Gathering Storm

by Peter Boyles | Jun 25, 2015 | Blasting with Boyles

If this were three months ago, there is no way I would’ve said to myself, “Peter you are going to be sitting down and trying (with great help) to write a column for the Chronicle about a trip to Lebanon, and a chance to meet Hezbollah.” But here I am sitting in the Chronicle office, surrounded by ink-stained scribes, talking out the story of my trip to Lebanon.

This all has its very strange beginning, a phone call from longtime friend and legendary car dealer John Medved. Medved tells me that I have to meet this interesting priest that he’s gotten to know, and he gives me a date and a time to be in his office. It’s before Cinco de Mayo, snowing, and off I go to the giant Medved autoplex. This was first time I met the priest, Father Andre Mahanna, a priest in the Maronite tradition of the Catholic Church of Lebanon.

He begins to tell me about what is happening to Christian people in the Middle East. John Medved, a very devout Catholic, wants me to help gain attendance for an ecumenical prayer breakfast at Father Andre’s church. Father Andre, Medved, myself and one of Medved’s staffers go to lunch. Outside it’s a snowstorm. Inside at lunch, I’m captured by the utter brilliance of this priest. He speaks English, Arabic, French, Italian and a smattering of Greek.

I’ve written about all of this before — as a little boy, my parents were a long way from what people considered middle class. My mother used to take us in the summer to the Carnegie Library and we would take out books — six each every two weeks. I read Ivanhoe, Richard the Lionheart, Robin Hood, and Men of Iron. I read about the crusaders (when they were the good guys). We sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It was the period of my life that preceded when I thought dinosaurs were everything.

In that period, I thought being a feudal knight and making a clear path to the Holy Land for devout people would’ve been the ultimate job.

That was also the beginning of me being drawn to the mysterious Templars; knights. Even later in life I find myself so intrigued by Templars, Jacques de Molay, why Friday the 13th was an ominous day, and do the Templars actually have the lost cup of Christ? PS — Any of you who saw “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” have an idea of what a Templar is so I mentioned the Templars to Father Andre. His eyes lit up and I thought, anyone who knows that history of the Templar deserves my affection and my attention.

Using the power of 710 KNUS, we were going to fill up the prayer breakfast that John Medved had wanted me to help Father Andre promote. It was mission complete. As they say, “we sold the joint out.”

By this time, I became fully involved in reading about what ISIS was doing to Christian people in parts of Iraq and Syria that have become captured lands. ISIS (Barack Obama’s JV team) systematically and brutally murders, rapes and kills any and all that stand in their path to create the Islamic state.

The Islamic state is a Jihad-waging Sunni-extremist group that hopes to create an Islamic nation in the modern Middle East. ISIS was formed by several fringe movements that formed into a single large force. No one is quite sure of the number of fighters, but it certainly is close to 30,000 Middle Eastern nationals and foreigners that make up ISIS.

They have been successful against Syrian and Iraqi governments, as well as other insurgent groups. As we write, ISIS forces now control Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province; they also have solidified footholds in Libya to expand their reach. ISIS — ISIL — I believe has an operational presence in the U.S. as well. The ultimate plan is for the entire modern Middle East to become the caliphate — an Islamic state that will stretch from Kuwait through Jordan, Saudi Arabia and of course, Lebanon.

I became so intrigued with all of this, thinking to myself — we are watching history happen in the Middle East and that I absolutely should go. But for the life of me, I can’t explain to anyone why I’ve done this. I’ve bought my own plane tickets, paid for my own hotel room. And if anyone knows me, I’m like crime — crime don’t pay. But there I was in Beirut, riding in a car from the Beirut airport with a couple of young men who I have never met in my life — a couple of Maronite kids — and we were off to the see the Wizard.

ISIS fighters are about 90-100 miles from Beirut on the other side of a mountain range in Syria. Beirut is an incredibly beautiful, cosmopolitan enlightened city with some of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. It’s vibrant and exciting but I’m sure it has elements of danger. At the end of the second day, I was on a rooftop restaurant with some members of the faculty of the Lebanese Maronite university, surrounded by beautiful people, the latest fashions and laughing. My first thoughts were that these are the French in 1938-39. They are having the times of their lives, going to see Charlie Chaplin films, American jazz, smoking cigarettes and going to the follies, and on the other side of that border are the Nazis. By the prickling of my thumb, something wicked this way comes.

The Lebanese people that I got to know, Muslim and Christian alike, had one principal question, Why did George Bush invade Iraq? They used the term “Twin Towers” — they don’t say “9/11.”

I am beginning to realize that there was a wake up in the United States of America that people were beginning to see that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11; on this statement of truth, the Lebanese are way ahead of us. In fact, most of the information supports that the Saudi Arabians were involved and not the Iraqis. In fact, I’ve tried to make the case that ISIS-ISIL is George Bush’s Frankenstein. That is, if Saddam was still there, they would not be.

The other interesting question they asked me is if they thought Barack Obama is a Muslim. They are all great Internet readers and know that I am known as a “birther.” So they would ask me if I believed him to be a Muslim — I told them that I have no idea as to the answer to both those questions. But then the most critical was asked: What did I think of Hezbollah? And do I think that they are a terrorist group?

Today in the war against ISIS-ISIL, there are three factions fighting against them. In the north, it’s Kurdish people and in Syria, it’s Bassar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria, today’s version of Saddam Hussein, and last but not least is the Hezbollah. In fact, outside of Baghdad today, the Shia militia is backed by Iran and the Hezbollah, fighting for the American backed gout in Baghdad, the party of God, in Lebanon. And that’s it. Barack Obama’s position that al-Ashir Assad should go, which is equally as stupid as George Bush pushing out Saddam Hussein. If al-Assad goes, it’s “Katie, bar the door.”

And Hezbollah and the Lebanese army will be all that stands between the Lebanese people and the viscious ISIS murderers. When I told some people one night that I knew this all to be true, they asked me if I wanted to meet the head of Hezbollah. And so that next morning, I was taken by car to meet Mohammad Raad. After going through a number of checkpoints, and driving in the city of Beirut, I was ushered into a large room, and there I met Mohammad Raad, President of Loyalty to the Resistance bloc of Hezbollah. I was told that I was the first western media guy that he ever met.

We were only supposed to have a limited amount of time. We ended up talking for two hours. I told him that in the late ’70s when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, I was part of a fundraising committee that was called “The Committee for a Free Afghanistan.” I was on the committee with a lot of very great people and some doctors at Children’s Hospital; we managed to get some children into the U.S. that had been brutalized by the war. He kind of sat up a little in his chair when I told him that and I told him that members of the mujahideen had come twice to Denver. When I stared into their deep black eyes, I knew right then that the Soviets were not going to defeat them. And I said to him, in that time period, that the mujahideen were heroes in the West.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. These were the men who were fighting the Soviet Union. We were locked in the Cold War. The Soviets were our enemies and the mujahideen were our friends. In fact, they were seen as heroes. Today Hezbollah is fighting the enemies of our country, the Unites States of America, and it’s almost the opposite of the mujahideen of the late ’70s. I’ve seen what ISIS is capable of doing — these are the Nazis. This is 1939 and as FDR and Winston Churchill made a decision, after the invasion of the Soviet Union by Adolf Hitler, it went back to back Stalin.

When we talk about the contemporary world — when I tell you what’s coming our way from these barbarians, religious fanatics, crazed killers, ISIS and ISIL, it’s imperative that you believe me. I don’t believe American foreign policy can do much, if anything, in that part of the world. The enormous mistakes of the Bush administration, followed by the Obama administration are done. But we must help save the incredible people of Lebanon. I visited centers of Iraqi and Syrian refugees — Christians who had crossed the desert to get away from ISIS and found refuge in Lebanon.

When I initially went to Lebanon, it was to help Father Andre find help for the 1.3-1.6 million people fleeing from ISIS. Lebanon is the end of the line. The population of Lebanon is about 4 million people. Lebanon is about the size of the state of Delaware. They just increased their population by a quarter. It’s important to know, Lebanese are not Arabs; they are Phoenicians. They gave the world the alphabet. They taught the world commerce.

I stayed close to an 11th century French crusader castle; I walked on Roman roads, and I saw where Phoenicians sailed out to begin trade in an ancient world. The invaders enter through Lebanon and always leave Lebanon to go to Spain. I saw a bunker where the German army was during WWII and remnants of the invasion of the PLO. The Israeli army has come and gone; the Syrian army has come and gone; the Romans have come and gone; and the French have come and gone. If ISIS comes, it’s not going to go. The religious war is not being fought in Israel. The religious war for Western civilization is being fought in Lebanon. The Maronites celebrate Christianity as it was done in the centuries following Jesus and they continue that tradition. If the light goes out in Lebanon, the light is going out in the world.

I got back on the airplane by myself at 8 o’clock in the morning two days before Ramadan was set to begin. That’s a long way from reading Ivanhoe realizing that perhaps we need to be modern Templars. And I’m not at all talking about the most overused statements in recent memory, “Boots on the ground.” That has gotten this country nowhere. But rather to find a way to help the right people defeat what’s waiting for all of us.

The picture that I am showing in the column is called the “Nun,” the 14th letter in the Arabic alphabet; it stands for “Nazarene,” equivalent to the put-down words for Jews and Blacks. (You know them, I don’t need to tell you those words.) So as these new barbarians come into and capture small towns and cities, they find out who the Christians are — be they Coptics, Maronites, Orthodox, or evangelical Protestants; they mark their houses with the Nun using spray paint, reminiscent of the Kristallnacht when the Nazis marked with the star of David, broke their windows, burned temples, and stores so the brown shirts knew who they were.

Only now, when the next wave comes behind the markers, everyone in the homes is killed and they play soccer with the heads of the children. Hardly a JV team. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know that maybe for the first time in my life, I see something that has to be done. We must stand against these medieval monsters.

— Peter