The Country, The Sublime and The Flag

The Maronite Patriarch's echoing of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah's call for a sort of universal blasphemy law is an important pointer: it would be wrong on the proposed global scale, but there is presumably already such a thing in Lebanon, since how could the country function without one? We had better get used to that sort of perspective, because Lebanon now looks like the coming place as Israel is taken over by the Haredim with (rather aberrantly in their own terms, but there we are) their extremely low levels of general education and of economic productivity. The only people still doing anything in that Land are going to be the almost equally fecund Arabs.

Even Sunni, increasingly Salafi Tripoli is the Prime Minister's constituency, the Prime Minister who is in office because both Hezbollah and the Maronite militia veterans around General Aoun wanted and want him. So at least a good proportion of the Sunnis in Lebanon are obviously no keener on the Saudis than their compatriots are. It is still within living memory that an immemorial Christian-Muslim society and culture, over which Christian sovereignty (Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, British) has been the historical norm, were destroyed further south, and it is no wonder that neither the Christians nor the Muslims in Lebanon are inclined to risk the same fate. Direct or indirect protection by Iran, which has reserved parliamentary representation for her ancient indigenous Christians and which more to the point is the enemy both of Israel and of Saudi Arabia, suits them down to the ground.

The rise of Lebanon, although it would be placed at enormous risk by any victory on the part of the Islamist insurrection in and invasion of Syria, would be a striking example of how such a thing could be attained by a country with a large, historically definitive, and constitutionally entrenched Christian population even if half of the population at large were Muslim, a situation which, if it ever happens anywhere in Western Europe, will not do so until long after we are all dead. And that really does mean a Christian population, not a pseudo-Western one as defined by neoconservatism. Specifically, it means numerically and otherwise a predominantly and observantly Catholic population. Learn the lessons well. There is every sign that we are about to be taught them.