Lebanon is ruled by a religious Mafia that either is itself involved directly in politics or operates like a puppeteer handling subservient puppet politicians. If you watch the political process in the media, you will see more men in robes, beards and strange headgear than men or women in normal professional attire. The Shiite sect is run directly by mullahs, imams or other clergymen, with a handful of civilian hacks posturing as politicians (MPs, ministers, etc.). Other sects, like the Sunni or the Maronite sects, act behind a façade of civilian ministers, party leaders or MPs, but none of the latter ever dare to oppose the patriarchs, muftis, bishops and other clergymen who set the general policies of the sect. As the Lebanese state has collapsed, the men in robes no longer hide behind their bonded politicians; they themselves become the political leaders who directly steer the politics of their respective sects on issues of national importance.
This is the multi-sectarian organization that divides the country into religious concentration camps in which the individual is trapped within his/her community and has no value or rights except to serve as a faceless member of a herd. While sects claim the freedom to worship without restrictions imposed by the other sects, individuals within each sect have no freedom. A Lebanese Christian who believes he is free is actually fooled into believing that he is because he can ring his church bell on Sundays without the Muslims prohibiting him from doing so. That is the extent of freedom as it is practiced in Lebanon. It is always in reaction to the other communities. I call this "communitarian freedom". But within any given community, there are no individual freedoms: A Maronite individual cannot openly challenge or criticize the Maronite Church, just as a Sunni Muslim would be well-advised not to openly criticize the Grand Mufti of the Republic.
The Lebanese confessional or sectarian system of government, disguised under the pernicious filth of "consensual democracy", grants rights to religious sects, but not to individuals within those sects. All of Lebanon's current problems are due to disagreements between the sects, not between individual members of those sects. The fallacy of "consensual democracy" is exactly the problem facing the country today in the inability of Parliament to elect a president. The essential element of a democracy is that it provides for resolving differences by voting, and the winner moves forward to form a government or pass a law while the loser becomes the opposition that tries to improve its standing with a view at winning at the next vote or elections. In Lebanon, however, differences always end up in a stalemate. When faced with a vote or an election, the party that suspects it might lose does everything it can to block or obstruct the vote or the constitutional process under the pretense that it wants dialogue and consensus.
By dialogue and consensus, the political and religious parties, regardless of the wishes of their constituents, meet in backrooms away from public scrutiny, make deals that often involve mutual concessions and payolas, and reach an agreement which is then ratified by a cosmetic vote in Parliament, thus bypassing the constitutional process. Since the last exercise of real democracy in 1970 for presidential elections and 1972 for legislative elections, all elections and votes have in fact been fake and for show, since they were always overridden by consensuses and deals that were imposed by occupying countries like Syria and Israel and their American and Arab backers. In other words, "consensual democracy" has replaced the genuine democracy that Lebanon had practiced in the early decades of its existence.
For the most part, genuine democracy was practiced when the Christians had a bigger say in government (1943-1976), while the fallacy of consensual democracy took hold when Muslims grabbed power thanks to Palestinian terrorism and the Syrian invasion and occupation, followed by the Taef Agreement in 1989 which was sponsored by an unnatural coalition between the self-declared beacon of democracy, the United States, and the authoritarian absolute Saudi monarchy. In that agreement, power was snatched from the Christians and handed to the Muslims who proceeded to mutilate genuine democracy and convert it into consensual democracy. Successive US republican administrations since Nixon’s have not ceased kissing the oily asses of the Arab dictatorships after the Arab oil embargo of 1973, sacrificing and backstabbing every other minority in the region (Kurds, Maronites, Copts, Yazidis, Armenians, etc.) in exchange for cheap Arab oil, while those same Arab dictatorships were dispatching terror groups and radical imams, and building mosques and madrassas to undermine and attack the West in the heart of its cities and capitals.
Why pretend to have a democracy? Why have elections and votes? Why even have a constitution and laws? Why not go back to a primitive form of government in which the religious bosses of the sects regularly meet and enact laws that suit their objectives without taking into account their people's wishes? This is how the mullahs of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan. This is how the ayatollahs rule in Iran. These are the forms of government in which people are infantilized as ignorant of their interests, and only the religious dinosaur in power knows what is best because he, and only he, understands the will of God as stated in dubious fictional parchments and scrolls written thousands of years ago.
In a country with a diverse population and a myriad of sects, the problem is compounded by the co-existence of multiple Mafia bosses. In Iran, there is one boss, the Ayatollah. In Afghanistan, the chief Mullah runs the show. In Lebanon, with its 18 religious denominations recognized by the constitution, the authoritative power of one religious boss is distributed across several bosses, which makes reaching a consensus difficult, if not impossible. Having one dictator may facilitate decision-making regardless of the merits of the decisions, but having several competing dictators is a recipe for hellish indecision. That is why reform is impossible in Lebanon as it exists today.
When the religious bosses disagree between one another, they wage wars in which hundreds of thousands of people die. And they convince their people that their death (sacrifice, martyrdom, etc.) is part of asserting God's will. The status of a victim of war and crime is idealized to that of a martyr for the cause. That is what the Christian Church did in its early years: It created the myth of the "martyr" which makes saints out of suicidal rebels. The Muslim world today does the same: from the poor driver who gets killed in a car accident to the religious terrorist who blows himself up to kill other people, they are all "martyrs" on an express lane to heaven. The words “killed” or “dead” are no longer used.
When the bosses agree, they act jointly to keep their respective herds in tow and the existing system in place. On questions of the civil status, religious laws and courts override civilian laws and courts. Inheritance, marriage, divorce, births and deaths... are all the purview of the religious authorities who engage in all manner of discrimination, abuse and corruption, especially against women. Lebanese women who marry foreign men cannot grant their children the Lebanese nationality. If a Lebanese woman dies without a direct male relative (brother, son, husband), it is virtually impossible to declare and register her death. I personally was unable to register my maternal aunt's death because she had no brothers, wasn't married (no husband) and had no children, let alone male ones. I, as her closest male next-of-kin could not officially declare her death, and I had to resort to "wasta" (personal connections) and a courageous “moukhtar” (local selectman) willing to bend the law to issue a death certificate.
Over the past few decades, people - overwhelmingly young people - have been demanding civilian laws for the personal status, as for example civilian marriage. Right now, Lebanese couples cannot marry before a judge; they have to be married by a priest, an imam, a sheikh, etc. The irony is that if a couple travels abroad and gets married in a civilian court, their marriage is accepted in Lebanon. Similarly for divorce: Some sects make it very difficult to obtain a divorce for the purpose of extorting money from the couple, but if the divorce is processed overseas it is accepted in Lebanon. Every time calls are made to adopt civilian laws for the personal status, the clergy of ALL the sects, Christians and Muslims alike, band together, and since they control the politicians, it is virtually impossible to change the law. The point is that the religious Mafia is alive and well: it controls people's lives and makes money out of marriage, divorce, birth, death and inheritance proceedings. Christian and Muslim authorities always come together to defend their money-making power-holding turf, while arguing that people's lives outside the religious lines are sinful to God. In education, they do everything they can to undermine state schools. They even take money from the state to run their own private religious schools, to the detriment of upgrading public schools.
But when they disagree and fight, they push people to take up arms and commit massacres in the name of God. Every sect is convinced that God is on its side. Lately, after the mushrooming of Muslim and Jewish religious terrorism around, an extremist Christian organization by the name of “Jund Al-Rabb” (Soldiers of the Lord) has raised its head in Lebanon, attacking bars and nightclubs and hacking airport computers. Christopher Hitchens once said, "Religion makes otherwise normal people do wicked things". The Shiite Muslim Hezbollah minister of culture - how can any sane government hand the culture ministry to a radical Muslim fundamentalist militia? - decided to ban the movie Barbie on the ground that it promotes gayness.
The bigotry of the religious establishments is blatant. On top of the Bkerke hill (some 10 miles north of Beirut) sits the Maronite Patriarch whose very humble title is "Patriarch of Antioch and the Entire East", even though his flock numbers in the few millions around the world and the title is contested by half a dozen other Patriarchs of other sects. Despite all the frowny affectations of piety and faith, right under the windows of Bkerke and a giant statue of the Virgin, is the Maameltayn red light district where prostitutes from around the world plough their trade near the city of Jounieh. Just google "Jounieh prostitutes" and read about how travel websites describe the area.
Over the past several decades, thousands of child sex abuse cases by Catholic priests have been exposed in the western world, but very few elsewhere. It is no longer a secret that the religious "vocation" attracts homosexuals and pedophiles, and child sex abuse by clergymen is most likely a world-wide pandemic, though very little has come out of opaque conservative backward countries, including Lebanon. Even though the Eastern Catholic Maronite rite allows married men to become priests, celibate priests may not marry. When one case, that of the priest Mansour Labaki, came out in public accusing him of a long series of abuses between 1967 and 1997, the Maronite Church tried to sweep it under the rug. It was only in 2013 that the Vatican declared him guilty, but the Lebanese authorities refused to extradite him in 2017. He was tried and convicted in France in 2021, but never in Lebanon which refuses to extradite him. See: [https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1280979/mansour-labaky-a-priest-faces-the-demons-of-the-past.html] and [https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/lebanon/2022/09/27/vatican-defrocks-lebanese-priest-convicted-in-france-of-sexually-assaulting-girls/].
More than in the Italian Mafia, the omerta is very powerful here in the Lebanese religious universe.
This past week (January 17-18, 2024), the Maronite Patriarch gathered in the Patriarchal See in Bkerke a number of Lebanese political and religious leaders for the objective of reaffirming their faith in the Greater Lebanon – Le Grand Liban – construct that was extracted from a reluctant French mandatory power by the Maronite Church in 1920. This Greater Lebanon was formed by attaching peripheral Syrian Muslim regions to the central Christian Mount Lebanon entity that had been independent from Ottoman rule since 1864. In their hubris of 1920, the Maronites believed their cultural superiority, nurtured by their close relations with France, would ensure their eternal dominance over a largely illiterate Muslim majority, in a manner similar to how Zionists believed they could maintain their dominance over the Palestinian people.
Despite the long-standing 100-year failure and collapse of that Lebanon, the assembled in Bkerke announced the formation of a group named the “Greater Lebanon Gathering”. This group seeks to preserve what has failed over the past 100 years by decentralizing government (i.e. Christians rule themselves and Muslims rule themselves) and declaring the neutrality of the country. The fact that Greater Lebanon needs reaffirming implies a recognition of its ongoing failure. Furthermore, after Greater Lebanon was initially conceived as a homeland for the Christians of the Middle East (like the Zionists’ idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine), the admission of Muslims into the governing structure forced the Lebanese Christians to change their “formula” from one of a homeland for Christians to one of an experiment in coexistence and tolerance between Muslims and Christians.
That coexistence has failed miserably. Within a decade of formal independence in 1943 and the departure of the French in 1946, the Muslims reneged on their commitments: In the 1950s, the Sunnis wanted Lebanon to be annexed to the Syrian-Egyptian United Arab Republic of Gamal Abel-Nasser; in the 1960s, they forced Lebanon to grant the Palestinian guerilla organizations freedom of action from the south against Israel, which led to disastrous consequences that Lebanon still suffers from; in the 1970s, the Sunni Muslims again allied themselves with the Palestinians and the Syrians and agreed to a Syrian military occupation of the country; beginning in the 1980s and to date, it was the Shiite Muslims allied with Iran that dragged Lebanon into the catastrophic situation that might lead to Lebanon’s destruction by Israel as it is doing in Gaza.
Has the Maronite Patriarch given any thought to the likelihood that the Muslims might not accept decentralization, which is the administrative separation between Christians and Muslims? Has the Patriarch really thought about whether Muslims will accept Lebanon’s neutrality? The two sides haven’t been able to elect a president in more than 20 years, except when outsiders forced them to do so. After destroying the country in the 1975-1990 war, the Saudi-allied Sunnis say they have finally subscribed to the Christians’ basic principles and policies - Lebanon first - for the future of the country. But everyone knows this is not out of conviction, but only to spite the Iran-allied Shiite Muslims. Has the Maronite Patriarch really thought through his grand ideas? Or are these ideas similar to the off-the-cuff Greater Lebanon idea of 1920?
The Lebanon as an “experiment” in coexistence that the Maronite Church and the Vatican behind it continue to market has a cost: Lebanon’s Christians are tired of being guinea pigs for religious wishful thinkers. Real lives have been decimated for half a century. Millions have left the country without any intention of returning. Lebanon is the last country in the entire east where Christians are still free and have a say in their government. Is the Church willing to risk this tenuous existence on the verge of extinction for aspirational slogans that are no longer valid in the illiberal times of our world today?
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