Those reading a Guardian article about Hasan Nasrallah’s funeral on Sunday (“Massive crowds attend funeral of late Hezbollah leader Nasrallah“, Feb. 23) aren’t informed that Hezbollah is a proscribed terror group in the UK and much of the West, that, over several decades, they’ve killed not only scores of Israelis, but Jews in the diaspora, Americans and other Westerners, or that Nasrallah has personally called for the mass murder of Jews.
“If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide”. (Hasan Nasrallah, Daily Star, Oct. 23, 2002)
Instead, the author of the piece, Beirut-based William Christou, informs readers that Nasrallah “was born into a working-class family” that he was “famed for his charisma and skills as an orator” and that “he became a celebrated figure in Lebanon for Hezbollah’s role in ending Israel’s 18-year occupation of south Lebanon in 2000”.
Though Christou briefly concedes that Nasrallah’s “image was tarnished after the group’s intervention in Syria’s civil war in support of the long-time dictator Bashar al-Assad”, he clearly seemed intent on whitewashing the malign regional influence of the arch-terrorist and his Iranian masters.
Christou not only fails to call Hezbollah out as a terror group, describing it benignly as a “Lebanese militia and political party”, but writes that it is merely “Iran-backed”. However, as Jeffrey Heltman, a former US diplomat and Middle East expert, has written, “Hezbollah is no longer merely a subsidiary or proxy of Iran but rather an almost equal partner, serving as Iran’s vanguard in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, while training local militias and terrorist groups”.
The Guardian writer evidently didn’t talk to any Lebanese opponents of Hezbollah. Instead, readers are told that thousands of mourners “wept” during the ceremony, and are treated to quotes like this, from a Lebanese man named Mohammed Khalifeh:
“I can’t even express how I feel, it feels like my father or grandfather I died. Most of us still don’t believe he’s actually dead,”
More on Iranian control of the organisation:
Hezbollah is part of Iran’s ‘Axis or Resistance’ and exerts a suffocating and malign influence on Lebanon, which has been characterised as akin to an occupation by the Islamic Republic. Tehran also funds the group to the tune of $200 million to $1 billion a year—not including military aid.
Hezbollah, our colleague Sean Durns documented in an in-depth backgrounder, was founded in 1982 by Shiite religious officials who were educated in Iran, and emerged in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley amid Lebanon’s civil war (1975-1990). Matthew Levitt, a former terror analyst with the FBI, noted that “Hezbollah was the product of an Iranian effort to aggregate under one roof a variety of militant Shi’a groups in Lebanon, themselves the products of the domestic and regional instability of the time.”
Magnus Ranstrop, a well-known terrorism analyst, noted that from the very beginning in the mid-1980s, Hezbollah “operated under Iranian supervision”, with as many as 1,500 IRGC advisers having set up shop in the Bekaa Valley, running terrorist training camps that all Hezbollah members were required to attend. The fact that Iran dispatched military advisers to Lebanon only a few years after its own revolution, and while fighting a bloody war with Iraq, wrote Durns, “is indicative of the Islamic Republic’s ideological commitment to sponsoring Islamist terror, and exporting its revolution abroad”.
Hanin Ghaddar, a Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who focuses on Shia politics throughout the Levant, wrote the following:
It is as a hostage that Iran views Lebanon—there’s no need to have a socio-economic policy for Lebanon, or for Iraq or Syria for that matter. On the contrary, a prosperous Lebanon means a stronger state, and that’s not in the interest of Iran and Hezbollah—a hostage needs to stay weak and frightened. What matters is how to maintain and strengthen Iran’s grip on these countries, whether their citizens stay, leave, or die trying. In this context, the institutional tools that Lebanon is using to show the world that it is still functioning as a democracy have been rendered worthless by Hezbollah’s arms, or threat of armed force. In the formula of ballots vs. bullets, the latter is always louder and more heard.
The damage done to Lebanon by Hezbollah’s occupation can’t be overstated, and includes, for example, their involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri.
Terrorism perpetrated by Hezbollah:
Hezbollah has waged near-constant war against Israel – as well as on Jews abroad. On March 17, 1992, Hezbollah, aided by Iranian operatives, bombed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 63, and, on July 18, 1994, Hezbollah and Iran bombed the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 86 and wounding more than 200.
They’ve also killed hundreds of Americans and other Westerners.
In the 1980s through the early 1990s, the group kidnapped—and frequently murdered—numerous Westerners, among them, journalists, academics, CIA officials and the head of the U.N. truce monitoring group in Lebanon, U.S. Marine Col. William Higgins.
On April 18, 1983 Hezbollah attacked the U.S. embassy in Beirut with a truck bomb, killing 63 people. A subsequent terrorist attack, on Oct. 23, 1983. employed a truck bomb and killed 241 US military personnel stationed in Beirut as part of a peace-keeping force. The complex operation also included a nearly simultaneous attack on the French military compound in Beirut, killing 58.
Other Hezbollah terror operations include plane hijackings and the April 12, 1984 bombing of a restaurant near the U.S. Air Force Base in Torrejon, Spain, which killed 18 servicemen and injured 83.
William Christou doesn’t mention any of this – representing another example the Guardian whitewashing the crimes of, and even evoking sympathy for, an antisemitic terrorist leader in the Middle East.
