ROME — Lebanon is the target of “a systematic and calculated strategy by Iran and its minions to empty the country of its Christians,” Habib C. Malik told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview Wednesday.
Malik, Senior Fellow on Lebanon and Middle Eastern Christians at The Philos Project, said Iran and its “proxies” are intentionally creating the conditions (poverty, collapse, instability, fear, despair) that are forcing Lebanon’s Christians to emigrate.
“The principal Iranian proxy now dominating Lebanon is Hezbollah, the armed Lebanese Shiite group beholden firstly to the Iranian ideological and expansionist agenda, and not to Lebanon,” Malik told Breitbart News.
Lebanon today “is facing a new and unprecedented threat unlike previous scourges — it is the difference between what I would term the ‘dumb evil’ of the Islamic State (ISIS or Daesh) and the ‘cunning evil’ of Hezbollah and its Iranian Mullah overlords,” he declared.
Hezbollah “has done everything in its power first to precipitate Lebanon’s downfall and then, by protecting the criminal mafia ruling class responsible for the downfall, to prevent any measures from being taken to commence Lebanon’s recovery,” he contended.
The intentional sabotage of sectors such as education, healthcare, and the banking system have given rise to a “galloping” emigration of predominantly Christian youth, Malik said, aggravated by Hezbollah terror strikes that have killed, injured, and displaced hundreds of thousands of Christians.
Revelers gather to attend the ceremony of the lighting of the Christmas tree in Sassine Square in the Ashrafieh district of Lebanon’s capital Beirut on December 7, 2022. (ANWAR AMRO/AFP via Getty)
Hezbollah has actively and deliberately sought “to alter Lebanon’s identity as a country and a society: from a free and open society with both solid Arab and Western connections to one with stronger if not exclusive ties with Iran, Assad’s Syria, China, and other anti-Western states,” he stated.
In private discussions with Christian groups, Hezbollah representatives “have bluntly said that their community is better equipped to outlast any Christian measures to deal with Lebanon’s freefall into failed-state status,” he noted.
Malik also warned of a pervasive “false narrative” about the situation of Christians in Syria and Lebanon, which emerged particularly during the height of the Islamic State’s terrorist activities.
Many believed that when it came to “the choice between living under the brutality of the Assad regime or enduring the bloodthirsty devastations of Daesh (ISIS), the first option was far better,” he noted.
This is a false narrative, he insisted, because “it is a choice between an immediate and drastic yet dumb evil, and the more insidious evil of a slow and debilitating form of tyrannical rule.”
It is no accident that Bashar Assad is a staunch ally of the Iranian regime, he added, and the Islamic State “served as a convenient tool in the hands of Iran and Assad against more moderate Sunnis, against Christians, and against Western interests.”
Malik said that Iran’s war on the Christians in the region, not just in Lebanon, “has been deliberate as part of the larger objective of creating the Shiite Crescent stretching from Iran to Lebanon through both Iraq and Syria.”
Since the Iranian regime’s ideology literally hates freedom, “it sees the native Christians, especially those of Lebanon who have successfully resisted dhimmitude over the centuries at enormous cost to them in terms of lives and resources, as the great obstacle in the face of their domination of the region,” he said.