The end of Lebanon dates from that day, in 1982, when Bashir Gemayel was blown up — the same day he, in a speech, first used the word “dhimmitude.” Lebanon was always the redoubt and refuge of Christians, who found in the mountainous region, the Mountain of Lebanon, Mont Liban, a place where, far from the centers of Islam, they could survive. But they didn’t reproduce enough, and the Muslims outbred them. And the Muslim Arabs known as the “Palestinians” contributed to the demographic degringolade.
However, proximity to those Christians did raise the level of the local Muslims, or at least some of them. In the case of Lebanon, it was the Sunni merchant class.
And power, which had been carefully distributed between Christians, Sunnis, and Shi’a (with the Druse also not being forgotten) according to the census of 1935, remained intelligently split. However, after World War II, slowly but surely, the French withdrew as protectors of the Maronites. The Maronites were the most self-assured and least “Arab” of the Christians. They knew that their presence in the area predated the arrival of the Arabs and of Islam, and they did not make the mistake of thinking that the linguistic and cultural imperialism of the Arabs, a natural accompaniment of the arrival of Muslims, made them into Arabs — that is, into more than “Arabic-using” Lebanese.
And then the Americans came in, in 1956, to rescue the old order, but that was it. The “Palestinian” Arabs kept multiplying, and in their villages (called, quite inaccurately, “refugee camps”), where their needs were met by UNRWA, they had time to plot and plan. They destabilized and they threatened, now the Christians here, now the Shi’a there.
Meanwhile, just as Muslims outbred non-Muslims, the Shi’a Muslims outbred not only the Christians, but also the Sunnis. The same kind of overbreeding accounts for the steady, growing Shi’ite demographic dominance over the Sunnis in Iraq. And it is they who now constitute a plurality in the country, and think they should rule the roost. Their leaders — first Fadlallah and now Nasrallah — are troglodytic, but they are troglodytes who have an Iran that, thanks to Carter and Brzezinski, was taken over by the least nationalistic (Iranian nationalism is a powerful anti-Islamic force) and most Islamic of regimes, that which now rules over the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Were the Shi’a of Iran only to seize Greater and Lesser Tunb, or to wreak havoc and overturn the Ruler (oops, King) of Bahrain, if they were only to cause trouble for Kuwait, and trouble in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, that would be a Good Thing for the Camp (as yet unrecognized) of Infidels, for it would worry, demoralize, divide, and ultimately weaken the Camp of Islamic Jihad.
And similarly, were their only victims in Lebanon other Muslims, one might not mind. But it is Lebanon as a haven for Christians that is now threatened, in the end. And none of the ruling elites in the Western world has given a thought to providing a permanent place of refuge in the Middle East itself to the more than a million Christians who have left, or will have to leave, Iraq. They could do this, for example, by moving many of them to Lebanon (and forcing the Shi’a out, by popular demand, so that they go to Iraq, among other Shi’a Arabs). Or they could move them to the “West Bank,” and force out the Muslim Arabs who represent a permanent threat to Israel. They can’t be allowed into Western countries, having been raised on a steady diet of hysteria and hate, but they could be given space in Iraq, replacing those lost Assyrians and Chaldeans. Those Assyrians and Chaldeans, if they wish to remain in the Middle East, should find their natural homes in Lebanon, or the “West Bank” within permanent Israeli protection, or possibly in Syria. But Syria could only be a haven for them if one assumes that the Alawites will begin to see the light and stop doing the Iranian bidding in order to prove that they are “real, if Shi’a, Muslims,” and continue to keep the local Muslims in check — which is the only protection the Syrian Christians now possess.
But who in the Western world now thinks of saving the Christians through such intelligent, and in another day, obvious population transfer?
It isn’t done. We prefer to stay pure, by never mentioning such things. Thus we allow millions of people to be booted out, with nowhere to go, because we simply can’t begin to think in realistic terms about such transfers, which were the norm, not the exception, throughout human history — including the history of the last century. Think of India and Pakistan in 1948 and Europe after World War II.