While policemen are issuing parking fines to people who park their cars longer than the allocated time in some streets of Beirut, the Lebanese state is unable to summon people accused of committing a real massacre before court. True, this impotence should be generalized to all the facets of public life, but the fate of the subpoenas issued against a number of individuals involved in the Taqwa and Salam mosques explosions in Tripoli calls for comparison. The evidence leaked to the media outlets regarding those who perpetrated the two crimes requires at least the hastening of their summoning to listen to what they have to say regarding the charges attributed to them. However, the summoned met these subpoenas with contempt and threatened to trigger civil war in the country. And this in itself is a crime punishable by law. The difficulty to bring the accused for interrogation, let alone prosecute them, leads us back to political reality in Lebanon and the Arab Levant. At this level, it is useless to say that most of the assassinations, explosions and sectarian and ethnic cleansing operations that have taken place here for decades, have been carried out by individuals and sides whose names and addresses are known, who have been - and will continue to be – above accountability and are unembarrassed to announce what they have done, are still doing, and will keep carrying out in the future. Hence, the issue is not about penal responsibility but rather falls in the context of "national action." Indeed, those dispatching booby-trapped cars to be detonated among worshipers exiting a mosque are not doing so for personal reasons or hatred. They are doing so to serve a higher interest, which naturally justifies the killing and mutilation of civilians. This interest is linked to a cause with ambiguous facets, including resistance against Israel, the liberation of Palestine, the deterrence of arrogance and – the latest addition as a new priority – the fighting of the Takfiris. But all of these tributaries eventually pour into the sea of preserving absolute power, by bloody mobs monopolizing all the qualifications to govern domestically and all the wisdom at the level of foreign relations. Nothing more and nothing less. Playing with those carrying an open license to kill is dangerous, and whoever is not protected by a group that is as fierce and violent as the priests of political execution in the cities' streets, should keep their heads away from this game, considering that the state and its apparatuses are not enough to protect those against whom a death sentence is issued, as revealed by the experience of General Wissam al-Hassan. What can be deduced from the easy resorting to mass or selective murders through bombs and booby-trapped cars is that there is something exceeding by far the wish to achieve quick goals and address painful messages to the opponent. At this level, entering the mind of a national criminal is not that difficult. Indeed, the retreat of politics in the broader meaning of the word – i.e. the management of the disputes through peaceful means - the high demand for power in the absence of mechanisms to ensure its rotation, the long history of violence in individual and public communication and the troubled and hostile relations between minorities and majorities, all render the annulment of the other through arrests, physical liquidation, or booby-trapped cars a logical method. On the other hand, there is a legitimacy crisis and a feeling prevails over the side holding power – whether inside or outside the state – that it is constantly lacking the justification to stay in its position. All this is pushing towards the use of the authoritarian clique's full arsenal of violent practices, covered by a disconnected and faltering ideological rhetoric that cannot stand in the face of a question or a joke. Hence, armed groups that draw their right to rebel against the agreed-upon laws from history, fear and bigotry, disregard the horrendous violation of the state institutions' basic work. And this seems to be the only solution left for the state's remains which are gladly settling for issuing parking tickets in some of the streets that are stuck in the state's limbo.
