A Message to the Mourners of Sons

After the appalling chaos at the two Mawlids, the women's organizations wired a sharply worded telegram to the heads of government, which readers will find on the Society pages.

. . . .

Bless your hands!

Come, to the field of struggle once again! Cast this barbarism into the sea, or dig graves for it in the belly of the earth.

It is a struggle we began a quarter of a century ago, for the sake of a Lebanon pure and clean. It is a crusade like no crusade before it: by it we rubbed a thousand noses and one in the dust, on the day we bound ourselves by covenant, Christian women and Muslim women, and founded the first women's union in this East — that the mothers might come to know one another, and so the fathers come to know one another, and the sons and daughters grow up friends and dear companions.

*

O ministers of this state, O stewards of the affairs of this sultanate! We say to you, all of you — we, all the women of this homeland: We are here!

It is your right not to be jealous for Lebanon's good name; it is our right to be jealous for it! You may stand by as onlookers while the fires of the mob boil over and stray bullets reap these young men — over whose "pounding of myrtle" you never wearied, and whose bodies you never wore down your own bodies to build!

And O men of this homeland!

You may let the vein of mercy burst in your faces, and walk behind the biers shedding the false tears of fathers!

All this is yours —

and it is ours, we the mothers, to accuse you of shedding blood, and to lay upon your necks the burden of a sedition that miscarried and all but turned into a massacre!

It is ours — and we speak with the tongue of your sons and ours — to cry in your faces: Enough! Enough! Go back alone to the jungle and the law of the jungle. As for us, and your children and ours, we remain here upon this beacon, in spite of barbarism and in spite of reaction.

There are ways of keeping thrones other than these: take them, and spare yourselves — and spare the faithful — the evils of these evils.