Lebanon, Iran, and the Forgotten Plight of the Shia “Infidel”

As a badly battered Middle East hangs off the edge of a cliff by a string with a temporary ceasefire between the United States and Iran, peace or anything remotely resembling it looks even less likely for Southern Lebanon than it does for the rest of that treacherous map drawn by dead British arseholes. Even if Israel were the kind of creature that could be trusted to respect a ceasefire with anyone, much of the damage is already done.

Long before the latest peacetime artillery pogrom, the IDF had already spent the better part of a month attempting to empty out every square inch of the region south of the Litani River with the same kind of scorched earth campaign they used to cleanse Gaza before obliterating every bridge crossing said Litani River. 600,000 people have been herded north to join another 600,000 Lebanese citizens in being internally displaced by Zionist terrorism.

Israel has made their intentions for this slice of the Levant sickeningly clear. They have already publicly abandoned their mythic crusade to disarm Hezbollah in favor of focusing exclusively on the blatantly illegal goal of simply annexing another chunk of the Holy Land and declaring it a “buffer zone.” They aren’t the least bit shy about just what they are attempting to “buffer” either.

Israel has released official statements reassuring the region’s Christian and Druze populations that they will be allowed to return home to Israeli-occupied rubble, but have also harshly warned these populations against so much as even sheltering any member of that region’s Shiite majority, who have very pointedly not been welcomed to return.

There is a word for this, and it starts with a ‘G,’ but even the most progressive First World observers don’t seem to want to use it. This seems particularly strange considering how many westerners have finally broken the taboo of accusing Israel of committing genocide in Palestine, but the word feels pretty damn appropriate here too.

Israel has openly declared war on Lebanon’s population of Shia Muslims, successfully removing many of them from the region of that nation that has long been their stronghold and instructing them in no uncertain terms never to come back, but still most westerners continue to avoid using the G-word here and I do believe that the reason why tells us a great deal about the violent current of First World depravity informing the larger regional war that has grown to engulf the entirety of the Middle East.

In a word, it all comes down to Shiaphobia.

Shia Muslims have long found themselves the victims of rampant and frequently brutal discrimination across the Muslim world, going all the way back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad. A minority among an already besieged faithful, Shiites provoked the wrath of the Umayyads with their critique of what they saw as the unjust power of the Caliphs and have never been forgiven for this rebellious trespass against theological conformity.

All other theocratic differences aside, it appears to be this population’s willingness to confront the corruption of the majority that has defined their plight above all else, a plight which has not only seen eleven of the twelve Shia Imams murdered at the hands of a variety of despotic autocrats, but has also led to the construction and proliferation of entire extremist Sunni sects like the Wahabi and the Salafi who are largely defined by their advocacy for genocide against all infidels, with the Shia serving the role of the original transgressors.

We have seen this play out in one horror show after another across the Muslim world, whether it be the systematic displacement of over 50% of Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Shia Hazara community or the glorified Sunni apartheid state of Bahrain, which has long shackled that oil-rich nation’s slim Shia majority with the status of second-class citizens.

More often than not, it has been Western imperialists fueling the bigotry, too, targeting Shia communities for their inability to capitulate and conform to our pseudo-Islamic Wahhabi quislings and generally using them as convenient scapegoats to keep the Sunni majority distracted while we rob them blind, too.

In many ways, for better or worse, Iran’s consistently defiant Islamic Republic is the natural result of the systemic plight of the Shia. After centuries of being raped and pillaged by one corrupt caliphate after another, the Twelvers formed a caliphate of their own, defined not only by their spiritual resistance to the West and its proxies but their willingness to put their money where their mouth is and support Shia and occasionally even Sunni resistance to colonial subjugation anywhere and everywhere it surfaces.

Sadly, this has also led Tehran to play the part of the foreign interloper, intervening even where they aren’t wanted by a Shia community far too vast and diverse to ever be properly represented by any kind of centralized authority. On more than one occasion, we have seen the Mullahs falling victim to that old Nietzschean trope and resembling the very same kind of corrupt caliphs they once defined themselves by disobeying.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has undoubtably become a corrupt and venal hierarchy of bloodthirsty fundamentalist imposters who have become totally disconnected from Islam’s roots as a force for social justice that had originally put them to the left of their Abrahamic cousins, but they must not be confused with the merciless beasts that even liberal westerners have convinced themselves that they are and they certainly must not be tarred by the downright absurd farce that they are somehow “the greatest state sponsors of terrorism on the planet.”

This simple act of historical sanity seems to be an obnoxiously challenging feat for the West to even attempt to grasp but after having our asses handed to us on a tarnished brass platter by the Islamic Republic, even after we assassinated the first two or three layers of their government, I feel like any form of peace is compulsory upon grasping it.

I guess, at the end of the day, you probably have to ask yourself a few hard questions before you can swallow the truth.

First, who is Hezbollah? Hezbollah is a militia formed by Lebanese Shia clerics during Israel’s brutal invasion of their already war-torn nation in the 1980s. They were trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard but formed well before this to defend a marginalized community subjected to near-routine massacres and pogroms during the Lebanese Civil War.

Now, who are the Houthis? The Houthi rebels, otherwise known as Ansar Allah, were actually a relatively moderate theological movement advocating for the revival of the Zaydi school of Shia Islam endemic to the mountains of Northern Yemen until their criticism of an American-backed dictator got their founder murdered and the Zaydi were forced to rely on the rifle to affect change. The Revolutionary Guard doesn’t actually appear at all during their rise until well after the Houthis established themselves as a force to be reckoned with.

But just who exactly are the Revolutionary Guard anyway, aside from a branch of the Iranian military connected to the so-called terrorists above? Well, they are the force responsible for organizing the Shia militias that crippled Al-Qaeda in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of post-Saddam Iraq. They are also the force that united a vast and diverse coalition known as the Axis of Resistance, more responsible than any conventional army for breaking the back of the genocidally Shiaphobic Islamic State.

Contrary to Western mythology, Iran’s Islamic Republic has found itself serving the role of the greatest state sponsor of grassroots antiterrorism on the planet. Now, with that being said, there is a very fine line between terrorism and antiterrorism, what with Nietzschean monsters being what they are, but let us at least get the score right and let us do so with a few more uncomfortable questions too.

First, who exactly is Al-Qaeda? Al-Qaeda is a loose network of Salafi-Wahhabist killers who spawned from the armies Jimmy Carter organized to kill communists in Afghanistan. And who are ISIS but the bastard sons of Al-Qaeda, not-so secretly funded by forces outside of the Levant for the purpose of destabilizing the pro-Russian Shia dictatorship of the Assad Dynasty in Syria. Their biggest donors are old Jimmy’s friends in the Persian Gulf

And just who are these friends in the Gulf? A clique of Salafi-Wahhabist billionaires defined by a series of Faustian bargains made with the British Empire and Big Oil after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. They are also the source of nearly every dollar that has ever lined the pockets not just of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but Al-Shebab, Al-Nusra, Boko Haram, and nearly every other organization advocating for distinctly global, aka imperial jihad.

Now, for the million-dollar question. Who is the United States? The US is the empire that arms, funds, and defends those nefarious Gulf States, along with the blatantly genocidal state of Israel, with trillions of dollars in tax-pilfered funds and millions of pounds of military hardware, much of which mysteriously and repeatedly finds its way into the ungrateful hands of Salafi-Wahhabist killers across the globe.

Ladies and gentlemen, the United States of America is the greatest state sponsor of terrorism on the planet, and Iran is our number one target in the Middle East because they are the fucking monsters defined by destroying our fucking monsters.

The Russians have an old saying that the communists were wrong about everything but capitalism. I guess you could probably sum up this latest rant of mine by saying that the Mullahs were wrong about everything but the Great Satan.

They oughta know, Satan always seems to go after the Shiites and the communists first, and there ain’t many communists left.

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