A Financial Times (FT) opinion piece by contributing editor Kim Ghattas (“History is tragically repeating itself in Lebanon”, March 21) not only minimises Hezbollah’s role in Lebanon’s political and economic dysfunction, but at times even gives credibility to the Iranian proxy group’s talking points.
But, first, in order to properly contextualise Ghattas’ latest piece, here are the FT journalist’s first X posts when the Oct. 7 massacre was occurring:
So, in addition to falsely claiming that Gaza was under “occupation”, Ghattas was seemingly more morally outraged by Israel’s (potential) “wrath” than with the medieval savagery being meted out to men, women and children by Hamas, in a barbaric pogrom she described as an “operation” and “incursion”.
Ghattas also wrote in a FT op-ed three days later that, at its core, “the current conflict is about the longest occupation in modern history, one that leaves the Palestinians dispossessed”. This, of course, erased, from the pages of history, Jerusalem’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, and included the mind-numbing cliché that, regarding both Gaza and Lebanon, “every fresh attempt to wipe out Palestinian militant groups only forges more extreme iterations”.
Ghattas’ tut-tutting about the putative futility of engaging in armed conflict against Islamist extremist enemies that seek Israel’s destruction – like so many other journalists who’ve covered or commented on the war – doesn’t include an alternative solution.
Turning now to her March 21 op-ed, where, in the second paragraph, she states her concern, as a Lebanese citizen based in Beirut, over how “the tiny Mediterranean nation emerges from this sixth Israeli military campaign against it could determine the shape of the region for years to come — regardless of the outcome in Tehran.”
You’d have to read the rest of the article carefully to even get a hint that any of the “Israeli military campaign[s]” targeted terror groups in Lebanon, not the state itself. The IDF operations were launched in response to aggression by entities – such as Hezbollah and the PLO – who violated the sovereignty of the weak and divided Lebanese state by using it as a base to attack Israel.
A glaring omission by Ghattas appears in another paragraph.
In 1982, the US had quietly acquiesced to the Israeli invasion, then tried to stabilise the chaos by sending the Marines to Beirut. In walking into the Lebanese quagmire, America became a target of bombings for the first time in the Middle East.
Who targeted America?
Ghattas withholds the fact that it was Hezbollah, who, on October 23, 1983, blew up the U.S. Marines and French army barracks in Beirut killing 241 Americans and 58 French – an attack which came just six months after the group bombed the U.S. embassy, killing 63, including 17 Americans.
On September 20, 1984 Hezbollah bombed the U.S. embassy annex in Beirut, killing 24.
It wasn’t a “quagmire” which killed over 280 US citizens in Lebanon over the course of 18 months. It was Iran’s Shiite terror proxy in the country – the “state within a state” representing Iranian imperialism in the region.
For her finale, Ghattas offers the following:
Some insist that if the Palestinians then, and Hizbollah today, had not launched rockets at Israel, Israel would not now be bombing Lebanon. Others claim that if it weren’t for the deterrent of such guerrilla militants, Israel would have already levelled Beirut.
The only “others” who frame Iran’s terrorist proxy as a deterrent force aimed at defending Lebanon from Israeli aggression are, of course, Iranian and Hezbollah leaders. Indeed, polls showing that nearly 80 percent of the Lebanese population say that only the Lebanese Army should be allowed to maintain weapons in the country suggests that the overwhelming majority not only don’t see Hezbollah as their “defenders”, but want them to leave their country.
One certainly wonders whether anyone within the FT editorial chain of command so much as raised an eyebrow at Ghattas’ legitimisation of the absurd propaganda of the proscribed Islamist terror group.
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