Blame It On Protestants or the Jews

Anyone but the real Christians.

Lebanon is a delicate nation constantly on the verge of civil war. The sectarian balance and sensibilities and anxieties of each community is as such that there is still no open and honest discussion about the 15-year long Civil War that devastated the nation 20 years ago. The Lebanese sects could not even agree on a common history book which was one of the tenets of the Ta'if accords that brought the war to an end. A common history lesson was meant to embody a sense of national unity for the bitterly divided Lebanese, but disagreement about the Civil War narrative precluded that from happening. A fight about who started the Civil War could bequeath battles anew.

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It is no exaggeration to say that political rhetoric that seems to target one community could easily lead to street gun battles in Beirut. Thus sect leaders often measure their words very carefully so as not to offend the other side and lead to a war of words. For instance, when the Lebanese right-wing Maronite Catholic Patriarch stated after the 2008 elections that the Shiite-led March 8 coalition - which lost the election - should be excluding from the governing cabinet in the name of majority rule, a senior Shiite leader in the fundamentalist party-cum-militia Hezbollah retorted that if the patriarch is so concerned with majority rule then let such a rule become the law of the land (an arrangement that would benefit the 40% Shiite population, a plurality in Lebanon, much more than the 30% or so Christians) and then added that the 'glory of Lebanon' has been given to the 'resistance' (i.e. Shiite Hezbollah). The former comment was seen as routine Lebanese political maneuvering to deny an opponent a position in government, but the latter was seen as a direct challenge to the disproportionate allocation of MPs Christians are accorded (half the parliament) and the use of the words 'glory of Lebanon' was not accidental. It is a common epigram that the 'glory of Lebanon' has been given to the Maronite Patriarch. The invoking of such a well-known phrase of Lebanese history and appropriating it away from the Maronites and to the Shiittes it was seen as an attempt to undercut Christian power and bolster the ever growing Shiite dominance in the country. Such rhetoric in a nation where confessional politics is always seen as zero-sum could easily lead to heightened tensions and Hezbollah almost immediately retracted the statement.

That's politics in Lebanon in a 'nutshell'.

Christians naturally adhere to the same rules of political sensitivity. So when a radical American Christian pastor threatened to burn the Qur'an recently, many Lebanese Christians felt the need to take a stand and emphasize that as Christians not only do they not condone the burning of the Holy book of their countrymen, but that they are not even part of the same community as the pastor.

The official, and I belabor official, response of the Maronite church was that the pastor is a protestant and that such people are not real Christians. While a Greek Orthodox MP and former deputy parliamentary speaker Elie Frizli revived the old prejudice of blaming the Jews and stated on Lebanese television that the pastor is, in fact, a 'rabbi who had worked in a synagogue.'

Prejudice. Another aspect of Lebanese politics.