European churches are increasingly
skeptical of US bombing
by Duncan Hanson, Coordinator for Europe, Worldwide Ministries
Division, PC(USA)
from Presbyterian News Service
LOUISVILLE - 14-November-2001 - In the hours after the
attacks on New York and Washington, many European Christians found
themselves feeling a solidarity with Americans that a few hours before
some would not have thought possible. Thousands, perhaps millions, of
Europeans bore witness to their grief and outrage about the attacks and
their solidarity with Americans in mass gatherings in cities and
villages across the continent.
I personally received almost a thousand e-mails from
people in almost every country in Europe expressing their sympathy and
promising their prayers. As church members and leaders alike sought out
individual Americans to whom they could express their feelings, church
assemblies and councils passed resolutions of support and concern.
The Synodal Council of the Evangelical Church of Czech
Brethren even voted to give seven thousand dollars, which was a generous
share of its annual undesignated income as a contribution to the
Presbyterian Church USA's disaster relief work in New York and
Washington. As far as most Europeans were concerned the fight against
terrorism was their concern too.
European solidarity with the United States continued
almost unabated from Sept. 11 to the beginning of the bombing of
Afghanistan on Oct. 7.
However, as the bombs began to fall in Afghanistan,
support in Europe for the United States' lead in the struggle against
terrorism began to dissolve. At first European discontent was muted,
even in the churches. Now, except at 10 Downing Street and in the
Kremlin, European patience with the Bush administration's policy is
wearing thin.
The General Synod of the Spanish Evangelical Church
and the Church and Nation Committee of the Church of Scotland have both
already condemned the bombing in Afghanistan and, from what I am hearing
from contacts all over Europe, many more churches will join the Spanish
and the Scots in denouncing the United States' conduct of the war when
the appropriate bodies in their national church structures next meet and
have the chance to take a stand.
It is important that people in the United States
understand why many Europeans have changed their mind about the United
States' handling of the struggle against terrorism. What is at stake is
not just the future of transatlantic relationships but, as many
Europeans now see it, the peace and harmony of the planet.
The most often expressed concern about the United
States' war on terrorism that I hear in European church circles is that
it will only provoke more terrorism. Even so-called precision bombing is
only as accurate as the intelligence that guides it.
To be sure, the bombs are aimed at terrorist camps and
munitions depots; unfortunately too many seem to land on Red Cross
supply centers and families of innocent civilians. However much the US
apologizes for each miss, a thousand more Afghans and a million more
Muslims worldwide will be further radicalized. If Osama bin Laden had
1000 followers world-wide on September 10, said one European church
leader in a private e-mail this morning, today he has at least that many
sympathizers among the immigrant population in every middle and
large-sized European city.
What European Christians are desperately worried about
is that in each European city even a few Bin Laden sympathizers will
become Al Qaeda terrorists. Who can say that this concern is not
realistic?
European Christians also point out that Osama bin
Laden and his followers are free to escalate their violence without
regard for anyone's opinions but their own. If Osama bin Laden is
willing to kill 50,000 people in an attack on the World Trade Center
(which is the number of people in the two towers that would have been
killed if the twin trade towers had fallen immediately after they had
been hit by the hijacked jets), there is no reason to think he would
stop at killing a hundred thousand or even a million.
But if an American city were blown up, say, by one of
the five nuclear warheads the Russians report are missing from their
nuclear arsenal, or even by a smaller bomb reassembled from the
components of one of those warheads, as several European Christians have
asked publically this week, would President Bush be willing to refrain
from dropping a nuclear bomb on a suspect Muslim country? Given domestic
political pressures could he forgo dropping a bomb even if he realized
that a nuclear exchange would set off the equivalent of a world war
between the United States and the Muslim world?
European Christians say they understand that Osama bin
Laden is already as radicalized and as motivated to do harm to the
United States and perhaps to himself and his followers as anyone could
be. They are concerned that United States policy not further radicalize
Muslim nuclear engineers and weapons scientists so that they offer their
skills in critical numbers to Osama bin Laden's terrorist campaign.
Another concern for many European Christians is that
the relationships they have painstakingly built with Muslims are
everywhere becoming frazzled. Europe has long since ceased being
monolithically Judeo-Christian. Almost every country in Europe now has a
sizeable Muslim minority that in many places feels itself to be the
victim of economic and social discrimination.
Church leaders nearly everywhere in Europe take it for
granted that they must engage their Muslim counterparts in work for the
common good if the social fabric in their societies is to remain intact.
Yet just as in Islamabad and Djakarta, Muslims in Berlin and Copenhagen
and London are increasingly seeing the bombing of Afghanistan not as an
attack on terrorists or even as an attack by the United States on
Afghans but as an indiscriminate attack by Christians on all Muslims.
No matter that President Bush and most European
leaders continue to deny that they are in a war against Islam, many
Muslims cannot get the sight of President Bush speaking in the National
Cathedral in Washington, a Christian cathedral, and using the
emotion-packed word "crusade" to describe the war he is waging
against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
European Christians are also disturbed by the
increasing number of innocent people who are being killed, albeit
unintentionally, by United States bombing in Afghanistan. Even if most
European Christians are skeptical about specific claims by the Taliban
about civilian casualties, many European Christians were genuinely
shocked when the United States mistakenly attacked a Red Cross relief
supplies warehouse a second time after it had acknowledged and
apologized for attacking the same Red Cross a few days before.
Finally, many European Christians are troubled by the
refusal of the Bush Administration to consult the United Nations
Security Council about its prosecution of this war. Certainly the United
States has an inalienable right of self-defense and admittedly the line
between self-defense and what is no longer self-defense but simply war
is fuzzy.
But President Bush is making decisions that will have
serious consequences for Europeans just as much as for Americans. Some
European Christians are beginning to observe that a war against
terrorism would have a chance of being accepted in the Muslim world only
if it were authorized by the United Nations Security Council. Yet so far
the United States has been even less willing to accept Security Council
review of its military action against Osama bin Laden than it has been
to accept European suggestions about curtailing the scale of its bombing
of Afghanistan.
What is to be done? European Christians accept that it
is not possible for the United States simply to do nothing, particularly
since the attackers' links with Osama bin Laden have been effectively
established.
However, the chances of avoiding a major war between
Muslims and Christians would be much enhanced if the United States
committed itself to settling the Israeli Palestinian conflict, asked and
received a Security Council resolution authorizing military actions by
special forces against Osama bin Laden and his followers and eliminated
aerial bombing or at least scaled it down to the point that there would
be few or no targeting mistakes costing civilian casualties.
