(Courtesy of Associated Content.com)
Around 70 years ago, the State of Lebanon was a thriving hub of mixing cultures and business activity that served as a model in contrast to even the Zionist Israel to its south. With a narrow Christian majority and political supremacy vested in the presidency, Lebanese politics remained a matter of electing a power-sharing government to overturn the problems of ethnic division and Muslim radicalism.
But like all good things, even the Lebanese dream could not last forever, and the 1991 Ta'if Agreement sold out the Christians, empowering the prime minister and ceding religious authority to the Sunni and Shiite Muslim blocs. In a matter of 20 years, the country changed from an open and more secure land to an intensely restrictive zone where growing populist Shiites prevent the moderated state of the old country from remaining ever-secure in its place.
Lebanon's dilemma is regrettably a cancer which has spread across the Middle East since the end of World War II, and only a swift intervention of western religion and culture can hope to overcome it. At a basic level, we must come to realize that our culture is superior. In the West, a promise between two individuals is entirely binding, whereas Muslims disagree with this unless both people pledging themselves are of the Islamic Faith. Obviously this creates a conundrum as they are not viable forces to debate with or live in proximity to.
Instead of these weak short-term operations by the Western bloc, the world should embrace a partial recolonization of the region in order to reinvest civil values in cultures that are dangerously verging towards radicalism. As long as these nations maintain their current path, they will inevitably converge in a point of issue when there vanishes the remaining cooperation needed to hold together the current peace.
Michael Veramendi
National Alliance Vice President for Foreign Issues
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