Before we go straight to the kneejerk reaction of screaming ‘bigot’, let’s take a look at what drove this rather extreme decision in the first place.
No, this didn’t happen in some ‘racist’ part of America the Libs dismiss as ‘flyover country’. It was in Lebanon, where sectarian tensions have sometimes been measured in actual bloodshed… and a lot of it.
The article tells the story about a man looking for an apartment for his family.
The 27-year-old journalist called the number and asked the owner when they could drop by to take a look. He was stunned by her response: Muslims are not allowed to settle in the town, she said.
The apartment owner apologized to Awwad, saying she wouldn’t mind renting to people of any sect but officials in the town of Hadat issued orders years ago that only Christians be allowed to buy and rent property from the town’s Christian residents.
Source: Washington Times
When we said ‘bloodshed’ we meant serious bloodshed. These are the kind of events that are not easily dismissed or forgotten.
Hadat is a small example of Lebanon’s deeply rooted sectarian divisions that once led to a 15-year civil war that left more than 100,000 people dead. Christian communities feel under siege as Muslims, who tend to have higher birth rates, leave overcrowded areas for once predominantly Christian neighborhoods.
Source: Washington Times
One Hundred thousand dead in a country of 6.8 Million in a civil war that dragged on for 15 years can leave a bad taste in some people’s mouths. To complicate things more, demographics are shifting dramatically.
Three decades ago Hadat was almost entirely Christian, but today it has a Muslim majority because the Muslim population expanded greatly between 1990, when the war ended, and 2010, when the ban was imposed. Since then, the Muslim population has hovered between 60% and 65%.
The ban only applies to Christian property – a Muslim resident or landowner of Hadat is allowed to sell or rent his property to Muslims from outside the town or to whomever he wants.
Hadat is the only area where such a ban is publicly announced. Local officials in Christian areas in central, eastern and southern Lebanon impose such bans in more discreet ways. In the predominantly Christian southern region of Jezzine, some local officials have changed the status of land in their villages from commercial to agricultural in order to prevent mass construction projects while in other villages and towns only locals are allowed to buy property.
In response to feeling increasingly powerless in their own homeland, they are taking some extreme measures to protect what they see as theirs… before they become a minority that exists at the whim of a majority that has proven capable of being seriously hostile to minority players.
Or have we forgotten about the Christian elected official in Indonesia that was jailed for blasphemy against Islam for saying it was Ok for Muslims to cast their vote for a non-muslim?
This is written neither to praise or rebuke the culture in Lebanon itself. How could we on this side of the Atlantic possibly presume to know and understand the ever-changing complexities of a delicate cultural balance that spans back more than a thousand years?
Instead, it’s offered as a mirror against which we can consider our own.
When Democrats say the conflict between cultures is a strictly American, or even Western phenomenon, they are either ignorant of — or willfully oblivious to — the fact that clashes of culture have been part of the human condition since the dawn of history.
When Democrats start accusing Americans (those OTHER Americans, of course, not their team) of being somehow uniquely bigoted or suspicious of their neighbors, they entirely miss the point.
In fact, the way Democrats have turned a collective blind eye to frequent hostility to their political enemies shows they are no better than those they presume to criticize. They just categorize and dehumanize the groups they ‘otherize’ by way of different criteria.
Political, for one. Religious, for another.
Their complete lack of interest in physical assaults against MAGA hat wearers (and even an assassination attempt!), the weaponizing of government Departments against political movements and candidates, of religious tests being raised to disqualify political appointees, of online censorship, of the endless and unsubstantiated claims of evil intent by anyone with the ‘wrong’ political opinion (etcetera) weighs heavily in the scales against them.
Together, it shows that they are neither better nor different than the great unwashed they denounce as ‘the enemy’.
Democrats just dress their hatred and intolerance up with trendy language that makes it seem ‘Progressive’ — even if it’s anything but.
Didn’t Jesus once say something about a plank and an eye? Maybe it’s time to dust off the old Bible and see what it was he said about that, eh?
Get Doug Giles’ new book:
Rules For Radical Christians is not a survival devotional designed to help the young Christian adult limp through life. Rather, it is a road-tested, dominion blueprint that will equip the young adult with leadership skills and sufficient motivation to rise to a place of influence in an overtly non-Christian culture. Rules For Radical Christians gives the reader the keys to become strategically equipped to move into an anti-theistic environment and effectively influence it for the glory of God.
You can choose either the classic Paperback to trigger your college professors and quasi-communist classmates, or the Kindle edition to always have it on hand.
