The Guardians of the Cedars Party - The Movement for Lebanese Nationalism issued the following message:
The cleansing campaign against the Christians in the East did not begin only recently with the attacks on the Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad and the Saints Church in Alexandria. This campaign has been ongoing since the late 1960s according to a meticulous plan designed by a number of radical regimes in the region that created proxy fundamentalist movements under various names, with the goal of executing it systematically, beginning in Lebanon.
We say 'beginning in Lebanon', since this country has, throughout history, played a pivotal role in protecting the persecuted minorities of various religions and denominations in this East. For example, the Druze and Shiite denominations sought refuge in Lebanon centuries ago, as they fled persecution by the Fatimids and the Abbasids.
The plan, whose implementation began on our soil in the early 1970s, called for bringing the country down and displacing its Christians as a prelude to displacing the Christians of the East, given that a strong Lebanon served as a moral guarantee for their existence in this obscurantist region of the world. This extremely dangerous fundamentalist Islamic plan would not have succeeded in Lebanon and the region had the people in charge here and in the West dealt with it properly and at the right time.
The Lebanese Resistance, contrary to all expectations, was able to confront it, with virtually non-existent capabilities. Yet, ultimately, it too fell because of the political mediocrity of Christian leaders in Lebanon, their crushing internecine fighting over money and power, and their mad pursuit of eliminating one another by all available means. With the fall of the Resistance in 1990, Lebanon fell in its entirety into the hands of fundamentalist terrorism and the regimes allied with it. It lost its immunity to defend itself and the other minorities beholden to it, and since that time, the emigration of Christian young men and women from Lebanon and the region began to grow, wave after wave, leaving those who remained as an easy prey to the monster of Islamic fundamentalism as is happening today in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and elsewhere. It is not an overstatement to say that the Christian leaders who brought down the Lebanese Resistance, perhaps contributed more than the Islamic fundamentalists to the destruction of the "Christian community" and, hence, of all of Lebanese society.
Meanwhile, Western capitals themselves bear responsibility for the spread of terrorism and its growing influence, because they did not heed the importance of Lebanon, its mission in the East, and its pioneering place in this delicate part of world. They abandoned it to fall into the hands of totalitarian and terrorist regimes. With the fall of Lebanon, the last wall that could have stemmed the fundamentalist tide to the West also tumbled. Today, that tide is knocking hard at the gates of Western capitals and in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and other flashpoints, they are paying dearly in their blood and flesh the price of having forsaken Lebanon.
If the Vatican is serious in its endeavor to protect the Christians of the East, it should not be merely content with issuing condemnation and denunciation statements, or for that matter, praying for the souls of the martyrs as we said in a previous statement. It should act immediately along two parallel paths:
First, it should mobilize all human, material, political and moral capabilities to support the international community, led by the United States of American and its allies, as well as the moderate Arab and Islamic regimes, in this war against terrorism and the fundamentalist organizations, at all cost and without any reservation.
Second, it should focus on Lebanon and find the means to empower that country and bolster its stability and security, in order for it to recover its wellbeing and resume its historic role of protecting the Christian and non-Christian minorities on its soil and its surrounding.
Lebanon, at your service
Abu Arz
January 7, 2011