With the eruption of the ‘Arab Spring' wave of uprisings, it was hoped that healthy politics would be the main fruit of the newfound freedom. But a quick look at Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, which saw its own ‘spring' in 2003, and then at Lebanon, which is experiencing the consequences of the Syrian ‘spring,' leads us to another hypothesis: That violence and hatred, cultivated in the past few decades, benefited more from freedom than politics did. Indeed, violence and hatred, much of them until now repressed, were also liberated, and went on to devour all forms of politics. In Egypt, it appeared surprising how much the Muslim Brotherhood were adamant about punishing the people with Islamization, but even more surprising was the extent of suppressed and entrenched hatred for the Muslim Brotherhood, not only among the military, but also among broad segments of civilians, including secularists and semi-secularists. Amid the massacre that may be followed by further massacres, the Muslim Brotherhood, now having become the victims, chose to exact revenge against the Copts, the object of their hatred, and took to burning their churches. In Syria, al-Qaeda and al-Nusra groups are no longer a detail that the revolution can ignore and turn the page on. These murderous organizations have swallowed a large part of the revolution, and portend to swallow the rest. When a man like Father Paulo is kidnapped, one may infer that anti-Christian, anti-Shia, and anti-Alawi sentiment is overwhelming all other sentiments in the folds of the revolution, including the quest to build a new Syria for all its citizens. The conclusion is that, as evident from relentless and merciless killings in Iraq and the recent bombing in Beirut's southern suburb, the prominence of the Sunni-Shia conflict in the Arab Orient, and in some parts of the Gulf, is itself an expression of the increased tendency for division at the expense of the tendency for unity, and the primacy of violence and hatred over politics. The death of the revolution is looming on the Arab horizon, just as does the need for us to dig deep in search of the monster that lurks within us, and prevents us from repeating what Southern Europe witnessed in the mid-70s and then Central and Eastern Europe in the mid-80s and early 90s. To this end, it is no longer rational to limit the debate to narrow-minded policies and the responsibility of regimes, though these are to blame, nor to overstate the responsibility of the West, which is indeed partially responsible. Similarly, we must not refrain from tackling our reality with the kind of criticism that "political correctness" is averse to and to which it attributes, with oversimplification, a racist mindset, and must not snub orientalism and orientalists who previously alerted us to the sources of violence in our midst. As for those who supported the regimes and opposed the revolutions from the beginning, then, for a very simple reason, they cannot tell us today "I told you so." To be sure, it was inevitable for the situations that existed under those regimes to expire sooner or later, without moral preaching being able to immortalize them against nature. But as to how these regimes can be toppled in this part of the world, then this is a question for our "authenticity", which we share with our crumbling regimes. The Sunni-Shiite conflict, Muslim hatred for Christians, and the hostility of the Muslim Brotherhood to others and vice versa, are all indications that politics in our countries are on hold until further notice. Today, what matters is to separate the belligerents and the mutual-haters from one another, as any such separation remains better than ‘brotherly' engagement of the sort we're seeing.
