Embassies have been burned.  I watched the television in horror this morning as smoke and flames rose from the Danish consulate in Beirut.

The Lebanese interior minister has resigned after failing to contain the riots.

As Migeru and I discussed elsewhere, failing to protect foreign embassies is a violation of the Vienna Convention and could have diplomatic consequences for Lebanon and Syria.

Denmark and Norway have lost their embassies.  So have Sweden and Chile, who had nothing to do with this fight at all.

But the cost of this violence is so much greater than mere damaged diplomacy.  

In Lebanon, which has suffered so much sectarian strife over most of my lifetime, the crisis has merged with Lebanon's domestic troubles and inflamed the sectarian tensions at a critical time.

And lest we forget, these are people we're talking about.

I spent part of the day in electronic conversation with friends, via e-mail and text messages.  I've never actually been to Lebanon (supposed to go this week, though) but I have a fairly large number of Lebanese or Lebanese-American (or Lebanese-Australian) friends, and a few other friends who live in Beirut or happened to be there today.

The consensus was horror.  And fear.  (And also the firm believe that Syria and Hizballah are behind it, but that's for another post....)

I don't want to quote them directly, because I haven't asked any of them if I can.

A Lebanese-American friend who lived in Beirut for years was appalled, horrified, and embarrassed that all Lebanese will now be painted with this brush.  She said the rioters were behaving like hiwan, or animals.

She forwarded me an e-mail from one of her friends in Beirut, who painted such a terrifying and sad picture.  She lives in Ashrafiya, the neighborhood where the Danish consulate was.

She said once the rioters were chased away from the consulate, they ran amok through the neighborhood, trashing everything they could find.  They smashed shop  windows and cars.  They attacked a church.

She said the protesters ran down her street, trashed a car and stoned several buildings.  She said they tried unsuccessfully to storm the Swiss ambassador's residence, which is on the same street.

(At this point I find myself thinking, the Swiss ambassador?  What the hell do the Swiss have to do with this?)

She shut all the windows and sat inside, scared.

Other friends were terrified for a different reason -- their young daughter was trapped at school, and it was quite some time before they were able to work their way there to retrieve her.

I post this to remind everyone that Europeans (and Chilean diplomats) are not the only ones suffering from this outbreak of violence.  The rioters may have numbered in their thousands, but Beirut is a city of two million, and many if not most of those people are every bit as appalled at the violence as you are.  And more afraid of it, because it's closer.