Word: bashir
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LIKE A CEDAR THAT HAS BEEN FELLED! was the banner head used by the Beirut daily L 'Orient-Le Jour in reporting the violent death at age 34 of the country's President-elect, Bashir Gemayel. The cedar is the symbol of Lebanon, especially associated with the mountains. Like the cedar, Bashir Gemayel was a product of Mount Lebanon. The cedar grows and flourishes in harsh surroundings, in unfriendly weather, and so did Bashir Gemayel. He lived in a tough and uncompromising world, reached its zenith, and was felled...
...year-old ancestral home in the mountains outside Beirut that Bashir Gemayel received us for the interview. From the windows of the pink stone house there is a breathtakingly beautiful view of the mountain slopes with their olive groves and grapevines among gray boulders. But Maronite Christians like the Gemayels did not settle in Lebanon because of its beauty. They chose those mountains because of security, a rugged area ideal for defense, where a lonely Christian community could defend itself and survive in a sea of sometimes hostile Muslim neighbors. The Maronites survived without ever being reduced to minority status...
...Maronite community. He got his chance originally because he was the second son of Pierre Gemayel, founder of the Phalange back in the '30s. Brother Amin, nominated by the Phalangists as their new candidate for the presidency, chose to handle the political side of the party, and Bashir went to work to build Maronite military muscle...
...rising to Maronite leadership, Bashir had to fight not only Palestinians and leftist Muslims but also some of his fellow Maronites. In the tense atmosphere, a minor automobile mishap could touch off a firefight between Bashir's Phalangist warriors and the "tigers" of former President Camille Chamoun, often with bloody results. Gemayel's Phalangists were accused of murdering a son and granddaughter of former President Suleiman Franjieh (whose own followers, according to local belief, had once gunned down 17 members of a rival family in a church in northern Lebanon...
Eventually Gemayel concluded that to defend the community successfully he could not afford the luxury of internal strife. His Phalangists took on Chamoun gunners and won. As the undisputed leader of the Maronites, young Bashir Gemayel welded the Phalangist, Chamounis and other Christian militias into one fighting group called "the Lebanese forces...