Middle East (where they barely exist, in any case) would likely not shed too many tears if the actual Jews and Christians involved were deleted from the scene. Not airlifted or relocated, but deleted. This was essentially the argument advanced by Ward Churchill in response to 9/11. So monstrous are the sins, that capital punishment is fully justified (never mind that they oppose capital punishment in all other cases). Hitlerian crimes on the part of Jews and Christians (remember the crusades) require Nuremburg-style punishments.

Posted by: sonomaca at May 15, 2008 1:46 PM

Every once in a while I come across a comment that captures the imagination and is worth repeating . . .

Lebanon is but the most recent Christian country to be sacked by Islam

Posted by: heroyalwhyness at May 15, 2008 2:23 PM

Hugh:

The Maronites have many splendid qualities, but most consider themselves Arabs. I have worked with them and lived near them for over 15 years and I am yet to meet one that disavows Arabness. Just go to Detroit or any heavy concentration of marointes city and you will see the Arabness oozing out. Conversely, the overwhelming majority Assyrians and Copts know the self-evident fact that they are not Arabs. The Christians of the Levant in general can perhaps reason that they are descended from the Christian Arab tribes that predated Islam and lived in greater Syria region such as the Banu Ghassan and Banu Kinda. It just happens that they do not look much different, if at all, from their countrymen. The Assyrian and the Copts can be easily distinguished from their Muslim neighbors.

Posted by: have_mercy at May 15, 2008 3:27 PM

The view among Western elites is that, because Western Civilization is vile, racist, oppressive, pick you epithet, that civilization and the Judeo-Christian ethic which created it, must be obliterated.

by sonomaca

But do they realize that they themselves will die in the process or do they think that their enemy's enemy will view them as friends?

Posted by: PMK at May 15, 2008 3:41 PM

I'm not opposed to swapping the Lebanese Christians with the Somali muslims that we've taken in. Although they don't have a problem with partaking of our free and wealthy society, they want us to adopt sharia and turn the U.S. into a muslim cesspool. so send them to a muslim cesspool and bring the Christians here in their place.

Given the problems that would undoubtably be associated, I doubt that it would be near the trouble that we've received from the non-assimilating muslims we've sheltered.

Posted by: walterc at May 15, 2008 5:18 PM

From "Lebanonesque":

Goodbye Watan?

D'abord, il y aura de moins de moins de gens qui penseront au Liban. Je le sens déjà quant à la fréquentation de ce blog. En France, par exemple, il est temps de reprocher à Sarkozy d'avoir manqué à sa parole vis-à-vis des Talibans. Imaginez qu'on trouve dans mon pays natal des gens qui préfèrent les Talibans à Sarkozy, vous mesurez à quel point ils vont se faire un devoir de soutenir le hezbollah. Car il y a de nombreux Français qui sont persuadés que le hezb, c'est la résistance ! La résistance à quoi ? A la démocratie, à l'impérialisme, à Israël, aux USA, au 21ème siècle, je ne sais pas. Hier soir, quand les canons ont de nouveau tonné vers le ciel pour fêter la ènième défaite du gouvernement à maintenir un semblant de démocratie, on a été beaucoup à se sentir tristes. Comprenez-moi : si le hezbollah prend le pouvoir au Liban, je m'en fous pas mal, je me casse. Mais j'ai beaucoup de peine en pensant à ceux qui restent et qui ne sont pas d'accord avec une prise d'otages de centaines de milliers de personnes. Non en fait, je m'en fous pas.

On trouve aujourd'hui un nombre d'idiots utiles remarquables. Le plus souvent, ils ne s'en rendent pas compte mais ils sont idiots à un point phénoménal. Je ne parle pas de Chomsky, qui joue au con, ni de George Galloway qui doit bien être élu pour manger. Je parle de tous ceux qui vont y aller de leur commentaire dans Libé, ou Le Monde, pour souligner à quel point ON nous trompe, ON nous ment, On ne nous dit pas toute la vérité, ON conspire contre le bon peuple, On veut nous faire avaler n'importe quoi sur la situation libanaise. Reprenant en choeur la propagande aouniste et hezbollahis, ces ânes se font une joie d'étaler une pseudo-science qui a tant inspiré Desproges (confiture, parachute...) pour affirmer haut et fort que : Hariri est riche, Geagea est un criminel de guerre, Joumblatt a soutenu la Syrie et Gemayel est un facho alors que le Général, Der General, est propre comme un sou neuf et le sayyed est le seul à donner son âme pour le Liban.

Bon, ce dernier argument a sauté ce week-end, mais on trouvera toujours des jean-foutres pour justifier la tentative de coup d'Etat. Saluons au passage les Druzes et leur hallucinante capacité à résister à n'importe quel envahisseur, avec un fusil de chasse ou une fronde en bambou. Mais revenons aux arguments des idiots utiles. Disons-le simplement : CE N'EST PAS LA QUESTION. Le problème n'est pas de soutenir une clique au pouvoir, association bancale et temporaire qui n'a rien de glorieux. L'idée est de trouver une façon de gouverner tous ces gens qui vivent côte-à-côte mais pas ensemble. Le problème n'est pas de se flageller comme un chiite pendant Achoura ou un taré de l'Opus Dei pour montrer qu'on est prêt à saigner pour les chefs de guerre de la majorité, l'important est de comprendre que le gouvernement, lié au mouvement du 14 mars mais distinct, demeure la dernière manifestation de l'Etat souverain libanais et que sans lui, le chaos s'installera non pas au Liban, mais dans tout le Moyen-orient. Et qui sait, peut-être au-delà. Je ne vais pas me relancer dans une comparaison entre la région et la vision de Frank Herbert dans Dune, mais parfois on se demande qui sont les Fremens.

On s'interroge : que peut-on faire pour le Liban ? J'ai envie d'être un peu concret et de dire ceci : aux non-Libanais, comme les Français, rester informé, mais bien informé. On peut tout à fait s'intéresser au mariage de la fille de l'ex de Nicolas Sarkozy tout en gardant un oeil sur Beyrouth. Il y a des médias et des blogs pour ça. Aux Libanais, je voudrais dire que l'espoir n'est pas perdu, même si le gouvernement a baissé son froc et que la Ligue arabe a fourni du lubrifiant. Il y a encore beaucoup de choses à faire et résister, ce n'est pas seulement avec des armes. C'est aussi arrêter de prendre le Liban pour une poubelle en balançant ses déchets par terre (le type à qui j'ai demandé si ça lui plairait que j'aille chier sur son lit est toujours choqué je crois). Conduire en respectant les autres. Aller voter coûte que coûte. Ne pas renoncer. Comprendre et accepter que quoi qu'il arrive, le Liban a des voisins plus bruyants que la Belgique et le Luxembourg. Eduquer les enfants. Bien traiter ses bonnes car un pays qui maltraite les êtres humains ne doit pas s'attendre à ce qu'on éprouve de la compassion à son endroit. Il y a beaucoup de choses à améliorer au Liban, mais il existe un énorme potentiel. Moi j'aimerais un jour que les Libanais nous surprennent pour autre chose qu'un nouveau massacre. Et j'y crois."

Posted by: Hugh at May 15, 2008 8:18 PM

have_mercy said:
"The Maronites have many splendid qualities, but most consider themselves Arabs. I have worked with them and lived near them for over 15 years and I am yet to meet one that disavows Arabness. Just go to Detroit or any heavy concentration of marointes city and you will see the Arabness oozing out. Conversely, the overwhelming majority Assyrians and Copts know the self-evident fact that they are not Arabs. The Christians of the Levant in general can perhaps reason that they are descended from the Christian Arab tribes that predated Islam and lived in greater Syria region such as the Banu Ghassan and Banu Kinda. It just happens that they do not look much different, if at all, from their countrymen. The Assyrian and the Copts can be easily distinguished from their Muslim neighbors."

Now, I don't know what planet you come from, have_mercy, but if you know anything, ANYTHING at all about Lebanon and the Maronites, you'd know that one of the "foundation myths" of Maronite identity rests on EXACTLY the opposite of what you're claiming; id est that the Maronites are certainly NOT Arab.

Contrary to your risible claim, "most Maronites consider themselves NON-ARABS." Your flawed premise is that of reductive imperious negationist thuggish Arab nationalists (and their Western groopies), that is, the premise of those who make the argument that "you're an Arab if I say so!" (Sati' al-Husri, Michel Aflaq, and other totalitarian Arabist neo-Nazis, who cannot fathom the possibility that the Near and Middle East had history, culture and civilization prior to the advent of the Arabs...)

Like I said, yours is a monistic, silly, and ultimately reductionist absolutist impulse that ignores the Maronite-Lebanese millenarian history preceding the Arabs and Muslims who (let it be said again) came to the Levant as conquerors and colonizers. And lest it slipped your lofty intellect, the Arab conquest did not happen in a vacuum.

And your drivel about "Banu Ghassan" and other so-called "Arab" tribes (from whom the Maronites and other Middle Eastern Christians are supposedly descended), is another one of those faulty mental clichés (based entirely on modern Arab nationalist fabrications, and retrojected into an unknown, un-recorded, pre-Arab conquest past, to satisfy and sooth the paranoia of Arabists and Arab nationalists with little more than Islamic history to base their "national myths" upon.)

A propos, the Ghassan tribe was an Arabian tribe of mercenaries, paid by the Byzantines of Syria to protect the Eastern flanks of the Byzantine empire from marauding Arabian looters and brigands to the East (and by Byzantines, I mean those hated Greek, Latin, and Aramaic speaking Christians of pre-Arabian Syria; those Eastern Romans if you will... hello??) Those "Arabic-speaking" Ghassans, if indeed they were Christian, practiced a primitive form of Christianity, (similar to the crude neophytic superficial Islam of African Americans today) a primitive turbid Christianity from which Muhammad possibly pilfered elements of his own new "faith."

But in any case, the Ghassans (you and Arab nationalists flaunt), if indeed they were the progenitors of today's Levantine Christians, (which is of course a preposterous claim with nary the historical or archeological evidence to support it), if those Ghassans were indeed the progenitors of today's Levantine Christians, how do you explain the fact that the Ghassans were "Arabic-speakers" in the 7th century, and the Maronites (who by the 7th century had been in Lebanon for some 200 years) were speakers of Aramaic? How is that possible? Doesn't this contradict the very bases of linguistically-based Arab nationalism?

The whole mythology of being an Arab rests on the illusion that one speaks Arabic (sort of the same risible logic that argues that an Irishman, a Scotsman and a Ghanan are all Englishmen on account of their weilding of the English language).. but I digress.. The whole mythology of being an Arab rests on the fallacy that one speaks Arabic, yet the Maronites spoke Aramaic (EXCLUSIVELY Aramaic) at least until the 16th century.. and until the 18th century were speaking an Aramaic dialect heavily imbued with Arabic, but one which they still wrote, until the 19th century in their Aramaic script. Prior to the coming of the Maronite monastic order to Mount-Lebanon (from the banks of the Orontes River in an area bordering Turkey and Syria today), the inhabitants of Mount-Lebanon (who subsequently became Maronites) were speakers of a variety of Canaanite dialects (a sister language of Hebrew, and a member of the Northwestern branch of the Semitic family of languages.) The Aramaic that the Canaanite inhabitants of Mount-Lebanon (and the Lebanese litoral) adopted was an Aramaic with Canaanite substrata.. in other words, an Aramaic that was quite different from even the Aramaic spoken in Iraq (to the same extent that French is different from Romanian...)
btw, Arabic belongs to the Southeastern branch of the Semitic family, and is as different from Lebanese (Canaanite) Aramaic as English is different from Hochdeutsch.

If you read French, have_mercy, I highly recommend the article (titled "you're an Arab if I say so" at the link below:

http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal_fr/2006/jv1no1a4.html

I would love to "have mercy" on you, but you ought to begin by having mercy on yourself first, and please, pretty please, don't conflate language (and a language--Arabic--that no one speaks to boot), don't conflate language with national identity! A Canadian is not an Englishman (simply because he babbles in English), and a Mexican is not a Spaniard simply b/c he was conquered by Castillians some 500 years ago. And a propos, just as the smatterings of speakers of Algonquian and Uto-Aztecan languages in Mexico are Mexico's indigenous (pre-Spanish-Conquest) native Americans, SO ARE THE MARONITES, JEWS, ASSYRIANS, COPTS, GREEK ORTHODOX, AND CHALDEANS, THE MIDDLE EAST'S "NATIVE AMERICANS"

Now, chew on that for a while.

Posted by: Old Levantine at May 15, 2008 9:48 PM

Since many educated Maronites know French (certainly all who live in Lebanon do, or who have left Lebanon for what they once took to be safer, because non-Muslim places of refuge, such as France and Quebec), and some may be coming to this site, I will put up the excellent article by Franck Salameh to which a link is given in the posting just above. [I do think that the poster was far too harsh with "have mercy" who was simply suggesting that his own experience with Maronites, those who were self-selected because they had chosen to settle in or near Detroit, where there is a large concentraton of Arab Muslims, led him to disagree with my comment, which was based on my personal acquiantance with Maronites of an older generation -- those who arrived in America between roughly 1900 and 1940, and their descendants -- and with those who had arrived recently, but were not about to settle among a group of Muslim Arabs, and understood, even if they could not articulate as Prof. Salameh does in the article above (and at greater length in his doctoral thesis), the way in which Arab linguistic and cultural imperialism has been used to make conquered non-Arab peoples come to believe, or even want to believe in the most dismal cases, that they are themselves "Arabs." The appeal of "Uruba" or "Arabness" can be found in the phenomenon of the "islamochristian" -- most obvious with such "Palestinian" Arabs as Hanan Ashrawi, Michel Sabbagh, Naim Ateek, and of course the gun-running PLO supporter, Archbishop Cappucci (Kapoudji).

Maronites in Montreal or Boston or New Hampshire are different from those Maronites who choose to settle in Dearborn. The latter have been cleverly exploited by Muslims, who have realized that they should appeal to the "Arabness" of the Christian Lebanese in order to exploit their good reputation in this country, for the purposes of furthering Islam -- that is, the Total Belief-System that caused the ancestors of those Christian Lebanese to leave the Middle East, and come to America, Canada, Australia, in the first place -- to avoid the encroachments of menacing Islam, and its True Believers.

Posted by: Hugh at May 15, 2008 10:13 PM

At staringattheview.blogspot.com are the following comments on Lebanon:

AN-NAKBAH:

While the rest of the world was celebrating Israel ’s 60th birthday, the Arab and Muslim media was bemoaning 60 years of “an-nakbah”. The word means disaster, but has come to take on a definition of its own; the displacement of Palestinians from their homes.

I watched a recent interview with Salman Abu Sittah, director of the Right to Return Organization. With dozens of maps he showed that the majority of the land evacuated by the Palestinians is relatively unpopulated even today. Most Israelis live in or near northern cities, and the majority of Palestinians were from the southern part of the country. Abu Sittah claimed that the Palestinians could return to their original homes and villages with little disruption of national life.

It’s an interesting idea, but it’s not going to happen. To understand why, here’s an Idiot’s Guide to the last 60 years of another country in the region, Lebanon :

1. The French leave Beirut , but not before drawing up a constitution that guarantees political representation to all the Lebanese factions. Maronite Christians, Catholics, Shia and Sunni Muslims, and the Druze all play a part.

2. To everyone’s amazement, it works. The economy is booming and tourists flock to the Paris of the Middle East . The beaches are beautiful, the women gorgeous, and the night-clubs stay open till dawn.

3. Yasir Arafat (yes, the same Abu Umar who later received the Nobel Peace Prize) flexes his muscles one too many times in Jordan and King Hussein gives him the boot. Arafat and his militias arrive in Beirut and use it as a staging ground for their operations against Israel .

4. The Lebanese army reacts against Arafat, the Lebanese factions take sides, and the country plunges into civil war. Arafat, booted out once again, watches it all from his villas in Tunisia . I still remember seeing his black Mercedes careening through the streets of Tunis , bodyguards hanging out the windows waving their AK-47s.

5. Lebanon crawls out of its civil war. Led by smart, forward-thinking businessmen such as Rafiq Al-Harari, it begins to once again make progress.

6. But there are new players. Syria applies pressure from the north, and supports Hizballah in the south. Hizballah wants more power and influence. Al-Harari is assassinated, Hizballah instigates another war with Israel , is further emboldened to challenge the Lebanese government, and all hell breaks loose.

Substitute “Lebanese Christians” with “Israeli Jews”, and “Hizballah” with “Hamas”, and you can imagine the picture in Israel in twenty years.

Hizballah leader Hasan Nasrallah has been all over the TV screen the last few days. He has a lisp that turns his r’s into w’s, so that “al-tariq” becomes “al-tawiq”, and makes him difficult for a non-native to understand. Fortunately, his two favorite words do not contain r’s so even I can follow him. They are “difah” and “dahiyah”. “We only fight in self-defense, and we are always victims.”

Posted by: ed at May 16, 2008 4:14 AM

The Arab expansion was the most successful imperialism in world history. Masses of conquered peoples were "converted" to Islam and adopted the Arab language. The few who managed to cling to their indigenous religions also adopted the Arabic tongue. Contrast that with the much reviled European imperialism which left the native cultures largely intact.

Almost as historically successful was another Muslim imperialism, that of the Turks. The Greek, Armenian and Assyrian Christian peoples of Anatolia, lost their ancient identities and were turned into Turkish speaking Muslims.

Posted by: RBLA at May 16, 2008 9:30 AM

Old Levantine:

Get off your indigent high horse. I know very well that neither the Maronites nor Syrian Christian are Arabs- They are the remnants of the Phoenicians and other Aramic peoples . Instead of tying to educate me, a Middle Eastern Non-Muslim Pan-nationalist, try to educate the multitudes of Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian and Palestinian Christians who would swear on a stack of bibles that they are as genuinely Arab as any of the descendants of Ya'rob ibn Qahtan- Of course, through the brave and chivalrous Arab tribes of the Levant which helped their Muslim cousins to liberate the region from those evil Byzantines. Rest assured, I know that it is all BS.

Remind yourself who came up with 'Arouba BS, the Baathist cult of 'Arouba and the mythical Ghassanite genealogy. Last I checked, it was not I and it was not the Muslims- It was your own people (Leventine Christians) in an attempt to use Arab nationalism as a counter-weight to Islam- Great idea, that was!

Please write to Dr. James J. Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute, and all those Maronite founding and current members of the Arab anti-Discrimination Committee, Arab Defense League and all other such organization to tell them that they are not Arabs. Tell them to declare it from the hilltops. Tell that to the koffya-wearing university professors of Maronite descent who are usually out demonstrating on behalf of Arab and Muslim causes and all their students . Tell that to those Maronite shopkeepers and dinner owners who are Hizbollah supporters. Tell that to all those cute though clueless Maronite college girls enamored with their Muslim boyfriends that they are betraying their people. Tell all the Maronite fathers who attend their daughter's wedding to a Muslim to bow their heads in shame.

Yes, I have not met every Maronite American, but I met so many and I heard and read about many others to be confident enough of my impression of the community. It is not my own fault that every last one that I have ever made their acquittance had a hard-on for Arabness.

My god (if I still believed in one)- I would love to meet and talk to a Lebanese Christian who spits on Arabisim, but I am yet to meet such a person.

Posted by: have_mercy at May 16, 2008 2:40 PM

because we simply can't begin to think in realistic terms about such transfers, which were the norm, not the exception, throughout human history

And the same applies here in the West as well. Muslim demographics will prevail in Europe as well as in the US. Population transfer is the only humane way we may avoid a civil war in Europe.

Posted by: DP111 at May 16, 2008 6:31 PM

Uh, have_mercy, it's funny, but I know a bunch of Lebanese Maronites in the US, and not a single one considers himself Arab. I like to clown around with them and call them Phoenicians.

I do not know the empirical basis of Hugh's claim that the Maronites do not see themselves as Arab, but I am absolutely sure that the "methodology" you describe is worthless. Sorry.

Posted by: sk-Zion at May 16, 2008 10:18 PM

Where did the Phoenicians go? Did they just disappear? Are we to believe that everyone was wiped out when the Arab invaders arrived, bearing not just Islam, that was not accepted by all, and bearing the Arabic language, that also was, in Lebanon and parts of modern-day Syria, not accepted until a thousand years had passed, and then, still, not by all? In fact, the French in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries discovered how eager were the Christians in the area to learn French, as an alternative to Arabic, and a window on a greater world than that which Islam, stifling in its embrace, permitted.

Wherever you see a restaurant named "Phoenicia" you are likely to find Maronites who, in one way or another, or always knew (their families handed down that knowledge), that the imposed use of Arabic, and even the adoption of Arabic last names, did not make them Arabs. A great Christian translator of Greek texts into Arabic was Husayn ibn Ishaq. He was a Christian. But in the West we hear those Arabic-sounding names, and conclude that so and so must be 1) a Muslim and 2) an Arab. Neither is correct. When I meet someone from Lebanon whose first name is Antoine, Georges, Franck, Robert, Charles (and I did once meet Charles Malik, the greatest statesman in Lebanese history), I already know, or strongly suspect, something about them, about their stance toward Islam, just as I do when I meet an Iranian named Darius or Cyrus.

I know Maronites whose parents and grandparents came from Lebanon. Not one of them considers himself an Arab. They call themselves, very carefully, "Lebanese." They are often sympathetic to Israel. More recent arrivals vary. Those who suffered directly from the Muslims take the same view. Those who have had to placate, for years, surrounding Muslims, and who have had as well to imbibe Muslim propaganda (say, on the subject of Israel), and naturally, at some point (simply to stay sane) find they are internalizing that nonsense, arrive with a view closer to that of the "Arabs" and some of them may well think of themselves as "Arabs." There can even be differing views in families, as one has been led to believe there may be diffrences between the Zogby brothers, with one being an open shill for the Arabs and Muslims, and the other...not.

As the nature of Islam becomes more widely understood, I think Christians from the Middle East, in the free and protecting West, will be more and more alarmed at the inroads being made by cunning Muslims, and will be particularly outraged at the use to which they, those Arabic-speaking Christians, are being used by the Muslims for their own purposes (see articles at JW about this very matter), in attempts to shore up their position by hiding behind the Christians. See the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, or whatever it is called, and the clever promotion of an identity between Arabic-speaking Christians, and those who tormented them, or their ancestors, in Egypt, in Iraq, in Lebanon. There is only so much of this that Copts, Maronites, Assyrians, and others are going to take. And many of them have had it with the Muslim Arabs, and are speaking out about Islam -- and speaking out with real knowledge of what Islam, and Arab linguistic and cultural and other forms of imperialism, are all about.

Posted by: Hugh at May 16, 2008 11:49 PM

Reagan was a traitor to the Lebanese Christians, ruining Israel's glorious victory in Lebanon in 1982, taking all the fruits of the victory from it and giving them to the jihadists, expelling Israel from Beirut - all this treason to please the Muslims. The moment Israel was gone, the carnage resumed, 1,000 Christians massacred on the very first day, hundreds of villages and cities overrun, rape, butchery, murder. The much-suffered Christian city of Damour where the citizens joyously celebrated their liberation by Israel just months earlier was crucified again. Having used the Americans up as useful idiots and traitorous dhimmis, the jihadists then blew them up in a series of spectacular bombings.
The cowardly US and EUrabia media Goebbelses are traitors to the Lebanese Christians, launching an evil global hate campaign against Israel the moment it began liberating Lebanon, serving their jihadist masters of whom they are always terrified.
Bush and Cowardeezza Rice are traitors to the Lebanese Christians, imposing the UN cease-fire 2 years ago, stopping Israel's war effort in its tracks and rescuing Hezbollah, a serial mass-murderer of Americans.
Now, Hezbollah and Iran have taken over Lebanon, with the US and EUrabia cowards just standing there watching.

Ruslan Tokhchukov, EnragedSince1999.

Posted by: Enragedsince1999 at May 17, 2008 7:19 PM