The status of the Free Patriotic Movement and its leader is going from bad to worse. And now its allies have let it down in parliament and demanded the reconsideration of the paper presented by the government to place $1.2 billion at the disposal of the minister of energy to be spent on the increase of power production in Lebanon. What is meant by the “status of the movement” is not the extent of its representation – regardless of its width or narrowness – or the extent of the proximity between its policies and the interests of its voters, seeing the great number of Lebanese political movements and parties that are established to carry out tasks serving local sects or foreign states and that continue to exist out of necessity. What is actually interesting is this mounting tension among the movement's leaders and representatives in the government – including the minister of energy – and in parliament. And while Deputy Michel Aoun's “slips of the tongue” have become a required material in Lebanese “political literature,” the viewers of the newscasts and the readers of newspapers can detect in his speeches all that characterizes the rural “mind” in our country, in terms of the lack of awareness of the situation in the rest of the world, the patriarchal tendency and the outsmarting attempts that are not based on sufficient knowledge. This “mind” is what justifies Aoun's scolding of Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Minister of Finance Muhammad al-Safadi in a way that sounded more like shouting off the rooftops of the village houses than the speech of the leader of the biggest Christian parliamentary bloc. Still, Aoun is certainly free to express his disgruntlement toward the performance of his allies in the government which he believes to be the one who endowed it upon them. Nonetheless, this is only half the diagnosis of the Aounist state. Whoever wants or can tolerate to see the other half, has to listen to and read what is said and written by the supporters of the FPM in regard to the developments and the Arab revolutions, especially the ones that are the closest to them on the geographic level and the ones enjoying the most influence over them, i.e. the Syrian revolution. For many years, Michel Aoun acted as the non-official spokesman of the “minorities alliance,” warned against the threat of Sunni fundamentalism and preached the blessing of Levantine Christianity which is allied with other groups that perceive themselves as being threatened (except for the Jews due to the alliance with Hezbollah and the Druze in the absence of any chemistry between Aoun and their leader Walid Jumblatt). Meanwhile, the journalists who are loyal to Aoun seemed as though they had fallen from planet Mars with stories about the Salafi Emirates which will be proclaimed in many areas of Lebanon, similar to their Syrian counterparts which the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is trying to dismantle. There is no need to respond to the Aounist-minoritarian delusions with similar ones. Indeed, the relations between the groups in the Arab Levant were always affected by many violations committed under a sectarian or religious cover, while their actual reasons resided in political and economic crises endured by some Arab and Islamic countries which governed our region. This was seen in the cruelty and war tendencies of the conquerors, the behavior of sultans who exerted tyranny and overly discriminated such as the Fatimid Al-Hakim bi Amr al-Lāh, the conflicts of the Mamluks, the Shiites and the Ismailis and the policies of the Ottoman Sultanate which cannot be described as being an archetype of enlightenment and reason. But these situations, among others, were linked to their environment and circumstances. Consequently, their generalization and reproduction in the present times while holding a specific sect historically responsible for the oppression which it also suffered, convey the existence of stereotypes and bad intentions. In any case, the neurosis is growing among many politicians and their supporters who wagered on the minorities' control over politics, economy and security in the region, under the pretext of guaranteeing the stay and the existence. But the latter are disregarding the fact that the required guarantees are offered by the free populations and not the tanks of the collapsing regimes.
