Mud Slinging

It is amazing how the two movements (March 8 and March 14) use every possible means to sling mud at each other. They even use Wikipedia (which is a source that needs to be triple checked in itself anyway) to discredit one another.
As I was doing some background research on the Arab University where fighting broke out on January 25 between the two movements, I stumbled upon this Wikipedia article.

It did have a NPOW warning (neutral point of view), but it is till under an ‘encyclopedia' heading. The NPOW read:
This is not a neutral point of view; al-Manar is a Hezbollah-operated TV station and not a reliable source because Hezbollah itself is active in this conflict. Something Wicked 14:12, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Quite a few people are worried about a return to the civil war days. The situation is after all quite similar.
Then it was a power struggle between the more affluent christians that had the power majority (6:5) over the muslim part of the population. As they grew in numbers and had access to education, they demanded a greater share of the cake. 15 years later, at a conference in Taef (hence the name Taef accord), they got their greater share; a 5:5 ratio between christians and muslims in politics (and also a 5:5 ratio between shia and sunnis).
Now it’s a discord between the sunni muslims (they are the more affluent ones, as I have been told, but can’t vouch for that) versus the ‘downtrodden’ shia (as Musa Sadr called his movement) who are not happy with their 5:5 ratio. They feel they are in the majority anyway, so why be satisfied with a 25% of the power? Now some people will violently dispute this.

You wonder why they don’t just take a census? Well, that’s a bit of a painful subject. What if the results are not what you expected? You just accuse the others of rigging the count of course, seems simple enough.

I am interviewing a professor of politics today. Let’s see if he can enlighten me any further. But these days you need to have two sources for everything. Before I can use his quotes, I’ve got to figure out what block he supports, and then find his counterpart in the other block to ask the same questions and compare the answers. Tiresome, this business with the two movements.

But I don’t think we have to worry about a return to the dark days. Times have changed. Everyone’s got digital cameras and internet access these days. People will just not be able to get away with atrocities the way they used to. Their faces will be uploaded faster than a New York minute, and stuck on the web for generations to come.