MMFD in 2021 is Heading in the Direction of the FPM in 2006 with Hezbollah
If you’re on Twitter or Instagram the past couple of days, chances are anonymous accounts and prominent MMFD members, Charbel Nahas’ political party, have been extremely upset with me with commenting on how they got a top Hezbollah operative, photographed with Suleimani (twice) was ill-timed given Nasrallah threatened people who talk about Hezbollah’s drug smuggling, their money laundering or their illegal interventions in the four courners of the world.
This is the post that got them so riled up. If you have some time to kill, I highly recommend you read their comments. The first few hours the justification and rationalizations were all over the place, ranging from some partisans thinking that this is the way to get the Iranian-funded militia to peacefully relinquish power to MMFD, to those that were scared that if they don’t, a war will happen, to my favorite excuse, which is if we don’t pander to Hezbollah, we’re excluding all Shia Lebanese (with numbers like 1 million, 400K and 250K being thrown around).
My wariness from MMFD is not new, I have always been outspoken towards them. The first thing that struck me was in the street once, where some of his partisans were carrying his photos in a Thawra protest. Not sure why, but that was a huge turn off from an era we are trying to get past where we sanctify politicians.
The second one was when MMFD chose to host an event with Michel Aoun’s son-in-law, Chamel Roukoz, with the infamous puppet show. It’s important to note that at the same time, most other Thawra groups and parties were protesting the thuggish Tourism Minister after his goons used taxpayer-funded cars and equipment to attack Wassef Harake in plain daylight.
The third one, is how eager they are to give up on essential Thawra ideals, and negotiate with the Sulta to maneuver ahead of the allegedly upcoming cabinet formation (whenever rockstar Hariri comes back from begging regional powers to give him more time to pay them back the hundreds of millions he owes them).
Before going in point by point, let me explain, I do this because I’ve seen something like this happen before, back when I left 14 March to support the FPM after the foursome alliance between the usual suspects during the Assad Occupation: Nasrallah and Berri (8 march back then) and Hariri and Junblat (14 march) on the other side, in a betrayal that showed me that all the fanfare in March 14 was a lie, and they still behaved and powershared as if they were still on their knees in Anjar at Ghazi Kanaan’s (before his “suicide” by Assad)
Step 1: Increase in Popularity for Standing Up for What’s Right
This is the FPM in 2005. They refused to negotiate with the four-way alliance that betrayed the “Hurriye, Siyedeh, Iste2lel” slogans that forced the Syrian Occupation out. That’s why some like me left the March 14 joke, and went to the “Orange Tsunami” as Junblat called him back then. They promised reforms, they promised accountability, they even promised to punish Harirism for all the money wasted.
They were progressives, with Nicolas Mkhaiber helping shape their thought processes, not Charbel Khalil, OTV anchors and Naji Hayek of today’s Aounism.
This is why the FPM won big back then. They had the second largest bloc in parliament, even though they went at it alone. It was because they were demanding what’s right, before it all collapsed with the deal to get Aoun president eventually.
Step 2: Negotiating a Better Deal After Sealing MP Bloc
It was that infamous meeting between Michel Aoun and Hassan Nasrallah in a church to sign the memorandum of understanding that would set the stage for the next 15+ years in Lebanon’s history.
Aoun, citing he wants to bring Hezbollah into the fold and avoid “strife”, signed the MOU with the party that only 3 years earlier, he was in the US Capitol begging the US Congress for UN Security Council Resolution 1559 that called for the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon (only Hezbollah at that point) and the withdrawal of Syrian Occupation forces.
Soon enough, Aoun was visiting and chumming it up with Bashar El Assad, the son of the man who forced Aoun to flee in and desert his men and family in 1989 when the Syrian forces attacked Baabda and Aoun promised he would be the last one to leave (he was among the first to go hide in the French embassy).
Step 3: Rationalizing their Decisions After its Disastrous Consequences
Aoun became president after years of Hezbollah/FPM grinding the country to a standstill to get what they want. Unfortunately, the entire system collapsed shortly after, and soon enough, the prodigal son-in-law was slapped with US sanctions in 2020, exactly 17 years after his wife’s father got the US to help make UNSCR 1559 a thing.
How did the son-in-law react? After all, many in his base found it hard to swallow the 180-degree shift towards Assad and Nasrallah form the start, and now, at the FPM’s lowest point, it’s obvious why it was hard to swallow that pill back then.
Gebran’s excuse? That if he doesn’t pander to Hezbollah and do its bidding, the militia controlling Lebanon will start a war. In his thinking (or at least his excuses) the only option is to do what Hezbollah wants him to do and get some crumbs like the Selaata powerplant prize, or else it’s all-out civil war. A weak reason that reduces an entire community in Lebanon to just foot soldiers that will go crazy if you disobey their leaders (which they kinda did in May 7, 2008)
The MMFD Parallel in 2021
So far, they check several boxes from the FPM checklist in its early days and more recently.
It was interesting to see the online onslaught morph from an incoherent mess with repurposed memes about me the Aounists had made in the early Hela Hela Hoe days. Eventually, the argument most of them settled on was that we need Hezbollah or else we are excluding all Lebanese Shia.
This is the most absurd and hurtful one, pretending that this rapprochement is simply reaching out to no “exclude” the Shia in Lebanon.
Why? Because even if MMFD forgot, the rest of us remember that one of the first and most forceful communities to rise up in October of 2019 were in Sour, Nabatieh and Mcharrafieh. They even burned MP offices and businesses owned by the Shia duo in power. People who were rising up against the entire cabal in power, including Hezbollah.
After that, Nasrallah would go on TV from his hiding place as often as possible to reign people back, threatening with, you guessed it, civil war, global conspiracies and going as far as to lockdown entire neighborhoods under their control to deter people living there from joining massive protests.
That’s not even counting the brigades sent to assault citizens while chanting sectarian slogans like “7 May is a glorious day” and the timeless “Shia! Shia!” as they burned and looted property in a concerted effort to dissuade, by force, people from demanding a better life for themselves and their children.
So many of the former March 14 would be angry we would embrace people from Hezbollah controlled areas joining in, but that’s what we’ve been waiting for our entire life!
Of course we’re gonna welcome them with open arms when they finally decided to take a chance and risk rising up to the disastrous Hezbollah policies that affected them as much and even more than it affected the rest of the country.
That’s why the MMFD excuse that we need to be docile with Hezbollah or else we’re anti-Shia, is so devastating, especially for those that rose up with us. After everything so many young men and women in Sour, Nabatieh, Baalbek and Dahieh did to show their displeasure and need for change, MMFD leadership today are reducing them all to one party (or two) which is exactly the narrative of the Sulta, like GB, who keeps justifying his Hezbollah affiliation with the need to be united (while his municipality chief bans Chia residents from living in Hadath)
So, no, Lebanese Shia is not synonymous with Hezbollah, and pandering to the militant group isn’t the only “realistic” way to reach out as so many MMFD commenters claimed.
Talking about Nasrallah in 2018 would get you slapped and beaten and forced to go on TV the next day carrying his photo and apologizing. Today, people can speak freely after decades of being terrified of the group. So, don’t turn the clock back on this and just give up and abandon all the Shia Lebanese who have risked so much more than the rest of us to be part of the Thawra, because of the risk Hezbollah poses on them and their loved ones for speaking out and the infamous “sa7soo7” you could get for stepping out of line of the Wilayat El Fakih.
Let’s Be “Realistic”
It seems that this is an excuse they feel justifies the rapprochement with the party who is the ringleader of the rest of the Sulta who got us in this mess. The excuse that if we want to get to power, we need Hezbollah to like us and approve of us, just like Aoun and his son-in-law thought and did, and look where that got them, and the rest of us.
If we want to be realistic, the idea of a Nasrallah cut-out being hung in Martyrs’ Square along with the rest of the leaders of Lebanon, would have been unthinkable just a year ago. That happened though after he went on TV grinning two days after half of Beirut was blown up by the party’s favorite explosives: Ammonium Nitrate, and then Nasrallah claiming he had no clue about it, when everyone knows all port of entries, legal or illegal, are under his party’s control. I guess it’s like he had no clue that his own judge was gonna release Amer Fakhouri from jail after two US senators threatened Hezbollah.
So, the excuse that not pandering to Hezbollah leadership, is anti-Shia, is laughable and pathetic. What’s anti-Shia in Lebanon is reducing this entire community to one guy who’s probably hiding in Iran out of fear of the Israelis they claim to be resisting, but have exclusively fought Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis and Lebanese since the 2006 adventure the party took with Israel.
Even after so many of their leadership was picked off by Israel, Hezbollah only focused on keeping Assad in power and attempting to make sure Iraqis’ revolt was quashed to ensure the country remains under full Iranian control.
MMFD, Come Back to the Fold of the Thawra
Your impatience in building coalitions with groups that were alongside you in the streets for years, doesn’t make sense with the current rush to normalize legitimizing Hezbollah at a time it’s struggling to find its footing after all their failed, unsustainable bets to stay in control of every facet of Lebanon’s life.
Energy would be better spent preparing to beat Hezbollah and its partners in the next elections, not angling to get a seat at the table with them like the Aounist did and which led us to the current sad state we’re in.
Dialog is always important, but not with your oppressor when your fellow Lebanese are still being oppressed by the militant group you’re so eager to make peace with as they promise to keep everything ground to a halt till the rest of the country submits.
So, after you’re done with the memes and the cancel culture bs, I think it’s time to soul search a little, because it’s apparent that even within MMFD this unhealthy love affair with Hezbollah seems to be a touchy subject.
Come back to Lebanon. We saw what Charbel Nahhas would do in a cabinet with Hezbollah and Aounists (in two consecutive cabinets), and I don’t think it’s what you should want after everything we’ve been through.
Mistakes happen, what’s important is to rectify it. Elections are in 18 months or so. Don’t alienate your base by going to the familiar option of getting Hezbollah approval from a weak negotiating position. Get the MPs we need, then we can sit and talk economics with the people threatening journalists and activists with mob murder for covering their organized crime rings worldwide.
One final note to my MMFD friends: stop answering “read his book” to any tough question. The Aounists had the “Ibra2 Musta7il” book too back when Nahhas was one of their ministers. How did that turn out? Having a book is super, but behaving the opposite what you’re preaching in it will just make you another tattered party that made a deal with Hezbollah and screwed themselves and the rest of us over with it. Books are important when you stick to them, and this political maneuvering with Hezbollah is nowhere in your book ❤
