On Friday 19th October, Lebanon stood still as all of its nightmares came flooding back.  A car bomb loaded with the equivalent of 30kg of TNT tore through the centre of the city of Beirut, welding two cars together and flinging them onto the roof of a nearby building. The bomb killed senior intelligence official General Wissam al-Hassan and seven others, shaking the fragile peace that had prevailed in the country since 2008.

The international press went wild for the story. That Syria’s civil war was seeping across Lebanon’s borders, reawakening the sleeping beast of sectarian rivalries in a country torn apart by 15 years of violence, was understandably seen as an unmissable scoop.  BBC radio exaggerated the heroism of its “war correspondents’” refusal to wear flack-jackets in such allegedly “perilous” times and analysts swept in to give their comments on Sunni-Shi’a tensions. One point, however, remained almost totally overlooked: if this is a Sunni-Shi’a conflict, why target a Christian neighbourhood?

The media has skewed the central issue at stake in Lebanon – the fight between those who support the Syrian regime and those who don’t – in favour of a good old narrative of straight-forward sectarianism. It is true that the majority of the Sunnis in Lebanon are against the Syrian regime and that the majority of Shi’as support it, but what about the Christians and the Druze, not to mention the other smaller sects?

The Christians in Lebanon are split down the middle, with one political party supporting Syria and two others opposing it. The Druze are pro-Syria but are famous for switching sides. The conflict in Lebanon is not simply a conflict between sects, but rather a conflict between two rival ideas of the country’s future: one in which Lebanon is allied with the Syrian regime, the other in which it is firmly bound to the West.

When the state of Lebanon was first created in 1920 by the French Mandate government, many Muslims – and indeed some Christians – thought it was an illegitimate foreign imposition and continued to think of themselves as Syrian. Indeed although the term “Mount Lebanon” is at least as old as the Bible, the expression “Lebanese” is comparatively new – those who lived in the region have, for most of history, been known as the “Syrians” of Mount Lebanon.  After independence, ties between Lebanon and her neighbour remained close only until 1976 when civil war ravaged Syria occupied it. The occupation was to last 29 years and its aftershocks are still being felt today  Nowadaysthe Lebanese are either “8th March” and support Syria, or “14th March” and don’t. It is a bitter rivalry that began with the major protests on those dates in 2005 and has since then taken many lives, most recently that of Wissam al-Hassan on the 19thof October

Assassinated like the outspoken journalist Samir Qassir and the former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the car bomb took not just al-Hassan’s life but several others’ with it. Like Qassir and Hariri, al-Hassan was not assassinated simply because of sectarian tensions but because he stood for a Lebanon independent of Syrian interference.

Had media simplificationss been justified and the attack motivated by religious tensions, al-Hassan would most likely have been assassinated in a Sunni district of the capital since he himself is a Sunni. By striking in Ashrafiyeh, the heart of Christian Beirut, the bombers sent an important message: they were aiming for the man, not his god.