A lesson from the Beirut bombing

A targeted assassination took the life of another Lebanese thinker along with companions and bystanders, exposing once more the evil of those playing God, thinking they win with every voice they mute and every life they cut short.

What the killers forget is that to be God you have to create beauty, symmetry and harmony, balance and perfection. Just take a look around you to see what God is: Life, breath and creativity. You can plot to kill someone, you can actually command the killing or commit it, but if you cannot create a perfect coming together of all diversity in a beautiful dance, you are nothing but a loser, a pretender, a fake. You are a murderer and a hater of life, a hater of the creator and all of creation. Death is only a passage that anyone can inflict; it simply takes us to what’s next. There is no dignity in death; only shame for the killers and agony for those left behind, peace surrounds those who depart.

Your arms and weapons do not scare us, nor do your intimidating tactics. Your targeted assassinations make us sick to the stomach and we ache for the departed at the personal and national level. But, we also despise you and your plans to take us backward. You might have to continue taking true thinkers and true leaders out until no one is left but you. You still won’t be half the men and women you eliminated, you won’t have half the qualities of those you suppressed. You won’t have the wit, the brains, the creativity to unite and the charisma to make everyone pay attention and respect what you are saying. You will always have the empty cheerleaders and blind followers, not one more will ever give you the time of day.
You can continue to rise on the dark pile of skeletons you’ve accumulated, you’ll never be nourished, as we are, by the message of those positive souls every time we think of them or remember them.

We are all going to die, there is no bravery in death, there is however bravery in living up to one’s principles and uniting people rather than dividing them, in loving people rather than hating them, in talking to people rather than killing them because you can’t handle opposition or non-loyalty!

This article was first published in al-Nahar on Dec. 30, 2013.
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Multi-award-winning journalist Octavia Nasr served as CNN’s senior editor of Middle Eastern affairs, and is regarded as one of the pioneers of the use of social media in traditional media. She moved to CNN in 1990, but was dismissed in 2010 after tweeting her sorrow at the death of Hezbollah’s Mohammed Fadlallah. Nasr now runs her own firm, Bridges Media Consulting, whose main aim is to help companies better leverage the use of social networks.