Why Jubran Tuwayni was right: When Jubran Tuwayni left for France a few months ago-- and he stayed there for months--he claimed that he was told of a black list of "leaders" targeted for assassination in Lebanon, and that he was prominent on the list. He said that he was warned to stay away. The first person to mock his claim, and to ridicule him was none other than Walid Jumblat, who publicly and repeatedly accused Tuwayni of seeking publicity for himself from those claims. This Jumblat is effusively mourning the death of Tuwayni today. Read this interview with Walid Jumblat in last week's issue of Ash-Shira` magazine (it is not easy to navigate--go the left, and select the issue from 2 weeks ago with Jumblat on the cover to read the interview), and see how Jumblat twice (as I remember) mocked and criticized Jubran Tuwayni, that he now is praising. (And today, LBC anchorperson, Marcel Ghanim talked about those "who mocked and ridiculed" Jubran's references to threats against him. But Ghanim would not dare name Jumblat. You never name names in Lebanon; you name some names, and protect others. This is Lebanon. You will always have imposed taboos and icons; and when somebody new takes over at the helm, new taboos and new icons replace the old taboos, and on and on. You all remember those grotesque portraits of Hafidh Al-Asad (and later of Bashshar) filling the air and covering the buildings all over Lebanon. Let them mount the portraits of Mehlis NOW.) I say this because now Jumblat will shed tears, and declare Tuwayni a "martyr" of Lebanon. He has already. That is another word I don't like: "martyr." I wish this word, like "freedom" and "Jihad", would be banned from common usage, whether here, or in the Middle East, once and for all. I want people I don't like to live, and I want my political enemies to live, because, among other (humanitarian) reasons, I don't want them to become "martyrs." Their statures get inflated, and their biographies get invented; look at how people talk about Bashir Gemayyel in Lebanon today. Now, Jubran Tuwayni has become a "martyr." Lebanonese seem to have a special privileged connection to God which allow them to brand all their dead, provided they belong to the right sect and to the right side of the sectarian and political divide, "martyrs." Of course, as an unbeliever, the word "martyr" has presumptious religious claims that bother me. Now, for those who care about my reaction. What? Am I going to lie? Am I going to suddenly pretend that I liked or appreciated Jubran Tuwayni? No. Having said that, you know how I feel about those heinous weapons of car bombs and suicide attacks and let us not forget Israeli indiscriminate bombings that now characterize the Middle East landscape. Those weapons also show carelessness about innocent civilian lives; car bombs are not assassinations. They are far worse. In the past, assassinations targeted individuals, with knives and poison at the time of Hasan As-Sabbah (of the famous Hashshasshin fame) for example. Car bombs are like destroying a village, to kill one person. I, of course, never agreed with Jubran Tuwayni on anything. Not on anything, literally. And it frustrated me that he was writing editorials in a language that he had no command of, and no facility in. We attended the same high school in Beirut (IC), but he was a few years ahead of me. From those days, while I supported the Palestinian secular Left, Tuwayni in school was known as a fanatic right-wing, anti-Palestinian Phalangist. I never dealt with him, and never met him in my life. I don't know who is behind this bombing, and I still don't know who was behind the assassination of Hariri, although I refuse to absolve the Syrian intelligence apparatus, and its Lebanese tools, of responsibility, just as I refuse to absolve Israel and the outside parties from violent intervention in Lebanese affairs, especially these days; especially these days. And I am also eager to learn who was behind the assassination of the poor Syrian workers in Lebanon. I know, I know. They don't travel around in armored cars, and they don't own TV stations and newspapers, and even their own government has not shown care for them. But I do care about that truth. Did you notice that nobody in the Lebanese or Arab or Western media noticed that there was a car bomb in Ba`albak two days ago? The Lebanese arena is back to what it was before and during the civil war: an open arena for violent and foreign intelligence intervention, and for sectarian and political scores to be settled by blood. This is the history of Lebanon. And whoever is behind those assassinations, you have to admit this, no matter where you stand (or sit) on the political issues of the day: they really are killing people who are quite influential in public opinion making in Lebanon, no matter what you think of them, and no matter whether you agree or disagree with them. I certainly don't think that Jubran Tuwayni was a good writer (he was a lousy writer in fact), and I certainly don't think that he was a sophisticated thinker or an intellectual: but in the context of Lebanon, he really was seen as a public intellectual--only in Lebanon. What do you know. I kid you not. Just this week: I was talking to a friend in Beirut, and I just asked him. Do people still read An-Nahar? Do they not see it for what a it is, a right-wing propaganda sheet? Don't people see what a lousy writer Jubran Tuwayni is? And he said: you will be surprised. He said that there are people who buy AnNahar on Thursdays just to read Jubran Tuwayni. Well, people often prefer simplicities and rabid sloganeering, which was what Jubran Tuwayni did to a great effect for a section of the Lebanese public opinion. So those who are killing Tuwayni and the others, want to undermine public opinion against Syria, most likely. Early on I commented: that if the Syrian regime feels threatened, it will fight back, and will fight back dirty. And don't forget this: there are Lebanese domestic considerations too. I just read the words used by a hitherto unknown Syrian nationalist group that claimed responsibility for the assassination. When Lebanese changes (political) direction, it always does so by force and conquest, and often with the help of outsiders. Whether in '58 or '76 or '82 or '90 and now. You know which Tuwayni family member I liked? No, not Ghassan (his father) for sure, and not this Jubran. The first Jubran (Sr.), the real founder of An-Nahar, and the grandfather of this Jubran. He was a real progressive, and was even part of the follow-up committee that was formed by the first meeting of the precursor of the Lebanese Communist Party (Hizb Ash-Sha`b) in 1925 when it convened in Cinema Crystal in Beirut--see the book Judhur As-Sindiyanah Al-Hamra', on the history of the LCP. Jubran Tuwayni Sr. also championed women's rights, and was an effective Minister of Education. Do you know that he met Jubran Khalil Jubran in Paris by chance too? A long story. Now you know. My grandfather knew Jubran Sr. I am told. I knew Ghassan Tuwayni in the 1980s, and the 1990s and he knew my father very well. He always insisted when I saw him that he taught my father at AUB, and I would in vain explain to him that my father attended college in Cairo at King Fu'ad University, before it was named Cairo University. He just had known my father for a long time, and could not remember when he first had met him. But in the summer of 2004, when I ran into him at the last public talk of Hishan Sharabi, he was furious at me, I could tell, and would not shake my hands. I realized that he must have been offended by my unending criticisms and attacks on An-Nahar over the years, and I have mocked him and his pretensions, and I mocked the poetry of his late wife in Al-Adab (linked on this page in the article against Franophonie). Certainly Ghassan had some talents, especially in recruiting people and managing them, and especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when he assembled a team of good journalists, and the team was diverse in its political orientations. Ghassan (unlike his son) created an ostensibly "liberal" newspaper. That was the widely read An-Nahar of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. In recent years, An-Nahar filled the partisan right-wing void left by the Al-`Amal newspaper of the Phalanges Party. Read the recent memoir of Riyad Ar-Rayyis in that regard. But Jubran, and I know that I am supposed to "mention the virtues of the dead," as Muhammad urged, really had no talent. And please, I just heard Jumblat's tool, Akram Shuhayyib, talk about Jubran being on a hit list by Syria, when his boss, Walid Jumblat, had mocked the reference by Jubran to his being on a hit list. These Lebanonese politicians, not only Jumblat--but he is their star in this regard, they lie and change their tune from one day to another. Amazing. And people are not noticing and not caring, as if an entire group of people are comatose. So the Lebanese cabinet met, and decided to ask for so many international committees and councils, and UNSC interventions, that I lost count. I am even tempted to ask for UNSC help in finding the truth about what happened to my kitchen sink. I mean, I know that Mehils is busy, but can he also add that to his items of investigation? And how could the US and French governments find time, any time, to deal with the affairs of their governments, when they are spending so much time on Lebanese affairs, on every development in Lebanon. Did the US and France condemn the car bomb in Ba`albak the other day? No, of course, not. You see the US and France are opposed to violence and terrorism but only if targeted against some people. That explains US and French tolerance, if not glee, at Israeli killing of Palestinians. That does not lead to UNSC meetings. The press briefing by Minister of Information, Ghazi `Aridi, was symptomatic. Some reporters were mad that the council of ministers reacted to the assassination of Tuwayni, but not to the car bomb in Ba`lbak. They got testy. This is a sign of what is come. Sectarian lines in the sand are drawn; and will be marked, as they are often in Lebanon, in blood. Some Shi`ites will now accuse the council of minister of sectarian and political bias (especially that Jubran Tuwayni was very unpopular among Shi`ites since he referred to them as "sheep" in the midst of the Hummus and Batata Revolution), and others especially Sunnis will now accuse Shi`ites, Hizbullah in particular, of implementing an agenda on behalf of Syria and Iran in Lebanon. And Hizbullah thus far has not formulated an argument for the Lebanese as to why they should maintain their weapons. Every Hizbullah leader gives his own explanation. Sunni-Shi`ites frictions are at an all time high; a Lebanese student sent me early this morning a Lebanese web site where Lebanese were reacting to the assassination. Some were cheering the murder of Tuwayni, while others were promising revenge and calling for the murder of other (opposite side) Lebanese politicians. To be fair, the ICG report that I critiqued a few days ago, very carefully warned of international exploitation of Lebanese events, and at least implied that things may get out of hand. The reason why there is no hope for a national formula of salvation to emerge in Lebanon is that there is an absence of a secular national party or even leader who can propose an agenda well outside the confines of this sect or that sect, or of this outside patron or that, and every Lebanese sectarian group has its own external patron, make no mistake about that. And did you see how fast MEMRI put out its "obituary" of Jubran Tuwayni? I never thought that MEMRI mourned the death of Arabs. Wait. I forgot. Tuwayni was a Lebanonese Pheonician. And when you read US media obituaries of Tuwayni, you will not read that he--and this while I condemn the murder of course--actually spent a career expressing hatred and racism against the Syrian and Palestinian PEOPLES. You also will not find a reference to what he did in 1990, when he took a group of thugs to occupy and ransack the US embassy in Lebanon--that was when he occupied the position of sec gen the pro-`Awn branch of the Lebanese Forces militia's front (the Lebanese Front) during the civil war . He was quickly forgiven for that, and let me know if you find ONE reference to that in any US newspaper today or tomorrow. Start looking.