wfn.org | Europe cools on Americas war

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Note #6943 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

14-November-2001
01424

Europe cools on Americas war 

by Duncan Hanson, Coordinator for Europe
Worldwide Ministries Division 
              
LOUISVILLE - 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
administrations 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 anyones 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.
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