CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

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

Image by Chloe Christine.

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........

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