No, Iran — Lebanon does not belong to you
On October 26, 2023, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian gave a speech before the UN General Assembly in which he said the following in the context of defending Gaza against the Israeli retaliatory response to the Hamas attack of October 7: “It is our home and West Asia is our region. We do not compromise with any party and any side and have no reservations when it comes to our home’s security.”
This statement expressed Iranian imperial designs on Western Asia and seemed to take it for granted that the region in question was an exclusive Iranian sphere of influence. Amirabdollahian’s claim is unfounded, insulting, imperialist, expansionist, and colonialist.
No, Mr. Amirabdollahian, and no, Iran, Western Asia is NOT your region! This claim is unfounded and colonialist. Western Asia is our region, our ancestral domain, and our home alongside other Muslims and Jews. Who are we? We are the native, rooted, and free Christians of Lebanon and the Eastern Mediterranean.
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Thanks to our many sacrifices and efforts over the centuries, we preserved a unique openness to the free world including the West with its rich universal values and traditions that uphold the true meaning of what it is to be human and how inherent human dignity can be anchored and allowed to flourish in our wider environment. Thanks principally to us, the light of education, modern healthcare, women’s rights, freedom of conscience and belief, peaceful and prosperous pluralism grounded in mutual respect, and much else managed to reach this otherwise struggling region that would have remained eclipsed from such benefits. We proudly served as historical “outposts of light” for the entire Arab region and beyond, and we intend to continue doing this as long as we preserve our free existence.
Under 400 years of Ottoman rule, we still managed, at considerable cost to lives and resources, to guard our freedoms and shine as beacons of illumination across the Arab and Muslim East. In the space of a few years since you dominated four Arab capitals including ours, Beirut, nothing but darkness and death and destruction have descended on our lands and peoples. Your obedient local armed agents continue to protect the corrupt mafia that stole all our money and to prevent urgently needed economic and social reforms for Lebanon as well as to stall any movement towards restoring normal political life. Your norms and values are alien to us and indeed to all of humanity. We refuse them out of hand.
Your local agents have wreaked havoc on our country, way of life, freedoms, glorious past achievements, hard-earned prosperity, peaceful coexistence side by side with the different others, and the modest yet positive role we have played in mediating East and West.
The articulated aspiration voiced recently by a leading Hezbollah parliamentarian, namely that the aim of that organization is to transform Lebanon into something resembling more the culture of resistance than what Lebanon has always been as a free, open, and vibrant society, is completely rejected by us and will itself be resisted tooth and nail every step of the way, we promise you. In the current war between Israel and Hamas, your country, through its agents in Hezbollah, is holding the entire Lebanese population hostage and is ready to use them as collective human shields even if this rains misery, death, and devastation on Lebanon and its people.
Please know that most Lebanese are opposed to Hezbollah dragging Lebanon into this war. Moreover, the impudence with which you and your mouthpieces singly accuse the West of being colonialist when in fact the only arch-imperialists in our midst today are you, is a disgrace, a deliberate distortion of truth, and an insult to the intelligence of all sound minds. The duplicity with which Hezbollah has carved out its own Iran-controlled confederal enclave to encompass South Lebanon, Beirut’s southern suburbs, and parts of the Bekaa Valley, only to turn on the other Lebanese and threaten them if they so much as contemplate introducing federalism as the only viable option for a composite society like Lebanon’s, is both unacceptable and outrageous. With everything at our disposal, we shall stand in the way of your attempts to swallow our country and our region and return them to the Dark Ages of ignorance, backwardness, repression, and inhumanity.
No, Mr. Foreign Minister, and no, Iran, Western Asia is not your region. Lebanon is not yours or that of your armed minions. Western Asia will be decolonized from your illicit dominance.
Habib C. Malik is a Senior Research Fellow at The Philos Project, where his work focuses on mapping out Lebanon's current challenges and the best path forward for reform. He holds a BA degree in history from the American University of Beirut and a MA and doctorate from Harvard University in modern European intellectual history. He has taught in universities in Lebanon and in Washington, DC for over 3 decades; and is currently an Associate Professor of History at Lebanese American University (Byblos campus) where he teaches history, cultural studies, and occasional graduate seminars in political science.
Dr. Farhad Rezaei is a Senior Research Fellow at the Philos Project in New York City, USA.
