Whenever a terrorist attack like the ones that struck Beirut's southern suburb and the Iranian embassy there, occurs, a person may become puzzled as to how to express sorrow and solidarity with the victims, while not falling into emotional vulgarity, and how to find the words that are compassionate towards the sanctity of death and human experiences. Indeed, the frequency of terror attacks, the abundance of talk and politicization, all make this task extremely difficult. This country, Lebanon, is now likely to be riddled by terrorism in a way similar to Iraq, where terror becomes daily and commonplace. This leads to generalizing everything in the discourse making it that much poorer. This is painful, especially since the terrorist activity in question is now synonymous to the fragmentation afflicting the relationship between communities and groups, with the collapse of the so-called long experience of coexistence among the Lebanese. The "spillover of the Syrian war to Lebanon" no longer lacks evidence, between Tripoli and Arsal, and the mobile terrorism that has many sources. Our whole world, whether individual or general, is collapsing. But in what regards this type of terrorism which strikes embassies, one has only to remember that it has a history of its own. Thirty years ago, in a place not more than a quarter of an hour's drive from the location of the Iranian embassy in Beirut, the U.S. embassy was bombed in the Lebanese capital killing 63 people. That attack, which was blamed on would-be Hezbollah leader the late Imad Mughniyeh, took place less than two years after the bombing of the Iraqi embassy in the same city, during the beginning of the war between Iraq and Iran. The two attacks made those two embassies living examples of what hell would look like. The bombing of the U.S. Embassy, after the Iraqi embassy, took place to say that the state in Lebanon was undesirable, and that the international powers that came to help us revive this state were also undesirable. Back then, as is known, four international powers (the United States, Britain, France, and Italy) joined to help the Lebanese state stand on its feet. In truth, Italy built a field hospital in the southern suburb of Beirut. The bombing of the U.S. Embassy was not described as a terrorist act among us. Refusing to do so was required, and continues to be required, because terrorism, as was said, is only what America perpetrates, while all we do is resistance. Then, it's America! With this and other things, no effort was spared to make the project for the state impossible. Thus, the lack of a state opened the door to expanding this want, and terrorism became venerable and bordered on the divine. More than this, the non-state, year after year, continued to expand the jungle it created, and accordingly, Lebanon's foreign policy was gobbled up, and so was the decision of war and peace, before this spread to its social relations. The fact is that if terror was eliminated back then, in 1983, we may have perhaps managed to prevent the terrorist act against the Iranian embassy three days ago, and subsequently, prevent the death of the innocent victims who died. The jungle cannot be monopolized after all, even by its creators, and jungle-like acts are professed by everyone, especially that the other kind of exchange, namely the political and civil, continues to shrink with the shrinkage of the state.
