More on Lebanon under Israeli attack

Journalists visit bombed out Harat Hreik, a Shi'ite suburb of Beirut. Chris Allbritton photo

Chris Allbritton has reported from Iraq for three years as a stringer for various U.S. media outlets, most recently TIME. Beirut was where he retreated for R&R -- and when Baghdad became too dangerous last spring, where he waited for a visa to the probable next target of U.S. invasion, Iran. Instead of Chris going to war, war has come to Chris. The guy knows how to look for a story in a war and he knows a little about Lebanon. Check out his vivid reports at the now slightly mislabeled Back to Iraq. *** 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. Finding the media coverage of what was happening in his country dominated by partisans of Israel, especially fundamentalist Christians, he wrote what follows for Christianity Today.

"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....

"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....

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 [an evangelical commentator] 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?

The whole article is well worth reading even if your perspective is secular.