One has to wait a long time in order to read an article in the Lebanese press that actually takes the time to interview people from several corners of the country. I already said elsewhere that Al Akhbar contributes in a novel and ‘fuller’ way (i.e. more in line with European press standards of constructing national imaginaries).
Yet it is even rarer when the presses deal with non-elitist issues, with parties that have been portrayed in a ‘bad light’ in the more dominant press (i.e. the one in line with Western discourse or that actually write in English). Ghassan Saoud has been following Tayyar and Christian politics for quite some time now. I never posted about what he writes on this blog but anything he has written in Al Akhbar is worth reading. It is archival work on Christian politics that may serve later on, at the very least for subversive ends (like anything written and archived).
In this article Saoud writes about a series of views given by Christian or more broadly Tayyar sympathizers of activists from north to south. Opinions range from “Hizbullah should definitely keep their weapons not just to liberate Shebaa but to liberate Jerusalem”, to their fear of the ‘religious dimension’ which is ‘a common subject amongst Christian constituencies’, and many others highly diverse and some times surprising viewpoints.
What I find highly interesting is how the Tayyar and Hizbullah alliance has pushed Christian constituencies to face several types of contradictions with their more isolationist pasts (even if they build upon that past quite effectively), resulting with sometimes contradictory opinions about this unknown entity called Hizbullah.
Remarkz 