Vilifying Walid Phares
Sarah N. Stern/Israel Hayon/November 22/16
History has a strange way of judging people. American history honors warriors of the past such as George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who struggled and fought for America’s freedom and independence. However, the closer one gets to our current age of moral relativism, the more critical we are of those who are thrust into a state of conflict — those who have had to realize that their people’s survival sometimes depends on defeating an enemy.
Walid Phares was born in 1957 to a Maronite Christian family in Beirut. By the time Phares was in his 20s, Lebanon, which has always been more of a mosaic of various religions and communities than a unified nation, had plunged into a bloody civil war. Naturally, Phares supported his own Lebanese Maronite Christian community’s efforts to defend itself in this brutal, existential struggle against Syrian occupation on the one hand and Palestinian and Lebanese Sunni and Shiite terror on the other.
As a young man just graduating from law school, he published a book on pluralism, promoting a federal system in Lebanon as a way to halt the war and protect minorities. Always prolific, he published many books on history and politics, submitted hundreds of articles and was widely interviewed. He also published a weekly magazine promoting Middle East minorities. At last he formed a small political party, the Christian Social Democratic Party, in East Beirut. The young lawyer wasn’t involved in war but rather in campaigns to raise awareness about the suffering in his ancestral land. He traveled around the world to draw international attention to the conflict in Lebanon and to offer solutions.
In 1986, toward the end of the conflict, he represented his small democratic party in the representative political council of the local de facto government known as “Lebanese Forces,” opposing the Syrian occupation, much like the American continental army resisted British colonial occupation. Phares’ intellectual skills ended up landing him with a task of diplomatic relations with the outside world and reaching out to emigres. In 1990, after Hafez Assad’s troops invaded all of Lebanon, he decided to immigrate to the U.S. to pursue his doctoral studies and warn the West about the impending jihadi terror threats.
In the United States, he received his doctorate and has authored 14 books. He taught at Florida International University and Florida Atlantic University and has testified before various congressional committees. Phares has continued to be a champion of human rights for persecuted minorities throughout the region. He is a pre-eminent scholar of the Middle East and has an uncanny ability to decipher the various players on the many Byzantine Middle Eastern chessboards and what their ultimate objectives are. He has a piercing intellect and a thorough grasp of the region that makes him a national treasure during these complicated times.
Professor Phares is highly regarded and is a respected American intellectual after 26 years of service to his adopted country. Since 2008, he has been an adviser to Congress and the European Parliament. His book “Future Jihad” (2006) became a best-seller, while his prescient book “The Coming Revolution” (2010) correctly predicted the Arab Spring before it happened. His most recent book, “The Lost Spring” (2014), warned about the rise of Islamic State before it surged, correctly predicted the Iranian expansion and once again called for Western support for civil societies in the Middle East.
In 2011, Phares was appointed as a national security adviser to presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and in 2016, Republican nominee Donald Trump named him as one of his foreign policy advisers. Phares defended Trump’s platform on foreign affairs and Middle East policies and engaged in diplomatic missions to explain the alternative policies of his candidate amid intense criticism in the press. Among these policies were Trump’s opposition to the Iran deal and his determination to confront radical Islamic terrorism. These two defenses drew the ire of the Iranians and the Muslim Brotherhood against the adviser.
Thus, both lobbies used the classic charge of Islamophobia against Phares, just because he warned against jihadism. But beyond the usual Islamist talking points, his detractors waged a smear campaign based on fallacies and lies. They targeted his early life during the Lebanese civil war, since the public today has little information about that conflict and the U.S. press cannot easily fact-check the Lebanese press (printed in French and Arabic) from that time period.
Because he lived his younger years through the bloody days of the civil war and championed a free area to defend his Christian community, Phares has been tarred and feathered by progressive left-wing publications such as Mother Jones. The false reporting was debunked several times, for example in Family Security Matters and Breitbart News, but the lobbies keep using it nevertheless.
I expect this from Mother Jones, but I was shocked to see that these exact same allegations have been repeated word for word in an article in The Jerusalem Post by Ben Lynfield. The piece alleged statements that Phares did not make and selectively chose parts of analyses developed in academic seminars to draw conclusions he did not make. Senior Israeli academics and former officials who knew what was happening in Lebanon are now responding to this tract and more will do so soon.
Phares is a national treasure, and the incoming U.S. administration could well use his depth of knowledge of the region, his piercing intellect and his infinite sense of compassion and justice for persecuted religious minorities all over the world. Phares has been a strong proponent of a Lebanon free of the suffocating choke-hold of Syrian and Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces. He understands the clear and present danger that radical Islam poses to the region, and to the world. And he has been on the right side of history.
**Sarah N. Stern is founder and president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a pro-Israel American think tank and policy institute in Washington, D.C.
