Michael Totten, in the latest post in his remarkable series of word — and photo — pictures from Lebanon sketches a portrait of a country poised on the brink of democracy but held back by terrorist forces.
Read it all of his post Lebanese Unity – and the Problem of Hezbollah. But here is a small taste 4 U:
Those fanatics with guns are everywhere. Some wear the Hezbollah uniform. Most don’t. I took few photos of these men because I was told, in no uncertain terms, that doing so would be extremely unwise. I did, however, manage to sneak in one snapshot from a long way away. You can see him in the bottom-left corner below.
Buildings are sandbagged. Surveillance and security watchtowers are erected in front of restaurants and stores. A Lebanese-American historian based in West Beirut told me that Hezbollah is better armed and more militarily powerful than the Lebanese army. East and West Beirut are as free-wheeling as Hong Kong, but Hezbollahland is a virtually sovereign fascist police state. It is so near to downtown I can walk to it. Now that I’ve been there and know how close by it is, I can almost feel its breath on my neck.
This cannot continue. Parts of Lebanon are still mobilized for civil war. Peace, democracy, and genuine national unity require not only elections but the disarmament of Lebanon’s terror militia. It can’t happen unless Syria, Hezbollah’s patron, is first thrown out of the country entirely. Even then it will be a long, arduous, delicate, perilous process.
Gripping stuff. It’s first hand reporting, versus the blogging op-ed style that usually marks most blogs (including this one). It’s stuff that shows what the new citizens’ journalism can do now — and what it promises to do in the future.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.