The Lebanese are fully aware of the nature of Kuntar's crimes. While some are truly appalled, the fact is that bludgeoning the head of a four-year-old child is hardly anomalous in the context of a military strategy that for over half a century has intentionally targeted civilians. After all, it is not as though Kuntar crossed the boundaries of decency so carefully articulated by Yasser Arafat, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Osama Bin Ladin. So, if the leaders of Lebanon's pro-democracy gathering will not denounce Kuntar's crimes or Hezbollah's celebration it is not merely because they lack courage. Rather, it is because even the Sunnis, as much as they despise the "Party of God", are so steeped in the same bloody history that they cannot imagine another course. What is unique about Hezbollah's coming out party for Kuntar is that it illustrates how the culture of death ("Death to Israel, Death to America.") may end by consuming itself. As Hezbollah proved in its blitzkrieg of Beirut in May, Lebanese lives, Arab lives, Muslim lives are also of little account if they stand against the "Islamic resistance". Moreover, the Kuntar episode shows that the Shiite militia has little regard for even Shiites. After all, insofar as freeing Kuntar was Nasrallah's casus belli for the July 2006 war [it was to force Kuntar's release that Hezbollah raided Israel and kidnapped two soldiers] the Lebanese Shiite community "martyred" 1200 of its own in order to vouchsafe Nasrallah's "faithful promise". Twelve hundred for one is a bargain suicidal in both its math and its ethics.

Self destruction is arguably the inevitable destination for a group that, as Martin Kramer details here, made its world debut with suicide operations during the Lebanese civil wars.

The first car-bomb "martyrdom operation" was November 11, 1982 when a Hezbollah fighter killed seventy-four Israeli soldiers and fourteen others. Then came a series of spectacular attacks, culminating in the1983 US Marine Barracks bombing at the Beirut airport. Amal, another Shiite organization, understood that Hezbollah's martyrdom operations were winning them prestige and power in the Shiite community, and tried to match is rival.

As the two Shiite organizations competed for martyrs, they started sending out their young men on ill-conceived operations that failed to kill any of the enemy and achieved only the deaths of the martyrs themselves. That is, they were suicides.