Outcry over Lebanon
Pastor Dale Morgan
*
Outcry over Lebanon*
August 17, 2006
International Christian Zionist Center
Shock, anger and disappointment were felt by many
inside and outside Israel – by Israel-loving Jews
and Israel-loving Christians – at the
unsatisfactory and premature outcome of Israel’s latest war.
The nation has been severely shaken, and a
process has already begun that could well lead to
a new political and military change of direction,
possibly even a change in Israel’s government.
Many people, among them Lebanese – especially
that country’s real Christians who have suffered
for years from the Hizbollah and other Muslim
extremists occupying their country – are also
deeply disappointed in the half-baked outcome of this recent war.
To give you a glimpse of the feelings and
opinions, chiefly Israeli and Lebanese, I have
listed some of the most remarkable heartfelt outcries expressed by them:
Joseph Farah writes (in WorldNetDaily, August 2006)
“When Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Liberation
Organization tried to take over the country and
make it his terrorist playground, nobody cared.
When people were dying by the thousands in the civil war, nobody cared.
When Syria had its boot on the neck of its tiny
neighbor for 25 years, nobody cared.
When Iran dispatched Hezbollah terrorists into
the country to undermine home rule by Lebanese, nobody cared.
When Muslims chased millions of Christians from
the country, tipping the balance of power, nobody cared.
But now, all eyes are on Lebanon.
Do you know why?
Because Israel has tried to clean up this
hornet's nest. Yet all we hear about is how many Lebanese are dying.
The whole world is going nuts over this "slaughter."
Does any of this make sense?
Do you think those screaming about the bloodshed
in Lebanon really give a hoot about Lebanon? If
so, where have they been for the last 30 years?
Why is Lebanon the top story in every newscast?
Why is Lebanon on the front page of every
newspaper? Don't you get the impression that the
violence there is probably worse than anywhere
else on the planet from this focus?
Clearly it is not.
And the only difference is who's doing the butt kicking in Lebanon.
As for me, an American of Lebanese and Syrian
heritage, I don't want to see a "cease-fire." I
want to see Lebanon freed of the terrorist
blight, once and for all. I want to see Lebanon
freed from domination by Iran and Syria. I want
to see Lebanon be Lebanon. I don't want to see
Lebanon suffer for another 30 years. It's time to
clean up the mess and allow this poor, little country to heal.
And that means getting rid of the disease of Hezbollah – now.
And the courageous Brigitte Gabriel, a Christian Lebanese writes:
“While the world protected the PLO withdrawing
from Lebanon in 1983 with Israel hot on their
heels, another more volatile and religiously
idealistic organization was being born:
Hezbollah, "the Party of Allah," founded by
Ayatollah Khomeini and financed by Iran. It was
Hezbollah who blew up the U.S. Marine barracks in
Lebanon in October, 1983 killing 241 Americans
and 67 French paratroopers that same day.
President Reagan ordered U.S. Multilateral Force
units to withdraw and closed the books on the
marine massacre and US involvement in Lebanon February 1984.
The civilized world, which erroneously vilified
the Christians and Israel back then and continues
to vilify Israel now, was not paying attention.
While America and the rest of the world were
concerned about the Israeli /PLO problem,
terrorist regimes in Syria and Iran fanned
Islamic radicalism in Lebanon and around the
world. Hezbollah's Shiite extremists began
multiplying like proverbial rabbits,
out-producing moderate Sunnis and Christians.
Twenty-five years later they have produced enough
people to vote themselves into 24 seats in the
Lebanese parliament. Since the Israeli pullout in
2000, Lebanon has become a terrorist base
completely run and controlled by Syria with its
puppet Lebanese President Lahood and the Hezbollah "state within a state."
The Lebanese army has less than 10,000 military
troops. Hezbollah has over 4,000 trained militia
forces and there are approximately 700 Iranian
Revolutionary Guards in Southern Lebanon and the
Beka’a Valley. So why can't the army do the job?
Because the majority of Lebanese Muslims making
up the army will split and unite along religious
lines with the Islamic forces just like what
happened in 1976 at the start of the Lebanese civil war.
It all boils down to a war of Islamic Jihad
ideology vs. Judeo Christian Westernism. Muslims,
who are now the majority of Lebanon's population,
support Hezbollah because they are part of the
Islamic Ummah-the nation. This is the taboo
subject everyone is trying to avoid. The latest
attacks on Israel have been orchestrated by Iran
and Syria driven by two different interests.
Syria considers Lebanon a part of "greater"
Syria. Young Syrian President Assad and his
Ba'athist military intelligence henchmen in
Damascus are using this latest eruption of
violence to prove to the Lebanese that they need
the Syrian presence to protect them from the
Israeli aggression and to stabilize the country.
Iran is conveniently using its Lebanese puppet
army Hezbollah, to distract the attention of
world leaders meeting at the G-8 summit in St.
Petersburg, from its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Apocalyptic Iranian President Ahmadinejad and the
ruling Mullah clerics in Tehran want to assert
hegemony in the Islamic world under the banner of
Shia Mahdist madness. Ahmadinejad wants to seal
his place as top Jihadist for Allah by make good
his promise to “wipe Israel off the map.
No matter how much the west avoids facing the
reality of Islamic extremism of the Middle East,
the west cannot hide from the fact that the same
Hamas and Hezbollah that Israel is fighting over
there, are of the same radical Islamic ideology
that has fomented carnage and death through
terrorism that America and the world are
fighting. This is the same Hezbollah that Iran is
threatening to unleash in America with suicide
bomb attacks if America tries to stop Iran from
developing nuclear weapon. They have cells in
over 10 cities in the United States. Hamas, has
the largest terrorist infrastructure on American
soil. This is what happens when you turn a blind
eye to evil for decades, hoping it will go away.
Suzy Goldy insightfully writes:
“It has been a continual downhill fall, from
their fundamentally flawed Oslo Plan to the
dances of Arafat, to giving weapons to the
Palestinians to getting out of Lebanon and
allowing Hezbollah to arm for years with 12,000
missiles, to getting out of Gaza while uprooting
and abusing peaceful Jewish Farmers and on and on
until their incompetent handling of the current war with Hezbollah.
It is unbelievable but it has taken the Israeli
Leftists and intellectuals over 55 years of wars,
terror attacks and Oslo to finally realize the
Arabs mean what they say – that they want to
destroy (D-E-S-T-R-O-Y) Israel!!! Even Amos Oz
and the “Peace Now” think-tanks finally get it!!!!
Rachel and Moshe Saperstein formerly from Neve Dekalim in Gush Katif write:
“Moshe and I have the remains of a Kassam rocket
which exploded near our home in Neve Dekalim. The
words Al Kuds were printed on its tail fins. Al
Kuds is Arabic for Jerusalem. The message is
quite clear. The war was not about Gush Katif. It
was about Jerusalem. Just as the war in the north
is not about Lebanon. It is a war to destroy
Israel. Last year the people of Israel and Jews
from abroad chose to ignore the message. They let
Gush Katif fall. Today our country is in ruins.
Last week a plot to destroy airliners from
Britain to the United States was foiled. The
message is clear. The war, of which ours is a
part, is of the east determined to destroy the
west. The west chooses to ignore the message.
Just as Gush Katif led straight to Lebanon, so
the war against Israel will lead straight to the war against the west.
While the war rages in the north, we have been
receiving signals that Syria is stockpiling huge
quantities of weapons along its border with
Israel. The weapons are deadlier and have a
longer range. Yet our prime minister still speaks
of his ‘convergence’ plan to remove 100,000 Jews
from Judea and Samaria and to give our Biblical
homeland to our enemies, bringing the heartland
of the country into the range of enemy weapons. Win or lose, the Arabs win.
Is it any wonder that we, the refugees of Gush
Katif, are still angry, hurt, bewildered and
horrified by the results of our expulsion?
Excuse me if I’m still crying. When we see the
direct results of this horrible crime of
expulsion against us now visited on the entire
people of Israel, of course I cry. When I recall
that our rabbis and political leaders worked with
the government to commit this crime, yes I cry.
When I recall that our soldiers and police chose
to carry out this crime, I cry. And today I cry
as I see innocent Israelis left without food and
water in bomb shelters. And when our young
soldiers are killed and wounded, I cry.
When we begged, pleaded and warned the Jewish
world that this is what will eventually happen if
we are expelled, we were met with indifference.
The Jews would not listen to us. Today they rush
to raise money for the refugees of the north
huddled in their shelters. Monies that will
largely disappear into organizational coffers as
did most of the funds raised for us.
To those who criticize my outcry, my “whining”,
my despair, please understand I do it for you,
the next victims of Islamic hatred. The Sudden
Jihad Syndrome shooting in Seattle will be repeated many times over.
No more prizes to our enemies! No Convergence
Plan!! At stake is not the survival of Judea and
Samaria. At stake is the survival of Israel. At
stake is the survival of our world.
And the forthright courageous journalist Ari
Shavit wrote in Ha’aretz August 13th 2006:
“A simple thing happened: We were drugged by
political correctness. The political correctness
that has come to dominate Israeli discourse and
Israeli awareness in the past generation was
totally divorced from the Israeli situation. It
did not have the tools to deal with the reality
of an existential conflict. It did not have the
tools to deal with a reality of an
inter-religious and inter-cultural conflict. That
is why it focused entirely on the Palestinian
issue. It made the baseless assumption that the
occupation is the source of evil. It assumed that
it is the occupation that is preventing peace and
causing unrest and perpetuating the instability.
On the other hand, the Israeli elites of the past
20 years have become totally divorced from
reality. The capital, the media and the academic
world of the 1990s and the first decade of the
21st century, have blinded Israel and deprived it
of its spirit. Their repeated illusions regarding
the historical reality in which the Jewish state
finds itself, caused Israel to make a
navigational error and to lose its way. Their
unending attacks, both direct and indirect, on
nationalism, on militarism and on the Zionist
narrative have eaten away from the inside at the
tree trunk of Israeli existence, and sucked away
its life force. While the general public
demonstrated sobriety, determination and energy,
the elites were a disappointment.
Instead of being constructive elites, in the past
generation the Israeli elites have become
dismantling elites. Each in its own area, each by
its own method, dealt with the deconstruction of
the Zionism enterprise. Step by step, the top
1000th percentiles abandoned the existential national effort.
They stopped doing reserve duty, they stopped
sending their sons to the fighting units. They
mocked those officers who warned about unilateral
withdrawals. They mocked those officers who
warned that the emergency warehouses were
emptying out and the enemies were becoming
stronger. And they deceived themselves and those
around them that Tel Aviv is in fact Manhattan.
Israel tried with all its soul and all its might
to be Athens. However in this place, in this era,
there is no future for an Athens without a speck
of Sparta. There is no hope for a society-of-life
that does not know how to organize itself to deal
with death. Therefore, after decades during which
the right and the left and the center took
Israeli power for granted and wastefully
exploited it, now there is no escaping the need
to place the renewed building of Israeli power at
the top of the agenda. We are returning to the
encounter with our fate; returning to what is
decreed by the reality of our lives.
And a courageous journalist in Beirut wrote:
(English – Translated from the French by Llewellyn Brown)
“The politicians, journalists and intellectuals
of Lebanon have, of late, been experiencing the
shock of their lives. They knew full well that
Hezbollah had created an independent state in our
country, a state including all the ministers and
parallel institutions, duplicating those of
Lebanon. What they did not know - and are
discovering with this war, and what has petrified
them with surprise and terror - is the extent of this phagocytosis.
In fact, our country had become an extension of
Iran, and our so-called political power also
served as a political and military cover for the
Islamists of Teheran. We suddenly discovered that
Teheran had stocked more than 12,000 missiles, of
all types and calibers, on our territory and that
they had patiently, systematically, organized a
suppletive force, with the help of the Syrians,
that took over, day after day, all the rooms in
the House of Lebanon. Just imagine it : we stock
ground-to-ground missiles, Zilzals, on our
territory and that the firing of such devices
without our knowledge, has the power to spark a
regional strategic conflict and, potentially,
bring about the annihilation of Lebanon.
Lebanon a victim? What a joke!
Before the Israeli attack, Lebanon no longer
existed; it was no more than a hologram. At
Beirut innocent citizens like myself were
forbidden access to certain areas of their own
capital. But our police, our army and our judges
were also excluded. That was the case, for
example, of Hezbollah's and the Syrians' command
zone in the Haret Hreik quarter . A square
measuring a kilometer wide, a capital within the
capital, permanently guarded by a Horla army,
possessing its own institutions, its schools, its
crèches, its tribunals, its radio, its television
and, above all_ its government. A "government"
that, alone decided, in the place of the
figureheads of the Lebanese government - in which
Hezbollah also had its ministers! - to attack a
neighboring state, with which we had no
substantial or grounded quarrel, and to plunge US
into a bloody conflict. And if attacking a
sovereign nation on its territory, assassinating
eight of its soldiers, kidnapping two others and,
simultaneously, launching missiles on nine of its
towns does not constitute a casus belli, the
latter juridical principle will seriously need revising.
Thus almost all of these cowardly politicians,
including numerous shiah leaders and religious
personalities themselves, are blessing each bomb
that falls from a Jewish F-16 turning the insult
to our sovereignty that was Haret Hreik, right in
the heart of Beirut, into a lunar landscape.
Without the Israelis, how could we have received
another chance - that we in no way deserve! - to rebuild our country?
Like the overwhelming majority of Lebanese, I
pray that no one puts an end to the Israeli
attack before it finishes shattering the
terrorists. I pray that the Hebrew soldiers will
penetrate all the hidden recesses of southern
Lebanon and will hunt out, in our stead, the vermin that has taken root
there.
I will end this all with a very serious and
alarming quote from another Arab Youseef Ibrahim on August 7th, 2006.
“For years, Israel claimed that its survival was
at stake, surrounded as it was by Arab armies. In
fact, it had already destroyed each of them, in a
matter of days. Now, however, anyone can see that
Israel is indeed facing an existential threat
call it death by a thousand paper cuts. Israel's
economy and a million of its citizens in the
north cannot survive a war of attrition. Unless
it is reinstituted with extreme ferocity,
Israel's aura of invincibility will give way to a
feeding frenzy of Jihadi sharks and the collapse
of a peacefully inclined but weak Lebanese government.
The apocalyptic scenario of an enemy within and a
Shiite militia without comes with impressive
numbers to back it up. Together with Hezbollah's
sister Lebanese Shiite militia, Amal, and 1
million Shiites in Lebanon, Iraq and Iran's
combined Shiite population of 100 million looms
large. This huge force is poised to fight foes
selected by the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, and his masters.
I am not an alarmist, just an egoist. For after
these jihadi hordes finish their work in Lebanon
and Iraq, they'll come for the rest of us:
moderate Arabs, secular Arabs, Christian Arabs,
Kurds, Armenians, Druze, and eventually the Sunni
Muslims (whom they are already cutting to pieces in Iraq).
In this "Spartacus"-like Shiite uprising, which
began with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, those
hanging on crosses all the way to the gates of
Rome will be all the non-jihadists among us. This
time around, the barbarians at the gate aren't
just coming for the Jews, but also for what is
left of Arab secularism and liberal Islam. That,
again, is why a cease-fire will not do.
If we were to affix red pins to wherever
jihadists are operating today on a map of the
Middle East, red would be the color of Lebanon,
Iraq, Iran, Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Algeria,
Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. So, once again, a cease-fire will not do.
If the mythology of Hezbollah survives the war in
Lebanon without a demonstrable humiliation or
defeat, the notion will spread that jihadists
don't need armies, just some fighters and a bit of momentum.
That momentum has spread to Al Qaeda, which is
now rallying to Hezbollah's side, as well as
Hamas; the Muslim Brotherhoods of Egypt, Jordan,
and Syria; Iran's mullahs, and all the jihadi
franchises around the world. This is why a
cease-fire will not do in the Israel-Hezbollah war.
What can one add to all these words of outrage
and of sorrow? I feel like crying like Jeremiah:
“O my soul, my soul I am pained in my very heart.
My heart makes a noise in me. I cannot hold my
peace, because You have heard, O my soul, the
sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.” Jeremiah 4:19
Only G-d Himself can save Israel out of her
present predicament! May we all fervently pray
for that to happen pleading His mercy which endures forever!
Jan Willem van der Hoeven, Director
International Christian Zionist Center