The War for Our Values

Here's testimony from a Lebanese Christian that is worth remembering today:

I was raised in Lebanon, where I was taught that the Jews were evil, Israel was the devil, and the only time we will have peace in the Middle East is when we kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea.

When the Moslems and Palestinians declared Jihad on the Christians in 1975, they started massacring the Christians, city after city. I ended up living in a bomb shelter underground from age 10 to 17, without electricity, eating grass to live, and crawling under sniper bullets to a spring to get water.

It was Israel who came to help the Christians in Lebanon. My mother was wounded by a Moslem's shell, and was taken into an Israeli hospital for treatment. When we entered the emergency room, I was shocked at what I saw. There were hundreds of people wounded, Moslems, Palestinians, Christians, Lebanese, and Israeli soldiers lying on the floor. The doctors treated everyone according to their injury. They treated my mother before they treated the Israeli soldier lying next to her. They didn't see religion, they didn't see political affiliation, they saw people in need and they helped.

For the first time in my life I experienced a human quality that I know my culture would not have shown to their enemy. I experienced the values of the Israelis, who were able to love their enemy in their most trying moments. I spent 22 days at that hospital. Those days changed my life and the way I believe information, the way I listen to the radio or to television. I realized I was sold a fabricated lie by my government, about the Jews and Israel, that was so far from reality. I knew for fact that, if I was a Jew standing in an Arab hospital, I would be lynched and thrown over to the grounds, as shouts of joy of Allah Akbar, God is great, would echo through the hospital and the surrounding streets.

Our strongest weapons in this war are our values. Yes, military force is important and necessary. But our values are what will win in the long run — because they reflect a deeper truth about human dignity than the poisonous doctrines of distorted religious certitude and bigotry. That's why we must never — never — tolerate torture of prisoners; that's why we should never sacrifice the rule of law; that's why we should never give civilian politicians a "get-out-of-jail-free" card for war crimes. And that's why we should support Israel now, more than ever. She is not perfect. But her enemies are in a different category of morality. The difference between collateral civilian casualties and civilian casualties as the entire purpose of war is the difference between an embattled civilization and barbarism. Yes, there are grays in the Middle East. But this isn't one of them.