On Sunday, an American-aligned coalition won a surprising victory in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections, pushing back a challenge by Hezbollah, which had been widely expected to win a majority of seats. There were undoubtedly many factors at play — Lebanon’s politics are fractured and Byzantine — but Obama’s well-received speech has been credited with making a difference.
This is an odd conclusion, considering that the key voting bloc was the Christian community, with Sunni Moslems and Druze generally for the pro-Western camp (or perhaps better termed anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian) and the Shias going for the Iranian-backed Hezbollah coalition:
Christians were the swing voters in Sunday's balloting and the votes in two key Christian districts helped the pro-Western coalition retain its majority in parliament over a coalition including the Shiite Hezbollah group, which is backed by Iran.
A key factor was a last-minute warning against Iranian influence from Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, head of the influential Maronite Catholic Church in Lebanon. He warned that the nation's character and its Arab identity were under threat — an allusion to Iran, Hezbollah's mentor.
Lebanon's large Christian minority fiercely guards its liberal lifestyle and freedoms.
"What the patriarch said affected the way people voted," said Edmond Samir, a Christian shopper in his mid-30s who said he backed the winning ticket.
The pro-Western camp won 68 seats while Hezbollah and its allies — including one Christian faction — ended up with 57.
An estimated two-thirds of Lebanon's Christian voters had supported Hezbollah's Christian ally, former army chief Michel Aoun, in the last election in 2005. But results indicated enough turned away from Aoun this time in favor of the pro-Western bloc to make the Christian split even, and to swing the outcome toward the pro-Western bloc decisively.
If the outreach was so powerful, shouldn't the Shias have been the group to switch its vote away from Hezbollah? If I may be so bold, didn't the actual Moslem vote--the target of the Cairo speech--basically go the way it did in 2005?
I know I shouldn't be so critical. I'm sure it's just that the president's outreach to Moslems was so gosh darned powerful that it spilled over into other religions.
Or maybe Tucker has no idea what she's talking about. I admit it could go either way.
"Reality-based" community, indeed.
