The First Things blog is doing something different for the month of August – members of their board are contributing posts and there’s a dialogue between Frederica Mathews-Greene, Ross Douthat and Jody Bottum on war matters, primarily on applying the Just War criterea to the Israel-Lebanon conflict.
The U.S. government must not allow foreign policy to be determined by political extremists or powerful special interest groups. Benedict XVI should invite world religious leaders to Assisi, as Pope John Paul II so effectively did (I was there) when he appealed for peace in Bosnia in the 1990s.
The Israeli military must stop its brutal bombings and killing of innocent women, children and elderly in Lebanon. The Catholic Church’s moral voice, rooted in its principles and values of the dignity and respect for all God’s children, must be heard. Special interest politics is driving American foreign policy. This is morally reprehensible and damaging our reputation as an objective and fair participant on the world stage.
The Pope must speak out, and Catholics everywhere, especially in the United States must support him. It is time for Catholics to accept the challenge of faithful citizenship.
Muslims, Jews and Christians must be able to live side by side in Lebanon and the Middle East. This must be the cornerstone of America’s foreign policy. The U.S. government hunts this objective by consistently taking sides in the conflict.
Catholics must demand that our political voice be no longer ignored. Catholics must begin to realize that the moral and political voice of our faith and Church has been severely diminished. Catholic political leadership has been weak, timid and ineffective. The voice of Catholic values is ignored and non-existent in the media today.
Yes, there are plenty of Catholics who are journalists and commentators in the American media, but their profession requires them to be politically correct and poplar with those who dominate and control both politics and the media today.
Catholics may be more than 64 million in number in the U.S., but our influence and political voice is growing weaker and weaker. Pope Benedict XVI may be the only hope for peace and justice in the world. Catholics everywhere must unite behind him.
A profile of the Archbishop of Tyre
A Canadian paper on Christians in Southern Lebanon:
As the war creeps toward the edges of their villages, the Maronite Christians of southern Lebanon feel they have enemies on all sides. Many Christians worked with the Israelis during their 18-year occupation of this area — some served in the hated South Lebanon Army, which was in fact a proxy militia controlled by Tel Aviv.
Now they feel betrayed by Israel, which abandoned its former allies when it suddenly pulled out of Lebanon in 2000. Some former SLA members were given citizenship and compensation by Israel, but many of those left behind were jailed by the Lebanese government.
The Christians also feel persecuted by Hezbollah, which views them as having collaborated with the enemy during the occupation. Residents speak critically of the Shia militia only inside their homes, and even then they use hushed tones, worried their words could come back to haunt them.
"It’s confusing for us. We don’t know which side to take," Mr. Asrouni said of the current conflict. His body bears the scars of the town’s tortured history. In addition to the shrapnel wounds on his back, the 52-year-old bus driver has a deformed left leg from a land mine he stepped on in 1975, when the SLA was locked in fierce battles with Palestinian militant groups operating in the south.
Lebanon’s Christians are stuck in the middle of a war with which they do not identify. Long distrustful of Hezbollah, they talk angrily about the militia’s incursion into Israel, and its habit of launching missiles from their orchards. Nor do they appreciate Israel’s response, which lobs rockets into their houses and keeps their hilltop town shut tight.
“Look here and here,” said Georgette Hassrouni, an elfin woman, pointing to holes in walls. “All these from bombs.”
But compared with people in some of the more devastated southern towns, the Christians in Ain Ebel live well, reflecting their relative privilege in Lebanese society and the fact that Hezbollah fighters, while present, do not run the town as they do some of the neighboring ones.
Another NYTimes article, from last week, detailing the views of Christians fleeing the battles:
Many Christians from Ramesh and Ain Ebel considered Hezbollah’s fighting methods as much of an outrage as the Israeli strikes. Mr. Amar said Hezbollah fighters in groups of two and three had come into Ain Ebel, less than a mile from Bint Jbail, where most of the fighting has occurred. They were using it as a base to shoot rockets, he said, and the Israelis fired back.
One woman, who would not give her name because she had a government job and feared retribution, said Hezbollah fighters had killed a man who was trying to leave Bint Jbail.
“This is what’s happening, but no one wants to say it” for fear of Hezbollah, she said.
Lebanon religious leaders issue statement:
A joint appeal to end hostilities in Lebanon and full support for Siniora’s government were expressed by the leaders of 17 Lebanese religious communities. The leaders meet for an extraordinary meeting today in Bkerke, the winter seat of the Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir. There was only one item on the agenda: “Studying the tragic development of the situation in Lebanon and facing the aggravated humanitarian crisis after the exodus of more than 700,000 displaced people from the south of the country and from Beirut.”
The meeting went on for more than two hours and was attended by many religious leaders, led by Card.Sfeir, the Grand Mufti of the Sunni Muslims of Lebanon, Sheikh Mohammad Rachid Kabbaniand the vice chairman of the Council of Shiite Muslims, Sheikh Abdel Amir Kabalan. At the end of the extraordinary meeting, the participants issued a message with seven points in which they expressed hope that a ceasefire would be reached, with the end of military reprisals on both sides.
Finally, two pieces looking at the conflict in broader terms. From the Times of London:
In the Lebanese conflict, Israel and Hezbollah are the junior proxies for the rival camps. Israel is not fighting to hold or win more land; nor is Hezbollah. But both realise that they cannot live in security and prosper as long as the other is in a position to threaten their existence. A Middle East dominated by Islamism could, in time, spell the death of Israel as a nation-state. A westernised, democratic Lebanon, on the other hand, could become the graveyard of Hezbollah and its messianic ideology. And if the US succeeds in fulfilling George W. Bush’s promise of a “new Middle East” there will be no place for regimes such as the Islamic Republic in Iran and Syria’s Baathist dictatorship.
The present rupture in Lebanon has much to do with who will lead the fightback against the West. For almost a quarter of a century there has been intense competition within the Islamist camp over who could claim leadership. For much of that period Sunni Salafist movements, backed by oil money, were in the ascendancy. They began to decline after the 9/11 attacks that deprived them of much of the support they received from Arab governments and charities. In the past five years Tehran has tried to seize the opportunity to advance its own leadership claims. The problem, however, is that Iran is a Shia power and thus regarded by Sunni Salafists as “heretical”. To compensate for that weakness, Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made the destruction of Israel a priority for his regime. The war triggered by Hezbollah is in part designed to show that President Ahmadinejad is not bluffing when he promises to wipe Israel off the map as the first step towards defeating the “infidel” West.
An op-ed in the Jerusalem Post:
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dreams of a new Middle East in which leading pro-US Arab states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are weakened and Iran becomes the new regional superpower.
The destruction of Israel is part of the dream, which is shared by Syria.
Iran is working hard to realize Ahmadinejad’s dream, destabilizing the "Shi’ite Crescent" stretching from Iran to Iraq to Syria; and from Syria to Lebanon, where the Shi’ites are the largest minority.
Another Shi’ite branch runs from Iran to the Gulf Emirates and eastern Saudi Arabia – and it is rich in oil as well as in Shi’ites.
Terror, the kidnapping of IDF soldiers and the Israeli response are all part of the Iranian-Syrian dream.
Arab leaders, standing by as Israel strikes back, are portrayed as collaborators of Israel and the US; and Israel is depicted as sinking into a quagmire of deepening attrition, faltering invincibility, ebbing deterrence and a teetering economy – and a burden to the US, an ally that cannot be relied on when the going gets tough.
THE ACTUAL work is being done for Syria and Iran by terrorist organizations, Hizbullah in particular acting as a fully-fledged forward unit of the Iranian army. And not only are Syria and Iran not paying a price, they are learning that the system works and terror pays.
If the current conflict ends without a severe blow to Hizbullah and without Syria and Iran paying heavily, Ahmadinejad’s dream will move ahead in leaps and bounds. Iran and Syria will grow unrecognizably stronger, with Iran on its way to attaining regional hegemony as it moves ahead with its plans to acquire nuclear power.
The influence of the Western-leaning Arab countries is weakening as Islamist and terrorist organizations burgeon and destabilize them internally. We are seeing countries like Sudan and Yemen jumping on the extremist bandwagon.
Russia, which wants to restore its previous position internationally, has decided to challenge the US in the Middle East and is aiding Iran and Syria. It will do so even more in the future. Ditto China.
There. Long post. Sort it out. Add your own links.
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