Batisseurs de justice, Artisans de Paix

Ironic or symbolic?
The title above was our motto as catholic schools for the current year.
"No peace without justice"
Robert Fisk wrote in his article commenting on the Sharm el Sheikh agreements:
If we are going to clap our hands like the Sharm El-Sheikh "peacemakers," we'd better realize that unless we are going to resolve these great issues of injustice now, this new act of "peacemaking" will prove to be as bloody as Oslo.

"This new act of peace making" seems to describe the official name of the current war waged on Lebanon. War for peace.

If it's peace that is ultimately sought then we need to ask: On what soil does peace grow? Will it grow on the debris of homes and decaying bodies, will it thrive on a soil where hundreds of people are being buried on a daily basis. Will the peace dove safely and majestically fly amongst an exchange of bombs, rockets, missiles and accusations?

Ghandi said: "I object to violence because, when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent."

Violence currently occuring doesn't even appear to do good, though the world turns a deaf ear and blind eye to the massacres committed. "Silence on tue" wrote one of the banners in a manifestation in Belgium. The world seems to allow Lebanon's happenings as a means to a desired end.

But what we're overlooking is that it never is a controversy about the end justifying the means. Huxley wrote way back in the 1930's:

If violence is answered by violence, the result is a physical struggle. Now, a physical struggle inevitably arouses in the minds of those directly and even indirectly concerned in it emotions of hatred, fear, rage and resentment. In the heat of conflict all scruples are thrown to the winds, and all the habits of forbearance and humaneness, slowly and laboriously formed during generations of civilised living, are forgotten. Nothing matters any more except victory. And when at last victory comes to one or other of the parties, this final outcome of physical struggle bears no necessary relation to the rights and wrongs of the case: nor in most cases, does it provide any lasting settlement to the dispute. (Huxley, 1938. p. 139)

All fighting parties in the middle east, remember that what goes round comes round, but what never comes back are all the victims of this circular movement of violence, this by all means is a literal definition of a "Vicious Circle".