The choice of Walid Phares as Trump's national security adviser unmasks Trump's worldview
While surfing the net today, I came across a small news about Trump and his position on the Muslims. It read: "Donald Trump will draw back his proposed ban on Muslims entering the country once he’s elected president and focus instead on more precise policies meant to identify potential terrorists, his national security adviser told The Hill on Tuesday.
In recent days, conflicting reports have emerged over whether Trump intends to stand by his controversial proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country. That “suggestion,” as Trump has described it, has been condemned as bigoted by liberals and dismissed by critics as impossible to implement.In an email exchange with The Hill, Trump’s national security adviser, Walid Phares, sought to clarify Trump’s position."
I have said earlier that I see fascistic leanings with Trump's positions on many issues, and am, therefore, not a fan of him, nor do I trust or believe him. But I was curious about the identity of his national security adviser. When I read through the news and found out that it is Walid Phares, I was not too surprised. Hitler needed folks like Eichmann and Himmler to carry out his last solution for the Jews. So what's so new about Trump choosing Walid Phares?
In recent days, conflicting reports have emerged over whether Trump intends to stand by his controversial proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country. That “suggestion,” as Trump has described it, has been condemned as bigoted by liberals and dismissed by critics as impossible to implement.In an email exchange with The Hill, Trump’s national security adviser, Walid Phares, sought to clarify Trump’s position."
I have said earlier that I see fascistic leanings with Trump's positions on many issues, and am, therefore, not a fan of him, nor do I trust or believe him. But I was curious about the identity of his national security adviser. When I read through the news and found out that it is Walid Phares, I was not too surprised. Hitler needed folks like Eichmann and Himmler to carry out his last solution for the Jews. So what's so new about Trump choosing Walid Phares?
I knew the name from my own research a decade ago into the activities of right-wing neocon Islamophobes, who were conspiring with Daniel Pipes to change the world through a series of summits or conferences of pro-Israeli and anti-Muslim/Islam hawks, which went by the name Jerusalem Summit. Since 2005 baroness Carolina Cox has been a co-president of the Jerusalem Summit, a hardline pro-Israel advocacy outfit. [Interested readers can google for my articles on the summit; see links here, here and here.] Walid Phares was part of that group.
I quote Wikepedia: "Their conference was sponsored by the Michael Cherney Foundation, which also funds the Intelligence Summit in the US, both of which are gatherings of neoconservatives such as Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Harold Rhode, Walid Phares, R. James Woolsey and others.[2] In 2009 she [Carolina Fox] was one of two UK peers to invite Dutch anti-Islam campaigner Geert Wilders to the UK."
See the link here for a proof. Ishaan Tharoor of The Washington Post has done a wonderful job in unmasking Walid's dark past (see the link here, and read below where I quote him):
As a 2011 Mother Jones investigation pointed out, Phares was once a leading ideologue in an armed Christian faction during Lebanon's grim, bloody sectarian civil conflict of the 1980s. The entire story, written by Adam Serwer (now an editor at Buzzfeed), is worth reading. Here are some excerpts:
During the 1980s, Phares, a Maronite Christian, trained Lebanese militants in ideological beliefs justifying the war against Lebanon's Muslim and Druze factions, according to former colleagues. Phares, they say, advocated the hard-line view that Lebanon's Christians should work toward creating a separate, independent Christian enclave. A photo obtained by Mother Jones shows him conducting a press conference in 1986 for the Lebanese Forces, an umbrella group of Christian militias that has been accused of committing atrocities. He was also a close adviser to Samir Geagea, a Lebanese warlord who rose from leading hit squads to running the Lebanese Forces...
In 1978, the Lebanese Forces emerged as the umbrella group of the assorted Christian militias. According to former colleagues, Phares became one of the group's chief ideologists, working closely with the Lebanese Forces' Fifth Bureau, a unit that specialized in psychological warfare...
[In subsequent years,] Phares continued to play a prominent role in the ideological training of Lebanese Forces fighters. Geagea wanted to professionalize the militia, so he established a special school where officers would receive training not only in military tactics, but also in ideology. The various Lebanese factions were already sectarian in character, but Geagea... wanted religion to become an even more prominent part of the Lebanese Forces. For that he turned to Phares.
"[Samir Geagea] wanted to change them from a normal militia to a Christian army," says [Toni] Nissi, Phares' former associate. "Walid Phares was responsible for training the lead officers in the ideology of the Lebanese Forces."
Ishan writes, "While Phares is not implicated with any direct role in acts of violence and criminality, he was a key thinker and actor in an environment of tremendous atrocity. The most gruesome incident came in 1982, when Phalangist, or right-wing Christian, militia carried out the slaughter of hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Phares moved to the United States by 1990, when a Syrian intervention stabilized Lebanon but made his own personal place in society unsafe. From there, he reinvented himself as an academic and positioned himself as a speaker on issues related to terrorism.
His ideological baggage occasionally seems rather close to the surface, such asan appearance on Fox News last November where he cast President Obama as a supplicant to the Iranian-Syrian axis Phares himself so bitterly opposed during the years of Lebanon's civil war.
To be sure, says Mohamad Bazzi, a Lebanese-American journalist and an associate professor at New York University, none of Lebanon's warring factions -- no matter their creed -- were innocent. "But [Phares] was in that world of the Phalangists and the Lebanese Forces when these were violent militias that were killing other Lebanese, that were killing other Palestinians," he observes.
"The key is to not let someone like him detach from the history," says Bazzi. "People do change and their thinking changes, but [Phares] has never had to account for this past."
Well, with advisers like Walid, we need not look around for another war-mongering neocon, advising a fascist world leader to rekindle our world with perennial wars!!!
I quote Wikepedia: "Their conference was sponsored by the Michael Cherney Foundation, which also funds the Intelligence Summit in the US, both of which are gatherings of neoconservatives such as Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Harold Rhode, Walid Phares, R. James Woolsey and others.[2] In 2009 she [Carolina Fox] was one of two UK peers to invite Dutch anti-Islam campaigner Geert Wilders to the UK."
See the link here for a proof. Ishaan Tharoor of The Washington Post has done a wonderful job in unmasking Walid's dark past (see the link here, and read below where I quote him):
As a 2011 Mother Jones investigation pointed out, Phares was once a leading ideologue in an armed Christian faction during Lebanon's grim, bloody sectarian civil conflict of the 1980s. The entire story, written by Adam Serwer (now an editor at Buzzfeed), is worth reading. Here are some excerpts:
During the 1980s, Phares, a Maronite Christian, trained Lebanese militants in ideological beliefs justifying the war against Lebanon's Muslim and Druze factions, according to former colleagues. Phares, they say, advocated the hard-line view that Lebanon's Christians should work toward creating a separate, independent Christian enclave. A photo obtained by Mother Jones shows him conducting a press conference in 1986 for the Lebanese Forces, an umbrella group of Christian militias that has been accused of committing atrocities. He was also a close adviser to Samir Geagea, a Lebanese warlord who rose from leading hit squads to running the Lebanese Forces...
In 1978, the Lebanese Forces emerged as the umbrella group of the assorted Christian militias. According to former colleagues, Phares became one of the group's chief ideologists, working closely with the Lebanese Forces' Fifth Bureau, a unit that specialized in psychological warfare...
[In subsequent years,] Phares continued to play a prominent role in the ideological training of Lebanese Forces fighters. Geagea wanted to professionalize the militia, so he established a special school where officers would receive training not only in military tactics, but also in ideology. The various Lebanese factions were already sectarian in character, but Geagea... wanted religion to become an even more prominent part of the Lebanese Forces. For that he turned to Phares.
"[Samir Geagea] wanted to change them from a normal militia to a Christian army," says [Toni] Nissi, Phares' former associate. "Walid Phares was responsible for training the lead officers in the ideology of the Lebanese Forces."
Ishan writes, "While Phares is not implicated with any direct role in acts of violence and criminality, he was a key thinker and actor in an environment of tremendous atrocity. The most gruesome incident came in 1982, when Phalangist, or right-wing Christian, militia carried out the slaughter of hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Phares moved to the United States by 1990, when a Syrian intervention stabilized Lebanon but made his own personal place in society unsafe. From there, he reinvented himself as an academic and positioned himself as a speaker on issues related to terrorism.
His ideological baggage occasionally seems rather close to the surface, such asan appearance on Fox News last November where he cast President Obama as a supplicant to the Iranian-Syrian axis Phares himself so bitterly opposed during the years of Lebanon's civil war.
To be sure, says Mohamad Bazzi, a Lebanese-American journalist and an associate professor at New York University, none of Lebanon's warring factions -- no matter their creed -- were innocent. "But [Phares] was in that world of the Phalangists and the Lebanese Forces when these were violent militias that were killing other Lebanese, that were killing other Palestinians," he observes.
"The key is to not let someone like him detach from the history," says Bazzi. "People do change and their thinking changes, but [Phares] has never had to account for this past."
Well, with advisers like Walid, we need not look around for another war-mongering neocon, advising a fascist world leader to rekindle our world with perennial wars!!!
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