For the Damascus Countryside

I can’t take it anymore.
I can’t read any more reports
Speculating endlessly, “Who?” and “Why?”
I already know the answers I will hear –
Who: The regime, the rebels, the Zionists, the Islamic extremists, the enemies of the Syrian people
Why: Counterinsurgency, fighting terrorism, fighting for freedom, false flag
All lies, meant to disguise the truth
That Who is our Fellow Man
And Why is to appease the God of Death
The God on whom all governments and rebel groups rely
From whom they draw all their power and authority
To whom they pray for deliverance
From the consequences of their crimes
And the God of Death is only too happy to oblige
But the God of Death demands sacrifice
And demands the right to choose the victims
Soldiers, freedom fighters, little girls in pajamas, babies, nursing mothers
Gasping, burning, screaming, shaking, shaking, shaking and then becoming still
And perhaps the supplicants cringe at the demand
But in the end, they make the hard choice, and the tough call
Because that’s what it means to be a leader
To do what it takes to defeat your enemies
But "the last enemy to be defeated is Death."

More Adventures in Muslim Apologetics

Courtesy of one of my Muslim Facebook acquaintances, I present to you a 20-minute-long video “proving” that the Jewish Bible predicts the coming of the prophet Muhammad – “by name!”

Too long, didn’t watch? The entire case is built around Song of Songs 5:16:

“His mouth is sweetness itself;
he is altogether lovely.
“This is my beloved, this is my friend,
daughters of Jerusalem.”

According to the video, the word “lovely” in the original Hebrew is actually “Muhammad.” Therefore, the Bible predicted Muhammad’s coming! Or, at least, the coming of someone who would be “altogether Muhammad.”

(If you’re wondering what the other 18 minutes of the video are, it’s mostly accusations of Christians and Jews hiding the “real” Bible. How clumsy of them to forget to remove clear prediction of Muhammad’s coming.)

In Arabic, the name “Muhammad” simply means “praiseworthy.” Given Hebrew and Arabic’s similar linguistic roots, it’s not surprising that there’s a Hebrew word – “mahammad” – with a similar meaning. (“Lovely, desired, charming.”)

It’s actually interesting that this common adjective doesn’t occur more often in the Jewish Bible.

I now have a mental picture of God looking into the future, and seeing Muslim evangelists scouring the Jewish Bible for any occurrence of the common adjective “praiseworthy,” and deciding that the one – the only – place that word will occur in scripture is in a passionate dialogue about sex between two people anticipating their wedding night.

Your move, apologists.

The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder, explained (at least to myself)

I just finished reading The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder, the indispensable guide to Anabaptist Christian pacifism.

Yoder's central argument is that Jesus' life and teachings are a model for how Christians should act in everyday life.

As my housemate Jordan said when I tried to sum it up that way, that seems like a pretty obvious, even cliche statement. Most of us who grew up during the "WWJD?" fad would probably agree. Cliche it may be, but that doesn't make it untrue. Nor does it mean we've fully grasped the implications.

Christendom's "traditional" understanding is that Jesus' primary mission was to die for the sins of mankind, and conquer death through his resurrection. It's a nifty bonus that he was around long enough to teach us, do some miracles, and choose the apostles. His was a unique mission, and while Jesus' teachings and actions are very important as a model for us, we aren't called to literally follow him to the cross. The cross was a spiritual event. The Son of God had to die to make peace between God and mankind with his blood, something no one else could do. Jesus had to live a perfect life, otherwise his sacrifice wouldn't have counted, but it's not the life for everyone. When the Gospels say Jesus "set his face towards Jerusalem," it means he was preparing himself to die. Jesus yelled at Peter, "Get behind me, Satan!" for suggesting that he shouldn't let himself die, and ordered Peter to put away his sword in the garden of Gethsemane, because he knew he had to be the sacrifice, and Peter was trying to prevent that. Pilate, the Roman soldiers, and the Jewish religious leaders had no idea what they were really doing. They were essentially being used by God and Satan like puppets in a larger, unseen cosmic struggle. Jesus basically tricked them into killing him. He presumably could have allowed himself to be killed in the remote forests of Lebanon, and it would have been just as spiritually meaningful (with perhaps the drawback of fewer spectators.) Jesus had no political mission. He was a king, but his kingdom was not from this world.

Jesus' crucifixion, while of ultimate spiritual significance, had no political significance, and certainly isn't a model for how Christians should live their lives.

This is what I grew up believing, at least implicitly, and this is what, I think, most evangelicals and Catholics teach, at least implicitly.

John Howard Yoder rejects this interpretation.

For Yoder, not only is all of Jesus' life a model for Christians in politics, but the cross is its centerpiece. Jesus did come as a king, and all Christians are called to participate in his kingship. When Jesus began his ministry with a sermon in Nazareth, he read from Isaiah 61:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor."

Then he said, "Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

According to Yoder, this was the announcement of a political program: Jesus wanted to reinstate the Jubilee, the ancient Jewish practice of annulling all debts, returning all property, and letting all the slaves go free every fifty years. This was a requirement of God's law, but not surprisingly, it was rarely applied.

Yoder views Jesus' entire ministry as a movement for the restoration of the jubilee. In occupied Judea, this call posed a direct challenge to the Roman authorities, the Herodian monarchy, and the religious leaders who collaborated with them.

Seen in this light, the crowds of tens of thousands of people following Jesus all across Galilee and Judea, repeatedly trying to make him king, following him into Jerusalem in a giant procession, where he proceeds to basically take over the temple, take on a rather different significance, no? Jesus "setting his face towards Jerusalem" meant he was embarking on a political mission.

Under this interpretation, Jesus didn't trick the Romans into killing him and thereby fulfilling God's sacrificial purpose. The Romans had no choice but to kill him. He posed a huge threat to their rule.

However, Jesus refused to marshal his followers into an armed challenge to Rome and the Sanhedrin. He combined his demands for political justice with the universal love of God, a love that ruled out killing his enemies, even in self-defense. Jesus orders Peter to put away his sword because killing is wrong, not because Peter's about to unwittingly screw up God's plan of redemption.

Rather than adopt Rome's tactics and use their own violence against them, Jesus confronts the powers for their corruption, oppression and injustice, and then lets himself die at their hands, rather than call on armies of angels to smite them down.

Jesus' living a perfect life and Jesus' self-sacrifice aren't separate things. They're the same thing. The only way to be a witness for justice and peace in 1st-century Judea would inevitably result in execution. So Jesus did it, and through his resurrection, proved that the power of this world and its violent men is meaningless.

Therefore, Jesus' call to his followers to "pick up your cross and follow me" is in part a political call. We are to struggle against the injustices of the world's fallen political systems, even if it costs us our lives - but we are not to do so by using the devil's methods. To the crowd he had fled from when they tried to make him king by force, Jesus says, "You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning." (John 6:15, 8:44) To his own followers, Jesus says, "But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven." (Matthew 5:44).

I hope I've explained Yoder's thesis well. (Obviously he has a lot more to say than this.) I'm not sure to what degree I accept it. On the one hand, I think it coheres very well. It makes more sense of Jesus' ministry than the traditional model. It unites the human and divine missions of Jesus into one. And it reaffirms the importance of human life and human history to God. If Yoder is right, the oppressive politics of Judea were not a sideshow to him when he lived with us. It follows that oppression is not a sideshow to him now.

But I have a lot of unresolved questions. Well, two, I guess:

1) Doesn't the Bible pretty clearly teach that Jesus eventually will come with angel armies to defeat the wicked? If so, there seems to still be a division between the ethics of God and the ethics of man.

2) What tactics are acceptable to God in our struggle for justice? May we try to reform state institutions that inherently depend on violence? May we work through political parties and elected officials? Or should we abandon state politics altogether, in favor of a community that tries to embody God's justice in a fallen world?

Yoder's argumentation style is different from every other theology book I've read. With some exceptions, he doesn't spend long pages poring over select passages and proving his interpretation of them. Instead, he takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of Jesus' ministry, placing almost every event and conversation into a political context. On the one hand, I appreciate the holistic-ness of this approach. On the other, I feel a little bit like I've been taken for a ride. I'm not sure whether I agree with him or not (though I want to); the book didn't give me time to examine any of the issues he raises in-depth. I suppose I could do it by myself, but I also work full-time, you guys.

So let me know: if you've read John Howard Yoder, what do you think of his work? If you haven't, what do you think of his ideas as I've laid them out here? And if you don't care to get that specific, what do you think about pacifism generally?

Preliminary Thoughts on Egypt's Coup/Revolution/Crazytime

Wait.  What Just Happened?

Here's how I see it, based on what I've read and conversations with Egyptian people somewhat in-the-know.

In January 2011, massive popular demonstrations throughout Egypt convinced the Egyptian military that continuing to rule Egypt through Hosni Mubarak was not a viable option.  They forced him to step down, and promised democratic elections.

At the same time, they were furiously negotiating with the largest, most organized opposition group in Egypt - the Muslim Brotherhood.  The negotiations resulted in a deal: the military would aid the Muslim Brotherhood in its rise to power, and the Brotherhood would respect the military's autonomy and considerable economic interests.  The military rulers of Egypt would keep their villas, and the Brotherhood would take power.

The Brotherhood won in relatively free and fair parliamentary and presidential elections in 2012.  The yearlong rule of the Muslim Brotherhood's president Mohammad Morsi was characterized by economic tailspin, a violent crime rate that tripled, the disintegration of police authority in many parts of the country, vicious attacks on Christians and Shia Muslims, rampant sexual violence against women, and political violence from the Muslim Brotherhood's armed factions against its opponents.

Mohammad Morsi wrote the grim epitaph of his stunningly incompetent, tone-deaf, evil presidency last month, when he appointed a former terrorist responsible for massacring scores of foreigners and Egyptians in Luxor province...as governor of Luxor province.

No, for real.  That happened.

Christians, liberal Muslims, and other opponents of the Brotherhood organized a campaign called "tamarod," or "rebellion," and called for massive anti-Morsi rallies on June 30, the one-year anniversary of Morsi's inauguration as president.  They gathered some 22 million signatures on a petition calling for his removal and for new elections.  (Morsi won the election with slightly more than 13 million votes.)

Driven by desperation at the course the new Egypt was taking, these protests may well have been the largest in world history. (I've heard the number 33 million bandied about, but who can say?) After a day of this, the military decided that Morsi was no longer a reliable protector of their portion.  They gave him - with a straight face - 48 hours to "meet the people's demands." Morsi went on TV and gave a desperate speech, yelling over and over again, "I am the president of Egypt!," forgetting that:

Morsi was unable to resolve all of Egypt's political problems in 48 hours, and the military threw him out.

Boom.

Tahrir Square in Cairo.

What Will Happen Now?

The Facebook page NOT A COUP currently has over 12,000 likes.  The protestors are insisting that this is a popular revolution, not a military coup.

The popular protests triggered the chain of events that led to Morsi's fall, to be sure.  But there's a reason the Egyptian popular revolution has now displaced two presidents, while the Syrian popular revolution has devolved into a horrific war.  In both cases, the military's decisions were the driving factor.  Syria's Alawite-dominated military has thrown in its lot with their president.  The Egyptian military is willing to chuck their president when necessary.

What it isn't willing to do is let go of its autonomy and economic power.

My guess is that the Egyptian military will now try to install another president - through popular elections, no doubt - who has the support of the people, but will protect the military's interests.

(They may also move to cement a military dictatorship.  See below.)

Because the Egyptian military is terrible (massacring peaceful Christian protestors and such), the new president will probably be a terrible person.  But terrible people can still guarantee a modicum of prosperity and peace. (See, the Great, Cyrus, and Obama, Barack.) That's not what worries me.

What worries me is: what is the Muslim Brotherhood going to do now?

After 80 some years of state persecution, they are finally given the chance to participate in a free presidential election, and they win, fair and square.  And now, that president has been overthrown.

Egypt's Islamists have engaged in armed resistance against the government before.  When the Algerian military overthrew a freely-elected Islamist president in 1991, it triggered a ten-year civil war in which 200,000 people died.

And now Egypt is surrounded by chaotic countries full of loose weapons and Islamist militias that are better-connected and more motivated than they've ever been. (Syria, Gaza, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Mali.)

"A message to the church of Egypt, from an Egyptian Muslim: if you conspire  to bring Morsi down, that will be another matter. [T]here are red lines—and our red line is the legitimacy of Dr. Mohammad Morsi. Whoever splashes water on it, we will splash blood on him."

- Safwat Hegazy, Muslim Brotherhood cleric, December 2012

“Measures announced by the armed forces’ leadership represent a full coup categorically rejected by all the free men of our nation."

- Dr. Mohammad Morsi, July 3, 2013

Might Egypt become the eleventh Arab country to have a post-independence civil war?  And might that give the military just the excuse it needs to put itself in power again - and permanently?

Buckle up, kids.  This is gunna suck.

Isn't there a chance that this is a genuinely democratic moment that will lead to a brighter future for the people of Egypt?

U.S. Sending Weapons to Syrian Rebels: A Grief-Stricken Attempt at Analysis

Hello America.

Can we talk about what just happened?

Great, thanks.

On August 20, 2012, President Obama announced that the use of chemical weapons in Syria by the Assad regime was a "red line" that would "change his calculus" in deciding how to intervene in Syria.

A month and a half ago, after evidence of small-scale chemical weapons use in Syria apparently became impossible to deny, the White House admitted that:

"Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria... Given the stakes involved, and what we have learned from our own recent experiences, intelligence assessments alone are not sufficient — only credible and corroborated facts that provide us with some degree of certainty will guide our decision-making ..."

Translation: We're pretty sure, but not sure enough to do anything about it.

Last week, the Assad regime retook the strategic town of Qusayr in western Syria from the rebels, with the help of Hezbollah fighters.  Thousands of Hezbollah fighters have entered Syria from Lebanon to fight for the regime, and regime forces are heading north to Aleppo to retake Syria's largest city once and for all.

As Samuel L. Jackson said in Quentin Taratino's most recent film, "Lo and behold!  Out of nowhere!" the administration now concludes that all the evidence is in on chemical weapons in Syria:

Today, we are providing an updated version of our assessment to Congress and to the public.  ...Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year.

So said Ben Rhodes, President Obama's deputy national security adviser, in a statement today.

Reuters is reporting that Obama has now authorized direct weapons transfers to the Syrian rebels.

Do not believe for a second that this decision is based on the Syrian government's chemical weapons use - which is responsible for less than a fifth of one percent of the casualties in this war.

This decision came about because the Assad regime, with the help of Hezbollah, gained the upper hand.

Our government was only to happy to watch Syrians dying en masse, as long as its enemies were losing.  Now its enemies are winning, and our government aims to correct the problem by sending weapons to its enemies' enemies, including groups affiliated with al Qaeda, who have pledged to cleanse - and are cleansing - Syria of its non-Sunni Muslim population.  60 Shiite Muslims were massacred in eastern Syria on Tuesday.

There's really nothing else to say.  I feel like I'm watching a train wreck from a mile away.  The human catastrophe that's approaching is so obvious, and I can't do anything to stop it.

Please pray for Syria.

A Week in God's Country

In Lebanon, the land rises steadily from the coast, a series of green mountains racing each other east towards a pinnacle in the center of the country.  At Harissa, where an enormous statue of the Virgin Mary watches over the country, I can peer down into the Christian coastal town of Jounieh, south along the coast to Beirut, the capital, and up the coast all the way to Byblos.  The Mediterranean Sea stretches out before me for long miles, seeming almost to rise into the distance like another mountain.  While it is bright and sunny where I stand, out over the sea, layers of clouds obscure the horizon, gray near the sea and dark black above.  A gigantic waterspout dips out of the cloud layer, skirts the surface of the sea, and retreats back into the firmament without making a sound.

If a multitude of press reports are to be believed, farther north up the coast, past Byblos, past Tripoli, in the Syrian town of Baniyas, pro-government militias are going “house to house, killing entire families and smashing men’s heads with concrete blocks.”

This trip to Beirut with Christian Solidarity International, the human rights group I work for, was my first visit to the Middle East since I left Syria in May 2011, when the country’s burgeoning anti-government uprising had claimed “only” a few hundred lives, and all of Syria’s main cities were intact.

On the coast of Lebanon, there are few tangible signs of the carnage taking place on the other side of the mountains.  The schools are open, the streets are clogged with traffic, and construction is booming. 

But you cannot avoid Syria’s war in Lebanon.  Already, 500,000 people have flooded into Lebanon from Syria to escape the fighting.  This, in a country of four million.

Among the refugees are two families I know from my time in Damascus.  On this trip, I get to see them again.  It is the greatest encouragement I’ve had in a while.  It proves to me that my time in Syria wasn’t a dream, and that this terrible war hasn’t destroyed everything I knew there.  Life is going on, at least for these people.

The first is an Iraqi Christian family who fled to Syria from Baghdad when their father was kidnapped by al Qaeda in 2007. “I think I might be the only Iraqi kidnapping victim who was released,” he tells me.

His captors tortured him for four days, and called his wife, telling her that she would have to pay $200,000 to get him back.  This, they said, would be their payment for living as Christians in a Muslim country.

My friend told them that they should go ahead and kill him, because “this is the short life, and the long life is still ahead.  But when we stand together before God, I will get my rights from you and your children.”

At last, the kidnappers let my friend go.  They said, “You can live, but we will take your house.  That will be your payment.”

The family fled to Syria after that, as did close to a million other Iraqi Christians fearing abductions, church attacks and massacres.  Iraq's pre-U.S. invasion Christian population was 1.4 million.  My friends settled in a Christian neighborhood of Damascus called Jaramana.  They tell me that it is Jaramana, and Syria, that they remember most fondly.

Starting last August, Jaramana was rocked by several huge car bomb attacks, and countless smaller explosions, despite its lack of military targets.  Scores of civilians were massacred.  My friends decided to leave after the first one.  Their youngest son, just 9, was suffering from psychological trauma, and the father was spooked by the large numbers of armed men walking the streets. “People knew me in Iraq, and I was still kidnapped,” he tells me. “Anyone could have kidnapped me there.  I decided not to wait.”     

I ask their son what he remembers from Iraq.  He remembers their house, and the giant toy car he had, and that his grandma’s house was right next door, and she would call to him and his brothers through the window whenever she made sweets.

The family now lives in a rough-and-tumble Christian neighborhood in Beirut.  The main street is dominated by an outpost of the Christian Lebanese Forces Militia, which announces its presence with a large wooden cross and two dozen posters of Pierre Amin Gemayal, a Christian anti-Syrian politician who was assassinated seven years ago.

The family is not registered with the Lebanese government.  The father apologizes for not seeing me off to the airport when I leave Lebanon; he doesn’t want to risk any contact with military or police personnel, who might deport them back to Iraq.


My friend, being a good host, tries to find a taxi for me to the airport, but after absorbing a million refugees from Palestine and Syria, the Lebanese have become perhaps understandably (if not justifiably) hostile to foreigners.  The cab drivers hear my friend's Iraqi accent, and give him terrible prices.  He sarcastically shouts "Shokran!" (thank you!) and walks away from each one.  One man drives after him, offering to bring his price down, but my friend will have none of it. "I don't deal with bastards," he tells me.

"Michael" was 15 when I last saw him in Damascus.  We agree to meet at an ancient church along the Dog River, where millennia of invading armies, starting with the ancient Egyptians, have carved their names into a cliffside as they passed through Lebanon.

Michael is taller now, and his voice is deeper, but he's still the thoroughly kind, gentle-hearted, completely sincere young man I remember being so out of place among his coarse classmates.  Sometimes he jokes: "I used to like the color orange, but General Aoun ruined it for me." Sometimes he is deadly serious. "I hate Lebanon," he tells me as we sit on the rocky shorefront, the glistening sea in front of us, the great peninsula of Beirut to our left, the beautiful green hills of Mount Lebanon to our backs. "I want to leave.  I want to go anywhere else but here and Syria."

Michael's family is from Aleppo, from a Christian neighborhood that became a frontline in the battle between regime forces and rebels.  Michael never saw the fighting, but he heard the explosions and felt the high-rise where he and his family lived shake.  After four days without electricity or water, they decided to leave for Turkey.  Their only real scare was when they saw the "terrorist" (rebel) flag flying in a town their bus was passing through, and realized the rebels had seized it.  Men with large guns approached the bus before their commander realized they were just refugees, and waved them through after checking their ID cards.  Michael's older brother was asleep at the time, and his nervous mother told the guards he didn't have an ID card.  Amazingly, the guards accepted this preposterous story. "They are so much stupid!" Michael's brother tells me, laughing.

I want to see where he's living now, so Michael takes me by bus high up into the mountains, a third of the way to the Syrian border, to a region dotted by churches and statues of a sword-wielding prophet Elijah.  Michael lives with his older brother and older sister in a flat in a dank, cold apartment building with a breathtaking view of a green valley stretching all the way down to the sea.  Electricity and water are only on for a few hours a day.  Black, angry mold grows on all the walls.  I'm frightened by it, but I don't know how to tell them that.

It's safe here, he and his older brother explain, because it's a Christian area, and the Christian Lebanese know what it's like to be at war with Muslims, so they are taking care of Christians who come from Syria.  Michael, his older brother and his older sister all have jobs - a rarity for refugees in Lebanon.  But Michael has had to drop out of school, because the Lebanese curriculum is too French-centric.  Michael's English is beautiful, but French, with its all of 110 million native speakers, is keeping him from getting an education.

Michael's parents, meanwhile, have returned to Aleppo to continue their jobs in government banks while their younger son completes his crucial 9th grade year at his school there.  Regime forces have decided to set up a military outpost right next to the school, which means the area is often the scene of fighting.

I also meet with some Syrian Christian refugees with my boss, as part of our efforts to find ways to help Christians fleeing the conflict.  One of them, "Basel," arrives at the monastery before my boss comes down from his room.  I introduce myself to him, and we exchange pleasantries in Arabic. "Where are you from?" he asks. 

"I'm from America," I respond.

Immediately, Basel tenses up. "What are your goals here?" he asks.

Later, after trust has been won, he confides in me that I made him nervous when I told him my nationality.  From the perspective of Syrian Christians, America's role in their country's civil war is so destructive that merely meeting an American inspires fear.  But after speaking with me and my boss for a few hours, Basel's natural Syrian hospitality takes over again, and he insists that I visit his temporary home for tea and cookies (which I do.)

Basel is from Homs.  He provides me with a straightforward map of the conflict.  For the first six months of the uprising, the revolution was largely peaceful, with only light arms being used on occasion.  After the sustained government violence against protestors, the revolutionaries began to arm themselves, and Islamic fighters flooded into the country to join the fight.  The Christian neighborhood of Hamidiyye in Homs became a frontline in the fighting, and most of the Christians fled.  Their homes were subsequently occupied by the rebels, who refused to allow them to return.  Today, the entire neighborhood has been laid waste in the fighting.

Basel and his friends tell me that many Syrian Christian men, including them, have sought refuge in Lebanon, not because the conflict directly threatened them, but because the Syrian government has begun selectively drafting Christian men into the army.  Unlike Muslims, the reasoning goes, Christians can be counted on not to defect and join the rebels.  The government is also organizing Christians and other religious minorities threatened by Islamist rebels into a "national defense army," a network of local militias loyal to the government.

Michael's brother also tells me that the government has been handing out weapons to Christians in Aleppo, and that some have accepted them.  The church, however, opposes this.  Michael's family is Orthodox, and his brother tells me that the Orthodox Church forbids carrying weapons, even for self-defense. "Killing is killing," he says.

This is a hard word, and not all Middle Eastern Christians can accept it.  During the 19th century, tens of thousands of Lebanese Christians were massacred by Muslims and Druze, and during World War I, 120,000 Lebanese died in a famine perpetuated by the Ottoman Muslim rulers of Lebanon.  The French carved out Lebanon as a safe space for Christians in the region, much as the British helped the Zionists establish Palestine as a safe haven for world Jewry.  When Lebanon's growing Muslim population, fueled by an influx of hundreds of thousands of Muslim Palestinian refugees, tried to overturn this arrangement, Lebanon's Christian government and militia movements responded with extreme violence.

The civil war lasted from 1975 to 1990, featured invasions from Israel, Syria, and the U.S., and killed nearly 120,000 people.  Both sides committed horrendous atrocities: Christians point to the village of Damour, where Palestinian militiamen massacred the Christian population, and Muslims point to Sabra and Chatila, Palestinian refugee camps where Christian militias conducted a similar massacre seven years later, after the assassination of Lebanon's Christian president-elect.

Beirut, once known as the "Paris of the Middle East," was a center of the civil war's violence.  Today, Beirut is running from that history.  Scores of giant construction cranes dot the skyline, busily building depressingly-modern hotels and shopping malls on the ruins of millennia of history wiped out in the war.  I have two encounters with the Lebanese military in Beirut while walking about on my free day.  The first comes when I take a picture of the Holiday Inn, a giant structure completed just before the civil war started which soon became a prime sniping post.  Its empty, bombed-out hulk still looms over the city.  The soldiers scold me for taking a picture of it.  This is forbidden.


The second comes when I try to find Beirut's last surviving Jewish synagogue, whose location is marked in my tourist handbook.  I arrive at the entrance to the road the synagogue is located on, only to find it blocked by a gate and an Army checkpoint. "Can I walk this way?" I ask one of the soldiers. "No, it is closed," comes the curt reply. "What are you looking for?"

"Oh nothing."

Apparently the one thing a country divided between Christians, Sunnis and Shiites can't handle is a publicly-accessible synagogue.

Despite this vigilance, the leftovers of the war are impossible to miss.  The Green Line, which separated Muslim West Beirut from Christian East Beirut, is a massive wasteland in the heart of an otherwise packed metropolis.  The buildings along the Green Line that were destroyed in the fighting have been bulldozed, but nothing has yet taken their place.  The headquarters of the Christian Phalange party, set in a beautiful 19th-century French mansion on the east border of the Green Line, are completely surrounded by giant cement blast walls, giving the whole mansion the appearance of a giant cement box.  The rival militias, still active, still armed, mark their territory with posters, flags and graffiti.  Do you see green cedar trees, red crosses, posters of Pierre Gemayal, graffiti that reads "Fuck Turkey"?  You must be in a Christian neighborhood.  Green flags, posters of Mousa Sadr or Hassan Nasrallah, pictures of the Dome of the Rock?  Shiite terrority.  Hammers, sickles and mustachioed men?  A Communist neighborhood.  "There is no god but God" in white Arabic letters on black background?  Hide.

Nearly everyone I speak to is convinced that war is coming to Lebanon again.  The country's balance of power is too tenuous, and the Syrian conflict too overwhelming.  The same sectarian groupings that define the Syrian war - Sunni, Shiite, Christian, Alawite, Druze - exist in Lebanon, and already, Lebanese militias are crossing the border to fight for their respective allies.  Violent clashes between Sunni, Shiite and Alawite forces have already taken place in Beirut and Tripoli.  The flood of Palestinian refugees into Lebanon helped trigger the last civil war.  500,000 Syrian refugees have already entered Lebanon, and if Syria's Sunni rebels take power in the Alawite heartland north of Lebanon, that number could increase by millions as Alawites flee the takeover. "Lebanon is close to the breaking point," the director of a Christian NGO in Beirut tells me.

But the cause of the coming new Lebanon war could be darker than a mere refugee influx.  Al Qaeda and like-minded Salafist groups are on the rise across the region.  Once viewed as a collection of psychopaths bringing destruction on the whole Muslim world, Al Qaeda has now become the leading name in Sunni Arab nationalism from Iraq to Lebanon.  In Iraq, Al Qaeda is the leader of the resistance against the near-dictatorship of the U.S.-installed Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.  In Syria, Al Qaeda's affiliate Jubhat al-Nusra is by far the most effective and (among Sunnis) most popular rebel group fighting the Alawite regime.  In Lebanon, the al Qaeda flag has begun making appearances at Sunni anti-government protests.

Lebanon's peace, when it has existed, has always been rooted in a balance of power between Shiites, Sunnis, and Christians.  They comprise relatively equal proportions of the population, and none can dominate the other.  Cooperation is essential to governance.

If Lebanon is considered together with Syria, however - as most Muslims consider them - Sunnis comprise an overwhelming majority in the region.  If Sunni Salafist rebels succeed in overthrowing the Syrian regime, is it believable that they will stop there, and respect the borders drawn up by Christian imperialists 100 years ago?  Jubhat al-Nusra has already proclaimed the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria." How hard would it be to add Lebanon to that list?

As all the Syrian Christians we speak to on this trip recount, the slogan, "Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave!" has been heard chanted in the streets of Syria since the earliest days of the revolution.  As chilling as it is, it also strikes me as deeply disingenuous.  Christians to Beirut?  Guys, we’ve been over this.  120,000 people died in the 1980s over the question of whether or not the Christians could have Beirut all to themselves – and the answer you settled on was a decided no.

This is Lebanon today - a heartbreakingly beautiful country, where all you can see in every direction is signs of war past and the war to come.  "If Lebanon is in danger, we will be there," proclaims a giant poster of Pierre Amine Gemayal hanging on the side of the Phalange bunker.  Pierre has been dead now for seven years.

"The people of this region have good hearts, but that's not enough," a Syrian Christian nun who's taking care of 400 Christian refugee families on the Syrian coast tells me. "Their minds must be changed as well."

What can we do when we see a man-made disaster approaching so clearly, and so unavoidably?

We pray.  We feed the hungry and homeless.  We preach the gospel of peace and justice to our neighbors and our government.

And we wait.

Christian Solidarity International is providing aid to displaced and suffering Christians inside Syria, where the church is being targeted for religious cleansing by Islamic extremists.  You can donate to these efforts at our website: www.csi-usa.org.


 

More Uncomfortable History

Sometimes, I read more than one book at the same time. Often, really. Probably because I lack the patience to focus on a single topic long enough to go one book at a time.

A few weeks ago, I started reading Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty by Mustafa Aykol, a Muslim Turkish journalist. I'd read it before, but I wanted to reread it as an antidote to all the depressing news out of the Muslim Middle East lately.

Another book I'm reading is Preventing Genocide: Practical Steps Toward Early Detection and Effective Action, by Dr. David Hamburg.

Aykol argues that there is a long-running conflict between "rationalists" and "traditionalists" in Islam - the rationalists favoring reason and tolerance, the traditionalists seeking to subject all of human life to the tradition of Mohammad. The traditionalists, he says, have unfortunately usually been on top, but the rationalist side has broken through in some key moments in Islamic history. Moments like, say, the waning years of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

His account of that period contains this description of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II:

Sultan [Abdulhamid II] was far from being a narrow-minded reactionary. He continued modernization, making positive advances in education, legal reforms, and economic development, including the construction of railways and telegraph lines. …A pious Muslim, Abdulhamid nonetheless admired Western civilization and explicitly advised his fellow Muslims to learn from the Christians’ successful efforts to rid their faith of dogmatism and obscurantism. …Sultan Abdulhamid, a peacemaker and a reformer, also introduced “innovations” to the Islamic tradition. (pp. 158, 160)

Wow. What a great guy! Such a shame that the Ottoman Empire collapsed just forty years after he took power.



And then I start paging through Preventing Genocide. Particularly the opening chapters, which contain examples of past genocides that could have been prevented by concerted international action. Including this one:

From 1894 to 1896 the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II was directly responsible for the massacre of perhaps as many as 100,000 of his Armenian subjects and indirectly responsible for an additional 100,000 deaths due to accompanying famine and disease.

Oh.

Well that's awkward.