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"And who is my neighbor?" an expert of the law asks in fury, annoyed with Jesus' message and behavior that frustrates every notion of conventional "righteousness" (Luke 10:29). Jesus embarks on one of his breathtaking stories about a man, a "righteous" man, apparently the hero of the narrative, suddenly transformed into the "enemy," replaced by a new hero, a Samaritan, an "unrighteous" man. New Testament scholars have pointed out that in this story, the man called to love his enemy is not the Samaritan, but actually the man who lay wounded, stripped of his clothes, half dead. For he, rather than the Samaritan, is the character in the story with whom Jesus' audience would have been able to identify. By inviting the wounded to accept to be helped by his conventional enemy, Jesus calls every one of us to accept to be helped by God, the "outcast," whom we have rejected.

I was overwhelmingly surprised by the responses I got the last two days from people who had read my Christianity Today article. Most were grateful for an alternative voice to what they usually read and hear. I write this text at the closing of a weekend spent responding individually to most of nearly a hundred emails that I got.

David Gushee's gracious response also, in his "Open Letter to Dr. Martin Accad" that Christianity Today published, gives me the desire to be picked up from the roadside despite my wounds. At the end of this weekend I have more hope, because I have discovered life in a part of the church's heart that I had thought dead. Thanks, David, and thank you to the new friends I have made.

If so many in the church in the U.S. actually care enough to listen and respond to a Middle Eastern Arab Christian cry, then perhaps there is enough hope, will and faith in this church to lean over the wounded "enemy" in the Middle East so that the universal church can address injustice and somehow bring to a halt this deliberate targeting of faith communities.

Through the responses that I received, it became clear to me that there are many misunderstandings about certain realities in the Middle East. The first has to do with the use of the term "terrorist." The term has been so grossly misused for political rhetoric in the past few years that only those who are willing to question deeply-rooted conventions will be able to hear me. "Terrorist" cannot—should not—be used as a noun or in the substantive. It can only be an adjective to describe an act. The fact is that the "terrorists" of one group are the "heroes" of another. The French resistance that used terrorist methods in their resistance to Nazi occupation would have retained their 'terrorist' label had their enemies eventually won World War II. Anti-apartheid units that used terrorist methods in their fight against racism in South Africa also only became heroes after they achieved victory. Examples are endless, but the point is that whenever an armed force carries out military operations so indiscriminate that they repeatedly result in the killing of non-combatant civilians, these should be called "terrorist" acts. On the Lebanese front, the media says that about 35 Israeli and more than 350 Lebanese non-combatants have been killed, with hundreds more injured and hundreds of thousands displaced. Ms. Ansari, Middle East and North Africa program director of Save the Children, U.K., said her "contacts in Lebanon reckoned that up to 45 percent of the casualties were youths." That is about 150 children, up to one hundred families left childless. All of these are acts of terror, and they are still going on, and the international community has been unable (or rather unwilling) to take a decisive stance by calling for a ceasefire.

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July (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50