Hezbollah dubbed “enemy of Arabs and Muslims”

More than two-thirds of participants in a four-day online survey that ended yesterday believe Hezbollah, Iran’s cat’s-paw in Lebanon, is the new adversary of Arabs and Muslims.

The one-question survey by Aljazeera.net asked: “Do you think Hezbollah has turned out to be an enemy of Arabs and Muslims?”

A total of 453,943 respondents (or 72.8%) said yes, compared to 169,605 (or 27.2%) who said no.

Almost half of the respondents (49.18%) were from Saudi Arabia. The others were from Lebanon, Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Qatar, Oman, Yemen, Turkey, Jordan, the UAE, Palestine, Morocco, the UK, Germany, France, the U.S., Canada and Australia.

One-question surveys are event driven, allowing respondents to give an immediate response with just one click to an important event.

In this case, the survey that closed yesterday got underway last Saturday, when Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, whose militiamen are openly fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s army, told supporters Assad’s war “is ours, and I promise you victory.”

In his televised weekend address to Hezbollah loyalists in Mashghara, Nasrallah said his party would not let Assad fall to the U.S., Israel and the (Sunni) Takfiris.

He said, “Syria is the linchpin and backbone of the Resistance” and his party “cannot stand, arms folded, while its back is broken.”

To underscore the Syrian regime’s military alliance with Hezbollah, Assad’s office says he is set to give an interview to Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV channel tomorrow, Thursday.

The interview would be broadcast simultaneously on Syria's official television channels at 9 p.m. local time (18:00 GMT), the president's office announced on its Facebook page.

Today, member states of the UN Human Rights Council will consider a resolution condemning the presence of foreign combatants in Qusayr, as fighting over the strategic town in Homs province intensifies.

The draft resolution, referring to Hezbollah, condemns the presence of foreign fighters siding with the government as a serious threat to regional security.

It demands access for United Nations and other humanitarian agencies to all civilians affected by the conflict by authorizing cross-border delivery of humanitarian aid as an urgent priority.

Hezbollah seems to be shrugging off the international outcry over its involvement in the Syria war and a 24-hour ultimatum set yesterday by General Salim Idriss, chief of staff of the Free Syrian Army, to end it.

Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP news agency today Hezbollah has sent extra fighters to link up with Syrian elite Republican Guards troops in the assault on the rebel stronghold of Qusayr.




“The preparations indicate they are gearing for a major offensive” on neighborhoods in the north and west of the town the rebels have been holding for a year, he said.



“Despite the intense bombardment, the rebels are resisting fiercely,” Abdul Rahman said.



He said Sunni militiamen from Lebanon had joined the battle on the side of the Syrian opposition fighters.

“The fighting is becoming more and more sectarian (Shiite vs. Sunni) in character,” he added.



Strategically placed close to Syria’s border with Lebanon, Qusayr is home to 25,000 people, most of them Sunnis.

Syria’s regime is dominated by Alawite Shiites, while the majority of the population is Sunni.



Control of Qusayr is essential for the rebels as it is their principal transit point for weapons and fighters from across the border in Lebanon.



It is also strategic for the regime because it is situated on the road linking Damascus with its coastal heartland.

The Middle East is falling apart at the seams

Painting by Syrian artist Wissam Al Jazairy

Ghassan Charbel, editor-in-chief of al-Hayat newspaper, penned this think piece in Arabic for today’s edition

Times are hard for the Middle East. It has to find a recipe for coexistence, drawing in the Muslims, Jews and Christians, which is not easy.

It has to search for a coexistence formula binding the Turks, Persians, Kurds, Arabs and others and a coexistence blueprint joining ethnicities, nationalities, religions and sects. This is not simple either.

Long lulls are deceptive. They feign that old conflicts have been assigned to the history books. This is not true -- any sudden twist is liable to rekindle old feuds streaming with blood.

Nation-states that were configured in the aftermath of World War One either curbed these conflicts or gave them other names. Once these nation-states’ repressive machines crack, the old demons resurface.

We’re clearly on the way to a ghastly, rather than a new, Middle East – one where the coexistence chapter drawing together its various components ends, heralding the reconfiguration of nation-states and maps.

We are unmistakably facing something more cataclysmic than the fall of the Berlin Wall or the breakup of Yugoslavia.

We are facing a Nakba worse than the 1948 Nakba of the Palestinian people, one marking the demise of coexistence.

We are into violent cross-border designs and aspirations tackling maps like an inmate treats his prison walls.

Don’t accuse me of being a prophet of doom. The pointers are everywhere in the print and audiovisual media, supported by rivers of corpses and declarations promising endless wars.

A suicide attacked a Husseiniya (Shiite house of worship) in Kirkuk, and the response was a spectacular offensive against Sunni mosques in or near Baghdad.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki blamed remnants of the “Baath” and “sectarian hatred.” His adversaries accused him of being a “sectarian bigot.”

Protesters in al-Anbar province treat the Iraqi army as a “Shiite militia” or the cover for one.

The Sunnite Iraqi says he won’t accept to be a second-class citizen, which is what the Shiite Iraqi was saying in decades past.

We’ve moved from the Arab-Kurd crisis to a Sunni-Shiite-Arab-Kurd predicament. It’s as if the whole Middle East has turned into the knotty problem of the disputed Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

Both sides in the Syria war are keen to deny its sectarian character. One side paints it as a war on inflowing terrorists and the opposite side depicts it as a revolt against a dictatorship.

So how do we explain the presence of Chechen fighters in Idlib, the arrival of Libyans to support their Sunni brethren or a funeral for a young Iraqi in Basra killed defending the Shiite shrine of Sayyeda Zeinab in Damascus?

Also, how do we explain the funeral for a young Sunni in the North Lebanese port city of Tripoli killed trying to infiltrate into Syria and the funeral for a Hezbollah member felled while on “jihadist duties” there?

Why does the Sunni Lebanese support the Syrian revolution and the Shiite Lebanese hinder it?

Why didn’t Alawites flee before rebels entered their villages or Sunnis take to their heels before government and allied forces stormed their townships?

Do the slogans of “objection” and “resistance” justify the military involvement of Iran and its allies in the Syria war? The counter-meddlers could be asked the same question.

What you hear in Lebanon, which used to be a model of and a proving ground for coexistence, is worrisome and unnerving.

Yesterday, I heard a prominent member of Gen. Michel Aoun’s “Free Patriotic Movement” accuse other Christians of treason. His charge sheet says the other Christians agreed to an electoral law allowing Muslims to have a weighty say in the election of 10 Christian legislators out of the 64 allotted to Christians in parliament.

A retreat to self-made islands won’t solve either Lebanon’s problems or the problem of its minorities. The biggest danger for Lebanon now is the growing number of risk-takers walking on thin ice.

Clearly, we are toughing out the eclipse of coexistence.

Our nation-states, our societies and our armies are breaking up.

The inviolability of international borders has evaporated. We’re in the midst of a regional civil war caused by a stream of cross-border projects. I am afraid we’re on the way to a period awash with statelets, militias, cemeteries and “cleansed regions.”

Film backlash is a Syrian revolution spoiler

Reuters photo of a young Syrian refugee on the Turkish-Syrian border

Syria’s allies -- chiefly Iran and its Lebanese offshoot Hezbollah -- are still whipping up a global Muslim outcry against the U.S.-made amateur film insulting Islam.

The obscure movie that ridicules Prophet Muhammad (see No one’s innocent in the film ‘Innocence of Muslims’) has no Syria links. But the September 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and the resulting outbreak of anti-American protests in the Muslim world shored up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s political survival prospects.

Western media have since been parroting the Assad line that he is mostly facing al-Qaeda and Jihadists. The implication is they are staunchly anti-West in general and anti-American in particular.

K.P. Nayar, filing from Washington this week for Calcutta’s Telegraph, reports: “At a hurriedly arranged media teleconference by the U.S. State Department which wanted to put across its version of the events in Benghazi, the very first question was: ‘…I know Secretary (Hillary) Clinton said that this would not affect how the U.S. dealt with the Libyans, and that you would move forward. But certainly, it must make you start to think about any precipitous rush to support groups in any other countries such as Syria or the like because of the uncertainty of who is on the ground.’

“Three State Department officials participated in the teleconference, the ground rules for which prohibited reporters from identifying them. None of the three officials came forward to answer that question because the anti-U.S. backlash in Libya has added a new dimension to what will happen in Syria now.”

John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who is tipped to be the next secretary of state if Barack Obama is reelected in November, said the violence in Libya “will certainly give pause, or should give pause, to people who are pressing for a kind of involvement (in Syria)...”

All this is music to the ears of Russia.

In a recent Web article quoted by Russia Today, the chair of the Russian parliamentary committee for foreign affairs, Aleksey Pushkov, wrote that such a scenario would be almost certain to take place if Assad were ousted: “Instead of the secular rational state we had in Syria under Assad, where all ethnic and religious groups lived in peace and accord, we will get a second Iraq.”

The Russian politician went on to argue that Russia had repeatedly warned Western states, who are blinded by “the narrowness of their minds” and political calculations, and are incapable of heeding such warnings.

There are no guarantees that whoever replaced Assad would not immediately turn their guns against the United States, even though Washington is actively aiding rebel forces, Pushkov said. He cited the current situation in Libya as an example, claiming Libyans showed no gratitude for America’s role in the overthrow of the Muammar Gaddafi regime.

Alarabiya TV news channel supremo Abdel Rahman al-Rashed notes today that Russia is clapping with glee after the Benghazi attack let out of the bottle “the genie of al-Qaeda in Libya, jihadists in Sinai and Salafists in Tunisia.” But he hopes press reports of Obama consequently reappraising U.S. policy vis-à-vis the Syrian revolution are unfounded.

In his think piece for the leading Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, Rashed writes, “It’s obviously difficult for me to explain briefly the importance of winning the great powers’ support for the Syrian people and their revolution – actually, for any revolution. Without great powers’ support, Syrian revolutionary organizations could be branded terrorist. They could be banned in Turkey and Jordan. It would be impossible for them to raise funds and arms in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In practice, they would end up like the armed Kurdish movements that have existed for decades, but remain outlawed and under siege.”

Rashed continues:

I concede, the Syrian revolution has no fewer problems than Libya’s. Future risks after regime change in Syria can’t be overlooked. But it would be ill-considered if Western states looked at Syria through the prism of their fears of radical fundamentalism.

Syria is not Egypt and Assad is not Hosni Mubarak. Failure of the Syrian revolution is more hazardous than its success because armed Islamist radicals would mushroom since they feed on government failures and chaos. Overpowered and demoralized insurgents would rally around them.

In a year of armed conflict, the opposition has broken the back of the regime and its institutions.

To re-establish his authority, Assad would have to come down harder on citizens, the neighboring countries and Western interests. Western states would ultimately have to revisit Syria and take him on. We had a precedent in Iraq, where allies broke the Saddam regime’s back in the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait then left Saddam wounded but standing. The allies had to return in 2003 to finish him off. The outcome is the chaos we have today as we watch the Iraqi regime being eaten alive by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Furthermore, bringing down Assad’s regime is more important for Syria, the region and most of the world than toppling Saddam or Gaddafi.

The Syrian regime is Iran’s cat’s-paw in the Arab region. It has been sponsoring terrorist groups in regional and Western states for 40 years.

There is abounding evidence linking al-Qaeda to both the Syrian and Iranian regimes. The former was an accomplice in most terrorist attacks mounted in Iraq over the past eight years. And I suspect it might eventually emerge that Assad’s regime, or its allies, orchestrated the attack by al-Qaeda and the like on the American consulate in Benghazi – especially that the outrage was timed to coincide with 9/11 in order to intimidate the U.S.

Lastly, I don’t know of any cause paralleling Palestine’s over the past half-century other than Syria’s. The scope and intensity of sympathy in the Arab street for the Syrian people is immeasurable because of the untold crimes committed against them.

This is what turned most Arabs against Iran and Russia. Arabs are also angry that the West continues to sit on the fence.

Dead duck in the Arab League house

English adaptation of today’s think piece by political analyst Sarkis Naoum for Lebanon’s an-Nahar 

When Qatar’s emir told U.S. broadcaster CBS Arab troops should be deployed to Syria to stop the killing there, many Lebanese, Syrians and Arabs questioned the credibility of his suggestion.

They wondered if he meant Arab military intervention to end the violence? If so, which violence? Violence by Assad’s regime against his opponents who, in the opinion of Qatar, the GCC, most Arab states and the West, make up most people in Syria, or violence by what the regime calls gangs of “terrorists and saboteurs,” or violence by the two sides?

Lebanese, Syrians and Arabs wonder if Arab states would want to deploy troops to Syria or can do so under their present circumstances. They also wonder if the Arab states would be agreeable to the move at the Arab League conference table or in two-sided consultations.

The Lebanese, the Syrians and most Arabs wonder if Syria’s Assad clan would accept Arab troops to either help it or help the rebels.

The regime’s rejection of any form of military intervention in its can lead to one of two consequences. Either the Arabs would refrain from intervening or intervene by force. The question here is if the Arab states are collectively or individually prepared, motivated or equipped for a military showdown with the regime. The answer is no.

Another question: Do the Arab countries have what it takes to intervene militarily? The answer is also negative.

Qatar, for instance, sent hundreds of troops to Libya but does not have thousands more to send to Syria.

Likewise Saudi Arabia, because: one, its long-standing policy is to shun military adventures and not to resort to force except when its security is challenged internally or externally or both at the same time. Two, it is worried about the threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran and looking to thwart that danger. Three, it is aware that security is vulnerable in its volatile Eastern Province where some Shiites there can be swayed by Iran.

The remaining four GCC partners simply lack the muscle.

Egypt, the Arab world’s military heavyweight, is busy with itself. It will remain so for a long time. After its disastrous military intervention in the Yemen war in the early 1960s, Egypt opted for nonmilitary involvement in Arab affairs. In 1976, for example, it refused to join the league’s Arab Deterrent Force (ADF) for Lebanon.

In turn, the Arab Maghreb countries are immersed in their own internal troubles. So are Sudan and Jordan, though the later is adept at active intervention.

To sum up, most Arab countries want to get rid of the Syrian regime but lack the needed capacity and power. That’s why they count on world powers, which so far refuse to use force to bring about regime change in Syria.

Only two countries -- alas both nonArab -- have the clout for change in Syria. They happen to represent the two main branches of Islam. Their military intervention could thus be palatable to Syrians and Arabs. But their visions, plans and objectives are at cross-purposes. Turkey backs Syria’s rebels while Iran stands by the regime. They won’t make up before Iran either jumps to bed, or goes to war, with America. Syria in the meantime will sink deeper in blood.