The Last Venom

Hezbollah, which for years made the entire country tremble with its weapons, its men and its threats, has now been reduced to smearing Maronite Patriarch Béchara Rahi through armies of anonymous accounts, false bravado and insults typed from behind a screen.

Even the way they fall has become small.

Why this rage? Because the Patriarch simply reminded them of something that has become unbearable: Lebanon belongs to the Lebanese. A simple sentence. A normal sentence. And yet they can no longer silence it. So they strike at thin air, like someone who feels the ground slipping beneath their feet.

This is not a sign of strength. It is precisely the opposite. Movements that are sure of themselves do not need to send anonymous individuals to attack a man of the Church. When arguments are replaced by mud, it is because, deep down, one already knows that part of the battle is lost.

There comes a moment in the life of organizations when they begin to understand that the fear they inspired is starting to fade. And when fear departs, very little is left.

That is when the nervous reactions set in, the insults, the excesses, the pointless blows. Like a cornered scorpion that stings one last time, not because it still dominates, but because it no longer knows how to die any other way.

In the history of Lebanon, when a movement begins attacking a religious authority with hysteria, it is often a sign that it has exhausted its other recourse. The political argument no longer convinces. The military argument no longer suffices. What remains, then, is the mud. But mud thrown at a patriarch does not soil the one it targets. It reveals, above all, the one who throws it.

What is happening today goes far beyond a polemic against Patriarch Raï. It is the spectacle of a system that senses the times are shifting around it. And a system that senses its end often becomes aggressive, chaotic and loud.

The hardest thing for them is this very precise moment when fear changes sides.

A dead man does not know he is dead. But a dying one does.