ARYE MEKEL: “You’ll see that there’ll be, by next week, you’ll see there will be countries that will step up to the plate. I think the French have an interest in a real Lebanon. Remember. Lebanon used to be a Christian country. Whatever happened to it? The Muslims kicked them out.” (via)
Bombs fall on Beirut again, 70 per cent of Christians ready to emigrate
3 August 2006
Some suggest that up to 70 per cent of the Christians that are still left in Lebanon is ready to leave as soon as Beirut airport reopens.
According to Mgr Bechara Rai, Maronite bishop of Jbeil, it is a real crisis for Lebanese Christians. If the “New Middle East” project that some have envisaged is implemented it may be too late for Christians.
The concern though is not limited to Lebanon but touches Christians across the Middle East. Pope John Paul II himself said that “the Christian presence in Lebanon is a necessary condition for the presence of Christians in the Middle East”.
The following is an excerpt from the article, “‘Who Is My Neighbor’ in the Lebanon-Israel Conflict?“, written by Martin Accad, the academic dean of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary in Lebanon. He is speaking about responses that he’d received to another article he’d written, “Another Point of View: Evangelical Blindness on Lebanon.”
Setting the Record Straight on a Few Points | 25.07.06
Through the responses that I received, it became clear to me that there are many misunderstandings about certain realities in the Middle East. The first has to do with the use of the term “terrorist.” The term has been so grossly misused for political rhetoric in the past few years that only those who are willing to question deeply-rooted conventions will be able to hear me. “Terrorist” cannot—should not—be used as a noun or in the substantive. It can only be an adjective to describe an act. The fact is that the “terrorists” of one group are the “heroes” of another. The French resistance that used terrorist methods in their resistance to Nazi occupation would have retained their ‘terrorist’ label had their enemies eventually won World War II. Anti-apartheid units that used terrorist methods in their fight against racism in South Africa also only became heroes after they achieved victory. Examples are endless, but the point is that whenever an armed force carries out military operations so indiscriminate that they repeatedly result in the killing of non-combatant civilians, these should be called “terrorist” acts. On the Lebanese front, the media says that about 35 Israeli and more than 350 Lebanese non-combatants have been killed, with hundreds more injured and hundreds of thousands displaced. Ms. Ansari, Middle East and North Africa program director of Save the Children, U.K., said her “contacts in Lebanon reckoned that up to 45 percent of the casualties were youths.” That is about 150 children, up to one hundred families left childless. All of these are acts of terror, and they are still going on, and the international community has been unable (or rather unwilling) to take a decisive stance by calling for a ceasefire.
As for the “real” profile of your so-called “terrorist,” come with me to the Beirut suburbs or to the villages of South Lebanon or to some parts of the Bekaa Valley. I will introduce you to many of my friends who eat the same food you do, watch the same movies, share your humanity, and yet happen to be staunch adherents to a group called Hezbollah. Contrary to many corrupt and double-faced political entities and ideologies in the Middle East, Hezbollah have been active in their social and educational programs, coherent in their message, and uncompromising in their political and militant stance. Whatever one’s opinion is of the group—and I, for one, am not a fan—in a country where war and occupation have often left a vacuum in entire regions of government, it is these characteristics of Hezbollah that have made it so popular to a majority of the most underprivileged, who happen also to be the most sizeable community in the Lebanese population: Shiites. The reality is that practically every man in almost every family in these regions belongs to the militant group that was first born in an effort to resist Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon in 1982. After having breakfast with them in Beirut, you and I would then sip on a strong black coffee on the plastic chairs of a sidewalk café in the Beirut suburbs and reflect on the tragedy that when Israel and some Western nations promised to get rid of Hezbollah, they effectively vowed the extermination of about a third of the Lebanese population! About 700,000 have been displaced from the South, the Bekaa Valley in East Lebanon, and the Beirut suburbs, and have taken refuge north and east of Beirut. Seven hundred thousand out of a total Lebanese population of 3.5 million, 20 percent of the population, mostly Shiites, are now being cared for and given refuge by mostly Christian schools, churches, and other humanitarian organizations. This is the story of the Good Samaritan at a mega scale! And to think that this is the outcome of a strategy that meant to rouse anti-Hezbollah feelings among the Lebanese population and government. Talk about a failed strategy! Of course, this has happened so many times before that any thoughtful tactician would have learned the lesson by now, but military muscle is always too hedonistic and narcissistic to listen to the voice of reason and history.