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In pretechnological times, the rugged and inaccessible geography of Lebanon's mountains acted as a natural refuge for persecuted minority communities fleeing oppression. For this reason an accurate, if colorful, description of Lebanon's recurring crises in religious turmoil, including the most recent agony of the past 20 years, is to refer to them as chapters in the ongoing drama of freedom under siege. This time around, however, the devastating technologies of modern warfare, coupled with the array of hostile neighbors and other foreign meddlers, broke down the natural protective barriers and rendered the siege far more destructive. The full brunt of the prolonged assault that commenced in 1975 was borne by the Christians, who also found they had to contend with a series of negative stereotypes about them, generated and popularized mainly by a host of Western journalists. These distorting stereotypes were quickly internalized by many in the West and did irreparable damage to the image of a community that was fighting for its life.
The first stereotype would be that of a ruthless minority out to do everything it can to preserve its political and economic privileges by keeping the Muslim majority deprived and in a subordinate state. The truth is that pre-1975 Lebanon, despite its many blemishes and imperfections, enjoyed a degree of equitable power sharing among its constituent communities that was unique in the Middle East—a liberal atmosphere that has all but vanished today following the silencing of the guns and the lowering of the Syrian curtain of occupation.
A second stereotype holds that Christians in Lebanon are affluent out of proportion to their numbers, and that they enjoy prosperity at the expense of the Muslim majority. This simply ignores the poor rural Christian population. Moreover, regarding relative poverty, many among Lebanon's poorer Shiite Muslims practice polygamy—for which the Christians cannot be blamed—thereby increasing the squalor index by adding large numbers of children to the ranks of the wretched. Today we see that the Christian middle class has been hit the hardest, and any significant money in the country is not in the hands of the impoverished Christians, but the monopoly of a Muslim-dominated plutocracy led by megabillionaire Prime Minister Hariri. In other words, the very tangible "trickle down" effect that characterized Lebanon's economy before 1975 has simply evaporated.
According to a third stereotype, this was a civil war from day one—the implication being that these savage Lebanese were just itching to get their hands at each other's throats. In fact, the conflict began as a Lebanese-Palestinian (specifically PLO) war that quickly acquired features of civil strife and internal confessional polarization fueled by the heavy-handed involvement of outside actors, principally Syria and Israel (not forgetting Iran and Libya and an assortment of mercenaries).
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