interesting read. and also if any of yall are looking for any literature to read to understand some of the background...im not fan of friedman but his beirut to jeruslaem...the beirut part is fantastic about the civil war in the mid 80s. i think i'll go re-read it when i have the chance in the next few days. Inside the Mind of Hezbollah By Robin Wright Sunday, July 16, 2006; B01 Hasan Nasrallah is exactly where he always wanted to be. "Ever since I was 9 years old, I had plans for the day when I would start doing this," the Hezbollah chief reflected on his leadership quest, when I visited him in the southern slums of Beirut not long ago. "When I was 10 or 11, my grandmother had a scarf. It was black, but a long one. I used to wrap it around my head and say to them that I'm a cleric, you need to pray behind me." Nasrallah is a man of God, gun and government, a cross between Ayatollah Khomeini and Che Guevera, an Islamic populist as well as a charismatic guerrilla tactician. The black head wrap -- signifying his descent from the prophet Muhammad -- is now his trademark, and he is Lebanon's best known politician. Lines from his speeches are popular ring tones on cellphones. His face is a common computer screensaver. Wall posters, key rings and even phone cards bear his image. Taxis play his speeches instead of music. At 46, Nasrallah is also the most controversial leader in the Arab world, at the center of the most vicious new confrontation between Israel and its neighbors in a quarter-century. Yet he is not the prototypical militant. His career has straddled the complex line between Islamic extremist and secular politician. "He is the shrewdest leader in the Arab world," Israeli Ambassador to the United States Daniel Ayalon told me on Friday, "and the most dangerous." Until this eruption of violence along the Lebanese border -- the most dramatic cross-border acts of war by Israel since its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 -- Nasrallah had largely succeeded in being both. A fiery populist, he extolled the virtues of democracy to me in one breath, then argued that only suicide bombers can secure that democracy. "As long as there are fighters who are ready for martyrdom, this country will remain safe," he bragged in a speech earlier this year. But now the man who helped create Hezbollah may finally have to make a choice. When we met in his office, before this new battle with Israel, Nasrallah claimed to see peaceful political activism as Hezbollah's future. "We have ministers, we have members of parliament, we have municipal council members, leaders of unions and syndicates," he boasted as we sat on faux French brocade furniture at his now-bombed headquarters. "If we are maintaining our arms until now, this is due to the fact that the need for it is still there, due to the permanent or constant Israeli threats against Lebanon. Whether we keep on with the resistance or stop the resistance, we are effectively now a full-fledged political party." The outskirts of Beirut are known as the dahiya , Arabic for "suburbs." It has come to mean the poor, dense and sometimes dangerous maze of slums that is also Hezbollah-land. Its dirty alleys are crammed with concrete-block shanties. Gnarled masses of wire run from one building to the next, illegally tapping into electrical, phone and television lines. While lights burn brightly in trendy downtown Beirut, the dahiya is often eerily dark because of sporadic electricity. Hezbollah has become an enterprise in the dahiya, often outperforming the state. It runs a major hospital as well as schools, discount pharmacies, groceries and an orphanage. It runs a garbage service and a reconstruction program for homes damaged during Israel's invasion. It supports families of the young men it sent off to their deaths. Altogether, it benefits an estimated 250,000 Lebanese and is the country's second-largest employer. In the dahiya, Nasrallah is an icon, famed for his oratory and revered as a champion of Lebanon's long-dispossessed Shiite minority. Born in a Christian suburb of Beirut in 1960, the first of nine children, Nasrallah only joined Hezbollah after the Israeli invasion. Trained in Islam at the top seminaries of both Iraq and Iran, he became one of the original military leaders in Iran's new training camps. "I was then 22 years old," Nasrallah told me. "We used to discuss issues among ourselves. If we are to expel the Israeli occupation from our country, how do we do this? We noticed what happened in Palestine, in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, in the Golan, in the Sinai. We reached a conclusion that we cannot rely on the Arab League states, nor on the United Nations," he said. "The only way that we have is to take up arms and fight the occupation forces." With a force of between 600 and 1,000 full-time fighters, along with thousands of backups pulled from the streets willing to become human bombs, Nasrallah managed what the tens of thousands in the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan were unable to do for a half-century -- force Israel to retreat. Today, his is the last private army left in Lebanon. Nasrallah became the movement's secretary general in 1992, at age 32, after Israeli helicopter gunships assassinated his predecessor. His first major decision was to shift a movement best known for its terrorism spectaculars against the United States, France and Israel into politics -- and run candidates for parliament. "They resist with their blood," declared Hezbollah campaign posters at the time, featuring suicide bombers. "Resist with your vote." But Hezbollah's shifts under Nasrallah should not be mistaken for moderation. As with other Islamist groups in the Middle East, change was about survival of both cause and constituents. The end of Lebanon's 15-year civil war in 1990 had altered the environment. From then on, Hezbollah needed to participate in the political system -- or face loss of the weapons that gave it power. Today, Hezbollah holds 14 seats in parliament, one of the larger blocs, and in 2005 joined the government for the first time. This year, Nasrallah even made an unlikely alliance with a right-wing Christian who was once a Lebanese army general -- while still accepting what U.S. intelligence has pegged at about $100 million annually from Iran in goods, cash and arms, including an estimated 13,000 rockets and missiles. For six years, Hezbollah also demonstrated some military restraint. When Israel ended its 18-year occupation of Lebanon in 2000, Nasrallah declared, "We have liberated the south. Next we'll liberate Jerusalem." Yet until last week, Hezbollah's increasingly infrequent offensives were largely limited to the disputed border town at Shebaa Farms. But the transition is far from complete; Nasrallah still wants it both ways. A few weeks before I saw him, he gave a speech about the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad, which triggered rioting worldwide and more than 100 deaths. Nasrallah condemned "those fools that did wrong to our prophet," but he also criticized the attack on the Danish Embassy in Beirut. "Let us stop this nonsense," he said. "As Muslims and Christians, we should continue to cooperate and unite in order to reject the offense to our prophets and our holy belongings." Yet Hezbollah still has refused to comply with U.N. Resolution 1559, which calls for the dismantling and disarming of Hezbollah's militia. "The Israeli Air Force could destroy the Lebanese army within hours, or within days, but it cannot do this with us," Nasrallah told me. "We exercise guerrilla warfare. . . . Lebanon still needs the formula of popular resistance." Whenever Nasrallah talks about the terrorist tactics with which Hezbollah has become synonymous, the message is still tortuously two-faced. Our exchange about al-Qaeda and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was typical: "What do the people who worked in those two [World Trade Center] towers, along with thousands of employees, women and men, have to do with war that is taking place in the Middle East? Or the war that Mr. George Bush may wage on people in the Islamic world?" he asked me. "Therefore we condemned this act -- and any similar act we condemn." But the Pentagon? "I said nothing about the Pentagon, meaning we remain silent. We neither favored nor opposed that act," he replied. "Well, of course, the method of Osama bin Laden, and the fashion of bin Laden, we do not endorse them. And many of the operations that they have carried out, we condemned them very clearly." The use of terrorism is a difficult subject for the head of a group that succeeded in redefining extremist tactics. Hezbollah deployed the first Islamic suicide bombers in modern times. It was also the first to carry out multiple attacks simultaneously. Al-Qaeda and Hamas and Iraq's insurgents -- all Sunni movements -- have copied these tactics. Nevertheless, Nasrallah has only disdain for bin Laden and the Taliban. In April, an al-Qaeda cell in Lebanon tried to assassinate him. And the late al-Qaeda chief in Iraq this spring condemned the Shiite movement as an "enemy of the Sunnis" -- ironically, in hindsight -- for protecting Israel by preventing Palestinian attacks from Lebanon. "The worst, the most dangerous thing that this Islamic revival has encountered . . . was the Taliban," Nasrallah told me. "The Taliban state presented a very hideous example of an Islamic state." Yet Hezbollah has not abandoned its extremist origins, even as it tries to establish conventional political legitimacy. "It is unacceptable, it is forbidden, to harm the innocent," he told me, reflecting on Iraq. "To have Iraqis confronting the occupation army, this is natural. But if there are American tourists, or intellectuals, doctors, or professors who have nothing to do with this war, they are innocent, even though they are Americans, and it is forbidden. It is not acceptable to harm them." In 2004, Hezbollah issued a communique condemning the beheading of American contractor Nicholas Berg by al-Qaeda in Iraq as a "despicable act" that did "grave damage to Islam and the Muslims." But the day before we talked, a suicide bomber had detonated a bomb at a Tel Aviv restaurant during the busy lunch hour, killing 11 and wounding more than 60 civilians. The bomb was laced with nails and other projectiles; the injuries were particularly gruesome. Islamic Jihad, another Iranian-backed group, claimed credit. I asked Nasrallah how he applied his metric on civilians to Israelis. He described the issue of what he calls "occupied Palestine" as "complicated." "It is our opinion that in Palestine, women and children need to be avoided in any case," he responded. "But it came after more than two months of daily Israeli killing of Palestinians, and the destruction of houses and schools, and the siege that is imposed on the Palestinians. There is no other means for the Palestinians to defend themselves. That is why I cannot condemn this type of operation in occupied Palestine." wrightr@washpost.com Robin Wright, Washington Post diplomatic correspondent, interviewed Nasrallah for her upcoming book, "Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East" (Penguin Press). post
I read about 2 or 3 paragraphs into it and I had to ask, aren't Hasan Nasrallah and his followers being incredibly blasphemous by having his image shown all over the place? Also, it may just be the way the article is written, but doesn't he compound this by talking so much about himself? I finished reading this and it seems to me that (and again it may be the way the article is written) that the religious aspects are secondary. I get the feeling that describing Palestine is "complicated" and the condemning of specifically inflammatory attacks are calculated political moves. I was watching a show on Turkey in WWI the other day, and it talked about how the aggressively secular Young Turks led by Enver Pahsa were only able to create widespread public support for joining the Germans by describing the war as a jihad, and appealing to all the religious feelings that they were so intent on removing from politics. This could be coloring my reading or it may be relevant to deciphering Mr. Nasrallah and Hezbollah. My view of Hezbollah has been complicated in simultaneously positive and negative ways.
I used to be tolerant of the Arab position in the Middle East and sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians (including Palestinian Christians) losing their land and having their homes blown up by the Israeli military. But the more I am around Arabs and Muslims, and the more I read of their actions, their culture, their long term political history and stance toward Christians - well, I keep coming to the conclusion that this world would be a better place if the militant extremist wing of the Arabs and of Islam was uh.......not around anymore. Now how large is that wing? It seems like as I learn about intolerance in Islamic cultures around the world that wing becomes larger and larger. I am becoming more and more intolerant of intolerant people. I do not believe in cultural relativism and believe that there are an awful lot of mis-programmed people who share none of my values - which means we have nothing in common. I am willing to work with people who share something culturally with me - they do not need to be clones. But the people who are uh totally out to lunch - well in the US we put them in prison. Outside the US - over the next 50 years I see a strong possibility of war - with Muslims and with the Communist Chinese government. If it does happen it will be interesting to see how alliances shake out. Where is the UN when you really need them? Oh yeah, not doing much of anything.....
"their long term political history and stance toward Christians" could you expand on what you mean...
I am very sorry you feel this way about Arabs and Muslims. Just so you know, religiously speaking, Islam is the religion that is closest to Christianity. Islam is the only other religion that recognizes the Prophet Jesus as the Messiah, and recognizes Jesus's virgin birth from Mary. I am very sorry you feel like Muslims have a negative view of Christians; I assure you, this is not the view of all Muslims worldwide. Islam preaches kindness and tolerance to all... of course, so do most of the world's major religions. Just as it would be unfair to judge Hinduism by the actions of the Tamil Tigers, Catholicism by the actions of the Nazis, Christianity by the actions of the Ku Klux Klan, it is unfair to judge Islam by the actions of extremists/ militants.
my problem with hezbollah, hamas, and the other "islamic" groups is all they appear to care about is jihad. they had to know that kidnapping israeli troops wasn't going to go without retaliation. they had to know that the palestinian and lebonese people were going to be hurt by this... but they go ahead with their agression towards israel. it's been relatively peaceful, and with olmert now in power he was giving more and more land back... but oh here comes these "muslims" and their holy war. one question, kinda like how axl asks in his song civil war, "whats so civil about war?" i ask, how can a war be holy? this article shed some light on hezbollah, and they sound to me very similar to hamas in palestine. but as Ottomaton said, he sounds like he's trying to tread a thin line.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006 Israeli onslaught will strengthen, not weaken, Hizbullah's popular appeal Editorial Despite the mounting civilian death toll in Lebanon, and despite increasing evidence of Israeli violations of international law, the heavyweights in the international community are once again following the lead of US President George W. Bush, who has effectively given a green light to Israel's destruction of Lebanon. With the exception of Russia, which seems to be reluctant to jump fully onboard the international bandwagon for fear of jeopardizing its relations with Iran, the world powers have taken the view that UN Security Resolution 1559 ought to be enforced - and Hizbullah disarmed - before any cease-fire is put into effect. In the meantime, Israel is pressing ahead with its bloody military campaign, which one Israeli official has said could be completed within a week. In the short-term, Israel may succeed in laying waste to Hizbullah's arsenal of weapons. But even the complete destruction of Hizbullah's military capabilities would do nothing to reduce the group's political appeal. On the contrary, each slaughter only fuels the political sentiments that inspire resistance groups such as Hizbullah to take up arms - not only in Lebanon, but across the region. Bombs will not annihilate the desire for statehood, missiles will not force an acceptance of occupation, and shells will not wipe out the desire of refugees to have a place to call home. These are political sentiments that no amount of American-made weaponry can annihilate. In fact, over the last 58 years, Israel's use of strong-arm tactics has consistently had the adverse effect of stirring these sentiments into a frenzy. When the dust from this latest round of conflict settles, Israel will likely revert to its decades-old pattern of demanding that the weak governments in Palestine and Lebanon crack down on the militants in their territory, while at the same time weakening those governments and denying them any means of meeting the imposed demands. This strategy has only dragged the region from conflict to conflict, fueling more and more calls for resistance. The only way out of this cycle is through a genuine closure of a political conflict, via a comprehensive Middle East peace. Any peace deal would need to be followed up with a local version of the Marshall Plan, in which the governments tasked with keeping the peace would need to be strengthened. One could hardly think of a better time to start this process, given that the Arab world is currently awash with petrodollars that could be put to good use. Failure to arrive at a political settlement will only ensure that this current conflict, which has been touted as a battle in a "war on terror," will end up nurturing the exact same forces of resistance that it aimed to destroy. daily star
I think it might be helpful if you study Arab and Islamic culture and history throught its entirety compared to Christian history and culture to really get the proper understanding and perspective. Muslims may seem intolerant when you look at it through the modern lens of Al Queda, Hezbollah, the Iranian mullahs and the Hamas but turn back several centuries and you will see that Arabs were at one time one of the most enlightened, cultured, tolerant and scientific minds relative to the Christians. While Christians in Europe were undergoing the Dark Ages and its lands were in turmoil and disarray, Arabs had built an advanced civilization and were prominent in the fields of algebra and other advanced mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and other areas. In fact the European Rennassance was fueled in part by increased contact with the more advanced Islamic culture which had thrived while Europe remained in the dark. And Muslims, relative to Christians, were far more tolerant of religious and national diversity than most Christian lands. If you had travelled back in time to before the European Rennaissance, it would have been the Christians who looked backwards, intolerant and savage, not the Muslims. Just wanted people to keep things in historical perspective.
Whatever shred of respect I had left for the Washington Compost disappeared yesterday after seeing those clips from Cohen's article. Ugh. That had to be the most uninformed antisemitic diatribe I've ever seen in a so-called national newspaper.
I don't think he himself is (and probably was just being really stupid when he wrote it), but he said that Israel itself is a "mistake", and says that Israel needs to stop fighting and just "hunker down" hoping that the terrorists change their minds eventually.
I think his position is more that Israel should withdraw from occupied territories, and follow it's end of peace deals, since that is what has worked the best curbing the violence in the past. It is about what works. Heavy handed military operations have never worked for Israel. Peace deals have worked, when they have been followed, and were fair. I want Israel to exist and exist peacefully. I want terrorism gone. I have seen the conditions that have brought that about or come closest to bringing that about, and I have seen the ones that have failed time and time again. I would keep going in the direction of what works.
Just because terrorists hide behind civilians, those civilians are no longer civilians, and they are at least sympathizers. Some of you guys sounded like they had a choice. I guess from now on, all hostages should be killed in any situation, because it's their fault to become hostages.
Now to be fair, sometimes you can't blame the civilians involved. I've seen at least one report talking about how Hezbollah militants were setting up roadblocks to prevent people from fleeing their villages. These guys are pure scum, and the civilian casualties are an unfortunate aspect of a war like this...but Israel cannot afford to let Hezbollah's dirty tactics defeat them either.
Boy, everybody jumped on Richirich. I'm not taking his position but he did point out he is only talking about the "militant extremist wing" and not all Arabs or Islamists. As much as you guys jump on him, I'd bet countless of millions of people share his view.
You're clearly FAR too sensitive to criticism of the Jewish state and quick to jump the gun on charges of 'anti-Semitism'. I just read the article, and here's the article in its entirety for context: Hunker Down With History By Richard Cohen Tuesday, July 18, 2006; Page A19 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/17/AR2006071701154.html?sub=AR The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself. This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, that was once a tacit ally of Israel's. The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and some other Arab countries may condemn Hezbollah, but I doubt the proverbial man in their street shares that view. There is no point in condemning Hezbollah. Zealots are not amenable to reason. And there's not much point, either, in condemning Hamas. It is a fetid, anti-Semitic outfit whose organizing principle is hatred of Israel. There is, though, a point in cautioning Israel to exercise restraint -- not for the sake of its enemies but for itself. Whatever happens, Israel must not use its military might to win back what it has already chosen to lose: the buffer zone in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip itself. Hard-line critics of Ariel Sharon, the now-comatose Israeli leader who initiated the pullout from Gaza, always said this would happen: Gaza would become a terrorist haven. They said that the moderate Palestinian Authority would not be able to control the militants and that Gaza would be used to fire rockets into Israel and to launch terrorist raids. This is precisely what has happened. It is also true, as some critics warned, that Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon was seen by its enemies -- and claimed by Hezbollah -- as a defeat for the mighty Jewish state. Hezbollah took credit for this, as well it should. Its persistent attacks bled Israel. In the end, Israel got out and the United Nations promised it a secure border. The Lebanese army would see to that. (And the check is in the mail.) All that the critics warned has come true. But worse than what is happening now would be a retaking of those territories. That would put Israel smack back to where it was, subjugating a restless, angry population and having the world look on as it committed the inevitable sins of an occupying power. The smart choice is to pull back to defensible -- but hardly impervious -- borders. That includes getting out of most of the West Bank -- and waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else. This will take some time, and in the meantime terrorism and rocket attacks will continue. In his forthcoming book, "The War of the World," the admirably readable British historian Niall Ferguson devotes considerable space to the horrific history of the Jews in 19th- and 20th-century Europe. Never mind the Holocaust. In 1905 there were pogroms in 660 different places in Russia, and more than 800 Jews were killed -- all this in a period of less than two weeks. This was the reality of life for many of Europe's Jews. Little wonder so many of them emigrated to the United States, Canada, Argentina or South Africa. Little wonder others embraced the dream of Zionism and went to Palestine, first a colony of Turkey and later of Britain. They were in effect running for their lives. Most of those who remained -- 97.5 percent of Poland's Jews, for instance -- were murdered in the Holocaust. Another gifted British historian, Tony Judt, wraps up his recent book "Postwar" with an epilogue on how the sine qua non of the modern civilized state is recognition of the Holocaust. Much of the Islamic world, notably Iran under its Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stands outside that circle, refusing to make even a little space for the Jews of Europe and, later, those from the Islamic world. They see Israel not as a mistake but as a crime. Until they change their view, the longest war of the 20th century will persist deep into the 21st. It is best for Israel to hunker down.
I read it, tigermission. The characterization of Israel as a "mistake" is a blatant lie and shows either a complete lack of historical knowledge or a deliberate attempt to ignore it. The conclusion that Israel needs to "hunker down" hoping these guys eventually change their minds is laughable at best.
Fine, you can argue that his premise is false or that "he's wrong", but you immediately went for the 'anti-Semitic' card. I am merely suggesting that you should be more careful with throwing around serious accusations like that.
