Entries Tagged 'Hezbollah' ↓

Hizbollah militants raise their arms in salute of assassinated Hezbollah top commander Imad Mughniyeh during a memorial service in his home village of Tair Debba, south Lebanon, Sunday, Feb. 17, 2008.

(AP Photo/Tara Todras-Whitehill)

 

John Bolton accuses her of having ceded to Hezbollah under the pressure of its fauxtography campaign.

[T]he main reason for America’s retreat from its initial position was U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who “changed her mind fundamentally” after an Israeli aerial assault killed 28 civilians in Kana on July 30. “Rice exerted enormous
pressure on me to reach an agreement already,” he said. “Until Kana, the U.S. wasn’t interested in another typical Middle Eastern cease-fire. We thought we would exploit the fighting to fundamentally change the situation, especially in Lebanon and Syria. But under the influence of her shock over Kana, the secretary of state changed her mind and only wanted an immediate end to the fire. That was the policy Rice dictated.”

She wanted to get the pictures off the TV screens, regardless of the cost. What an incompetent dolt.

 I decried the lack of attention to fauxtography here.

I suppose we’re going to have to have a lot more experience with this new weapon in asymmetrical warfare before we get secretaries of state who stick to their guns rather than cave in to demented neanderthals like Nasrallah.

Carlos Edde, head of the National Bloc party which is part of the March 14 Forces in Lebanon, has criticized Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah for announcing that his organization was holding body parts of Israeli soldiers.

Edde said: “I never imagined that a Lebanese political leader… would shout before hundreds of children and before television cameras that he has body parts and is proud of it. The worst thing is his joy in trading in these body parts.”

Secretary Rice’s legacy:

“Your army left behind the remains of soldiers in our villages and fields,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said, addressing the Israeli people during a speech to tens of thousands of Shiites taking part in commemorations marking Ashura.

“They [Israeli army] were so weak on the field that they left behind remains not of one, two or three but a large number of your soldiers,” Nasrallah added.

“One body is almost complete,” Nasrallah said. “What did the [Israeli] army say to the family of these soldiers and what remains did they give them?”

The Hizbullah leader’s comments sparked outrage in Israel, which prides itself on doing everything to recover the remains of its soldiers from fields of battle and has in the past freed prisoners in exchange for remains of soldiers and civilians.

And now some Israelis are calling for his assassination. I’m sure that Secretary Rice—who finds it so inconvenient to hold Israel’s enemies accountable for their destructive behavior—will find some way to condemn the “cycle of violence.”

Agence France-Press reports thatA’jad scolded Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah for consorting with the enemy:

“I wish the name of Saudi Arabia was not among those attending the Annapolis conference,” Ahmadinejad told the king late Sunday, according to state news agency IRNA.

“Arab countries should be watchful in the face of the plots and deception of the Zionist enemy,” he added.

Focusing on “the Zionist enemy” of course detracts attention from the actual state of affairs that has Iran in a tizzy:

The Islamic republic — which has made non-recognition of Israel one of its main ideological themes — has been left isolated by the attendance at the meeting of its chief regional ally Syria as well as Saudi Arabia.

This is the second time in two years that the major Sunni players in the Middle East have signaled their intense displeasure with Iran and its acolytes and clients. An interesting development.

Every society has its status symbols. In HezbollahLand, anyone associated with martyrdom is in like Flynn:

The mother [whose son was killed in a 1988 Hezbollah operation] explained that she now has a special status among the people who now show her more respect. She is also looked after by the party and is frequently invited to visit religious sites in Syria or Iran. She repeatedly says that “a female Hezbollah official” frequently takes her by the hand when she attends a function and lets her sit-in the front row. She added, “Do not believe that the mother of a martyr is unhappy. She may cry sometimes but she is happy.” The father then turns to me and says, “Do not forget that we gain a lot of support. The Martyr’s Institution covers all our medical, housing, and school expenses.”

Bribery, corruption, intimidation, preying on the weak and needy, exploiting the religious beliefs of simple people, feeding on their anxieties and fears—that is how “charitable” organizations like Hezbollah operate: they’re mini-totalitarian societies. You give what you have—your sons’ lives—to the cause. In return, the party takes care of you and your entire clan for life.

I first posted about BBC correspondent Alan Johnston in mid-March, when he was kidnapped in the streets of Gaza. I had expected his abduction to catch the attention of the MSM, since he was one of their own. Instead, except for many, prolonged protests held by Palestinian and British journalists, there has been a troubling silence. (You can follow all my posts about Johnston here. You can read a few posts about kidnapping as the terrorist tactic du jour here, here, and here.)
Until today. The group holding Johnston released a propaganda video:

He is wearing a red sweatshirt and reading out what appears to be Palestinian propaganda denouncing Israel and the Middle East policies of Britain and America. He appears calm and without any visible injuries.

His voice, familiar to many BBC listeners and viewers from his 16-year career with the corporation, is measured. He says he is “in Gaza”. …

During a three-minute speech, Mr Johnston accuses Britain and the US of causing suffering in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, and for “occupying Muslim lands against the will of the people in those places”.

He starts to give a message to his family but is cut off. Subtitles then appear on the video, saying: “The BBC refused to take this message to his family”.

Naturally, the family is relieved to have this sign of life from Johnston, although no one can say when the video was shot. But this isn’t anything like relief for the family—it’s extended agony:

Norman Kember, 76, a British peace campaigner held hostage for more than four months in Baghdad in 2005, said the video was designed to cause “maximum stress” to Mr Johnston’s family and the Government.

He drew comparisons between the orange suit he was given to wear during videos and Mr Johnston’s red sweatshirt. He said: “I think the idea was to show the parallel to Guantanamo Bay and put the maximum stress on the Government and relatives.”

The British government is well aware of that:

The video was condemned by the Foreign Office for the distress it caused the family and Tony Blair used a press conference at the end of his African tour to call for the kidnappers to release Mr Johnston, who passed his 45th birthday in captivity.

Also calling for the release of Johnston is Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian “prime minister” of Chaos and In-fighting.

“We are renewing our demands of the men, the abductors of the British journalist, to protect him and not to harm his life and to immediately release the journalist,” Haniyeh said after Friday prayers in Gaza City.

“This is an action that does not serve Islam, does not serve the Palestinian cause, and does not serve those who have abducted him.”

Johnston’s kidnappers would surely disagree. It serves them just fine as a recruitment tool for the wretched, dispirited youth of Gaza, who have been failed by two successive generations of their “leaders” (and failed, too, by two successive generations of Israelis, who have been unable to collectively rise above the massive hatred and violence engendered by their reclaiming the Jews’ ancestral homeland). These young men were once ripe for the picking by Hamas. Now that Hamas has also failed them, they’re ripe for the picking of by Qaeda.

You can read all about it here in the NYT. Read it and weep.

This recent wave of abductions of Westerners in the region began with the June 2006 kidnapping by Palestinians of the Israel soldier Gilad Shalit. (At the time, I held Hamas responsible for an act of war; now we know it was this shady Army of Islam group that was responsible, and that they’re not under Hamas’s, or Fatah’s, control—which is part of the problem in Gaza) It was followed a month later by the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah—they’re not Palestinians, they’re Lebanese, and this happened in a different region: in the north of Israel. Second Lebanon War followed in August.

And now I feel like I belong on the Daily Show. Still with me? Good.

Anyway: The same Palestinian group (the al Qaeda-inspired Army of Islam) that snatched the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit last June snatched the BBC correspondent Alan Johnston this March.

In between, there was the abduction and release (after a forced conversion to Islam) of two Fox journalists in August 2006.

I think you get the picture: there’s chaos in Gaza—so much chaos that Hamas begins to look moderate compared to the al Qaeda-inspired nihilist thugs doing these freelance operations, from kidnapping to setting fire to Internet cafes. And the prospect of anyone on the Palestinian side following a “road map” to peace with the Israelis is brought into relief as the deeply cynical and totally ludicrous political theater it is. What negotiated agreements could hold up under chaos, and when no one group among the Palestinians has the monopoly on the use of force?

Also: remember that there have been no Western journalists in Gaza since Johnston was abducted. The Palestinian journalists operating there must be under tremendous pressure and risk in this deeply uncertain political climate. Freedom of the press is the last thing that al Qaeda-type thinking tolerates. These journalists are very brave people, but we cannot know the extent of what is happening.

Keep your eye on this situation. It’s very dangerous indeed.

And spare a thought not just for Alan Johnston but also for the American hostages being held in Iran.

Khalil Hamra

Palestinian journalists hold posters of kidnapped BBC correspondent Alan Johnston during a protest calling for his release in front of the parliament building in Gaza City, Tuesday, March 20, 2007. Johnston was kidnapped last week in Gaza City and no group has yet claimed responsibility.

The photo above accompanies a depressing piece about the internal strife in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah, now that Arafat-era “strongman” Mohammed Dahlan has been put in the driver’s seat to oversee security. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Even more depressing, there is nothing new to report on the Alan Johnston story.

I was glad to see that ETP’s Glynnis MacNicol picked up on the story in a long post. Too bad she got her facts wrong about “Gilead” (much, much more frequently known as Gilad) Shalit. If you’re going to go “deep in the weeds,” *** you gotta know what you’re talking about.

It was not the kidnapping of Shalit that “ostensibly launched last summer’s Israeli attack on Lebanon.” [!]

The kidnapping of Shalit (and murder of two other soldiers), on top of continual Hamas-sponsored rockets lobbed into Israel, was what sparked an Israeli offensive into Gaza (which is to the south of Israel) in June 2006.

Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah, the terrorist organization dug in on its northern border, in Lebanon, started in mid-July 2006, three weeks later, after Hezbollah kidnapped two other Israeli soldiers (and killed three ) in a cross-border raid that violated Israel’s sovereignty. That was the casus belli of that conflict, which today was given its offical name: the Second Lebanon War. (I don’t much like the sound of that. Whenever they start counting wars, knowing it’s only one of a series—of indefinite length—it makes me nervous.)

————

*** I read that expression on Matt Yglesias’s blog today—twice in once post—and googled it, because I’d never heard it before. What I dug up was really interesting—with more than enough meat for another post. But who knows when I’ll ever get to that, so here’s the short version.

Googling “deep in the weeds” led me to Language Log (which I haven’t visited in waaaaaay too long)

Do six uses of a phrase in two years [May 2004 to May 2006 --ed.] count as “quintessential”? Well, I’ve observed before that a word or phrase may only need to be repeated a couple of times in order to seem characteristic of a writer or speaker, if the use in context is striking enough. In this case, five of the six TPM uses of “deep in the weeds” are used to introduce a post, as part of a ritualized warning to the reader that the content will involve a level of detail that some may find excessive.

In comparison, the phrase “deep in the weeds” has never been used on Language Log, on Language Hat, on the Volokh Conspiracy, on Crooked Timber, etc., although these blogs are more often deep in (what some might consider) the intellectual weeds than not

TPM, where Josh Marshall has used it a lot, is where Yglesias (who used to write under the TPM Cafe banner) must have picked it up.

We’re all Professor Donald Foster wannabes now. (He unmasked Joe Klein as “Anonymous,” the author of Primary Colors, the highly unflattering insiderish 1996 roman a clef about the Clintons. Foster has also gotten some wrong.)

(update: added a missing link)

What do you do when you’re humiliated by international support (to the tune of $7 billion) for your political opposition?

Well, if you’re Hezbollah’s would-be rock star Hassan Nasrallah, you soften your tone, admit to mistakes, cop to your own international support, clarify your opponents’ failures and your own heroism. Oh yes, and you project your 40-foot-high image on the wall of a government building so that no Lebanese need miss your TV interview.

Hizbullah supporters gathered near the government house watch on a giant screen Nasrallah speaking during an interview on Hizbullah’s Al-Manar television, in Beirut, Lebanon.
Photo: AP

Not exactly Cinema Paradiso, eh?

Austin Bay links to Michael Totten’s most recent report from Lebanon (if you haven’t been reading Totten’s blog and series, you should do so).

On the subject of Hezbollah’s “Divine Victory,” Bay says:

Our enemies are masters of media manipulation. But “information victories” without on the ground success are thin facades.

I agree that “information victories” are thin facades. They are better, however, than no victories at all. What’s more: score enough of them that are “sticky” (per Malcolm Gladwell) and you can actually change a narrative. That makes “information victories” very important in a hearts-and-minds war such as the one that Hezbollah continues to wage. We shouldn’t underestimate their importance.

It is dispiriting to watch various jihadi and Islamist groups, in the West and everywhere else, manipulate the media again and again. It is way past time for the West to start scoring some “information victories” of its own—particularly in the (seeming) absence of “real” victories.

We cannot afford too many “information victories” for jihadis and Islamists. l