“During these 28 days, 932 Lebanese were killed and over 3,000 wounded; the victims among the Israelis are 84 dead and 867 wounded”: the tally of human lives lost or maimed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Lebanon is that of the British writer John Le Carré , who, in the pages of the French daily LE MONDE (07/09) poses a question to the paper’s readers: “ When you kill 100 innocent civilians and one terrorist, have you won or lost the war against terrorism?”. “As we have been informed – continues Le Carré – Israel has done to Lebanon what Lebanon had done to her twenty years ago: she has destroyed her infrastructures and inflicted a collective punishment on a fragile and multicultural democracy that was striving to reconcile its confessional differences and live in close harmony with its neighbours” . In Le Carré’s view, it was “perhaps too optimistic on the part of the international community to believe that Hezbollah would have gradually cut its own links with Syria and Iran” and if “today the whole of the Arab world is celebrating this armed force“ , the Lebanese are “the latest victims of a global catastrophe that is the work of zealots who have lost their way and seem to have no way out”. “ He had said so. Calmly and very firmly. Without having to defend anything… He had said: don’t use God for your wars… They are your wars, not His…”. According to Davide Rondoni, author of an editorial in the Italian Catholic daily AVVENIRE (07/09), “with the power of someone who has no power” Benedict XVI, in his message to the meeting in Assisi in recent days, “had given voice to the people who do not believe in those who wave a puppet of God as their banner of war”. But “ the threat of a war in the name of religion” has been raised by Iranian President Ahmadinejad in Teheran. Words of a “prophet of death“, comments Rondoni, “who did not hesitate to involve God, indeed to send him into the front line as if he were the first of his soldiers”. “With his crazy proclamation of a holy war – continues the editorial – Ahmadinejad places himself outside the community of religious men… and not only makes it more difficult for everyone to take their bearings in this grim time” but “makes life more difficult especially for Muslims: for all those who were educated in the faith of Allah and who find themselves in agreement with the Pope”.
