January 20, 2015
Today’s news from the Middle East resonates powerfully with emotional memories for people who lived in Lebanon during the era of In Borrowed Houses, and illustrates the way current events are the down-stream flow of what happened in the past.
The Beirut Daily Star tells me that early today a sea of mourners filled the streets in the southern suburbs as the body of Jihad Moughniyeh was buried beside his father, Imad Moughniyeh. The Star first reported that the young Jihad was one of seven Hizballah commanders killed by a missile fired from an Israeli helicopter in Quneitra, a ruined town in the Syrian Golan Heights, but UN observers have stated that they saw, not a helicopter but two drones crossing from Israel toward Quneitra. According to the Israelis, the men were in a convoy moving toward Israel. Of course, any vehicle moving west in Quneitra is moving toward Israel. And of course Hizballah is a Shiite Lebanese party that gained considerable political power in Lebanon by resisting Israeli invasions with remarkable strength and courage. In recent years they have taken a stand in support of the Assad regime in the complicated Syrian war. (Many Syrian Christians also consider the regime the lesser of evils, because Assad’s secular government has protected Christians, granting them a great deal of freedom.)
The event in Quneitra has created fear and tension in Lebanon, where various leaders have cautioned Hizballah not to drag the country into conflict by responding from Lebanese soil, and Hizballah says it is not interested in escalation, though previous to the attack its leader Hassan Nasrallah announced that they were prepared to retaliate for any Israeli attack.
But who was Imad Moughniyeh and why does the mention of his name bring back the pain of a past era? The CIA knows. And there are plenty of people who knew a young Imad Moughniyeh, including some who knew him only as one more angry young man.
Not all angry young men were dangerous. (In my book I said that everyone in Lebanon was angry unless some work of grace had been done in his life.) Imad once told a casual friend that he was angry at the American Marines because they had blocked the Corniche, a beautiful avenue wrapping around the seaside of Beirut and a main thoroughfare carrying a lot of traffic. He said that if the Marines continued to close this road, he would blow them up on their base. The friend liked Imad and considered this remark a rash, exaggerated statement, the kind that young men are prone to make when they are angry.
And then a truck bomb destroyed a barracks on the Marine base, killing 241 young Americans.
The friend, who was also a young person, younger than Imad, has lived a long time with guilt, a totally undeserved guilt. Because, who could have known? Who would have guessed that the speaker was part of an international plot? Rhetorical questions do not erase the pain.
Several months ago I wrote a review of an enlightening book, but I never, for one reason and another, posted the review. Now, because it is highly relevant to today’s news, I am sharing here my review of One Family’s Response to Terrorism by Susan Kerr van de Ven. My review below begins with a quote from In Borrowed Houses…a true story of love and faith amidst war in Lebanon.
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“In January, 1984, on the first day that Wayne and I were back at work after our son’s wedding, the Druze unloaded five thousand shells on Christian areas from Jounieh to Khalde, and Pat Dunn and I planned a dinner party. Five thousand shells create ten thousand booms—a suitable introduction to the coming weeks. Attacks and counter-attacks continued, Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut and indisputably a friend of Lebanon, was shot dead in the hall outside his office, and every day brought us new excuses not to plan anything.”
In this paragraph from my book, p. 158, I mention, as though in passing, the death of Malcolm Kerr. My description of him as “indisputably a friend of Lebanon” is an expression of the sense of confusion that prevailed. We did not claim to understand anything that was happening. We knew, of course, that the event was a tragedy in numerous ways, including no doubt the profound grief of his immediate family, but for us it was mainly one more evidence that our world was very dangerous.
Only since the publication of In Borrowed Houses have I discovered the book that Malcolm Kerr’s daughter, Susan Kerr van de Ven, wrote about the same confusion and the studious, intelligent effort of Malcolm Kerr’s family to make sense of his assassination. One Family’s Response to Terrorism tells with great restraint the story of their pain, their various, sometimes conflicting reactions, and the years of painstaking research to uncover the truth.
I heartily recommend the book to anyone who would like to understand better: this diverse and unique country, some of the Americans who lived there and loved it and were loved in return, and why there was a campaign to rid the country of those very people.
The Kerr family shared a long history with Lebanon. Beginning with Susan’s missionary grandparents, three generations had lived there. Christian and humanitarian, they believed in building bridges across cultures. For years after the murder of their husband and father, Mrs. Kerr and Susan tried just to understand and to forgive. Only the youngest member of the family, Andrew, who was a high schooler, expressed a different desire. His first reaction was, “I want to get those guys.”
But “why” became a question that required an answer. Why would anyone in Lebanon want to eradicate Lebanon’s friends? It took the Kerr family twenty years to unearth the facts about who killed him and why, though the U.S. government knew in three weeks but would not tell the Kerrs. The details of what Susan learned are informative and sometimes shocking.
You might not be surprised to know that the president of the American University of Beirut, was labeled a dangerous spy by a radical organization in Lebanon, exactly because he was both knowledgeable and popular. But I was surprised to know that the U.S. government also watched his every move and monitored every word he said.
Though not everyone who had a role in carrying out the assassination can be named, some are known and Susan became certain that Malcolm Kerr’s death was part of a huge plot, with Iran ultimately responsible. And the name Imad Moughniyeh appears all over her book. Though she did not seem to understand his exact role, she concluded that anger against America over the Israeli invasion of 1982 (because we could have stopped it and did not) set the process in motion.
Iran’s actual goal in sponsoring assassinations and kidnappings was the creation of an Islamic revolution in Lebanon, but the effort failed. Near the end of her book, Susan van de Ven expressed the very important understanding that Lebanon’s diversity, often considered a weakness, was actually the reason that the revolution failed. And I believe that this diversity saved and would have continued to save those of us who lived among friends, so near but so far from West Beirut. This is what the Reagan regime did not understand or would not admit when it forced The Near East Baptist Mission to leave our work and our homes in 1987.
The murder of Malcom Kerr, such a wonderful man, was a chilling event for me and the handful of other Americans living in Lebanon at the time. It made no sense at the time, but many things made no sense. The pleasure of reading his daughter’s book was like that of working a difficult jigsaw puzzle and seeing in the end the picture that once was just a jumble of pieces in my hand and on the table. It gives me confidence that every little thing I know is part of a big picture that will one day become clear. I must not lose a piece under the table. This makes me glad all over again that, through my own book, I have saved an impression of daily life in Lebanon during the chaotic time of Kerr’s assassination.
I appreciate Susan Kerr van de Ven for her patience and skill in pursuing the question that haunted her and for her courage in sharing with the rest of us her struggle and conclusions.
(Susan Kerr van de Ven was born in Lebanon and lived there in part of her childhood. She has a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies and a doctorate in education from Harvard University. Her book, One Family’s Response to Terrorism was published by Syracuse University Press in 2008.)
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There you have it. Reading the news these days is like standing by a stream, watching the debris of past disasters wash up on the shore, bringing with it pieces of puzzles, explanations for our suffering and warnings about the future. Imad Moughniyeh, a terrorist, died in 2008 on the CIA’s most-wanted list, victim of a car bomb in Damascus. The Daily Star says that his son, Jihad, had a plan for his life: to die a martyr like his father. But Imad Moughniyeh was also a human being. If he were alive today he would be grieving the death of a son who survived only twenty-five years, walking in his footsteps.
The whole story we may never know, but standing by the stream and picking up the pieces, we know that any mistake we are making now will send us a bill somewhere down the years. Our children and our grandchildren will pay. Even our country will pay.