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Lebanon backs Hezbollah against Israel.
Lebanon’s prime minister voiced concern Wednesday about “escalating” Israeli war threats, and said his government will support the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah if a new war breaks out with the Jewish state.
Saad Hariri’s comments come amid heightened tensions in the Middle East following some of the sharpest exchanges in years between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
The Pakistani Taliban have been trying to take credit for the recent bombing that killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan, but Syed Saleem Shahzad reports that it was actually Ilyas Kashmiri and his 313 brigade, which is comprised of veteran combatants from the Kashmir conflict that were highly trained by the Pakistani military.
Supporting Kashmir ain’t what it used to be: Militant groups fighting for Kashmiri liberation seem to have largely been colonized and absorbed into Al Qaeda’s global caliphate project. Some Islamist national liberation movements, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, have resisted being assimilated into the Al Qaeda borg.
Two stories about Hezbollah.
Hezbollah publishes new manifesto that tones down Islamist doctrine and goals, drops demand for an Islamic republic in Lebanon.
Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who read the new “political document” at a news conference, said it was time the group introduced pragmatic changes without dropping its commitment to an Islamist ideology tied to the clerical establishment in Iran.
“People evolve. The whole world changed over the past 24 years. Lebanon changed. The world order changed,” he said via a video link.
Hezbollah promotes mutaa marriage, even for virgins and women who have never married.
Hezbollah’s recent encouragement of this phenomenon highlights the compromises it had been required to make in order to remain the preeminent force among its domestic Shiite constituency. As the party gained strength due to its effectiveness in fighting Israel, it was forced to cope with the reality that many Lebanese Shiites did not share the Iranian-inspired religious beliefs of Hezbollah’s leaders. They came to dominate a community that was shaped by the secular leftist trends of the 1970s and 1980s, and the cosmopolitan culture embodied by Beirut.
A reporter at Huffpo has interviewed the foreign relations ministers of Hamas and Hezbollah. What’s striking in the introduction is that again and again these groups are defined by their social welfare programs:
Hamas and Hezbollah are both seasoned denizens of the US State Department’s List of Terrorist Organizations, a designation that seems odd when one considers that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese would fall through the cracks without the vital social services — healthcare, education, employment, infrastructure development — these two groups provide their indigenous populations. Ask a secular Palestinian or Lebanese civilian which of their political parties they trust most, and even the most begrudging among them may name Hamas or Hezbollah as the “cleanest” of their politicians.
And this influence continues regionally. Polls throughout the Middle East consistently point to Hezbollah’s secretary general Hassan Nasrallah as the most popular leader in the Arab world. Hamas’ Khaled Meshaal is never far behind — a far cry from his main political opponent, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, whose US-supported Fatah party is viewed as corrupt and incompetent, sometimes even by its own supporters. Despite US and Israeli efforts to isolate these groups by swathing them in the dreaded “terrorist” label and all that implies post 9-11, even pro-US Arab leaders are careful not to malign these groups. Popularity rubs off, so to speak.
I’ve previously contrasted these organizations with the Taliban, which are described much differently.
An interview with Osman Bakhach, a deputy chairman of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Lebanon. The reporter is Mahan Abedin.
MA: But surely you can’t deny the fact that the Americans wish nothing but ill-will towards Hezbollah. They would like nothing better than to see the group disarmed and, better still, disbanded altogether.
OB: The Americans will have no problem in disarming Hezbollah when the group’s mission expires. For now and until further notice, Hezbollah is a useful instrument in the hands of the Iranian and Syrian regimes and ultimately the Americans’ requirement to balance Israeli hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East.
If a lethal high-tech, spare-no-expense modern military could disarm Hezbollah, the Israelis would have already done so. I was also surprised to see the assertion – one that had not occurred to me – that America is seeking ‘balance’ and perhaps containment of Israel, rather than being assumed complicit in expansionist Israeli projects.
Al Qaeda-linked group claims responsibility for launching two rockets into Israel.
A militant group claiming links to al-Qaeda said on Monday it was behind the firing of rockets into northern Israel last week.
….The statement was signed by the Ziad al-Jarrah division of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades and the posting’s headline linked the group to Sunni Muslim militant network al-Qaeda.
Ziad al-Jarrah, a Lebanese militant, was one of the group of 19 who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks of 2001 in the United States. Abdullah Azzam was a preacher close to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Reminds me of a bit of analysis that Rob at Arabic Media Shack produced last Fall:
Some readers are probably thinking WTF are you talking about? Israel wants a strong Hezbollah? Yes, because if the Party of God’s military capabilities were to collapse, then Israel will be faced with an even more fanatical enemy who is literally dying to “get some.” Unlike Hezbollah who has to balance their desire to fight with other domestic political considerations, the Salafis answer to no one but God. They don’t care if half of Lebanon gets destroyed in the process because those people are all infidels anyway in the Salafi mindset.
And that’s why Lebanon wants a strong Hezbollah.
What’s a working journalist to do in Tehran? Spend most of his time disproving rumors. A sample:
Now for the very latest on the fantasy circuit. The cruel “Iranian” cops aren’t Iranian at all. They are members of Lebanon’s Hizbollah militia. I’ve had this one from two reporters, three phone callers (one from Lebanon) and a British politician. I’ve tried to talk to the cops. They cannot understand Arabic. They don’t even look like Arabs, let alone Lebanese. The reality is that many of these street thugs have been brought in from Baluch areas and Zobal province, close to the Afghan border. Even more are Iranian Azeris. Their accents sound as strange to Tehranis as would a Belfast accent to a Cornishman hearing it for the first time.
A Fatah official is claiming that Hezbollah has infiltrated the party
UK government announces it will talk to the largest political party in Lebanon (Hezbollah).
Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah has long been treated by the United States as a proscribed terrorist group. This narrow view has ignored the fact that both organizations are now entrenched political and social movements without whose involvement regional peace is impossible.
Muslim Americans are invited to denounce yet another bad thing. I decline.
Another example of Saudi and Israel falling on the same side in regional conflicts.