Alibis Written in Blood

Once again, a piece from l'Orient le Jour. This time it's an editorial that appeared today, left and above the fold, by writer Issa Ghorayeb.

In the last few days I've had a series of depressing conversations with friends, new acquaintances, even service drivers. The theme has always been the same: the US strikes may not happen, but war is still coming to Lebanon.

The feeling of unfinished business is pervasive, disquieting and very troubling. As if it wasn't troubling enough in itself, there's also an inability to explain exactly why this has to happen, or what will cause it. People shrug their shoulders and smile tiredly. There are too many enemies, too many plots, too many causes, and....no more heroes.

I thought the piece below embodied some of that feeling, as did Walid Joumblatt's piece a few days ago, which I posted last week. This one is more generically about the Arab world as well as Lebanon. It touches on a lot of themes that keep coming up here: cyncial governance, manipulation of public opinion, lack of democracy and education, and something about the Arab world that makes it insist on walking against the current of history.

Alibi written in blood

As we like to say, the creation of Israel was the beginning of all our troubles. Not only does the Palestinian problem continue to haunt us exactly as before, not only have new territories been lost over the decades, but the convulsions of this conflict have generated any number of equally important crises over the years.

But, even so, how to ignore the enormous role played by the Arabs themselves in this frenetic march backwards against the tides of history?

It was supposedly to revenge the debacle of 1948 that corrupt monarchies were overthrown by officers who would soon prove even more despotic. As it was supposedly in order to better counter Israel's formidable war machine - but actually in order to better cement their hold on power - that these dashing, over-dressed revolutionaries made their populations live without bread so they could buy ever more canons.

And it was still in the cause of Palestine that the Palestinian guerillas somehow lost their compass bearings and, rather than taking the road to Jerusalem, ended up mucking about in Beirut and even Jouneh.

We Lebanese still haven't finished rubbing elbows with - and actually embracing - every kind of absurdity, brought to us live and in living color. Right next door a pitiless tyrant uses against his own people chemical weapons that were supposedly aquired to provide a balance of terror against Israel's nuclear arsenal. Caught red-handed, he accepts to give them up - or, at least, pretend to - in order to hold on to his throne which swims in the blood of innocents.

And it's to give a helping hand to this torturer that Hezbollah, under orders from its patron Iran, sends men off to fight in Syria. All the while invoking, without even the suspicion of an ironic smile, the imperative of resisting the Israeli enemy.

Still mouthing this slogan, it continues its guerilla action against the gears and cogs of our own state structures. And seeks to shadow - if not replace - those same state institutions. All the while explaining away its activities by the weakness of those institutions...while it works furiously to weaken them further. The courageous and healthy wave of protests in Zahle over the installation, reparation, or maintenance (who knows which?) of Hezbollah's private telecommunications network served to remind Lebanese of the rampant intrusion of the ever-encroaching spider's web of ears that can spy on everything.

And, of course, always and again in the name of resistance against the enemy.

If that excuse didn't already exist among the ruins of unfortunate Palestine, we'd have to invent it.

Issa Ghorayeb, in

l'Orient le Jour,

18 September, 2013