Declan Hayes
The Shia, who predominate in South Lebanon and Iran, seem to have forgotten key pillars of their religious inheritance, Declan Hayes writes.
The Shia, who predominate in South Lebanon and Iran, seem to have forgotten key pillars of their religious inheritance, including the life and death one that tens of millions of American, Saudi and Qatari proxies hate them and everything and anything to do with them. This was brought home to me in Iran when they told me that many Gulf States businesses will not do business with Shias because they kick with the wrong religious foot and say their prayers this way rather than that way. I have not seen such rabid sectarianism on display even in my native Ireland.
Although the architecture of Shia mosques does not impress me (no architecture does), some of the devotions that go on there do impress me, as they did St Francis of Assisi before me. I have seen the Shia in north London gather in their Kilburn mosque for their Eid family celebrations and the big fear I had was that one of their children, in her childish excitement, would get killed by a missing motorist.
I was not there to pray but to see one of their leaders to get help for the beleaguered Shias of Syria. Although the guy was helpful, he made it plain that the mosque was for praying, not for politics, which is fine by me.
But not by the CIA's proxies, who continue to replace all moderate Sunni imams with semi literate sectarian Gulf State firebrands. For the Gulf State despots to feel safe with their ill gotten wealth, the Shias, to a man, to a woman and to a child, must be destroyed, and so Shias, Alawites and all Twelvers remain particular targets of the head hackers the CIA sent into Syria and who are again flexing their muscles against Sisi's Egypt.
Although the Shias like to commemorate and adulate the bravery of Husayn bin Ali and the lads at Karbala, they seem to have forgotten its flip side, that generations of CIA and Gulf State proxies have been weaned to want them dead.
Although Karbala and other Shia (and Christian) sites have suffered immeasurably as a result of the CIA's ISIS proxies rampaging through Iraq, the painstaking work Qom's religious community did in restoring those sites can only be admired.
But all that navel gazing gets us only so far. When I toured Malaloula in the company of Syrian's Christian leaders on Easter Sunday 2014, local priests told me that, though much of the ISIS graffiti had been written by semi-literate savages ("we get nearer to God by cutting the heads off Christians and sodomising their dead bodies"), others were the obvious handiwork of learned scribes, who were every bit as rabid as their semi-literate partners in crime.
Now that the CIA and Mossad have won their war against the Levant's Christians (aka the Cross worshippers), it is again time for the Shias to get it in the neck. Although the Iranian government is trying to restore diplomatic relations with Syria, they just don't seem to understand the nature of the game, which is to build a new Middle East in the interests of Israel and Uncle Sam and that there is no room for the Christians or the Shia, except as a punching bag, in this dystopian Muslim Brotherhood hell.
Although I can offer no easy solution to this or to the ongoing extermination of harmless Russian-speaking Christians by the Zelensky Nazis, the leaders of both Russia and Iran best sit down together and, together with their armed forces, work out a no-frills plan of salvation.
Although Russian President Putin has said that the world without Russia would be a worthless wasteland, it is the enemies of the Shias and the Christians who are plunging us into that nightmare and it is up to suitable leaders like those in Russia and Iran to deliver us from their clutches.
Russia and Iran both best shake themselves down and scrape off the human barnacles that both of them are afflicted with and that Tolstoy wrote about as long ago as1869 in War and Peace when he referred to all the blood suckers that clung to the Tsar's coat tails, as patriotic Russians sacrificed their lives fighting Bonaparte. Just as the great Tolstoy has shown us that human nature is immutable, so also must Iran's Shias show us that they too are as indomitable as Ali and the lads were on 10 October 680 AD and that, if the Shias are to finally fall, they most definitely will not fall alone.
Although the battle for Iran is still some months off, the battle to exterminate the Shias and Copts of Egypt has re-ignited with the latest resurgence in the Muslim Brotherhood sectarian violence "for democracy". Although the hope has to be that the Egyptian military will once again crush those cockroaches, the collapse of Syria shows that Ali's killers are once again riding high in the saddle and that is the worst of all possible worlds for all of those who pray this way rather than that way when they go on pilgrimage to Karbala.
The high point of the Arab world in our lifetime was the pan-Arab alliance that Egypt's Colonel Nasser and Syria's Hafez al-Assad spearheaded. Although the Egyptian and Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, together with their various Israeli, British, French, Turkish, Qatari and American handlers, have killed all hope of resurrecting such a grand alliance again, it is up to the world's Shia leaders to not only rethink the lessons of Karbala but to thereby avenge and reverse that defeat and those of our own era in Syria, Libya and Egypt as well.