A TOP official from the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement has slammed the United States for its seditious schemes in Lebanon, warning that Washington is seeking to trigger a ‘social explosion’ as the country’s economic disaster worsens.
Vice President of the Executive Council of Hezbollah, Sheikh Ali Damoush, made the remarks during his Friday prayer sermon in Lebanon’s capital city of Beirut.
He warned the US wants to deepen and exacerbate the crisis in Lebanon, and push the country to the brink of a social explosion, and a straightforward example of this is the latest comments by Barbara Leaf, assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, at an event hosted by the Wilson Center in Washington DC on Friday.
Leaf said that Lebanon ‘will likely have to bear more pain’ before the impoverished Mediterranean country forms a new government.
‘Things will have to get worse before the public pressure mounts in such a way’ that parliament selects a new president, she asserted.
The senior Hezbollah official said: ‘… enemies have tried many times in the past to place Lebanon under their guardianship and impose own policies –but they have failed.
‘As long as we possess the willpower, vigilance, patience and solidarity and are ready to make sacrifices, our enemies will be defeated.’
Elsewhere in his remarks, Sheikh Damoush pointed out that Lebanon had won its maritime demarcation deal with Israel without military confrontation.
‘Due to the presence of the resistance front and strong positions of the nation, Lebanon can establish its oil and natural gas exploration rights without a military confrontation.
‘Lebanon can tap the reserves in the Mediterranean and implement all clauses of the agreement with the help of Hezbollah and its steadfast people.’
The top Hezbollah official also touched on the opposition of far-right Israeli political parties and Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to the maritime border demarcation deal, dismissing the new Israeli premier’s stance as a political manoeuvre during last week’s Israeli parliamentary elections in order to pander to the Zionists and garner more votes.
Sheikh Damoush said it is unlikely that Netanyahu would take any action against the agreement for fear of sparking off retaliation from the popular Lebanese resistance movement, which also possesses great military capabilities.
‘Netanyahu well knows that Hezbollah is fully prepared to impose its own equation on the Tel Aviv regime if the Israeli authorities obstruct exploitation of reserves in the gas-rich Mediterranean Sea,’ he said.
On Thursday, Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Sheikh Naim Qassem also warned that the resistance movement will punish Israel and bring it back to its senses ‘in case of any foolishness in terms of the maritime border demarcation agreement’ with Lebanon.
The second-in-command of Hezbollah reiterated that his group is ready to confront the Israeli regime, and it is the strength and unity in Lebanon that has allowed the crisis-hit country to deal with its problems as well as guarantee the demarcation of its maritime borders.
‘If Israel creates an issue in the maritime border demarcation agreement, Hezbollah has enough power to punish and prevent any foolishness,’ he said.
Israel and Lebanon have technically been at war for decades. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 during the latter’s civil war and occupied Lebanese territory until 2000. Israel’s last military aggression against Lebanon was in the summer of 2006.
- United States occupation forces in Syria and their local Kurdish mercenary allies have reportedly looted another 94 tankers and trucks loaded with the country’s oil and wheat, illegally transporting them to neighbouring Iraq.
Citing local sources, Syria’s official SANA news agency further revealed in a report last Saturday that the intruding American military forces had transferred out 30 tankers loaded with stolen Syrian crude via the illegal al-Waleed border crossing, and 44 more tankers of oil from the al-Swaidiya fields through the unauthorised Mahmoudiya crossing, heading to US military bases across the border in Iraq.
According to the report, the occupation troops, aided by the so-called ‘Syrian Democratic Forces’ (SDF) of US-backed Kurdish militants, also hauled 20 more trucks loaded with wheat out of the country to northern Iraq through the Semalka crossing.
Syrian media outlets regularly report on illegal American oil and food smuggling, with the US occupiers and their local Kurdish allies organising convoys containing dozens of tankers or trucks at least once a week, and sometimes more.
Last week, US forces reportedly shipped 43 tankers of Syrian oil looted from the country’s al-Jazeera field into northern Iraq.
This is while Damascus has repeatedly condemned Washington’s oil and food looting in the war-torn nation, which have robbed Syria of access to nearly 90 per cent of its own oil resources, and much of its arable land.
Prior to the 2011 foreign-backed terrorist campaign unleashed in the country by the US and its European and regional allies in their attempts to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad, Syria enjoyed modest self-sufficiency in both food and energy.
The US military has illegitimately maintained at least 800 troops in Syria east of the Euphrates River since 2017, tasking its troops with controlling Syrian energy fields and blocking Damascus from regaining control of its internationally recognised borders.
In addition to plundering Syria’s energy and agricultural resources, Washington and its European allies have further imposed a crushing sanctions regime against the country, aimed at crippling its economy by blocking the import of all sorts of goods, including medicines and medical equipment.
Former US president Donald Trump has openly conceded on several occasions that American military forces were deployed to Syria because of the country’s oil wealth.
On September 21, China called on the United States to stop looting Syria’s national resources and respect its sovereignty and territorial integrity.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin further underlined that Washington has a duty to investigate robberies committed by its occupying military forces, as well as to compensate for the damage caused.
- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that the global economy is splitting into rival blocs, threatening a repeat of the Cold War.
‘We may be sleepwalking into a world that is poorer and less secure as a result,’ IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told the Washington Post in an interview.
‘I lived through the first Cold War on the other side of the Iron Curtain. And, yeah, it is quite cold out there,’ she said, ‘and to go into a second Cold War for another generation is … very irresponsible.’
Georgieva warned of risks to the global economy from the rivalry between China and the United States, adding that Trump-era tariffs on Chinese imports are one example of the US’ counter-productive policies.
Annual trade between the US and China is still substantial, exceeding US $600 billion and the US and Chinese economies are so intertwined that the IMF director believes a complete break is impossible.
US President Joe Biden has yet to resolve the key policy issue surrounding tariffs on Chinese goods enforced by his predecessor Trump that cost US importers billions of dollars.
‘It is important to think through actions and what they may generate as counter actions carefully, because, once you let the genie out of the bottle, it’s hard to put it back in,’ Georgieva warned.
Relations between the world’s two largest economies have strained in recent years over issues like tariffs, Taiwan, intellectual property, cyber security, the removal of Hong Kong’s autonomy and the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak, among others.
The Biden administration has stressed the need to maintain and keep open lines of communication between the two countries, but also recently highlighted the implications if Beijing were to support Moscow in the Ukraine conflict.
Chinese President Xi Jinping last month made a veiled attack on Washington’s increasingly explicit support for Taiwan at the 20th Party Congress, blaming ‘foreign interference’ for exacerbating tensions. ‘We will never promise to renounce the use of force.’ he said.
After US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi provocatively visited Taiwan in August, the Chinese military reportedly moved several warships and planes near the median line.
Beijing says such visits to Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) by high-level US lawmakers fully expose Washington’s hidden agenda.
Under the internationally-recognised ‘One-China’ policy, nearly all world countries recognise Beijing’s sovereignty over Taiwan, including the United States.
However, in violation of its own stated policy and in an attempt to irritate Beijing, Washington continues to court the secessionist government in Taiwan, supporting its anti-China stance and supplying it with massive amounts of armaments.
US President Biden is currently in Cambodia, alongside other world leaders, at the ASEAN summit led by Southeast Asian leaders.
He is expected to meet his Chinese counterpart this week at the G20 summit in Indonesia’s Bali.
