Unsettled Christianity

For the record … if your thoughts on Middle East policy don’t go farther than “Israel is good,” then please stop reading this post, now.

I’m going to open with an 18-year-old story. In January of 1991, while the opening attacks from Operation: Desert Storm were being shown, there was talk about anti-aircraft fire coming from the rooftops of many buildings in Baghdad, including hospitals. I turned to my father to ask him a question. His credentials, by the way, are pretty solid to answer my question. He was about to retire from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel. He had flown B-52’s over Vietnam, and later the FB-111’s. He had worked at the Intelligence desk for the Strategic Air Command’s 45th Air Division. Yes, I was raised by someone genuinely qualified as an expert in military ethics.

I asked him, “If Hussein is putting AA guns on top of a hospital, does that make it into a legitimate target?”

I still remember the look on Dad’s face as he began to answer. At that time, I was a pretty faithful right-winger, and had the world very much divided into “us” and “them.” I think he knew that I was just about ready to blame Saddam Hussein if a hospital was bombed. However, he answered very levelly, “No. It is a war crime to use a hospital as a gun site, but it doesn’t justify bombing a hospital. It’s a hospital.”

For years, rockets have been fired into Israel from Gaza. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, that means about 8,000 rockets have been fired, for a death toll of about 22 Israelis.

Read the rest….here

Post By Joel (9,255 Posts)

Joel L. Watts holds a Masters of Arts from United Theological Seminary with a focus in literary and rhetorical criticism of the New Testament. His interests include exploring the role of mimesis in human civilization, specifically in the study of religion and media, as well as science fiction and the way in which it has allowed mythology to be explored in light of scientific discoveries of the past century. He is the author of Mimetic Criticism of the Gospel of Mark: Introduction and Commentary (Wipf and Stock, 2013) and a co-editor and contributor to From Fear to Faith: Stories of Hitting Spiritual Walls (Energion, 2013).

Website: → Unsettled Christianity

Connect