By Samir Khalaf
| Like the preacher told me, we all come to Jesus in our own way and in our own time... |
 A week after the death of Rafik Hariri, we can only reflect again how a stellar Lebanese public figure has fallen victim to the perfidy of the political behavior of neighboring political regimes.
| He's decided the killing wasn't a home-grown act... |
Larger-than-life, charismatic figures like Hariri, who exude the redeeming virtues one longs for in visionary and proactive leaders, are rare in the lives of nations. They appear at momentous interludes to shake them out of deep slumber.
| I come to bury Hariri, not to praise him. As a politician, he was all over the map, guided much more by expediency than by vision. But that was the kind of man that was needed in the wake of Lebanon's horrible civil war: men who were willing to turn a blind eye when necessary, to make alliances with Beelzebub if needed, to pretend things were one way when they patently weren't. As part of a strategic planning exercise I took part in about 20 years ago, I predicted, with tongue only partly in cheek, that sometime around 2000 the last Lebanese would shoot the second-last Lebanese. It was the feet-of-clay pols like Hariri and Jumblatt that shifted the Beirut paradigm enough that it didn't turn out like that. |
Brutal and cold-blooded assassinations are an indelible feature of Lebanese political culture. Abominable as they are, usually such acts remain unexplained. The perpetrators and criminals are never recognized or brought to justice. Barely four months ago, former Economy Minister Marwan Hamade miraculously survived a bomb attack. If the same malicious forces were also behind Hariri's murder, and the incriminating traces are strewn all over, they made certain that providence would not this time foil their crime.
| Mainly by blowing the whole street... |
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