Yarun is a small town planted with olive groves, wheat, tobacco, including the border with Israel, closed since its independence in 1948. According to the municipal chronicle, a nuclear physicist, a soccer player and a queen model of a beauty contest They were born on the spot. It is a very short distance from Bint Jbeil, where Hezbollah fought tirelessly against the Tsahal soldiers in that summer war of 2006. A good part of its Shia population, like so many inhabitants of Lebanon, have been and are emigrants and tend to spend each year your vacation in your homeland. Hadi Matar's family emigrated to the United States a long time ago, and the author of the criminal attack against the Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie has barely set foot in this country, a source of permanent emigration to all continents.
A Beirut newspaper has published a revealing detail of Hadi Matar. He was using a fake driver's license bearing the name of a powerful Hizbollah member, Hasan Mognie, who in the 1980s gave the small foreign colony goosebumps by his countless kidnappings of Western correspondents, university professors and residents in the Muslim neighborhoods of this capital.
The 1991 release of Terry Anderson, the Associated Press bureau chief near my neighboring Commodore hotel, allowed the Washington government to finally accept Salman Rushdie's petition to reside in the United States after three years in Britain. . By the way, another great writer and Nobel Prize for Literature, the Egyptian Naguib Mahfuz, was also attacked in 1994 by a terrorist in Cairo, but he was able to save his life.
Lebanon has various stereotyped images in the world. Along with those who have succeeded in banking, fashion, industry, literature, art, cinema, entertainment –such as Mika, presenter of the last Eurovision Song Contest–, there are the great swindlers, criminals who control markets weapons, drugs, wanted by Interpol. The contrast between the two images is more evident because it is a country of only 10,454 km2 and five million inhabitants, not counting the Palestinian and Syrian refugees, since no one here has dared to undertake a threatening population census for decades.
Hadi Matar's biography is revealing. He has only lived in the US, but he reflects the great changes of the Islamic political movement in the peoples of the Middle East. Since 1979, after the incredible occupation of the sanctuary of Mecca by extremists opposed to the Saudi royal house, the powerful force of the Islamic revolution of Imam Khomeini has appeared in the Muslim world, with its spectacular mass movement of that year about which I I reported from Tehran.
With the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate, the Muslim world disintegrated and various doctrines appeared, primarily Sunni, such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and decades later the doctrine of Imam Khomeini, which aspires above all to liberate the Shiites from oppression. After the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have appeared, trying to impose their rule on the Sunni populations.
In some countries, and especially in Lebanon, the Shiites are increasingly fed by the Khomeinist revolution, especially after the Israeli invasion of 1982. It was then that southern Lebanon became heavily influenced by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Then the embryo of Hezbollah arose, especially in Baalbeck and in the south of the country. Like Yarun, birthplace of Hadi Matar.
With the Ottoman centralizing authority suppressed –always dominated by the Sunnis– the Shiites, marginalized by a long history, burst into the Middle East with a bang. It is clear that in Syria or Lebanon it is the Hezbollah guerrillas who have clashed the most with the various radical Sunni groups, whom they describe as barbarians of Islam. They are two intransigent Islamic movements, faced by the domination of half the world. It is the great danger of these great international threats of murderous identities.
