Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condi Rice weighed in: “Hezbollah fighters should not be in the streets. There is a legitimate government of Lebanon, and we are working with others to support and sustain it.” She lauded Arab League foreign ministers rejection of militia attacks in Lebanon as “clearly illegitimate” and their convening of an emergency meeting in Cairo. Rice said she'd participate in a conference call on the crisis with a dozen other top diplomats from Europe and the Middle East.
These same Arab ministers said after their Cairo talks that they'd send a high-level delegation to Beirut headed by Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa, to attempt an end to the deadlock gripping Lebanon. Their aim was to bring together three opposition leaders - parliament speaker Nabih Berri, Christian leader Michel Aoun, and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah - with present parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri and a former president, Amin Gamayal, father of Pierre Gamayal, who was assassinated in 2006.
According to a BBC News report on May 15, 2008 “the army has emerged as the only factor preventing complete collapse and it is generally agreed that its commander, General Michel Suleiman, should be the next president.”
Benedict's diplomatic move is merely the latest of his attempts to improve the Lebanese murky political situation. In July 2006, Hezbollah had taken over a large refugee camp in Lebanon and set up bases in the southern portion of that country from which it daily launched rocket attacks into Israel. The Lebanese army, aided by a shipment of arms from the United States, reluctantly moved into the refugee camp and drove Hezbollah fighters out, even as Israel sent troops into southern Lebanon to dislodge Hezbollah. Pope Benedict decried both Hezbollah terrorism and Israeli military reactions during his Angelus audience on Sunday, July 16, 2006, saying: “Neither acts nor reprisals - especially when they have such tragic consequences for the civilian population - can be justified.” Earlier, he had expressed his wish that the Middle East could be freed from religious, cultural, historical, and geographical discrimination, so that the region “can finally enjoy peace.”
His efforts have been unappreciated by Muslim hardliners, among them Anjem Choudary, a notorious Muslim extremist apparently backed by exiled British Muslim cleric, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who told a demonstration outside Westminster Cathedral in London on September 18, 2006 that “the Pope must die.” One wonders what it will take before the British crack down on this sort of thing. Inflammatory speech of that sort should not be legal.
The Pope's reply? “May Lebanon, through the intercession of Our Lady of Lebanon, know how to respond with courage to its vocation of being, for the Middle East and the whole world, a sign of the real possibility of constructive and peaceful coexistence among people.”
