All For The Country, The Sublime

I chanced upon Rageh Omaar's excellent report for al-Jazeera on Lebanon and the confessional system, with, as ever, an emphasis on the legal difficulties of intermarriage under it.

Well, who wants to abolish the entrenched protections of Lebanese Christians and others, and why do they want that abolition? No wonder that they are being cheered on by the same Western elements that cheered or cheer on Izetbegovic, the KLA, the Chechen separatists, Jundullah, the genocide of Christian Iraq, and the bombardment of Lebanon by those who impose martial law on Bethlehem, who demolish Jerusalem in order to build on top of it, and reduce the inhabitants of Nazareth to fourth, fifth or sixth-class citizenship.

But a perfectly simple solution is at hand. Many an anticlerical regime on the Continent or in the Iberian world has made civil marriage compulsory, but the intended victims, mostly Catholics, have simply followed up these brief formalities with full church weddings as if nothing had happened. They still do. In fact, considering Lebanon's longstanding ties to France, I am rather surprised that this is not already the case there.

Speaking of the Christian Middle East, the British-based Archbishop Athanasios Dawood has called on his fellow Iraqi Christians to flee, and on Britain to take them in. We, after all, are to blame for their predicament. I couldn't agree more. Just so long as, for every family of Iraqi (or Palestinian) Christians that we took in, we got to deport, to anywhere daft enough to take them, an Islamist or a neocon. It is from the latter's media and political ranks that the first, because the most urgently necessary, deportations should be made.