Last Friday witnessed an event of exceptional importance in Lebanon. Sunni Muslims in Sidon and Tripoli, two symbolic cities, prayed in "support" of Sheikh Ahmed Al-Assir's followers for what has befallen them. This was nearly denouncing Sunni politicians, especially those of the Future Movement, whose responses to the Abra clashes and what followed them seemed lacking in "support" for those who had been wronged. It may seem as if the matter affects the Sunnis, as it certainly does, but it affects at the end of the day all those who still believe it possible for Lebanese of all sects to live together in peace. Of course, no one is arguing about the right of the state, including the army, to respond to any aggression against it. This is especially true if it is an armed aggression, as was the case with Assir's supporters, who attacked an army checkpoint in Abra and killed soldiers stationed there. Over the past few years, the Lebanese, and especially the Sunnis among them, have been somewhat excessive in demanding for the state to restore its standing. They also demanded the army to take strict measures to prevent armed clashes that have been recurring in several areas, some of which took on a frankly sectarian nature. On the other hand, the image of this army has begun to erode among the Sunni public, especially in the periphery. Here, the adopted principle states that repression alone allows for besieging extremist movements and terrorism. Army services have thus engaged in broad campaigns of arrests. If some indictments have been issued in certain cases, a vast number of those detained in miserable conditions have for years been waiting for their fate to be decided, and for whether they are to be indicted or released, if no criminal evidence can be provided against them. There are two thing between which the Sunni public fails to make a distinction: on one hand, the "victimization" they are experiencing for being Sunnis, who express their "Sunni identity" trough affiliation to the Jihadist ideology prevalent in the region – especially since the invasion of Iraq; on the other hand, the fact that the source of such "victimization" is the Lebanese security apparatus, which had in the past been connected to Syria and is today connected to Hezbollah. This means that it considers such "victimization" to be confessional in nature. The ambivalent political discourse adopted by Hezbollah and its media outlets has contributed to driving towards the assertion that the Sunni public has rebelled and rejected the state and its institutions, reaching as far as to establish "Islamic emirates" in this or that Lebanese region. Thus, at a time when all Sunni politicians, without exception, declare their priority to be the state and its security, Hezbollah has resorted to accusing Sunni leaders of supporting extremism. Such accusations reached their peak during the war of the Nahr Al-Bared refugee camp, when Hezbollah-affiliated and Syrian media outlets accused the Future Movement of supporting Fatah Al-Islam and Shaker Al-Abssi, who was later confirmed to be entirely a product of Syria. With the wave of arrests that followed the events in Dinnieh, the assassination of Rafic Hariri and the recurrent clashes in Tripoli, and sporadically in other areas - reaching up to the Beirut campaign waged by Hezbollah, in which the army remained neutral - this image of the army among the Sunni public became well entrenched. In other words, the Sunni public considers the army to be targeting it for being Sunni and in order to serve Hezbollah's goals. The army has therefore entered the arena of confessional division, as took place during the Civil War, when the military institution was ascribed the image of sectarian division in favor of the Maronites. That is the outcome of last Friday. The Sunni public has come out of its Pandora's Box; it declared its rejection of the ways, in which Sunni leaders are currently dealing with this "victimization". This day has revealed even further erosion of the image of moderation and the priority of the state. Inasmuch as Assir, with his confessional crudeness, was of service to Hezbollah's theories about Sunni extremism and to its campaign against the Future Movement and Sunni politicians, he has to the same extent invigorated the kind of extremism that drives towards infighting and rejects both the state and peaceful coexistence. This is especially true on the background of the war in Syria, of which Lebanon has become one of the fronts.
