Truth with a capital T

My mom said the American press is saying that Hizbollah is staging a coup d’etat. But then of course, people here say it’s Amal, and others say it’s the Hizb. Or maybe it’s other people in the Opposition.

Someone asked if I live in East or West Beirut. This is how the Western press liked to talk about the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War: Christian East Beirut vs. Muslim West Beirut.

Now the press likes the Shia/Sunni thing. They created that whole thing in Iraq. I ask my Iraqi refugee friends here, “What are you? Sunni or Shia.” They say, “We’re neither. That question doesn’t even make sense. If you go back, we had grandparents that identified themselves as such. But we’re all mixed. All the Iraqi people are.”

So today, it’s the US-backed, Sanyoura, (Sunni) government opposed by the Shia Hizbollah.

But the US media can’t really understand that the Opposition consists not only of Shia, but of Aoun (a Christian), Talal Arslan (a Druze), Amal (the more traditional Shia party), and random others.

The pro-government alliance consists of the Ishtirikiye, Druze party led by Walid Jumblatt and the “Christian” Lebanese Forces (who to me always seem like the most savage, having colluded with Israel in massacring the residents of Sabra and Shatila, neighborhoods like mine, that I pass every day, with Ariel Sharon overlooking the whole operation. He was tried and convicted for war crimes, and the Israeli people still elected him Prime Minister. But I shouldn’t be a hypocrite. Look at the criminals we Americans have in office.)

It’s all too complicated to really explain, so why should I blame the media? It’s like that with anything. If you were actually at a place or know someone involved in something, it’s always different than how the news story explain it. Always. We know this.

Yet, it’s really scary if we allow that to sink in, if we choose to accept the full repercussions of this fact. We can’t trust anything. We can’t know anything. Just what I see with my own eyes. And even that I can’t trust.

If there really is such a thing called Truth, does it really matter, since we can’t ever know it?