Anti-Shi`ite Bigotry

There is one camel in the room that people are ignoring in talking about Lebanon. It is an essential element in Lebanese culture to despise inferior groups and others (not that it is different elsewhere). And the contempt for Shi`ites has been an essential element in the Lebanese political and popular culture. "Mutwali" (a word of disputed origin which refers to Shi`ites) has been historically used--like the word "Kurd"--to insult and denigrate. I grew up with a Sunni family (the family of my mother) and a Shi`ite family (the family of my father). And long before the American-Saudi plan to incite Sunni-Shi`ite discord in the Middle East, Sunnis traditionally despised Shi`ites and looked down at them as uncouth and uncivilized (there are other areas of the Middle East in which Shi`ites look down at Sunnis as in Kuwait where Shi`ites constitutes the merchant class). And let me add another sectarian generalization: there is a historically Christian (going back to the Crusades which are still referred to admiringly in some Church and secular Maronite histories in Lebanon) contempt for Muslims and perceiving them as less civilized. So when the Hariri family resorted to sectarian mobilization and agitation in Lebanon, there were roots for this: it did not come out of nowhere. So it was easy for the Sunnis to be mobilized against "those Shi`ites" riffraff and mobs (such words in Arabic about Shi`ites appear casually now in Hariri media and in the right-wing, sectarian Christian, anti-Syrian (people) and anti-Palestinian (people) newspaper, An-Nahar which once had this headline about the southern suburbs of Beirut: "They procreate like mice"). And as far as the Christians are concerned, it is easy for Christians who despise Muslims to regard Shi`ites as more inferior than Sunnis particularly with the association with peasantry. Having said all that: there are some common bigotries among Sunnis, Shi`ites, Druzes, and Christians: they tend to despise and denigrate Kurds, Gypsies, and poor Syrian workers in Lebanon, and of course darker skinned Asian and African maids. What a country, as one unfunny American-Russian comedian used to say.