RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lawmakers in Beirut agreed to elect Lebanon’s next President on Monday, breaking a deadlock that had crippled government for 29 months. The decisive vote was cast in Tehran. Iran wanted a Lebanese President who would be an ally of Hezbollah, the Shiite terror group that its chief proxy in the country. It found one in the 81-year-old former general Michel Aoun.

Under Lebanon’s explicitly sectarian political system, the President must be a Maronite Christian, while the Prime Minister is a Sunni and the Speaker of Parliament a Shiite. But in recent years Hezbollah has exercised a veto over Lebanese politics and tilted the balance in Tehran’s favor. It helps that Iran funds Hezbollah to the tune of around $200 million annually and supplies it with tens of thousands of missiles, making the group the strongest armed force in Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s presence in Lebanon allows Tehran to threaten Israel and defend Syria’s Assad regime, pillars of Iranian regional strategy. Mr. Aoun, though a Maronite, enjoys close ties with Hezbollah and isn’t likely to press the group to disarm. His Free Patriotic Movement party signed a memorandum of understanding with Hezbollah in 2006, and his rhetoric and positions are usually aligned with the Shiite group.

Mr. Aoun’s election marks a détente between Hezbollah and many in the Maronite community who have come to view the group and its Iranian backers as protectors amid a Syrian civil war that has flooded Lebanon with more than a million refugees, most of them Sunnis. It also represents a personal humiliation for Saad Hariri, who will again serve as Prime Minister under the deal. Hezbollah and agents of the Assad regime assassinated Mr. Hariri’s father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in a 2005 car bombing.

The engines of anti-democratic subversion have been grinding away for decades. The signs and portents all around us. The emergence of the scourge of political correctness and the lockstep leftist agitprop of the mainstream media, for example, are sure indicators of advancing democratic collapse. According to Reporters Without Borders, Canada ranks 18th and the U.S. 41st in its World Press Freedom Index — a rather shabby performance for ostensibly enlightened democratic nations. Political disinformation has come to supplant journalistic integrity in a sustained effort to steer the electorate toward the socialist agenda of anti-individualism, bigger government, state welfarism and bureaucratic expansion.

Another important way of facilitating the leftward drift is to mutilate the historical archive or reject the value and influence of history altogether. The historical register which binds a nation to its past and creates a holistic sense of national identity thus becomes a non-factor in the political and cultural zeitgeist. In Canada, for example, we have a postcolonial prime minister who believes that Canada is not determined by its history — “There is no core identity… in Canada,” Justin Trudeau bloviates, ignorant or dismissive of the institutions developed by classical British liberalism in the country, namely “freedom to associate, speak, create, and to be entrepreneurial.” Similarly, Title IX in the U.S. has materially watered down school curricula to the extent that students no longer have a secure grasp of their country’s history, or any grasp whatsoever — although the process of epistemic decay dates back many years.

In line with this movement of social engineering, importing third-world refugees with no experience of democratic institutions, particularly from the Islamic Middle East and North Africa, and seeding these immigrants in vote-sensitive regions guarantees loyalty to the progressivist, anti-democratic project and renders the eventual destination of one-party rule increasingly probable. The Hart-Celler 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, promoted by Ted Kennedy, and Canada’s policy of multiculturalism, adopted by former PM Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1971, opened the floodgates. The flood is now in full tide.

There is yet another weapon in the ideological arsenal of the left which has been extremely effective in forcing compliance with and muzzling opposition to its homogenizing diktats. Official and quasi-official bodies that purport to defend “human rights” and that enjoy legal recourse to implement their decisions are perhaps the most potent agencies enforcing conformity to the prevalent ideology. This is because they have the power to levy onerous fines and judgments sufficient to damage and even lay waste the lives and careers of those who run afoul of their manifold proscriptions. They are the ringwraiths of the dark kingdom. Their websites, however, are golden; after all, protecting “human rights” sound like a noble endeavor. But there is a clandestine flavor to them too. Few know the trivial nature of many of the complaints and the drastic penalties levied for even inadvertent misdemeanors or honest mistakes. Passive or unsuspecting individuals will feel the wrath of these ersatz magistracies. At the same time, those who are cognizant of their sway and peremptory intent make sure to keep their heads down and act as they are expected to, cowering beneath the shadow of punitive reprisal. Compliance with the progressivist orthodoxy is thus assured.

As a coalition of disparate forces – including the Iraqi military, Iranian-supported Iraqi Shiite militias, Kurdish forces, Turks, and Iranian militias – closes in on Mosul, Iraq, ready to oust ISIS from the capital of its self-proclaimed caliphate, it is easy to overlook events hundreds of miles away in Beirut. But events in both places are related.

At only half the size of Israel and with half the population, it is easy to overlook Lebanon altogether. Once a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and diverse country – Beirut was called the Paris of the Middle East – it broke down into its constituent parts decades ago and now lives in sulky (if no longer generally violent) enclaves. Christians are separated into Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic; Muslims into Sunni and Shiite; and the Druze are a separate entity. In theory, the president, chosen by Parliament, is always a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the Parliament a Shiite Muslim. In practice, Hezb’allah owns the south (including approximately 130,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel) and now, apparently, the government in Beirut.

After 45 rounds of balloting beginning after the election of 2014, the Lebanese Parliament has chosen retired Maronite General Michel Aoun as president. An enemy of Syria during the Lebanese civil war, in 2005, he made peace with Assad in Damascus and then forged an alliance with Hezb’allah at home. His ascension to the post – over Maronite Suleiman Franjieh, favored by Saudi Arabia – puts a point on Iran’s influence in Lebanon, and Iran cheered. Ali Akbar Velayati, Ayatollah Khamenei’s top foreign policy adviser, said, “The election of Michel Aoun as president shows new support for the Islamic resistance [against Israel].”

Perhaps, but it was at least as much a cheer for nailing down the eastern end of the long sought Shiite Crescent and enhancing Iran’s reach across the region.

Iran established Hezb’allah in 1983 as the anchor of the Crescent. It has financed the organization and supplied weapons and training, including those missiles in the South. Iran has taken more and more direct control of Hezb’allah activities and pulled it into the Syrian civil war, where it has taken tremendous casualties and lost some of its luster at home. (Even Shiite Lebanese object to their sons dying in Syria; they prefer the anti-Israel “resistance” meme.) In response to Iranian and Hezb’allah warfare against Sunni Muslims in Syria, as well as Iran’s role in the Houthi uprising in Yemen, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League, led by Saudi Arabia, labeled Hezb’allah a terror organization and cut off aid to Lebanon in March.

This, as much as anything, may have tipped the scales in favor of Iran’s candidate.

Anti-Israel protesters who crashed a pro-Israel event in London last Thursday targeted female students planning to attend the event, physically attacking Jewish girls both on the way to and inside of the venue.

The event, held at the University College London, featured a talk by former IDF soldier Hen Mazzig.

As previously reported, BDS activists stormed the event, trapping participants in a room. Police ultimately intervened, warning those trapped not to attempt to leave the room before officers gained control of the situation.

The protesters, however, apparently did far more than merely trap those participating in the event.

According to The Algemeiner, the pro-BDS activists targeted female students both outside of and inside the event, physically attacking them in a scene a senior official at the Simon Wiesenthal Center said was reminiscent of pogroms by Nazi street gangs in the 1930s.

The guest of the event, Hen Mazzig, a former IDF officer and veteran who served in Judea and Samaria, said he was shocked by the assault.

“I don’t think that even in my days in the IDF it was as bad as it is right now. It’s really scary. I hear that they have been attacking some girls, Jewish girls that came to support and to [hear] my talk.”

Several female students, including Devora Khafi, director of the local Stand With US branch, and Liora Cadranel, co-president of the local Israel Society, told the Jewish Chronicle that protesters “weren’t afraid to hurt girls.”

Khafi said while she was accustomed to aggressive opposition by anti-Israel groups, the incident on Thursday “was unbelievable.”

“I go to a lot of Israel events. This one was very different. These people are not afraid to do anything. It was unbelievable. This was the worse experience I’ve ever had at an Israel event on campus.”

Later, in a letter obtained by The Algemeiner, the Simon Wiesenthal Center international relations director Shimon Samuels described the attacks to the UCL’s Vice Chancellor, writing that the scene was “redolent of a 1930s Nazi storm-trooper ‘pogrom,’ or of budding Jihadi volunteers serving ISIS on a British university campus.”

“The thugs first attacked female students on their way to the event…Their screams. ‘Intifada, Intifada, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ bore witness to their violent intent in championing the cause of a ‘Palestine’ built on the ruins of the state of Israel.”

For those who believe in a “one-world” thesis – the union of people in a harmonized legal system – these are unsettling days. Rather than singing kumbayah each morning, tribes are displaying a form of loyalty bred in the bone. In fact, tribalism is alive and well and driving political judgments across the globe.

Whether it is Brexit or the manifestation of the post Sykes-Picot Middle East geography, tribalism reigns. If tribalism is defined as variable combinations of kinship, reciprocal exchange, economic circumstances, then the desire to impose an overlay of internationalism or globalization is bound to face formidable opposition. Intense feelings of common identity promote tribal connections.

While a full-scale analysis of the Brexit vote has not yet occurred, my suspicion is that tribal factors, namely class and station, had a profound effect on the vote. There was a union of culture in Britain, a subterranean belief that the elitists working in financial emporiums in London didn’t have the foggiest idea of how ordinary people are obliged to deal with the migration issue or even the pettifogging matter of requirements for electric product use.

Globalization has hastened the reemergence of tribalism, in large part, because of a public refusal to accept homogenization. The obvious point that people aren’t all the same is lost on supra-democrats who believe they can and should impose their will on an uninterested and ignorant populace.

Although the setting is different from the UK, tribalism was and remains the definitive character of the Middle East. Attempts to impose national structure on tribes only works to the extent each of the tribes believes it is being treated fairly. It turns out that appeals to nationalism rest on this thin reed. When consensus breaks down, as it did in Iraq and Syria, tribal warfare ensues.