Faux Christians support War Crimes
Lebanese Christians fleeing the destruction in the south are denouncing Hezbollah... and Israel.
"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."
...
Many Christians from Ramesh and Ain Ebel considered Hezbollah’s fighting methods as much of an outrage as the Israeli strikes.
They are powerless to stop either Hezbollah or Israel. All they can do is flee. All of which underscores Pat Buchanan's plaintive plea last week asking Where are the Christians? And by "Christians" he meant American Christians as well as the rest of the world community of Christians.
Let it be said: Israel has a right to defend herself, a right to counter-attack against Hezbollah and Hamas, a right to clean out bases from which Katyusha or Qassam rockets are being fired and a right to occupy land from which attacks are mounted on her people.
But what Israel is doing is imposing deliberate suffering on civilians, collective punishment on innocent people, to force them to do something they are powerless to do: disarm the gunmen among them. Such a policy violates international law and comports neither with our values nor our interests. It is un-American and un-Christian.
But where are the Christians? Why is Pope Benedict virtually alone among Christian leaders to have spoken out against what is being done to Lebanese Christians and Muslims?
When al Qaeda captured two U.S. soldiers and barbarically butchered them, the U.S. Army did not smash power plants across the Sunni Triangle. Why then is Bush not only silent but openly supportive when Israelis do this?
Democrats attack Bush for crimes of which he is not guilty, including Haditha and Abu Ghraib. Why are they, too, silent when Israel pursues a conscious policy of collective punishment of innocent peoples?
I've focused on Lebanese Christians in this post because I'm fully aware that there is a faction of rightwing Americans who favor a modern day "final solution" for any Muslims and Arab Muslims in particular.
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http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/rockfordfiles.cgi/The%20World%20Beyond/Lebanon/2006/07/30/The_Forgotten_Victims
Sunday, July 30, 2006
The Forgotten Victims
In late 1990, in the run-up to the Gulf War, I was a graduate student in political theory at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. The coming war occupied much of our talk outside the classroom, and I can recall only one graduate student—a Sicilo-American Republican from Philadelphia who had gone through ROTC and was studying at the law school so he could be a JAG Corps attorney for the Army—who was in favor of the war.
I was a subscriber to the American edition of the Italian Catholic magazine 30 Days, and we were all shocked when the American publisher (Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J.) decided to quit publishing the American edition when the Italians ran a cover story on Pope John Paul II’s opposition to the war. (For those unfamiliar with the story, that was the genesis of Catholic World Report, which was given to American 30 Days subscribers to fill out the rest of their subscription.)
While it was clear that there were some Catholics in favor of the war (Catholic politicians, in particular), much of the conservative political opposition to the war was being led by Catholics, such as Pat Buchanan and Russell Kirk, as well as an increasingly Catholic-themed publication called Chronicles.
How times have changed. Today, the war in Iraq is far less justified, morally or strategically, than the Gulf War was; and yet, outside of Chronicles and Pat Buchanan, most “conservative” Catholics have supported the war unquestioningly. Take a spin around “St. Blog’s Parish” and try to find anyone who raises any objection to the war. Mark Shea is about the only one, but even when he questioned the most over-the-top proposal by Michael Ledeen (that “terrorists should be killed on the battlefield, not captured“), many of those who commented on his post (as well as many of his fellow St. Bloggers) took him to task.
And anyone who points out that John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger opposed the war is simply dismissed: Don’t you know that they oppose all war? Don’t you understand that this is just a prudential judgment? Are you suggesting that my prudential judgment may not be better than that of two popes? After all, there’s a lot they don’t know—John Paul and Benedict aren’t even Americans, much less Republicans!
And everything I just wrote applies in spades to “conservative” American Catholic support for Israel’s latest attack on Lebanon.
Back in 1990, the opposition of us conservative students at Catholic U was both moral and strategic. One thing that may have set us apart from others, however, was an awareness that the conflict in the Middle East can never be boiled down to just two extremes, whether Judaism versus Islam or Israel versus Arabs. We had watched the Lebanese civil war rage most of our lives; we knew the effect it had had on Maronite Christians. Coming from Michigan, I knew of the massive influx of Lebanese Christians to the Detroit area, in large part because of the war.
In the eyes of today’s “conservative” American Catholics, the Christian populations of the Middle East—the oldest continuing Christian communities in the world—are simply invisible. Palestinians are all Muslims; there are no Melkites. Lebanese are all Muslims; there are no Maronites or Syrian Catholics or Orthodox. Ditto for Syria herself. Iraqis are Sunni and Shiite and Kurd; Chaldean and Assyrian Christians simply don’t exist. And everyone who lives within the borders of Israel is an observant Jew.
This blindness on the part of “conservative” American Catholics is partly ignorance; even many of those who have heard the words Melkite and Maronite have no particular interest in trying to learn anything about either rite, must less trying to grapple with the history of these Christian populations or even being bothered to find out who lives where or how they worship.
More importantly, though, it reflects a growing political reality. Since at least the Six-Day War, the presence of Christians in the Middle East has been a sign of contradiction that has stood in the way of American and Israeli attempts to reduce the broad conflict in the Middle East to the dualism of Judaism/Israel versus Islam/Arabs. The inconvenient reality of Middle Eastern Christianity has been a stumbling block to remaking the Middle East in a particular ideological image.
I started to write the “irreducible” (instead of “inconvenient”) “reality of Middle Eastern Christianity,” but, unfortunately, it is not so. By acting as if they were dealing only with Muslims, both the United States and Israel have changed the demographic reality in the Middle East. Palestinian Christians have left in droves. Much of the Maronite population is now in the United States. The Chaldean and Assyrian Christians in Iraq have, as Wayne Allensworth predicted before the war, largely fled the country.
These Christians, who used to act as leaven, politically and spiritually, in a troubled region can no longer do so. And so the ideological description of the conflict as the dualism of Judaism/Israel versus Islam/Arabs has gone from an inaccurate reduction of reality to something more than a half-truth today.
What is astounding is that so few “conservative” American Catholics realize that the ethnic cleansing of Christians from the Middle East is not, in the long run, in the national interest of either the United States or Israel. Blinded by American nationalism or partisan politics or maybe just bloodlust, they’re supporting policies that will likely cost more American and Israeli blood in the decades to come.
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