27th January, 2007

It has just been announced that all educational institutions in Lebanon will remain closed on Monday. Tuesday is, anyway, a holiday (Ashoura, the Muslim mourning holiday), so there will be no school until Wednesday. So, IF (and here the hypothetical can be no more than that...stay tuned) we have school from Wednesday to Friday, that measn that we will have had five days of
school out of ten in this two-week period (as it is, next Saturday is, for my school, a school day, as we desperately - in both senses of the word - try to make up for the days lost to the summer war (I hesitate to call it the Lebanon-Israeli war, and equally I hesitate to call it the Hezbullah-Israeli war...language is a very tricky thing here)).The rationale behind this latest closure appears to be that, since Thursday's fighting originated in the Arab University, if the students are kept away from their educational institutions, then there are fewer possibilities for 'conflicts' to arise.

I am not even going to begin to analyse the illogicality (literally) of this assumption, you all know me well enough to know that such an analysis will be pedantic, boring, and will last a long time. The context, though, is this: last night Samir Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces (a Christian, right-wing party) and Walid Jumblatt the Druze Party (a right-wing party, despite calling them selves 'Socialists') leader, both gave speeches. You can imagine what they both said. They hate Nasrallah, they are not that fond of Muslims in general, they have scores to settle from the Civil War, and they are supporters of the government, but minority players, which irks them no end. One of them, Geagea, is also a convicted war criminal, who served his time in prison and was released under an amnesty a few years ago. But here's the rub: they both served up photographs of the conflicts the other night which showed their supporters ONLY throwing stones, wielding batons and so on as PROOF that they are not aggressive. Now, it might be true (although stories from the Chouf mountains appear to indicate otherwise) that they are not the ones wielding guns, and
that three of the four who were killed on Thursday and who were from the Shiia Hezbullah were not killed by people like that, but to believe that showing pictures of your supporters attacking people is a virtuous act which proves your loyalty to democracy is a bit rich. Not that this has been pointed out, of course, because, and here's the rub, that kind of rhetoric carries here. The newspapers this morning (the four I checked anyway) carried pictures of the events, and all carried pictures of the snipers, not that they focused on them - they were one photograph amongst many others. Other articles played heavily on the 'how much this is like the beginning of the Civil War' angle - masked men asking for identity cards, districts of Beirut and areas in the Chouf being barricaded according to denomination and all of that.

So, Geagea (pronounced 'Gaga' - no coincidence from my point of view, the man is as mad as a march hare, and psychopathic to boot) and Jumblatt talking as they talked comes as no surprise, hardly registers, and elicits very little comment. And, as always, education is used as the political football. One of the endless complaints, one of the 'usual suspects', is the 'pernicious influence of The West' (in capital letters). The West gets blamed for quite a lot of things: I find it sadly ironic, then, that this attitude to education, this using education as a political tool, which I had long believed was one of the diseases of politics in The West, is echoed here.