Who Lost Syria? The Hezbollah Angle

Hezbollah fighters

2,229 words

Arabic version here

“The real failures [in Vietnam] were made at the policy level. We were fighting on the wrong side.”
— Merrill McPeak, USAF

“No matter what we do, the goyim always find fault with us.”
— Aaron Rubashkin

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to “crush the head of the snake” that was the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was headquartered in Beirut at the time. The Israelis imagined that they only had to throw the PLO out of Beirut and they’d have “forty years of peace.” The head-of-a-snake analogy coined by Jewish soundbite creators emphasizes this Jewish lack of understanding concerning why the people who they are around always eventually resist them. The very reason for the PLO’s existence, as well as for Lebanese resistance to Israel in the first place, was as a reaction to Jewish and Israeli behavior. Ultimately, Israel’s invasion didn’t create peace, instead causing the war to expand and drag on.

Hezbollah is a good organization for white advocates to examine. It is an identitarian movement of sorts, based on a Lebanese, Shi’a Muslim, Arab ethno-religious core. In a little more than two decades, the movement went from a shadowy group of terrorists carrying out suicide bombings and kidnappings to a serious military force that drove the Israelis out of Lebanon by 2000, and inflicted another defeat on Israel in the summer of 2006. Hezbollah has produced a serious body of intellectual and metapolitcal work, and it broadcasts its perspective on its Al-Manar media platform. It also offers social services and fields representatives in the Lebanese parliament.

Hezbollah has also successfully partnered with foreign governments, including Syria and Iran, and it has effectively been an ally of the United States in the fight against ISIS. Hezbollah’s remarkable success has caused pro-Zionists in the United States and Israel to carry out reckless operations. One day, the United States will not be so cozy with Israel, and when that day comes, knowing what makes groups like Hezbollah tick will be greatly beneficial.

A Look Back to When Syria was a Friend: The Yankee Arabists

America, too, has suffered from the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. The Reagan administration deployed Marines to Lebanon – a move, one could cynically say, that was designed to give Israel a victory over the PLO that they were otherwise unable to achieve on their own. This deployment[1] turned into a bloodbath, as 241 American troops as well as 58 French soldiers would be killed in suicide bombings by a group called Islamic Jihad – but which many analysts believe was really the nascent Hezbollah. And indeed, America lost Syria and Lebanon because of its unconditional support for Israel.

And yet there was a time when it would have been unthinkable for a Syrian or a Lebanese to kill Americans. From the nineteenth century until the late 1940s, Americans had very good relations with the region’s nations. Those Americans who lived and worked in Syria and Lebanon were often upper-class Yankees from the American Northeast who tended to be Congregationalists or some other form of Low Church Protestants. Such men founded the Syrian Protestant College, which later became the prestigious American University in Beirut.

After the First World War, as the victorious powers met to carve up the colonies of their defeated rivals, one such Yankee, Howard Bliss, the second President of the Syrian Protestant College, said:

My plea before this body on behalf of the people of Syria is this: that an Inter-Allied or a Neutral Commission, or a Mixed Commission, be sent at once to Syria in order to give an opportunity to the people of Syria – including the Lebanon – to express in a perfectly untrammeled way their political wishes and aspirations via: as to what form of government they desire . . .

By the end of the Second World War, the Jewish-controlled media in the United States worked to shut down voices such as Howard Bliss’. Protestant missionaries became “racists and anti-Semites” who were “tired,” had “old blood,” and so on. This battle was also waged within the US State Department. That organization was filled with those who would come to be called “Arabists,” a term coined by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 1946-47.[2] Often, Arabists in the US State Department came from the large American Protestant missionary community in Syria or Lebanon, and many had been born and raised in Beirut. They were all opposed to Zionism, but were not able to stop President Truman from recognizing the new Israeli government in 1948.

The Arabists were never entirely driven out of the State Department, but they were extremely sidelined. Their exclusion helped to give the American establishment a warped perspective on the Middle East. Instead of a nuanced view of Arabs and the Islamic world, only the neoconservative view was presented. And even today, those pro-Palestinian groups which have no history of violence against Americans or other whites are routinely called “Islamists” in Israel’s English-language news reports. The term Islamist is an unhelpful appellation for the violent elements in the Islamic world.

Lebanon after the Nakba (النكبة)

The peoples of Syria and Lebanon were colonized by the French, but French rule was nowhere near as terrible as the Zionist cancer injected in Palestine turned out to be. When the Palestinians were robbed of their land and homes, they went elsewhere. One such place was Lebanon. There, they organized against Israel, but in doing so they helped to trigger Lebanon’s Civil War. In Lebanon, Palestinians pushed the locals around, and massacred Lebanese Christian villagers in 1976.

The Palestinians’ presence was so disruptive because both Syria and Lebanon, and Lebanon in particular, are inherently unstable nations due to the extreme sectarian differences among their communities. Additionally, there was no longstanding native military tradition in the region, as compared to, for example, Prussia or the American South, since for centuries they had been defended by the Ottoman Empire, which made use of European Janissaries until the early nineteenth century, and then mostly ethnic Turks thereafter. One self-organized Shi’a revolt was put down by the Ottomans in the late eighteenth century. Thus, when Israel was founded, the neighboring Arabs had less training, military skill, equipment, and organizational abilities than the Western-backed Zionists. As a result, they were trounced in a series of wars beginning in 1948. Thus, when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, most older Lebanese felt that Israel was unbeatable.

Operation Peace for Galilee & Hezbollah

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 appeared at first to be a success. Apart from one group of Palestinians who fought to the death in an old Crusader castle, Arab resistance in southern Lebanon mostly melted away. That situation changed, however, when the Israelis besieged Beirut. The Israelis ended up needed an intervention by United Nations “Peacekeepers” to achieve their aim of removing the PLO. And in the end, the PLO came out of the invasion looking good. They’d held off the Israelis for seven weeks, while the Israelis blew Beirut to pieces and created new enemies with each bomb they dropped. At the same time, Hezbollah’s founders began to organize.

The organizers were able to work within a revived Shi’a metapolitical framework. One of the great proponents of a new interpretation of Shi’a Islam, termed “dynamic Islam,” was Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. His ministry began in the early 1960s and influenced Hezbollah leader Imad Fayez Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh would go on to develop a new tactic that would later prove to be a big headache for Israel and its allies: the suicide bomber. The first such attack was carried out against the Israeli Defense Force’s headquarters in Tyre on November 11, 1982. For all its faults, organized religion has a unique ability to bind a community together, and in warfare, these binds can prove to be potent.

From the Israeli perspective, their occupation of south Lebanon became a quagmire. Indeed, it developed in a remarkably similar way to how the Iraq War later played out for the United States between 2003 and 2007. Islamist terrorists attacked key allies of the occupier, causing them to withdraw: the French and Americans were attacked in Beirut in 1983, while in Iraq, the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was bombed in 2003, and train stations in Madrid were bombed in 2004 in retaliation for Spanish involvement in the war, causing the UN and Spain to withdraw from the country.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah began using improvised explosive devices along roads or in other places where Israeli troops congregated. As the casualties mounted, the Israeli public soured on the war. There was a thriving draft-dodger movement during the south Lebanon occupation among young Israelis. The Israelis finally withdrew in 2000, after eighteen years of war. Hezbollah’s guerrilla tactics, community organizing, and international networking won the day. They were the first Arab organization that succeeded in driving the Israelis out of a part of the Arab lands.

What happened next, however, was truly extraordinary. In 2006, a Hezbollah kidnapping operation against IDF troops triggered a massive Israeli response. They again invaded south Lebanon with the intention of wiping out Hezbollah once and for all, but things didn’t go as planned, and they didn’t come out of the war looking good. Hezbollah had built an extensive network of tunnels and laid fiber optic cables underground for secure communications. Using these, Hezbollah fighters destroyed a large number of Israeli tanks by “swarming” them with volley-fired rocket-propelled grenades and other anti-tank weapons. They also used recoilless rifle fire to destroy a tank’s reactive armor in order to make it vulnerable to a final kill shot. Hezbollah likewise used their rockets to great effect against the populations of Galilee and other Israeli cities. Peace did not come to Galilee; the Israelis had misread the situation, and instead of a decisive victory, they had created a tough, Jew-wise, and media-savvy enemy. As Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said, Hezbollah, had “creat[ed] a situation in which the enemy [i.e. Israel] is subject to our conditions.”[3]

Today, the Israelis live in fear of Hezbollah and the southern Lebanese – a fear that is probably greatly exaggerated from the reality. For example, Colonel (ret.) Dr. Jacques Neriah said on Israeli TV that “[e]very second house [in southern Lebanon] is an outpost of Hezbollah, with missiles inside it.” This is extremely unlikely. Nevertheless, Israel has not attacked southern Lebanon since 2006, which is unusual. Israel attacks the Palestinians often, and with little provocation, but a confrontation with Hezbollah is too risky for them. Thus, it is quite possible that America’s idiotic involvement in the Syrian Civil War is in part driven by the Jews’ blind fear of Hezbollah.

Before proceeding further, I must state up front that there is no “smoking gun” to prove that American involvement in the Syrian Civil War was carried out for Israel’s sake, nor is there definitive proof that Israel or the Gulf Arabs supported ISIS (yet). But there are certainly indicators that the Syrian Civil War was exacerbated because of Israel’s fear of Hezbollah. Consider:

• Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s leaked e-mail stating that destroying Syria’s legitimate government was good for Israel. Hillary is a known pro-Zionist, and it has been rumored for decades that she’ll do anything for the right price.
• ISIS had access to top-grade military weapons such as drones, that require operators with significant training. Furthermore, ISIS never attacked Israel, but instead focused on attacking Shi’a Muslims and the Syrian government.
• ISIS and the “Free Syrian Army” were both attempting to sever the “Shi’a Crescent” which extends from Iran, across Syria, and into Iraq and southern Lebanon. Syria was a target for that reason – not because of “global banks,” “oil pipelines,” or anything else.
• The entire situation is not unlike other disastrous Jewish political adventures, where they create adversaries for their foes who then turn against them, thus going wrong in a predictable way. Jewish golems such as ISIS were probably part of that pattern. Additionally, if your existence and livelihood is derived from what amounts to stealing from others – such as Palestinians and the US taxpayer – there will always be problems.

I don’t wish to beguile the reader with the idea that Hezbollah represents some sort of Traditionalist, Evolian, or utopian organization. The Shi’a are a Third World people, but are closer to Europeans than many others. While researching this article, I was struck by how similar Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s rallies are to the large Evangelical Protestant meetings that I’ve attended. Ultimately, it is essential for white advocates to understand contemporary history than to endlessly discuss what Stonewall Jackson or Hitler should or should not have done.

Notes

[1] The story of the deployment itself is more complex than that of most other deployments. US Marines were sent to Lebanon, were pulled out, and then returned. Also, some Marines were sent to Lebanon, were deployed in the invasion of Grenada in October 1983, and then returned to Lebanon afterwards. But this goes beyond the scope of this article.

[2] According to The New York Times in 1971, Arabists “tend to be very low profile about their Arabic expertise. ‘I was an enthusiastic specialist in my early years,’ Rodger Davies says. ‘Now I’m more of a generalist.’ And he feels that even the term Arabist is slightly polemical: ‘It originated with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency back in 1946 and 1947. Now it’s used whenever there’s a crisis to try to finger us, to peg us as pro‐Arab in order to discredit our views.’”

[3] Nicholas Blanford, Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel (New York: Random House, 2011), p. 102.