Walid Phares > Quotes

“Among the avant garde of the Christian ethnic claim were a few prominent, bold activists. In 1976, volumes entitled The History of the Maronites were published by a historical, Boutros Daou. In this voluminous research, documents revealing the pre-Arab identity of the Maronites and other Christians were analysed and the "missing" history of the community was re-established. The new documents gave a comprehensive description of the Lebanese Christians' struggle throughout the ages and established their non-Arab, Aramaic identity.”
― Walid Phares, Lebanese Christian Nationalism: The Rise and Fall of an Ethnic Resistance

“In June 1984, taking a Christian nationalist stand the Lebanese Forces' command rejected the Gemayel's overture to the Arabs and declared that: It's a historical heresy to impose a false Arab idenity on the Lebanese army into an Arabist army and transform Lebanon into a confrontation country against Isrsel. It's an educational heresy to develop the educational programs towards the Arab identity, which we consider as a blow to the cultural reality of the Christians. We will never drop any rights of the Christian people of Lebanon.”
― Walid Phares, Lebanese Christian Nationalism: The Rise and Fall of an Ethnic Resistance

“Neither the Muslims of Lebanon nor the other Arabs (particularly the Syrians) could accept a Christian Lebanon, even if restricted to a region of self-rule in a Lebanese federation. John Engel's concludes in his 1979 study of the Lebanese Christian Nationalism that: Most Lebanese Christians now agree on partition... but it is undesirable because it is tantamount to Christian isolationaism and inexpedient because no major power seems ready to encourage it. Yet there remains the Maronite Christians' adamant conviction that they must never again be vulnerable to Muslim influence. This view, in its most acceptable guise, calls for a major decentralisation of government (à la Swiss cantons) and a larger degree of local autonomy. From the Maronite point of view confessional democracy cannot be revived so long as Lebanese Muslims reject the validity of a pluralistic social arrangement which respects and gives political expression to primordial social arrangementwhich respects and gives political expression to primordial ethnic and communal sentiments.”
― Walid Phares, Lebanese Christian Nationalism: The Rise and Fall of an Ethnic Resistance

“Emile Edde, a lawyer and later the president of the Lebanese Republic; Suleiman Kenaan, a member of the administrative council; and many other Lebanese nationalists pleaded for the establishment of a homogeneous Christian state. Even within the Maronite Church there were sympathisers with this point of view. Numerous lower-level clergy and many spiritual leaders warned that the annexation of territories in which Muslim populations consituted a sharp majority (such as Tripoli, Baalbek, Nabatiah, and others) could bring trouble. Bishop Awad, a native of Hassrun in the Maronite North, feared that the Maronites might become a minority in Greater Lebanon.”
― Walid Phares, Lebanese Christian Nationalism: The Rise and Fall of an Ethnic Resistance

“We in the West have been at the mercy of those who where supposed to translate and explain an entire ideology but instead sanitized it and camouflaged it. The same applies on the other side. In western culture, democracy is being taught in the classroom, but it is a historically understood concept. The intellectual translation into Arab Muslim culture depends on the “translating party.” In those cultures, its real meaning has been complicated and altered in the madrassas (Islamic religious schools) or when taught by antidemocracy teachers.”
― Walid Phares, Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against the West