According to this Reuters story used by Al -Jazeera,
- Lebanon has detained three leaders of an ultra-nationalist Christian party after it distributed CDs calling on every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian, judicial sources say.
A prosecutor on Wednesday ordered the detention of Habib Younes, Naji Awdeh and Joseph Khoury Tawk, members of the Guardians of the Cedars Party, “on charges of breaching judicial clauses and harming relations with Arab countries”, the sources said.
The three leaders of the party, which was set up during the 1975-1990 civil war but has been dormant for the past 15 years, called at a news conference on Tuesday for “expelling Palestinian refugees and confiscating their property”.
“No Palestinian should be left in Lebanon”, and “Every Lebanese should kill a Palestinian”, are two of its civil war slogans distributed on CD during the conference, the daily As Safir newspaper said.
Well, it’s not only Al-safir that says that. Back in the late 1970s when I used to travel around the parts of East Beirut totally controlled (and religiously “cleansed”) by the Maronitist militias, nearly every piece of blank wall bore on it the slogan “It’s the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian”. These slogans were put up with spray-paint, sprayed through stencils. They bore the “signature” of the very extreme little group Guardians of the Cedars.
I wrote about that here a bit, when I was in Lebanon (and Syria) last November. I also wrote this:
- Throughout East Beirut, the walls had the stenciled-on slogan “It’s the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian”. Ala kul lubnani in yuqtil filastiniyan. I never saw anyone trying to cover those slogans over or otherwise erase them: they loomed over the public streets there for years.
And I saw, counted, smelled, and examined the putrifying phsyical remains of a good number of the thousands of Palestinians– women, children, men, old people– who were killed in the enactment of that openly genocidal campaign.
That is extremely depressing that 25 years later, that hate-speech and genocidal incitment is once again being distributed in Lebanon– and by the same group! Encrouaging, though, if this time around, the country has a state apparatus that is (a) strong enough and (b) motivated enough to try to crack down on it.
In general, I believe the answer to hate speech is more speech. But in the case of the Guardians of the Cedars, their proven track record of following through on their very explicit incitement indicates that judicial measures are completely appropriate for them.
(Hat-tip to the two friends from Kansas who got this to me.)
A friend of mine in Beirut shares a sense of forboding in that city:
“beirut is in a strange mood. there is some irreality in the air. many important politicians are in hiding in paris because of threats they have received. once a month a bomb is placed in a christian neighborhood. four ex-strong men are in jail, generals and high ranking officers. water is arriving stronger in the apartment. electricity still gets cut here and there. the street downstairs still need to be repaved after the new water connections were made. this week-end doctors are meeting at the medical association to discuss women mental health. several courageous cultural events are hapening. schools are reopening. it all looks normal. but something else is happening. we are all waiting. the wife of bashar asad is in london with her children. the sister of bashar is in paris with her husband and their children. rumors speak of a change to happen at the head of syria.”
Scary.