Thread by @skedeschi

🧵 Lebanon - another case study of the marriage between "the left" and Islamic takeovers.

I'm half Lebanese. And while a thread on the full history would go on for hours, I find this particular part very interesting...

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Like the whole area, Lebanon was colonised multiple times over and Islam swept over the country, and like everywhere else, the Christians, Jews and other minorities were made dhimmi. So the story of Arab imperialism is repeated.

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But unusually, there was much resistance to forced conversion so the Christian population rather uniquely remained a majority. The eventual move to a Muslim majority occurred for many reasons.

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Firstly, there was was a great deal of emigration of the non Muslim populations, who moved to South America and other places. Secondly the Muslim birth rate was much higher. And thirdly, there was war and inward Muslim migration.

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After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Lebanon and Syria came became French colonies: one country with a unified command. But by 1944 the decolonization era had begun and the French were preparing to leave the country.

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Similarly to the British mandate area of Palestine, the French Mandate of Syria was divided into two independent countries with Lebanon as the Christian majority country and Syria as the Muslim majority country. Lebanon was a democracy while Syria was a dictatorship.

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And as soon as Lebanon became independent, the neighboring Islamic countries set about a fairly long project to make Lebanon an Islamic country. And that process took just a few decades.

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Palestinians flooded in with three major waves - firstly a lot after the 1948 Arab Israeli War, then again with the 1967 Arab Israeli war and finally with the expulsion of about 400k Palestinians from Jordan (after they tried a coup).

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There was a lot of fighting - including a civil war which resulted in 150k dead civilians and many key Christians expelled. By this time, Iran was already funding militia groups, as was Syria.

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Jordan and Syria pushed the refugees or disenfranchised of their Muslim populations towards Lebanon, the only non-Muslim majority country in the region except Israel, changing its delicate demography. 

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The Palestinian militias forked a base on the southern border and used this to attack Israel, which led to a war and was followed with a relatively brief partial occupation by Israel, who as usual didn't want to be attacked.

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It became a pretty long term mess and I've skipped out 99% of the story, but my point is that something very interesting happened which I think mirrors what occurred in Iran and also mirrors what goes on in the world today with Israel.

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The terrorists, who were working to simultaneously overthrow multicultural democracies in both Lebanon AND Israel to replace them with Islamic clerical rule, figured out what their angle would be: leftism.

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I think that occurred partially because Russia was supporting Iran and its mission because it wanted to destroy the US and Europe, or destroy freedom entirely (this was, and probably still is 'the cold War')

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But also, the terrorists latched on to the idea that in a world that had just recovered from a World War started by Nazi fascists, that the world would lap up anything and anyone going by the tag ‘leftist’. This is exactly what happened.

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Terrorist organisations (Shia & Sunni) encouraged Muslims to infiltrate key government institutions and start an agitation to take control but under the label of ‘Left’. Foot soldiers of Islamic terrorists in Lebanon became ‘leftist’, in name only.

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What I mean is - there is ostensibly fuck all "left-wing" about Islamic clerical rule: not in Lebanon, not in Iran and certainly not in Palestine either, and these groups represented absolutely NO left-wing values of any kind.

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Yet they successfully aligned with the left and spun a story that the world bought hook, line and sinker and by default, the hapless majority of Christians became ‘rightists’, for no reason either.

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Global media demonised the Christian ‘majority’ of Lebanon, calling them fascists who were usurping the rights of the Muslim leftist minority. It didn't matter that it was actually a Christian majority country, the die was kind of set.

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Muslims were depicted in terms designed to generate global sympathy, casting themselves as an opressed minority when the truth was that Lebanon had a pretty small pop of Christians and other minorities, surrounded by an ocean of 50 Islamic countries with millions of Muslims

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So a narrative developed of ‘rightist’ Christian ‘majority’ portrayed as the ‘oppressor’ against a rapidly increasing population of ‘leftist’ ‘oppressed’ Muslims. And so one by one, first western Beirut, then Sidon, then Tyre. 

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Left-wing historians spin a narrative on the ensuing Civil War saying that it is the Christians who started it, but the truth is that Muslim attacks on Christians had become so frequent that the Christians had no option but to defend what was left. 

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The Christians didn't do well: they were isolated militarily, geographically, and ideologically with the world media portraying them as aggressors, whereas the Muslims were surrounded with allies only too willing to provide them with arms and support.

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So by the time it was over, Lebanon was a Muslim majority country. A lot of Christians and other minorities left, and continue to leave and I imagine unless something changes those populations will be wiped out in time.

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I am not sure why the global left is so willing to align with Islamic terrorists, who are ostensibly far-right religious facists and murderers who defy every Liberal or left-wing principle, but this strategy has been effective multiple times.

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Russia is of course continually engaged in silent warfare to undermine the west, and the western left are themselves inclined to be in the thrall of (knowingly or unwittingly) with Russian propaganda.

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We see know the brightest youth from Harvard or our top organisations completely sucked into this idea of a vast army of Iran backed Islamic fundamentalists cast as the allies of the left seeking "freedom" of some kind.

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Those with a brain know the only "freedom" they want is freedom to kill, take, opress and control everyone and everything in the name of their religious extremist ideology under which nobody is ever free.

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Yet many are still deeply indoctrinated with the anti-west PR campaign that tells them a minority, indigenous,liberal and tiny community are somehow "opressing" the terrorists who attack them daily and have vowed their annihilation. Wake up world.

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@GhostOfLalime This one of quite funny! Referring to Assads forces - who've been funding the coup, agitating and firing artillery from the golan heights as "peacekeepers"

nytimes.com/1976/11/16/arc…

@GhostOfLalime There's also heaps of interesting minor media that's obvious propaganda. For example MERIP was founded in 1971 by "activists for peace and social justice to bring to the U.S. public critical analysis of Middle Eastern political economy and US policy toward the region".

@GhostOfLalime They published an award-winning magazine, Middle East Report, that was nothing short of Iranian propaganda tripe. Full of articles calling Christian Lebanese "facists" - which they obviously weren't. This is an example of an article marrying left-wing students with PLO!