Ex-PM: Hezbollah rally in Beirut a massive hoax

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | 3/9/05 | Aaron Klein

[llama hunter]

but 12 seats in Parliament says they have some but not majority support, if they are supported by one third of the Shia Muslims, that means two thirds of the Shia Muslim in Lebanon do not support Hezbollah and what portion of the Lebanese population, without the Syrians (who are mainly Sunni Muslim I believe) is Shia?

I suspect neither the majority of the Lebanese nor even the Syrians want an Islamist state which is Hezbollah's main goal for Lebanon (I'm sure they got their eyes on Syria next)

Saddam Hussein was able to muster up these kinds of protest and we knew Saddam forced those people out and we've also found out since Saddam paid persons for anti war protests outside of Iraq

in fact the Democrats did the same thing when the mayor of Philadelphia (?) made all the city employees attend that Clinton Kerry rally, after giving them the afternoon off

[Darnright]

>Protestors held signs, in English, reading "Thank you Syria'' and "No to foreign interference,"<

This has to be the oxymoron of the century.

[cdrw]

I'm curious about the stats. Of the 3.6MM you reference do you know if that is the "Lebanese" population or if that is the total number of human beings presently residing in Lebanese territory. I'm not challenging your number ... I would really like to know because I have heard of nearly a million Syrian "guest workers" and of an unspecified but very large "Palestinian refuge" population. If there are 3.6MM true Lebanese but 0.8MM Syrian nationals and another 1MM "refuges" then the non-voting foreigners represent a substantial proportion of people there. If the 3.6MM includes the foreigners then there appear to be as many foreigners in Lebanon as Lebanese. Either way I feel sorry for these people.

[monday]

"Attendance at the rally greatly outnumbered recent demonstrations led by opposition figures against Syria's presence in Lebanon and was billed by Hezbollah speakers as a sign Syria enjoys popular support among the people of Lebanon "

What it shows is that the majority of Lebanese are terrorists. One cannot support Hezbollah without being a terrorist.

[monday]

"This has to be the oxymoron of the century."


Not if they were Syrians holding the signs. They apparently think Lebanon is part of Syria.

[cdrw]

Here is what I've got so far: according to the CIA Factbook there were, as of July 2004, 3.8MM in Lebanon. There were 0.4MM Palestinian refuges and their labor force includes "as many as one million foreign workers (2001 estimate)".
It is still not clear from this data if the 3.8MM population includes the workers and refuges. The factbook also indicates that about 60% of the population is Muslim but that includes Shi'ites, Sunni, Isma'lite, Druze, Alawite and Nusayn at least some of which tend to be anti-occupation. Given that Hizb'allah is a Shi'ite organization and that 39% of the population is Christian, and that there is a huge foreign presence in county, it seems very likely that the pro-Syrian turnout was nowhere near proportional to national opinion. This is not to say that Hizb'allah is small or that there is not a significant, pro-Syrian faction. I'm just trying to put together an objective gage of how representative that huge crowd might have been.

It appears to me that in Lebanon, as in this country (The US), the forces of oppression have a disproportionate ability to rally people into the streets.

[Lady In Blue]

I've been wondering something the last few days, does anybody know how all of this is affecting the Syrian people? Do they have an opposition party? Anybody know? Thanks.

[OneTimeLurker]

http://education.yahoo.com/reference/factbook/le/popula.html

Don't know that you can extrapolate beyond the main number. I am sure you could find then number of guest workers if you look around. There were only 15K Syrian troops there though...not a massive presence. Their security service was had a similar sized presence though from what I understand.

[cdrw]

Yup - thats the difficulty. When the population is around four million and there are upwards of one and a half million foreign nationals ... the foreign nationals are a potentially huge swing factor in the size of protests. As far as I know the foreigners don't vote therefor their opinion doesn't really count but they can sure make headlines. Regardless of the foreigners inclusion in the four million I don't think the size of street demonstrations is even remotely accurate in predicting how an actual vote would go.

There are now reports that the pro-Syrian PM is going to be re-appointed as an emotional response to the big demos!! Unbelievable.