Lebanon

TUESDAY, JULY 25, 2006
Here we go...! Politics! With a capital P.
I am not a particularly political person but today I heard a caller on the radio commenting on the present Israel-Hezbollah war, and I heard the unsatisfactory answer of the talkshow host - which then triggered a train of thoughts as to how would I have liked that call-in to be answered. This is what I would have liked to unfold on that radio show.

The caller was an obvious Hezbollah sympathyzer and he defended Hezbollah after a previous caller said that Hezbollah was a terrorist organization. The caller emphasized that Hezbollah was a guerilla organization the mandate of which was to fight the Israeli occupation in Lebanon. The host replied that he considers Hezbollah terrorist organization because it wants the distruction of all of Israel. To which every pro-Hezbollah' listener surely just nods their head, "Dah...! But of course! After all isn't Israel the great aggressor, the great Satan?"

Now I would have liked the following reply:If Hezbollah was created to push out all the Israelis from Lebanon, how come it is still there six years after Israel left? How come there were over 10 000 rockets amassed at Israel's northern border, ready to strike at any time? Does the caller know where the financial and military support came from which built up that sizeable military infrastructure?

Also think about the fact, that Israel was not the only occupier force in Lebanon. While all those years that Israel maintained only a buffer zone along its borders, Syria was in there, too, - all the way in! As a matter of fact they left barely a year ago, after much international pressure. How come there was no anti-Syrian resistance guerilla army, fighting the Syrians? We all know that the Syrians weren't white lilies, either, when it comes to aggression and killings. Do you think Syria would have exercised utmost restraint if there was a Western backed guerilla army along its Lebanese borders, with tens of thousands of rockets pointing in their direction, an army whose expressed mandate would be to wipe Syria off the face of the Earth? Should this army have killed eight Syrian soldiers and kidnapped two, on Syrian soil(!), do you think they would not have responded? And do you think they would not have used the opportunity to try and destroy that growing and threatening military entity along their borders - the rest of Lebanon be damned...?

The caller also tried to defend Hezbollah as being more than just an army, but a social umbrella that brought great amount of help to the people in the south of Lebanon. Sure...! Sounds to me very much like the modus operandi of the Christian missionaries over the ages. Help, with strings attached. Come, come, we provide you with financial aid, medical service, schools, etc. All we want from you is to commit yourself to Shiite principles, live a clean life, and develop an exalted spirit that will help you join us in the fight of our great enemy, the "Zionist pigs"! They definitely were committed to raise the youth of South Lebanon on these ideas in their schools. All these may sound wonderful for the insider, but for the outsider it very much looks like whoever financed all these had the goal to buy the souls of the Southern Lebanese people with some proverbial loaves of bread. Why? So that when they fight Israel it should look like it is only a small Lebanese guerilla group fighting the big bad wolf of Zionist Israel. Yet, by their own (very recent!) admission they are actually fighting the fight of all of the Muslim world. See and hear it for yourself, from the mouth of Nasrallah, as he spoke on Al Manar TV on July 16 ( click on #1194). Knowing this, doesn't that make you wonder: to what extent those poor Southern Lebanese have been duped? Don't you feel sorry for them?