American Maronite Union
email: USMaronite@aol.co

AMERICA AND LEBANON ONE AGAINST TERRORISM
Washington, September 16, 2001

We, Lebanese-Americans felt the tragedy of New York and Washington very deeply in our hearts The thousands of  lives which were taken by criminal terrorists are more then just victims. They are American martyrs for freedpm and democracy.
The Lebanese People, one of the few small nations victimized by international terrorism since the mid 1970s,  share the horrors experienced by the American People. Our small nation of Lebanon was submitted to the barbaric and vicious attacks against civilians as of December 1976. Car bombs and cowardly suicide attacks reached deep inside our neighborhoods in Beirut and other cities for years. Thousands of victims died, vanished or became handicaps for ever. For 15 years, our people in Lebanon were savagely aggressed by the terror groups and Fundamentalist organizations.
Since 1983, American blood was spilled on Lebanon's soil to mix with Lebanese blood:
*  The murder of the US Marines
* The blowing up of the US Embassy
*  The assassination of US Ambassadors, diplomats and officers.
*  The taking of hostages and the execution of innocent US citizens
All of which ordered, planned and executed by regimes listed on the US State Department of states sponsoring terrorism.
These were not only crimes against American interests but against Lebanon's freedom as well.
Left alone to the onslaught of the forces of terrorism since the mid 1980s, the Lebanese People was made to pay a high price in blood and freedoms. They lost their country's independence and the liberties of their civil society since. As of the early 1990s, the Lebanese civilian population was continuously terrorized by various Fundamentalist organizations. Twenty-one months before the barbaric genocide of Americans in Manhattan, the same criminal group, which perpetrated the attack against the World Trade Center Towers, entered Kfar Habou, a small Christian village in northern Lebanon and perpetrated a horrendous massacre against pregnant women, older men and soldiers.
In addition, we have learned that at least two Lebanese men were among the victims of the planes hijacked from Boston, two are still missing under the rubbles in New York and may be many more.
American and Lebanese blood has once again mixed under the cowardly aggression of modern barbarians. We join our modest resources and long experience in resisting terrorism to the great efforts to build a world coalition for freedom and democracy to defeat evil.
America and Lebanon will struggle together for freedom and democracy.
May the sacrifices of those who fell in New York, Washington in 2001 as well as of those who were massacred in Lebanon since 1975, bring us freedom and liberty. May the acts of America, brings back freedom to our country and humanity to the world