Time & Perspective Quote by Walid Jumblatt

Jumblatt’s line isn’t offering condolence so much as a political autopsy delivered while the body is still warm. He performs the required moral posture - “I condemn” - then immediately pivots to what he really wants on the record: suspicion, not grief, should be the default reaction. The rhythm is deliberate. Condemnation functions like a visa stamp, the minimum paperwork needed to cross into the more volatile claim that terror attacks have downstream beneficiaries powerful enough to make coincidence feel naive.

The Madrid reference lands in the early-2000s European panic loop, when bombings didn’t just kill people; they reordered elections, security laws, and public tolerance for hard-right rhetoric. By dropping France into the sentence, he widens Madrid from a national tragedy into a modular political mechanism: attack, fear, backlash, power shift. Chirac versus Le Pen is the tell. He’s not warning about “extremism” in the abstract; he’s naming the specific transfer of legitimacy from mainstream conservatism to ethnonationalist insurgency - a transfer lubricated by chaos.

The subtext carries two sharp insinuations at once. First, terrorist violence can be politically instrumental even when the perpetrators aren’t in on the full chain of consequences. Second, states and factions may quietly welcome the “useful catastrophe” because it expands surveillance powers and narrows the acceptable range of dissent. Coming from a Lebanese politician steeped in regional intrigue, the remark reads less like conspiracy-mongering than like a veteran’s cynical rule of thumb: in modern politics, follow the votes, the emergency laws, and the men who suddenly sound “necessary.”