A small update:

Sam and I were debating about whether or not there was Christian Lebanese support for Hezbollah. Knowing several Lebanese Christians, I was much surprised by her contention of support from that community for Hezbollah.

As it turns out, I was right. (Well, not that anyone's surprised by that, of course. :)

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TYRE, Lebanon, July 27 — The refugees from southern Lebanon spilled out of packed cars into the dark street here Thursday evening, gulping bottles of water and squinting in the glare of the headlights to find family members and friends. Many had not eaten in days. Most had not had clean drinking water for some time. There were wounded swathed in makeshift dressings, and a baby just 16 days old.

But for some of the Christians who had made it out in this convoy, it was not just privations they wanted to talk about, but their ordeal at the hands of Hezbollah — a contrast to the Shiites, who make up a vast majority of the population in southern Lebanon and broadly support the militia.

“Hezbollah came to Ain Ebel to shoot its rockets,” said Fayad Hanna Amar, a young Christian man, referring to his village. “They are shooting from between our houses.”

“Please,’’ he added, “write that in your newspaper.”

[Evidently the NYT did - Geoff]

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/28/world/middleeast/28refugees.html&OQ=_rQ3D2Q26hpQ26eQ26orefQ3Dslogin&OP=3ee9a087Q2FQ25)VkQ25In6Q60qnnP8Q25877Q51Q257Q2F Q258eQ25)nqfIQ25Q26SIIfVVRQ60PQ258eqVQ2BQ3BQ5CVVQ6 04vPQ26f

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Retribution, restriction, exploitation. Now, what does that remind me of? Sharia, anyone?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,251-2290203,00.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0728/p06s01-wome.html
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=1768

July 29, 2006
A new poll shows that 80 per cent of Lebanese Christians, 80 per cent of Druze and 89 per cent of Sunnis support Hezbollah, even though it remains Shia to its core.

edit: your Christians may be from this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_massacre) group

Home > Christianity Today Magazine > Hot Issues > Politics & Law

Christianity Today, Week of July 17

Another Point of View: Evangelical Blindness on Lebanon

It is normally easy enough for me to dismiss with a smirk some of the simplistic comments that I constantly read or hear from Christians around the world as pertains to events that are going on in the Middle East. These comments hit much deeper at a time when my country is once again hurting beyond pain, under the murderous aggression of Israeli armed forces for the past five days.

It is striking how normally highly reasonable and spiritually aware people can suddenly lose any sense of ethical, let alone Christian, balance when it comes to Middle East conflicts involving modern political Israel.

"Great. All we need is a nuclear-armed Iran led by a messianic president who hates Israel and believes that apocalyptic destruction is a precursor to global salvation," writes David P. Gushee in a recent Christianity Today online column, in reference to Iran's president Ahmadinejad. On the whole, Gushee's article is fairly balanced from a certain point of view, and I suppose within the limits necessary to avoid being attacked and branded by those in our churches who have but disdain for Arabs.

But how is it that he, like so many others, fails to notice that world events in the last few years—even decades—have had as their main catalyst tens of thousands of evangelical Christians with a "messianic" mentality who believe that apocalyptic destruction of all but their beloved Israel will be "a precursor to global salvation"?

"Nuclear-armed Iran"? How about the Israeli jet planes that are bombing, as I write, my country and its population, my sisters, my brothers, my fathers and mothers and grandfathers, my children and nieces and nephews? According to the Lebanese health minister, Israel is even using phosphoric bombs, which are forbidden under international conventions! Are my people to consider Iran more dangerous than this? Are we safely in good hands with such actions? Come with me to Beirut and see how inoffensive Israel is. Ask the thousands of Western nationals that are presently being evacuated by the shipload. Ask the hundreds of U.S. and other Western missionaries that are running for their lives from Lebanon as you read this, through the most dangerous routes. Ask them whether weapons of any kind are in safe hands in any bloodthirsty human hands. And if they were not bloodthirsty, why would they have them? Why would anyone have them?

In the past, tit for tat has been the only way for any Arab country or armed group to get anything from Israel. So once more last Wednesday, Lebanon's Hezbollah ventured into kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in order to force the hand of Israel into a prisoner exchange. "The actual result," Gushee wrote, "is predictable. Israel responds with massive (sometimes disproportionate) force; civilians get killed accidentally along with intended militants."

"Sometimes disproportionate"?! Talk about an understatement to describe a one-week—and still going—machine of annihilation that has destroyed in days what had taken 15 years of reconstruction. Civilians "killed accidentally"?! Explain that to the young mother squatting right now at my parents' home in Lebanon, having just heard her husband was torn into pieces by an Israeli bomb as he was carrying out civil relief in villages of South Lebanon! But of course these civilians were at fault, since they had been warned by Israeli flyers to evacuate their villages the previous night. But to go where? To my father's living room?! They are welcome, but it's getting really full. Tonight I had my finger hovering over my computer's "send" button for at least one long minute before I was able to bring myself to sending to a few friends who might care to receive them, some of the gruesome images of war, of torn infant flesh from my bleeding country.

And then this wish: that "our own government will undertake policies to help foster a reduction of tensions in the region." Oh what wishful thinking! When did it ever?! When did the U.S. ever use anything other than its veto power at the United Nations, precisely in order to prevent policies and resolutions that might potentially have been helpful to my people?

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!)

As an academic with a Ph.D. from Oxford University and specialist in Christian-Muslim and East-West relations, constantly seeking creative models of conflict resolution and better understanding, all of what I have just written is written in a manner far from what I would normally write or say with a cool head, far from what my Swiss-blood-flowing veins would normally permit me to utter. But then, perhaps academics sometimes owe their readers more genuine feelings, skin-level emotions gushing out of a deeply hurting, frustrated, desperate, and hopeless soul that has had enough of human arrogance and injustice.

Having come to the U.S. at the wrong time to teach a course for two weeks, I find myself at the wrong place at the wrong time, stranded after my country's airport was sent up in flames by Israeli jets. There are two Israeli soldiers imprisoned by Hezbollah hands, 10,000 Arabs in Israeli jails, and one poor soul imprisoned in the U.S. by human madness and bloodthirsty governments.

I am angry at self-centered Hezbollah, which has done the inadmissible of taking a unilateral war decision without consulting the Lebanese government of which it is part, never giving a second thought to the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Lebanese who will perish as a result of its selfish decision. I am angry that citizens of a nation like Israel, who have so suffered at the hands of others, would allow themselves such an out-of-proportion reaction, oh-so-far from the "eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth" principle that we might have forgiven them. I am just as angry at—I have lost hope in—the international community that is keeping silent and not even budging with an official condemnation of this senseless instinct of extermination. By both sides, I would be lynched for what I have just said, if they had the chance. But what have I got to lose anymore?

Martin Accad is the academic dean of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary in Lebanon. He was teaching at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, last week and is now unable to return home.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/129/42.0.html

This conflict has nothing to do winning christian or muslim support, it's about politics and the greater shite agenda in the middle-east. The real losers in this war are the sunni arabs and christians in Lebanon as they are caught up between two sides with different interests in the region
Do not forget the former SLA soldiers and families that fled into Israel after Israel voluntarily withdrew from S.Lebanon in 2000.
It's clearly understandable arabs as a whole would not like to see their cities and towns bombed by Israel or any non-Islamic nation.

July 29, 2006
A new poll shows that 80 per cent of Lebanese Christians, 80 per cent of Druze and 89 per cent of Sunnis support Hezbollah, even though it remains Shia to its core.

edit: your Christians may be from this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_massacre) group

Dubious on all accounts. Firing from within Christian neighbourhoods, accounts of civil repression, and fear from those in positions of responsibility within the government point to internal repression by Shia supporters of Hezbollah. In a country where the PM is assassinated by Syria for failure to completely support their agenda, should we be surprised at such news? I do thank you for implying that my acquaintances are war criminals of some kind, however: such openmindness is rare.

The other account is an opinion piece. Are we meant to glean facts from it?

So the firing of rockets was limited only to the Christian neighborhoods?
Surprising the Hezbollah let the Christians get away then.

No; but it certainly occurred there. Other Christians appear to have been prevented from leaving, one even being killed. The refugees themselves say that Hezbollah was holding them in thrall, and that they were afraid for their lives - but why would I think that a terrorist organization would limit political expression? Silly me.

I do note that you do finally appreciate that Hezbollah is using civilians as cover for their activities: "So the firing of rockets was limited only to the Christian neighbourhoods?" Previously I had the impression that you thought Israel was deliberately attacking civilians. Glad to see that you understand the situation.

Surprising the Hezbollah let the Christians get away then.

They didn't let some of them get away. Weren't you reading the article?

Dubious on all accounts. Firing from within Christian neighbourhoods, accounts of civil repression, and fear from those in positions of responsibility within the government point to internal repression by Shia supporters of Hezbollah. In a country where the PM is assassinated by Syria for failure to completely support their agenda, should we be surprised at such news? I do thank you for implying that my acquaintances are war criminals of some kind, however: such openmindness is rare.

The other account is an opinion piece. Are we meant to glean facts from it?

Considering it's written by an influential Lebanese Christian versus an unknown Christian with unknown motives?

They didn't let some of them get away. Weren't you reading the article?

Yes; I also heard on the news about how the Israelis were "depending" on some allies in South Lebanon to help them locate the Hezbollah; who were "old allies" from 1982.

Wonder who they were.

I see: so the influential fellow is more believable than the refugee who came out of the fighting zone. The "influential" fellow has more believability, and no motives, while the refugees - who may have just lost everything they ever owned, and are afraid to give their identities for "fear of retribution" (and by who? surely not Hezbollah, that bastion of tolerance and democracy), have "unknown" motives.

Suspicion seems to be unevenly applied in your dictum.

Yes; I also heard on the news about how the Israelis were "depending" on some allies in South Lebanon to help them locate the Hezbollah; who were "old allies" from 1982.

Wonder who they were.

Simple: they were those who suffered previously at the hands of Hezbollah and other Shia groups.

Given Hezbollah's history in that region, I fail to see why this is a surprise. Unless you're implying now that you support Hezbollah's methods, which you decried...yesterday, I think it was.

Anyway, at least you seem to accept that some people might be able to escape such a gang of idiots as Hezbollah.

I do note that you do finally appreciate that Hezbollah is using civilians as cover for their activities: "So the firing of rockets was limited only to the Christian neighbourhoods?" Previously I had the impression that you thought Israel was deliberately attacking civilians. Glad to see that you understand the situation.


I think Israel is very smart to create enough damage to punish the Lebanese; and I believe that South Lebanon is a Hezbollah stronghold.

And they are a guerilla army; they are using the best vantage point, if you've been watching the military analysis. Most of the people in bint Jbael are the Hezbollah as the ambush proved.

Simple: they were those who suffered previously at the hands of Hezbollah and other Shia groups.


I thought the Shias were the poorest group in Lebanon?

Given Hezbollah's history in that region, I fail to see why this is a surprise. Unless you're implying now that you support Hezbollah's methods, which you decried...yesterday, I think it was.

And which year was the Hezbollah created?

Anyway, at least you seem to accept that some people might be able to escape such a gang of idiots as Hezbollah.

Surprisingly, most of them want to come back.

What do you mean by "create enough damage to punish the Lebanese"? And how does this relate to the issue?

I appreciate they're a guerilla army; I still don't like their tactics.

I see: so the influential fellow is more believable than the refugee who came out of the fighting zone. The "influential" fellow has more believability, and no motives, while the refugees - who may have just lost everything they ever owned, and are afraid to give their identities for "fear of retribution" (and by who? surely not Hezbollah, that bastion of tolerance and democracy), have "unknown" motives.

Suspicion seems to be unevenly applied in your dictum.

I could say the same for you.

Is it so difficult to believe that disinformation can come from any side?

What do you mean by "create enough damage to punish the Lebanese"? And how does this relate to the issue?

Why don't you look at the history of Israeli aggression in the region.

You'll find it's always very controlled.


I appreciate they're a guerilla army; I still don't like their tactics.

I don't either, they are fools; but then, I've not lived under occupation for 20 years.

So they can't have controlled responses (not aggression - that comes from the other side) to terrorism simply because they don't want to kill a lot of civilians? And now their trying to limit their military actions is because they want to "create enough damage to punish the Lebanese"?

Look, either they're monsters or they're not. Either they're blasting civilians indiscriminately or they're not. You can't run two contradictory conspiracy theories at the same time, no matter how often you want al Jazeera.

So they can't have controlled responses (not aggression - that comes from the other side) to terrorism simply because they don't want to kill a lot of civilians? And now their trying to limit their military actions is because they want to "create enough damage to punish the Lebanese"?

Look, either they're monsters or they're not. Either they're blasting civilians indiscriminately or they're not. You can't run two contradictory conspiracy theories at the same time, no matter how often you want al Jazeera.

They are not monsters Geoff, they are surrounded by enemies who wish them ALL gone.

But their PR sucks.

I would agree with both those statements.

Terra communa.

Dubious on all accounts. Firing from within Christian neighbourhoods, accounts of civil repression, and fear from those in positions of responsibility within the government point to internal repression by Shia supporters of Hezbollah. In a country where the PM is assassinated by Syria for failure to completely support their agenda, should we be surprised at such news? I do thank you for implying that my acquaintances are war criminals of some kind, however: such openmindness is rare.

The other account is an opinion piece. Are we meant to glean facts from it?
geoff,

Thank you for this, i did not know it had been proven that syria assassinated Harrari yet??