Sunday, May 14, 2006

The sectarian enclaves of Lebanon. The Maronite patriarch is one of the worst and most sectarian politician in Lebanon. And nobody dares to criticize him; even leftists and secularists shower praise on this man. In the last election, he received a blender for being the most blatantly sectarian agitator in the country: he said in one speech that Muslim voters should elect the Muslim representatives, and Christian voters should vote for Christian representatives. Today, he met in Paris with mini-(very mini)Hariri. They reached an agreement: that the next electoral law for Lebanon should be based on the qada' (the smallest administrative district in Lebanon), and not any larger entity, although the Ta'if accords stipulated that elections should be based on the governorates as electoral districts. Overwhelmingly, most qada's are more than 95% sectarianly pure. So this should satisfy the sectarian agenda of the Patriarch (and Hariri Inc). The Patriarch today also revealed--yet again--his electoral ignorance. He argued that the elections in Lebanon should be based on single-member districts, and that all countries of the world use the single-member district system. Listen to him.