On November 21st 2006, Pierre Gemayel, the Lebanese industry minister was assassinated in a hale of bullets from three gunmen who rammed his car and shot him at point blank range. The killing, like so many in the turbulent Middle East, received few headlines in the West and was quickly forgotten in the wake of other troubling stories from the region. Lost in the headlines, however, is the real significance of the power politics at work in Lebanon in specific, and in the entire Middle East in general.

Pierre Gemayel was the scion of one of the most well-known Lebanese families. His grandfather, also Pierre Gemayel, led the Christian Maronite community in the 1930's and established the Phelange party, among the most influential in Lebanese politics. It was Pierre Jr.'s uncle Bashir that was assassinated in 1982 shortly after taking the Lebanese presidency and his father Amin who assumed the Presidency in his stead. As the current leader of the Maronite Christians, Pierre Gemayel was staunchly anti-Syrian. His assassination was no mere political killing, rather a statement that Christians -- once the majority religion of Lebanon -- are no longer the party of power.

The current Lebanese government of Fouad Seniora, a government Gemayel helped set up, has been seen as nominally pro-Western and was born out of the "Cedar Revolution" of 2005 that ousted the long-time Syrian occupation. The Cedar Revolution was itself a product of an assassination, the death of former Prime Minister Rafik Harriri, a Sunni Muslim who was also staunchly anti-Syrian. It has been widely speculated in Lebanon that Gemayel's killing was a Syrian attempt to prevent an international tribunal into the death of Rafik Harriri that would implicate senior Syrian officials.

So why is Syria interested in silencing all opposition to its Hezbollah proxies? The answer lies in the peculiar sectarian make-up of the country and the long history of rivalry and war between them.

In 1932, the last time an official census was taken in Lebanon, the French colonial overlords of the country (who took over from the Ottoman Turks following World War I) determined that Lebanon was inhabited by 861,399 people of which 55% were Christian (29% Maronite Christian). As the only remaining majority Christian country in the Middle East, Lebanon's government was set up with a peculiar arrangement known as the "1932 convention," which mandated that there would be 6 Christians to each 5 Muslims (including Druze) in parliament. Although this ratio remained fixed, the percentage of Christians to Muslims has been dropping somewhat ever since.

In 1956, of 1,411,416 Lebanese, 54% were Christian, 44% Muslim. Over a long and bloody civil war between 1975 and 1990, over 100,000 Christian were killed. Many more fled into the Diaspora. By 2005, the United States CIA estimated Lebanon's sectarian make up as 45% Shia Muslim, 20% Maronite Christian, 20% Sunni Muslim, 5% Greek Orthodox Christian, 5% other Christian, and 5% Druze. The Christian population has shrunk from approximately 55% to approximately 30%.

Of the 21 countries that commonly make up the Middle East, only 1 (Israel) does not mandate Islam as the state religion. Of the remaining 20 Muslim countries, all save 4 (Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain) are predominantly Sunni Muslim. In fact of those 20 Muslim countries, only 3 (Kuwait, Lebanon, Sudan) have non-Muslim populations greater than 10% and those non-Muslim minorities are disappearing.

When the long and bloody Lebanese civil war came to an end with the Taif accords in Saudi Arabia in 1989, Lebanon was for the first time declared an "Arabic State," much to the dismay of its many non-Arab Christians. The accords called for the disarmament of the many militias that had so plagued the country. All but one complied. The dominant Shia Muslim militia -- the Iranian backed Hezbollah -- refused to disarm. While all other groups, the Sunnis, Christians and Druze laid down their arms, Hezbollah gathered its strength and changed the balance of power in Lebanon permanently.

Today, the Hezbollah are the strongest single power in Lebanon, not only stronger than their rival sects, but stronger than the national army. With the backing of Syria and Iran, Hezbollah is also better armed and better financed than the central government and maintains a Shia power base in the South of the country. When they provoked last summer's war with Israel by killing 8 Israeli soldiers and kidnapping 2 others from the Israeli side of the border, it was Hezbollah that Israel declared war against, not Lebanon.

Hoping for a weakening of Hezbollah, much of the West, and indeed Seniora's government sat back fairly quietly at first allowing Israel some time to avenge the attacks against it. Failing to capture or kill the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, however, Hezbollah emerged from the war down but certainly not out, even going so far as to declare "victory." Now that the war is over and Hezbollah has had time to rearm and re-supply from Iran and Syria, it is pay back time against the Christians and Sunnis in Seniora's government and against its Western sponsors. Of course, Iran would like nothing better than to see Lebanon's historically downtrodden Shia take power and extend Iranian influence over this once Christian country into something of a "Shia Crescent" from Iran, through Syria, into the Levant.

A Lebanese dissident and herself a Maronite Christian, Brigitte Gabriel recently wrote "Because they Hate: A Survivor of Islamic terror warns America," detailing the systematic persecution of non-Muslim minorities in the Middle East. In her book, which was banned in Lebanon amid death threats from Hezbollah, Gabriel tells her story from the Lebanese civil war as well as the stories of the Egyptian Christian Copts, Syrian Christian Assyrians, Turkish Christian Armenians and Palestinian Christian Orthodox who are all disappearing as they are systematically being killed or driven from their ancestral homes. Gabriel's warning to America is that if Islamic fundamentalism is not seen for what it is: "a movement of Islamic supremacy meant to drive out all infidels," there will soon be no non-Muslims left in the Middle East.

The Western world of free, pluralistic, liberal societies does not understand -- and at the same time is diametrically opposed to -- the world of fundamentalist Islam that is gaining ground in the Middle East. If non-Muslim minorities are not protected and modern, pro-Western leaders in the region are allowed to be killed with barely any protest, then what hope is there of reform for the region?

If Hassan Nasrallah and his Hezbollah and pro-Syrian and pro-Iranian allies are allowed to take power by force in Lebanon what message have we sent to any pro-Western allies left in the Middle East? How can we hope to achieve any peace in Iraq when we are seen as abandoning our allies elsewhere? Do we really want theocratic, fundamentalist Iran to be the power-broker in the Middle East? Pierre Gemayel was on our side, are we on his?