By Wissam al-Saliby

I am grateful for several recent conversations with American pastor friends, during which we spoke about writing from and on the Middle East, trans-Atlantic (mis)perceptions and political fault lines. One of these friends, who leans toward political conservativism, told me that when reading my posts on the IMES blog he would often dismiss my writings as ‘liberal’ from the very first sentences. He added that, with time, he sought to understand “where I’m coming from” and read my posts in a different light.

In this post, I would like to present some issues on which we might be at odds, but where my personal experience and the socio-political context in which I live would have shaped my positions as a committed follower of Christ differently from Christ followers in the U.S. or elsewhere.

Guns. I hate guns. The first 7 years of my life were lived during a bloody civil war where all ‘religious’ groups took part in war crimes and mass killings, including so-called Christian groups. As a Christ-follower,I find it impossible to approve of the proliferation and availability of small arms in any society. These arms are the primary cause of conflict deaths in Syria, numerous African nations, and elsewhere in the world. They fuel conflict (just as recruiting child soldiers fuels conflict) and sustain criminal armed groups and armies. I’m against small arms, including in the U.S. where the same paradigm applies: more guns equal more deaths. I cannot in all honesty distinguish between my experience in Lebanon, my understanding of the role of arms in fueling conflict globally, and the U.S. gun-related death toll. (Even as I was writing this post, news broke out of the mass shooting in a church in Texas and later again in California.)

Israel. In 1996, Israeli helicopters attacked a United Nations peacekeeper compound in the village of Qana in southern Lebanon, where women and children were taking shelter from shelling. At the age of 13, the images of the burned bodies of women and children on TV were quite haunting. I grew up seeing nothing from the state of Israel but death and destruction. The Qana 1996 killings were neither the first nor the last such incident. Up until 2000, a significant part of South Lebanon was militarily occupied by Israel. The experience of a Lebanese with the state of Israel is starkly at odds with the experience with and perception of that same state among Christian circles in the US and other Western countries. We have a front-row seat to document Israeli wars against Lebanon, wars that are described from Israel’s vantage point in Western media. And this definitely shapes how I write about the conflict.

Outside of our region, Israel is never seen as an aggressor, but as responding to aggression. However, seen from Lebanon, Israel has always been an aggressor. It is impossible to thoroughly treat the topic in a blog of this size, but this Human Rights Watch report on the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, to which I contributed, provides a glimpse into how over 1,000 Lebanese civilians were inexplicably killed by the Israeli army in 33 days.

Furthermore, my experience is compounded by the fact that, unlike Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation, we never encounter an Israeli. Palestinian Christian non-violence leader and peacemaker Sami Awad calls people to “engage in continuous acts of love to your oppressor,” and to do so daily, for example, when going through Israeli army checkpoints. In contrast, Lebanese are physically separated due to the absence of peace between Lebanon and Israel. And this separation challenges my Christian attitude towards the Israelis. How can we humanize, let alone love, an “enemy” if we never meet him or her?

Justice. While studying law in Beirut and later in France, I developed a passion for human rights law and advocacy. I worked in this field of law prior to joining ABTS. And in recent years, I have read extensively on the topic of justice in the Bible. In the past years I’ve grown surprised by the dichotomy present in U.S. churches: “Liberal denominations” tend more to seek justice, explore race relations, and advocate for human rights, whereas “conservatives” do not. In the Old Testament, justice, compassion, and caring for the (often-oppressed) poor were the litmus test for righteousness. And in the New Testament, most of Jesus’ listeners would have understood many of his parables (the Parable of the Great Banquet, for example) as an even more radical injunction to justice, compassion and care for the poor.

The United Nations. I am also struck by the attitude of some Christian groups towards the United Nations – attitudes ranging from suspicion to eschatologically-motivated rejection. Far from perfect, the UN remains a unique platform where peace, security, and human rights can be advanced, and where poverty can be fought. Lebanon benefits from the stabilizing role of the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL), a peacekeeping force. The UN Refugee Agency in Beirut processes the asylum requests of over a million Syrian and Iraqi refugees. And in my human rights work (prior to joining ABTS), UN mechanisms, decisions, declarations and reports were the reference for all aspects of respect for human rights principles. As such, it is natural for me, as a Christ-follower, to expect churches to have a positive stance towards the UN and its various bodies and mechanisms, to challenge their respective governments for better UN engagement, and to interact with the UN for greater efficiency and better results.

My point in writing this post is, first, to remind myself that I need to exert extra effort to explain why, as a Christ-follower, I think and write the way I do. I should not make any assumptions that my reader understands my personal context and history, or that the words that I use – Justice, United Nations, International Criminal Court, Israel – would relay what I intend to say to the readers. This is a challenge when blog posts are, by definition, short! Second, I would like to invite the readers of the IMES blog to exert additional effort to learn about the context in which we live, think, write, and witness to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. As I have written previously, visiting the local ministries, and seeking to learn about God’s work in our region, is invaluable.