To say that my question “Is this book pro-Hezbullah?” wasn’t well received on Tuesday night at SOAS is an understatement.
I was at the book launch of The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication written by Lina Khatib, Dina Matar and Atef Alshaer.
After I had asked my question Dina Matar said “I knew you were going to ask that” and Lina Khatib waved the book at me and said “Why don’t you read it?”
The book explains how Hizbullah has been successful in staying relevant since its 1982 inception by adapting itself to changing situations and communicating these adaptations through various means such as poetry and social media.
Hizbullah are poets? Who knew.
One can imagine: “To kill a Jew, or not to kill a Jew. That is the question.”
So, according to the authors, Hizbullah’s 1980s narrative was one of “victimisation” to attract Lebanon’s marginalised Shia Muslims.
During the 1990s it was one of “resistance” against Israel and connection with “Palestine”.
From 2000 onwards it was focused on “defence” after Israel had left south Lebanon with Hizbullah disseminating the narrative that the Lebanese army is not strong enough to defend Lebanon from Israel.
Now Hizbullah is back to a “victimisation” theme after being implicated in the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and others by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and also due to its fighting alongside Bashar Assad in Syria.
Dina Matar said that although Hasan Nasrallah has lost some credibility because of Syria he is still popular, and people in the Arab world listen out for his speeches.
She said there’s a sense that Nasrallah is “just like us, he’s approachable, he speaks the language of the people, he’s funny, he jokes and he’s humble in appearance”.
If this is true then it is a sad indictment on the Arab world that with Hasan Nasrallah complicit in the deaths of over 200,000 innocent Syrians he is still thought so highly of.
I wasn’t trying to be controversial when I asked whether this is a pro-Hizbullah book. I was concerned by this comment by Lina Khatib at the beginning of her presentation on the book to the large student audience:
“Books on Hizbullah seek to frame Hizbullah as a terrorist movement. This is primordial. We have evidence to the contrary. But this is the dominant discourse in America.”
Khatib lives in America. One might forgive Americans for thinking such a thing with the murder of 241 of their fellow citizens by Hizbullah in Beirut in 1983.
And what about the 200,000 dead in Syria and Hizbullah’s attacks on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aeries in 1992 (29 dead) and on the AMIA builing in Buenos Aeries in 1994 (85 dead), the Burghas Airport bombing in Bulgaria in 2012 (6 dead) and Hasan Nasrallah, true to his word of going after Jews worldwide, is now targeting Jews in Peru.
This book is worth reading (if you can stomach the 30 page chapter on Hizbullah poetry) but only with a view to finding out how a modern day Nazi group, totally funded by Iran, portraying itself as a positive force continues to hold a beautiful country like Lebanon to ransom while bringing death and destruction both to Lebanon’s citizens and to Syria all with the final objective of destroying Israel and the Jewish people that live there.
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Hezbollah, a Nazi group? Come on, Nazis can only be members of the NSDAP! Said someone whose name I don’t remember anymore… 😉
Google Images “arab nazi salute”
I only heard part of the report on BBC’s radio 4 Today programme of the interview that Nasrallah gave to the BBC, but I do recall some twisted comment about ISIS now having killed as many or more Palestinians/Arabs as the Israelis. As Richard notes above, some 200,000 have died in Syria since the uprising started. That is something like 5 times as many Arabs/Palestinians have been killed in all combat between the Jews of the Yishuv/Israel and the surrounding Arabs since the passing of the UN Resolution establishing the State of Israel in 1947.
One has to admire Hezbollah’s arithmentic. Or not, as the case may be.
More pertinently, there was this recent article http://www.timesofisrael.com/after-losing-1000-men-in-syria-hezbollah-builds-security-zone/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=b9c80b582a-2014_11_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-b9c80b582a-54417869 which asserted that Hezbollah has lost some 1000 fighters in Syria (it wasn’t indicated whether this included those wounded too severly to return to the front, or only the dead), a further 4-5000 were still fighting there, and Hezbollah have had to create a security zone on the Lebanese/Syrian border (tying down a further 1000) to halt suicide bombers attacking Hezbollah targets.
Doesn’t leave many to attack Israel.
Which, despite the tragic cost to innocent Syrian civilians, can only be good news for Israel.
Never mind arithmetic. They have learned from Goebbels.
Good posting Richard – the armchair revolutionaries love all this this intoxicating blood & soil & poetry guff – ethnic nationalism is unfashionable these days, but in the case of violent extremist genocidal Islamism, with its aesthetic explicitly modelled on National Socialism, it’s given a free pass and celebrated at places like SOAS
Meanwhile, the MSM ignores this but is full of the armies of the righteous lobbying the gov to ban distasteful puerile and pathetic pick-up artists from giving seminars in the UK to hapless men
It all confirms bottom-line that you have to be very careful what you say these days – unless you’re talking about Jews & Zionists – then all bets are off
Look at the sick articles about Jews in Sat’s Guardian (weekend before last): Hadley Freeman hatchet job on Julie Burchill’s philosemitism & Will Self’s sycophantic review of Shlomo Sand’s latest rhetorical attack on Jews (Self has like Sand has also disavowed his Jewish heritage), followed by Mon’s edition with Daniel Barenboim urging Germany to stop feeling sorry for the Holocaust and start laying down the law to the Israel gov
One never reads anything positive about Jews or Israel in the Guardian. The Guardian speciality is Jew-Baiting pure and simple, and they’re clever enough to use a Jew to do it – how delicious! Comment Mach Frei – plus ca change. Less than one million Jews remain in UK & Western Continental Europe, while Jewish communities in Ukraine and Latin-America (Brazil, Venezula, Peru) are increasingly under seige. Thus, knocking off America and Israel, the Great & Little Satan, has become a priority for the genocidalists of Islamic persuasion and their fellow travellers in the West
I think thate Hollande of France is more willing to stand up to the Islamofascists than the UK. Cameron and Blair say the right things, but the British media (the BBC and Der Guardian in particular) is in full Fascist Jew-baiting and hating mode.