I dont’ have time to write any thoughts, but I found this article so fascinating because it is similar to my blog that I wrote a few weeks ago. It is similar in the desire for a personal encounter with the realities of the Middle East. It is a much better article than what I wrote. And my favorite thing about it is that Lisa’s (my wife) cousin wrote it.
Reflections on the Lebanon I know
by Deanna Murshed
I wish more Americans knew the types of Lebanese people that I know: The gelled-up club goers, the halter-topped café hoppers. The plain-faced, ankle length-skirted fundamentalist Baptists. The serious arm chair philosophers and poets. Or the fun-loving, eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-die types (a state of mind you perfect after 20 years of it being literally true).
The Lebanese I know are as colorful as any nationality gets. But from the perspective of their neighbors, they are most commonly known for their cultural sophistication - a trait borne from living in a land so rich in natural beauty, history, and complexity. But you wouldn’t get this picture of Lebanon watching the news of the Lebanon-Israeli conflict - by witnessing the mostly underprivileged southern Shiite villages turn into rubble, or hearing the impassioned pleas of select Arab spokespersons.
What has been almost as frustrating as seeing the disproportionate military response has been watching the disproportionate public relations machines play their parts. Even small differences in communications savvy can lead to wide disparities of power and leverage.
Don’t get me wrong. Who can fault Arabs for impassioned pleas in a foreign accent when responding in English? But I can’t seem to shake the trepidation I feel when I observe lesser polished commentators try to compete with the likes of Mark Regev (spokesman for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Washington, D.C.) speaking so eloquently on almost every major cable network in his Australian accent. Or seeing any number of press representatives justify Israel’s right to “defend its borders” in unaccented English, completely on-point and on-message, over and over again, (in nice suits), as comfortable on camera as any U.S. counterpart. Anyone who understands how PR functions knows the power of presentation and articulate repetition.
But before anyone can accuse me of crying “media conspiracy,” I simply wish the American public could see the Lebanon I have come to know. I recently argued with a Lebanese friend that if more Americans knew that Lebanon had been, for most of its history, a majority Christian region, and that churches were being caught in the crossfire, perceptions of the conflict might change. My friend rightly chided me for what he perceived as an attempt to distinguish between the value of a Christian life and a Muslim life.
However, my point was simply that - like it or not - there is a real human tendency to empathize most with those who look and talk like us. And ignoring human nature does justice no real service. The longer the American public remains isolated from the diverse and complex realities in the Middle East, the gulf of understanding and empathy will only widen.
Allow me to take a personal turn and say this: I love America. I wish some of my Arab friends overseas could know the Americans I know - their idealism, goodness, and generosity. I wish that the face of America abroad (through its foreign policy) could reflect the values that I admire and love. Because America, as Bono says, is not just a country. It’s an idea.
Recently, while talking about why I love America at the dinner table at home, I welled up with tears when describing to my Jordanian-born father and Syrian-born mother (both my parents are now U.S. citizens) how, unlike many people in the world, Americans will readily give up their life to defend a people they have never met for a just cause. They agreed.
Ironically, one of the people who has most fanned the flame of my love for America has been a Lebanese Christian, one of my closest friends, who is now an American citizen. Having come to the U.S. with her family from a war-ravaged Lebanon in the early 1990s, she had not known a life without the constant threat of bombs (having lived much of her life hiding in bunkers, listening to Simon and Garfunkel). She was my roommate all through college and kept me up at night quoting The Federalist Papers, Thomas Jefferson, and John Locke - making sure I did not take the American experiment or the price of freedom for granted. We would argue until dawn, the way that wide-eyed undergrads do when coming upon universal ideas for the first time, about justice and politics and the Middle East.
But my friend also painted for me a complex picture of Lebanon’s political and cultural landscape that I wouldn’t have known just living in America. I would not have known the predicament Christian Lebanese felt when forced to choose Israeli or Palestinian allies, simply because they were caught in the middle.
In turn, I hope I offered her something from my experiences as a lover of and believer in the power of the universal church. Though we shared a common personal faith, the public expression of religion had made her skeptical - for its use as a wedge to divide warring factions, or as a naive ideology clouding the post-Enlightenment ideals upon which her new country was based.
But I have maintained a hope that the witness of the universal church can alone offer an alternative to blind nationalism.
This past weekend, my Lebanese-American friend treated me to a birthday weekend in Chicago at the Lollapalooza rock festival. There, we stood in Grant Park with a sweaty throng at the Flaming Lips show. (It was almost like our college days again, only our knees really, really hurt). To our surprise, the lead singer Wayne Coyne, after climbing out of a massive clear balloon he was using to stage dive, asked the crowd to sing along to his next song to “stop Israel from bombing Lebanon!” Everyone around us roared in agreement. My friend received the feeling of comfort you can only get from the solidarity of a crowd of roughly 10,000 (something I wish more of her Christian community could offer her.)
It got me thinking that, without intending it, this rock star modeled what I feel the church has always been called to and why I still believe in its power. Nations and individuals will fail. But my prayer is that the church would still speak for the voiceless, shine for justice and - if that’s what it takes to get the crowds to sing its song - crawl out of its plastic bubble and be prophetic.
Deanna Murshed, integrated marketing manager at Sojourners, is a graduate of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s faith and culture program and a recently-converted The Flaming Lips fanatic.
Twin Island