On Thursday, we posted on a Guardian review by Stuart Jeffries of Channel 4’s One Day in October documentary about Hamas’s mass murder, sexual violence, torture, incineration and mutilation of men, women and children on Oct. 7th, which actually criticised the film for unfairly demonising Hamas.
The piece immediately elicited a firestorm of complaints, and, in an effort at damage control, editors removed the piece ‘pending review’.
In our post, we stressed that Jeffries’ complaint about the documentary’s ‘unfair’ characterisation of the bloodthirsty pogromists who murdered, raped and pillaged their way through Israeli villages, was not, as many alleged, a new low for the Guardian. Rather, it was entirely consistent with their coverage in the days, weeks, and months following the barbarism on that dark Shabbat day.
It was also consistent with the outlet’s often sympathetic coverage of the antisemitic terror groups on Jerusalem’s borders, coverage which we’ve documented over the last 15 years.
So, we weren’t surprised that, before the dust even settled over the Stuart Jeffries row, the Guardian published an op-ed sympathetic to Hezbollah by frequent contributor Moustafa Bayoumi.
Before turning to his most recent op-ed, a sense of Bayoumi’s sympathies can be found in a piece he wrote at the Guardian on Oct. 11th, 2023, a mere four days after Hamas’s massacre, while dead, burned and mutilated bodies – or, more often, parts or traces of what were once living human beings – were still being found uncovered in the border communities targeted by the terror group’s pogromists.
That piece (“The double standard with Israel and Palestine leaves us in moral darkness”, Oct. 11) included a claim that echoed Hamas propaganda, arguing that the attack was NOT unprovoked.
What exactly counts as a provocation? Not, apparently, the large number of settlers, more than 800 by one media account, who stormed al-Aqsa mosque on 5 October.
A week later, he published another op-ed which demanded the we “stop the imminent ethnic cleansing of Gaza” and added that “We hear Israel present the situation as if it has no choice but genocide“. He peddled this baseless libel, let’s recall, before the IDF’s ground invasion began.
Let’s turn now to Bayoumi’s most recent piece, (“How long will the destruction of Lebanon continue? This is madness.”, Oct. 11), published exactly a year after his Hamas apologetics, coming to the defence of another another putatively unfairly maligned terror group.
Pushing back at Israeli claims that Hezbollah – a global antisemitic terror group that has attacked EU, US, Israel, South American and Jewish targets for decades, and is proscribed by the British government and most of the West – is an Iranian proxy group, and is a dangerous, malign force in the region more broadly, he writes:
whether you like it or not, Hezbollah is an indigenous and multifaceted Lebanese political party and social movement. Netanyahu’s allegation that Hezbollah is merely an Iranian proxy that has taken over all of Lebanon should be seen for what it is: a ploy to stoke as much sectarian division in Lebanon as possible, and a brazen attempt to lead the country into yet another disastrous civil war, all for Israel’s benefit.
He also risibly accuses Israel – and NOT Iran – of ‘colonialism’ with regard to Lebanon.
However, leaving his Zionist conspiracy theory aside, even describing Hezbollah as a proxy of Iran is an understatement. As Jeffrey Heltman, a former US diplomat and Middle East expert, has written, today, “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”.
It’s of course 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, has 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, has 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.
That Iran would dispatch military advisers to Lebanon only a few years after its own chaotic 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, where she focuses on Shia politics throughout the Levant, has written 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 can’t be overstated, and includes, for example, their involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri.
However, we do narrowly agree with the Bayoumi’s claim that Hezbollah isn’t merely a proxy group, in one sense: It’s also a global, ant-Western, antisemitic terror group which has carried scores of deadly attacks across the world for over four decades.
Let’s remember that, in addition to waging near-constant war against Israel, Hezbollah, CAMERA researchers have documented, also has targeted both Israeli and Jewish people and institutions abroad. On March 17, 1992 Hezbollah—aided by Iranian operatives—bombed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and injuring more than 200. On July 18, 1994, Hezbollah and Iran bombed the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 86 and wounding more than 200.
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, employing a truck bomb, killed 241 US military personnel on Oct. 23, 1983 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 people.
The Guardian columnist of course doesn’t mention any of this.
Nor, while accusing Israel in their current war with Hezbollah as “reigning death down on Arabs”, does he concede that conflict began on Oct. 8th last year, when terror group decided to show solidarity with Hamas after their antisemitic rampage by firing rockets at Israel – attacks which continued almost daily for nearly a year, many of which were launched from within Lebanese civilian areas.
Bayoumi’s defence of Hezbollah is yet another example of the extremism that passes for enlightened, progressive commentary consistently published by Guardian editors.
