SOME LEBANESE CHEERING FOR ISRAEL

Be Thorough, Israel. Lebanese hope that Hezbollah will be completely wiped out by By Nissan Ratzlav-Katz (NRO)

In an interview on July 19 with Israel National Radio’s Tovia Singer, Etienne Sakr (a.k.a. “Abu Arz”), a former south Lebanese army officer and leader of the Guardians of the Cedars militia, called on Israel to press ahead until it gains victory in its offensive against Hezbollah. He said that Israel must not allow the Islamist elements in the country to survive the war; Lebanon can be rebuilt.

The Lebanese Foundation for Peace (LFP), an international organization of Lebanese Christians, issued a press release recently that called upon Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “to hit them hard and destroy [Hezbollah’s] terror infrastructure. It is not [only] Israel who is fed up with this situation, but the majority of the silent Lebanese in Lebanon who are fed up with Hezbollah and are powerless to do anything out of fear of terror retaliation.” The LFP also said that “thousands of volunteers in the Diaspora” [are]“ willing to bear arms and liberate their homeland from [Islamic] fundamentalism” with the logistical support of Israel.

Another well-known expatriate Lebanese individual calling for Israel to decisively win the war in Lebanon is Brigitte Gabriel, founder of the American Congress for Truth, a non-profit organization dedicated to combating radical Islamic fundamentalism in the West. She compared the current destruction in Lebanon to a painful operation aimed at removing a cancerous growth, which will hopefully release Lebanon from the “hijackers” — Iran and Syria. To that end, Gabriel said, the roots of the Islamist movement in Lebanon must be completely destroyed.

One reason for the adamant stand of those aforementioned groups against allowing Islamist seeds to remain in Lebanese soil is their people’s experience of bloody and vicious internecine warfare. Lebanese Muslim militiamen active against Israel in the 1980s, as they kept up attacks on Lebanese Christians, encapsulated their vision for the Middle East in a catchy phrase, “After Saturday comes Sunday,” or in a more obvious formulation, “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people,” as it was once reported by the historian Bernard Lewis in reference to the buildup to the 1967 Six Day War. (In recent years, versions of that taunt have been tossed at Christians in several cities in the Palestinian Authority; such as Bethlehem, which went from 80 percent Christian under Israel to less than 20-percent Christian under the PA.)

Such forthright statements of support for Israel by expatriate Lebanese, primarily Christians, carry a certain undertone of worry, however. They fear that Israel will not press its offensive against the Lebanese Islamists, that Israel will again fall victim to a mistaken ideology of limited engagement with an absolutist enemy.