If it's not Iran then it must be Hezbollah, but it can never be France
If the West cannot destroy Iran in 2019 they will happily settle for destroying Hezbollah.
There are only two types of political parties: those which people fight to destroy (like the Yellow Vests against the mainstream political parties in France), and those which citizens fight to preserve. Hezbollah is the "Party of God" and the party of Lebanon's poor, but they are not a political party.
Amal is the political party affiliated with Hezbollah, and Western media coverage is doing their best to lump Amal in with the older, established, Western-aping, billionaire-backed parties which are the true source of the recent corruption protests.
Hezbollah has always said they would never turn their guns on Lebanese, and even if the West doesn't want anyone to know that, then the Lebanese certainly do know. They know that without Hezbollah southern Lebanon would be called "Northern Israel" today. Or, nearly as badly, it would still be the Free Lebanese State, that stillborn Israeli client from the early 1980s which no country would recognize. (That's just more irrelevant history to Western mainstream media journalists of course.)
After saving the Lebanese from Israel on multiple occasions, the undeniable and enduring popular support of Hezbollah and Amal comes from its education, health and other social welfare organisations. Southern Lebanon is most notable not for being mostly Shia, but for its extreme poverty, which was the result of decades of governmental neglect. Amal helped reverse that, to the extreme consternation of France, Israel and their many sectarian militias, mafias and political puppets in Lebanon.
And yet despite being so late arriving to power, despite being anchored in the poorest regions, despite decades of neglect from Beirut, and despite illegal and inhuman US-led sanctions on Hezbollah; the West wants us to believe that Amal is the one responsible for the corruption at the heart of the current protests!
One has to wonder: if Amal is so corrupt then where is the money, because it is certainly not in southern Lebanon?
The idea that Hassan Nasrallah (who can make a fair case to be the most popular Muslim leader and hero in the world) is about to fall due to decades of corruption in Beirut is an absolute fantasy which can only be believed in the West.
Again, what we have here is another situation where Western propaganda is aiming to manipulate legitimate unhappiness created by long-tenured Western client politicians in order to deny their own neo-colonial culpability. The legitimate demands in Yemen, Palestine and Iraq are all being portrayed as being caused by an Iranian neo-colonialism which does not exist, when the real culprit is the very real and very accurately-named Western neo-colonialism.
The West, of course, may speak of neoliberalism but never admit to neo-colonialism.
The real source of corruption in Lebanon: Western-allied, neoliberal & neocolonial puppets
I would imagine that up to this point a Lebanese reader has been quite bored - I have only relayed things which he or she already know quite well. But perhaps a Lebanese expat in Brazil or the United States - who cannot visit Lebanon so easily and who foolishly relies on the Western mainstream media - may not know some of these things.
What most Lebanese know quite intimately is that they no longer have a "real" economy which could provide a large amount of jobs. Their export capabilities are so woeful that scrap iron was their third top export in 2017, at just $179 million.
This is unsurprising, because Lebanon's longtime function was to serve as France's Middle East banking haven, with Switzerland-level secrecy laws dating to 1956. However, it has increasingly been replaced by Qatar and other Persian Gulf nations.
Banking is still a strong sector of Lebanon's economy, but mainly due to the huge number of remittances. Only 4 million Lebanese live in Lebanon, but there are an astonishing 8-12 million who are expatriates.
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