Dr. Walid Phares is American of Lebanese origins, a noted scholar and author with a clear vision of the dynamics of the Middle East. He is also a friend of Israel of longstanding. Earlier today we posted on an emerging jihad in the Sudan that Dr. Phares had spoken of in his capacity as a Middle East Advisor to President-elect Trump. In 2012, he was a foreign policy advisor to Republican candidate former Massachusetts Governor, Mitt Romney, currently under consideration by the Trump transition team as a possible nominee for Secretary of State in the new Administration. Dr. Phares by my own acquaintance is a Lebanese patriot and opponent of Syrian, Iranian and Hezbollah involvement that has plagued the unique political structure of the confessional politics of his homeland.

Following the Trump victory in early November, the long knives were out from Iranian and leftist sources in both the US and Israel publishing defamations of Dr. Phares’ character that were patently false. The object was to smear his reputation and discredit him from holding a significant advisory role in the Trump transition and Administration focused on the Middle East.  The leftist Mother Jones published a hit piece by Andrew Serwer, a supporter of the Iran nuclear pact that was quickly piled on by provocateurs in social media.

Perhaps  one of the most vitriolic of the later was a piece published by Ben Lynnfield in The Jerusalem Post on November 16, 2016,  “Who is Walid Phares, Trump’s Mideast Adviser”.  It was a farrago of untruths.

On November 20, 2016, Sarah Stern of EMET-Endowment for Middle East Truth in Washington, DC published a rebuttal of the Mother’s Jones allegations, “Villyfying Walid Phares, “in which she called Phares, “a living national treasure” for his scholarship and astute observations and advices on how we should make sense of the troubling Middle East in the thrall of barbaric Islamist doctrine.   A doctrine aimed at the destruction of Christians, Jews and other non-Muslim minorities in the region.

It was left to Israeli Col. Yair Ravid to author a devastating rebuttal to the leftist attackers on Dr. Phares endeavoring to impugn his character.  The Jerusalem Post published it on November 28, 2016 appropriately titled, “In Praise of Professor Phares.” Ravid is in a unique position to author this rebuttal. He was a long serving Israeli intelligence officer who held the Beirut operational post for Mossad and knew intimately the confessional political system, dynamics of Lebanon and the facts on the ground during the long Israeli withdrawal culminating in the seeming pell mell leave-taking in May 2000. Some of that is described in a book published in May 2016, Window to the Backyard: The History of Israel-Lebanon Relations – Facts & Illusions.

Here are some of the facts that Ravid marshals to destroy the lies of the leftist enemies of Dr. Phares.

Accusation by Serwer of Mother Jones: Phares was an “ideologue of Lebanese militiamen during the civil war in the 1980s.”

Ravid:  One of the quoted persons, Toni Nisei, has himself slammed the far-left media for lying about him: “Regrettably Mother Jones selected three sentences from an almost four-hour… conversation with Serwer about the Lebanese resistance against Syrian occupation. Serwer maliciously distorted the form and core of what was discussed in a cheap and repulsive attempt to attack Professor Walid Phares and create an absurd and ludicrous connection between Professor Phares’ academic, political and intellectual roles [as a] contribution to educate the high cadres of the Lebanese Christian resistance [is] deplorable and unacceptable.”

Accusation: “Phares advocated that Lebanon’s Christians work toward creating a separate, independent Christian enclave.”

Ravid:  This of a man who has published books since 1979 while he was at law school, and hundreds of articles, all focusing on a federal solution to the crisis in Lebanon.

Accusation:  Lynnfield quoted far-left Mother Jones stating “that he was a close adviser of Samir Geagea, a Lebanese- Christian warlord.”

Ravid:   Tunic Hindi, a Lebanese politician today, has already crippled this charge in an interview where he wondered why Phares’ critics insist on this falsehood since Hindi himself was the adviser to Geagea, not Phares.

Accusation:  The Post piece goes on to claim that in the 1990s, Phares tried “to lobby the Israeli government to carve out a state for Christians in the security zone Israel maintained in southern Lebanon, despite the fact that Israel had been burned badly when it allied with Lebanese Christians in 1982, that most of zone’s inhabitants were Shi’ite Muslims and that Israel already had its hands full dealing with an insurgency by Hezbollah.”

Ravid:  This is utterly false. At the time Phares, along with his NGO colleagues, lodged a demand at the United Nations Security Council in New York to issue a resolution to establish international protection for a “free zone” in south Lebanon, to replace the Israeli military. The plan was that Christians, Muslims and Druze together would control their own destinies under a federal system. They wanted to see local police stations and municipalities act as a functioning local government until Syria had withdrawn and Hezbollah had been disarmed.

Accusation:  Former Mossad director Efraim Halevy opines on Phares’ mischaracterized position: “To think in 1997 of creating a Christian enclave in the South, an area of preponderant Shi’ite presence, is esoteric bordering on the ridiculous.” Yossi Alpher, former director of the Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies (now the Institute for National Security Studies), wrote: “Even in Israeli terms, he represents an attempt to subvert our good intentions and exploit us militarily so that we spill our blood for the Maronites. This ended very badly and he is a reminder of this.”

Ravid: None of that was found in Phares’ arguments at the time. Precisely the opposite: the Lebanese-American scholar argued that Israeli forces should withdraw but surrender the area not to Hezbollah and Assad, but to local municipalities’ forces protected by the UN. In fact his plans then are the same as what is being discussed today for areas in Iraq and Syria.

Accusation:  Alpher continues: “His association with the Lebanese Forces is very problematic… He was a prominent ideologue indoctrinating people who went out and murdered people and he has never accounted for that.”

Ravid:  Alpher’s ignorance is abysmal. Walid Phares was never a combatant and never headed a Lebanese Forces military command. He wrote books and articles and offered lectures. Sadly, Hezbollah propaganda has now been able to manipulate Israeli expertise.

Accusation:  anti-Israel Abed Ayoub, the national legal and policy director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, libeling Phares: “If you look at his history, he was a warmonger and he shouldn’t be near the White House. He was part of a militia that committed war crimes and, if anything, he should be tried for war crimes.”

Ayoub partially quotes Phares as saying, “The only military strategic option remaining to the Jewish state in the medium and long term, if it is to maintain its balance of power with the northern threat, is obviously the nuclear deterrent. But Lebanese and Israelis alike know all too well the consequences of a blast anywhere in Lebanon….”

Ravid:  These were parts of conversations that anyone in the field of defense and military studies has had, but to use a discussion about Iran’s military advance in the region, select half a sentence and paint Phares as developing a nuclear doctrine is not just silly, but low. No one knows the Arab world and Lebanon better than Phares. When he and others were part of conversations about establishing a so-called mini-entity alongside Israel, like the Kurds actually did in northern Iraq and in Syria, they wanted to express their belief at the time that minorities in the region could count on each other.

Ravid concludes his rebuttal observing:

What concerns me in The Jerusalem Post piece is historical veracity. We cannot as Israelis rewrite the history of our northern neighbor to please the terrorist network that dominates it at this point in time. Phares is a public figure in the US with most of his adult life dedicated to public service. His work during his 20s in his ancestral homeland is to be praised, not condemned, and above all described accurately. For demonizing is a prelude to ostracizing and we in this country know exactly what that means. It is unfortunate that a segment of our own academic and media elite has fallen for the games of Iranian and Islamist propagandists.

What we know and what we saw are very different from the vapid and erroneous writing of critics and the comments they quoted. When it comes to history let’s be serious and not reproduce chimeric tales concocted by Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood in order to meddle in US politics.