...Since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri two years ago, every single attack in Lebanon has targeted either a Christian or a Christian area. Lebanon was once a country known as a refuge for minorities. And yet, Christians have been singled out for attack by a Syrian regime that is itself run by another Middle Eastern minority, the Alawis.

Before Hafez al-Asad made a deal of political convenience with Imam Moussa al-Sadr to acknowledge the Alawis as real Shia Muslims, their blood was believed to be licit, by both Shia and Sunni. The fourteenth century jurist Ibn Taymiyya ruled that the Alawis were "more infidel than Jews or Christians, even more infidel than many pagans."

That fear of being swept along in a current of their own blood, as they themselves are letting Christian blood, is what keeps the Alawi regime from being able to negotiate or make peace with Israel, or indeed anyone, and it is why they embraced Arabism and became more "Arab" than even the Sunnis. It is also why they must be flexible enough to incorporate Islamism as well. As a minority sect running a Sunni majority state in a Sunni majority region, they have no choice but to follow regional trends. And they have no legitimacy except for what they can establish through violence. That is how things work in Syria. In Lebanon, there is an agreement between minorities, however difficult, to share power. It's not surprising that Syria's ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, would prefer to play by Syrian rules.

Hezbollah represents much of Lebanon's Shia minority, and that minority's large population and rage have led much of the Western press corps to believe that the huddled masses camping out in downtown Beirut are the long suffering wretched of the earth--and thus entitled to bring down the government, and with it the international tribunal investigating Hariri's murder. It was the particularism of Shia suffering this past summer that made them the darlings of the international community, even though the fanatical Islamic resistance made use of an entire nation, Christians, Sunnis, and Druze alike, to shield them and abet their anti-Semitic eliminationist fantasies. Yes, Shia civilians were killed, but only when Hezbollah took them to war against Israel. Christians are being killed because they won't submit to the will of Hezbollah's patron in Damascus...