Juan Cole asks this morning:

Informed Comment
The wholesale destruction of all of Lebanon by Israel and the US Pentagon does not make any sense. Why bomb roads, roads, bridges, ports, fuel depots in Sunni and Christian areas that have nothing to do with Shiite Hizbullah in the deep south? And, why was Hizbullah’s rocket capability so crucial that it provoked Israel to this orgy of destruction? Most of the rockets were small katyushas with limited range and were highly inaccurate. They were an annoyance in the Occupied Golan Heights, especially the Lebanese-owned Shebaa Farms area. Hizbullah had killed 6 Israeli civilians since 2000. For this you would destroy a whole country?

It doesn’t make any sense.

It is certainly infuriating. But I have the answer to that last question. It’s becuase in Israel’s mind, the “point” is to show your stuff, as a warning. As to “showing their stuff”, I think they have achived that. The whole world sees what their “stuff” is. It is inhumanity, and it is absolute hubris and arrogance and self-centeredness. it is macho-imperilaism, and it is disgusting. All the more so becuase the United States is so foolishly supporting this. This is one of the worst strategies the U.S. has ever employed (other when they themselves are carrying out such atrocities; but only because they have done so in the past are they of a mind to see anything but criminality in such actions. Because they have engaged in such campaigns of intimidation and indiscriminate bombing, they have shown to be a “subscriber” to that ilk; that ilk which can only be characterized as empire.

These fools are going to get us all killed if there isn’t an uprising of Christians and people of faith whose telos is God’s shalom.

This sort of thing (along with Iraq, these “bozos” that run our country, and the brazen disregrad they have for everything that “hinders” their idea of “unfettered capitalism” that translates into absolute irresponsibility)……this is making it even plainer to me how important it is for the church to dispense with its cowardice and speak the truth about the way of violence, and the only alternative to that violence, which is the love of God as manifest in Christ. In that, there is NO justification for the choosing of nationalism over the Kingdom of God; there is no LIVING TOGETHER or complicity with that. We are called to be an entirely different society; a “New Community”.