Gashwin Gomes has a good round-up post (and you should have been following him for the great Banned-Blogs-in-India travesty ), including this Christianity Today roundup of the Christian angle. (This CT Weblog, as usual, has many, many othe great links. Go read.)
Mainstream media coverage of the Christian angle in the conflict focuses (with good cause) on the Maronite church. Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Nasrallah Sfeir, the Maronite Patriarch of Lebanon, telling him "the international community has to help you."
What does the patriarch want help with? Enforcing UN Security Council Resolution 1559 which called for Syria to withdraw its forces and involvement in Lebanon, and for "the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias" (i.e. Hezbollah). At his meeting with Rice, Patriarch Sfeir seemed—as many of us do—at a loss for a solution.
The world says the Resolution 1559 will it be applied. But it is not up to the Lebanese Government to apply it. It is so weak to do so. There is another way to apply this, but I do not know how. But our interest is that all the citizens will be equal (inaudible). When some are having arms and the others have not there is no equality and I’ve said this a long time that — how to apply this I don’t know. [Through a dialogue] perhaps, some other — some pressure to …
Sfeir, coincidentally, has been on a long-planned, month-long tour of the U.S. since July 2. As for Christians still in Lebanon, there have been a few meager scraps of information. The Swiss media reports that foreigners are flocking to Christian churches to await evacuation. The hawkish Israeli site Debka.com—sometimes way ahead of mainstream news reports, sometimes way off in its facts—reports that rockets are being launched from Christian villages due to "Israel’s reluctance to attack Christian targets. … [Hezbollah] is using Lebanese Christians as human shields for its attacks and their towns and villages as supply centers to pump ordnance to the launch teams in forward positions."
Weblog goes on to quote an article in which several Lebanese Christian youths are interviewed, the general consensus being – if Israel’s actions are going to free us from Hezbollah and Syria: good.
Please, Christians! Let’s grow up and get over our childish wishes. If, like me, you had lived through the 17 years of Lebanese civil strife from 1975 to 1991 and were presently facing the real and gruesome prospect of another extended conflict, you’d be far from hoping and believing in any benevolent and sincere peace efforts of any external broker, supposedly neutral.
I’ll tell you, if you care, what I think those governments will help foster. I think that some pseudo-biblically motivated Christians with decision power, who believe "that apocalyptic destruction is a precursor to global salvation," are presently working toward provoking a Middle Eastern conflict of regional significance in order finally to settle accounts with Hezbollah- and Hamas-supporting Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine, who have committed the crime, as Gushee put it, of making their hatred for Israel "crystal clear." And how dare they, since the said state has only been acting as an aggressor and racist colonial state with neighbor-exterminating tendencies from the moment of its inception?
(Of course, I will be accused of being an anti-Semite because of such words. But I will just shrug and sneer at that accusation and say: "What makes you a Semite anyway?" Having just read the holocaust account of Elie Wiesel’s Night with tears and deep empathy, having Jewish relatives on my Swiss mother’s side who fled Germany to Switzerland during the period of the rise of Nazism, being an Arab Christian with Lebanese paternal ancestry, I have more Semitic DNA in me than most who will be reading this. My ethnic heritage may be a mess, but I can still recognize ethical wrong when I see it!)
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