Irrationality and Duplicity
By Elias Bejjani
LCCC Media Chairman
18/4/03

I pity the people of our Near East who are oppressed by dictatorial, tribal, and radical regimes that have trampled for many long years on values, principles, human feelings, and religions alike.   May God help our Lebanese people who have been cursed by the rule of a band of mercenaries blinded by subordination to a foreign occupier and lured by greed and money to the point of becoming immune to the suffering of their own people.

These rulers have knowingly removed themselves from the harsh reality of their people who suffer from occupation, anarchy, oppression, humiliation and impoverishment. They have built themselves grand illusions based on anachronism, fundamentalism, and sick Mafia perversion. They prostituted everything while distorting the image of a civilized, peace-loving, and open-minded Lebanese people. These people are marching against the future.

These rulers want to build a dictatorship at a time when dictatorships are in extinction. They market the Stalinist Syrian regime while the Syrians themselves have had enough and are looking for a way to rid themselves of it. They want to fight Israel and liberate Jerusalem while most Arab regimes have formally recognized the Jewish State and established diplomatic relations and signed peace accords with it.

They want to wage war in the name of religion while most of the peoples of the earth have rejected that defunct notion. They wave the flag of Arabism while its most ardent leaders like Qadhafi have given up on it. They outbid everyone and every ideology past and present. They are more Palestinian than the Palestinians, more Iraqi than the Iraqis, and more Nasserist than the Egyptians. The Russians and Europeans have given up communism, but they remain attached to it. The civilized world is fighting fundamentalism and terrorism while they are still inaugurating "madrassas" for them and praising their qualities. The Iraqi people hailed the fall of the Baathist regime of Saddam, but they are still calling for "jihad" and martyrdom to bring it back. And the list goes on and on. They are like stray dogs, howling at the tail of the forward-moving caravan.

The following excerpts from recent media reports sum up the credibility and patriotism of Lebanon¹s tyrants:
1. Radio Free Lebanon news bulletin for April 10, 2003: "The National Lebanese and Palestinian conference that was held today at Hotel Alexandre in Ashrafieh issued the following recommendation: The Iraqi people is urged to organize the National Iraqi Resistance using as an example the National Lebanese and Islamic Resistance (i.e. Hizbullah), which was created with the Zionist occupation of Lebanon in 1982, so it can be the national basis for the liberation of Iraq and the solid cornerstone for the birth of true Iraqi national unity that will break the hand of Zionism through its struggle against American and British occupation and colonialism.

2. Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper of April 11, 2003: " He returned from Iraq wishing he had never gone there. He went to fight the Americans, as he said, without any monetary compensation, organizational support, or political backing, but just because he felt that he had had enough Œhumiliation¹. The Lebanese volunteer who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retribution spoke bitterly about his trip from Beirut to Baghdad. He said that the trip took him to the Qadissyah region where he met a group of approximately 300 Arab volunteers from different countries like Algeria, Sudan, Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and others? They were dispatched to army barracks after their passports were taken away from them.  B. K. said that ambiguity surrounded all of the volunteers¹ activities and that Iraqi officials isolated them. He added that the Iraqis rejected the presence of Arab volunteers among them to the point of hunting them down by sniping at them whenever they could. B. K. recalled that period by saying "the volunteers started discovering the Iraqi betrayal to them when their Iraqi guide, who was supposed to guide them to the ambush location, would run away before reaching their destination and leave them stranded and an easy target to unfire".

3. Reuters April 11, 2003: "The Syrian government called for an end to the occupation of its neighbor Iraq, while at the same time it remained silent to American accusations directed at it regarding its facilitating the escape of supporters of President Saddam Hussein. Syria also urged the international community to do all it can to stop the occupation of Iraq and help in containing the disastrous situation that resulted from that act of aggression. The Syrian communiqué stated: "During these dangerous times that are facing the Arab nation, Syria reiterates its total commitment to the territorial integrity of Iraq and the unity its people."

Here is a force of occupation that accuses others of its own sin, and here are a bunch of "visa beggars" stranded at the doors of foreign embassies attributing to others the subservience that they themselves have excelled in. They remind us of the saying by the writer Khalil Taqieddine: "They are like a whore who lectures on chastity at the brothel."

In occupied Lebanon, acts of delusion, duplicity, deceit, and base subservience have surpassed all limits to the point of insulting people¹s intelligence. There is no shame left, and in times like these all bets are off and anything is possible. In occupied Lebanon, the world has become topsy-turvy. The light at the end of the tunnel must truly be near!

N.B: Translated by: Nabil Khoury, and edited by Dr. Joseph Hitti