Lebanese Normality

There is a sort of strange, weird normality about the Lebanon even when nothing is really normal. When I was there in 2006 it all seemed so normal that I invited my girlfriend and another female friend to visit me, telling them how so very normal everything was and just as they were about to come the bombs started falling and that only reminded me that sitting down in the cafe in Hamra a week before the Israelis started to bomb Beruit, watching Germany versus Italy in the World Cup Semi Final, I had deluded myself into believing that things were normal although if I had only opened my eyes, the signs had always been there that things weren't normal and it was all a wee bit reminiscent of Belfast when I was there in the early 80s and not really very like the south of Spain, which was how it wanted to see itself.
Yesterday, a car bomb killed a certain Sheikh Saleh Aridi, a top aide to Talal Arslan, the leading Druze opposition figure. Now, I am not going to confuse you here with the internal politics of the Lebanon. However, there are those who see this as a move to split the loyalties of the Druze community and there we have it, not only are loyalties split along sectarian lines in the Lebanon they are also split inside the various communities themselves. We should never assume anything but as the history books tell us, "divide and rule" has invariably been the order of the day and in whose interests would a united Lebanon definitely not be?