Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization

[FlavaKreemSnak]

Because we dismissed them as terrorists, we didn't know how to fight them....

For the first time since Islam lost Spain, radical Islamists have begun to believe that the caliphate can be restored, that the empire of Allah can overcome and eventually supplant the West...

If the right are to be believed, all the Arabs want to see Israel dead, and despotic Islamic regimes reign supreme. If the fossil right is to be believed, then, there's no hope for any of us. If what we are facing 200 million terrorists, as the fossil right would have us believe, there's no hope for the right, either.

There is another possibility, of course. That is, that something about terrorists changes over time when they actually are faced with the real challenges of governance. When they are faced with actual constituents, with diverse needs and diverse belief systems, and little real taste for the iron fist and the religion of rifles and explosives...

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/753073.html

I think this article is unusual because even though it is from a newspaper in Israel it is not saying oh well let's just bomb some more people and then they will do whatever we say, and I was also thinking about another article that I posted on here, from a person here who is scared to go live in Israel. And there have been some more articles like that, not a whole lot, but still. Saying that Israel might be safer if it was not bombing people. I don't think that will happen or anything because their leaders know they have to help us with the war on terror because we have a special relationship etc. so I guess if a lot of people in Israel start to disagree with that they will have to be put under clampdown and it will be more expensive for us.

[pooja]

1. Terrorism is a coined phrase to make an unseen enemy boogyman

I am not sure how many people move beyond the scope of their American roots, but if you adventure out, attend college, travel abroad, make friends on internet sites... you will find people just like yourself. Wanting to be alive, learn and have peace. Don't think that any person is happy with their govt completely. Europeans want to tout their clout as progressives... but how many Europeans take to the street in protest of things they don't want their govt to do. As the modern world becomes a progressive world, and as long as the internet provides us with access to each other, and as long as the simple life is played around the world... people will become more tolerant of each other. Seriously, how big and bad can America be when the world sees what we watch on t.v. Have you ever sat and thought twice about the idiocy of our programs.

The young who are in touch with these modern means will one day be older, more tolerant, worldly savy people. People are attracted to people. People want to know about other people. When you meet someone new, you ask where they are from and what's it like.

Do you know how porn is revolutionizing the Arab world. Many male acquaintances think American women are crazy, have big breasts, have crazy sex, and they want one for a wife. The world is opening up and no matter how much you want to hide it, globalization and corporate greed hasn't allowed it to. Can you imagine what is going to happen when Chinese people wake up and Unionize?

[furman]

5. Terrorism is a phrase coined for unlawful violence -- like Hezbollah

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=1148

Timeline of Hezbollah Violence

Hezbollah and its history of international terrorism and violence:

1982: Israel invades Lebanon to drive out the PLO’s terrorist army, which had frequently attacked Israel from its informal "state-within-a-state" in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah, a Shiite group inspired by the teachings and revolution of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, is created with the assistance of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The group is called Hezbollah–or "party of God"– after initially taking responsibility for attacks under the name "Islamic Jihad." (Not to be confused with the Palestinian terror organization Islamic Jihad.)

July 19, 1982: The president of the American University in Beirut, Davis S. Dodge, is kidnapped. Hezbollah is believed to be behind this and most of the other 30 Westerners kidnapped over the next ten years.

April 18, 1983: Hezbollah attacks the U.S. embassy in Beirut with a car bomb, killing 63 people, 17 of whom were American citizens.

Oct. 23, 1983: The group attacks U.S. Marine barracks with a truck bomb, killing 241 American military personnel stationed in Beirut as part of a peace-keeping force. A separate attack against the French military compound in Beirut kills 58.

more at http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=1148

[ShortnFiery]

7. Too bad the Traditional and Overwhelming Powers are the

ONLY ones who get to define what is "Lawful" versus "Un-Lawful" violence. :shrug:

IMO it's a way to dismiss your enemy as less than human. For example, we all know that Herr Gonzales considers applying The Geneva Conventions to "UN-lawful Combatants" as quaint.

If the Powers That Rule (Occupy the Area) deem certain groups as *Terrorists* in order for them to remove them from power and start anew. The result is always allowing the Occupier dealing from a position of Absolute Power. :(

Yes, it's good to be Powerful because those who weld the Power choose what's LAWFUL.

However, that still does not make the Ruling Powers actions MORAL and/or Humanitarian in the eyes of The World Community. You can NOT demand that the rest of The World agree with Your Laws, i.e., either those of the mighty USA or Israel. :(

[angstlessk]

9. Exactly, the MOST PROFOUND lesson I ever learned and it was late

in life. "To the victors goes the writing of history". When I heard that it was like someone punched me in the face! I was naive to believe that history was the gathering of facts. I have learned to be VERY skeptical about what I read now and often times google the authors of certain articles to see what their point of view is from past articles.

[MrPrax]

13. Wrong...

Hezbullah didn't become official until Feburary, 1985.

It was some other Shi'ite group that actually identified the bombers of BOTH American and French missions in Lebanon...some of us are old enough to actually live through that episode.

That link is just some Israeli propaganda site -- full of disinformation and revisionism

[bemildred]

14. Originally it was the al Dawa party, back to 1981 I think it was.

I can't find my fave link that lays out the timeline. Internet sources are so unreliable. An example that is also a good read:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=76140

Car bombs began to regularly terrorize Moslem West Beirut in the fall of 1981, apparently as part of an Israeli strategy to evict the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon. The Israeli secret service, the Mossad, had previously employed car bombs in Beirut to assassinate Palestinian leaders (novelist Ghassan Kanfani in July 1972, for example), so no one was especially surprised when evidence emerged that Israel was sponsoring the carnage. According to Middle Eastern schoalr Rashid Khalidi, "A sequence of public confessions by captured drivers made clear these were being utilized by the Israelis and their Phalangist allies to increase the pressure on the PLO to leave."

Journalist Robert Fisk was in Beirut when an "enormous bomb blew a 45-foot-crater in the road and brought down an entire block of apartments. The building collapsed like a concertina, crushing more than 50 of its occupants to death, most of them Shia refugees from southern Lebanon." Several of the car bombers were captured and confessed that the bombs had been rigged by the Shin Bet, the Israeli equivalent of the FBI or the British Special Branch. But if such atrocities were designed to drive a wedge of terror between the PLO and Lebanese Moslems, they had the inadvertent result (as did the Israeli air force's later cluster-bombing of civilian neighborhoods) of turning the Shias from informal Israeli allies into shrewd and resolute enemies.

The new face of Shiite militancy was Hezbollah, formed in mid-1982 out of an amalgamation of Islamic Amal with other pro-Khomeini groupuscules. Trained and advised by the Iranian Pasdaran in the Bekaa Valley, Hezbollah was both an indigenous resistance movement with deep roots in the Shiite slums of southern Beirut and, at the same time, the long arm of Iran's theocratic revolution. Although some experts espouse alternative theories, Islamic Amal/Hezbollah is usually seen as the author, with Iranian and Syrian assistance, of the devastating attacks on American and French forces in Beirut during 1983. Hezbollah's diabolic innovation was to marry the IRA's ANFO car bombs to the kamikaze -- using suicide drivers to crash truckloads of explosives into the lobbies of embassies and barracks in Beirut, and later into Israeli checkpoints and patrols in southern Lebanon.

[MrPrax]

15. Funny story about Dawa...

Fisk as well as Cole revisited this bit of history because of the Iraqi connection:

"...The US Congress, aside from a strange inability to recognize the disproportionate use of force when it sees it, does not seem to realize that the Dawa Party of Iraq, from which Nuri al-Maliki hails, is a revolutionary Shiite religious party not that much different from the Lebanese Hizbullah.

The members of Congress also don't seem to realize that the Iraqi Dawa helped to form the Lebanese Hizbullah back in the early 1980s. The Dawa was in exile in Tehran, Damascus and Beirut and it formed a shadowy terror wing called, generically, Islamic Jihad. The IJ cell of the Dawa attacked the US and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983, in an operation probably directed by the Tehran branch, which was close to Khomeini.

My understanding is that Nuri al-Maliki was the bureau chief of the Dawa cell in Damascus in the 1980s. He must have been closely involved with the Iraqi Dawa in Beirut, which in turn was intimately involved in Hizbullah. I am not saying he himself did anything wrong. I don't know what he was doing in specific, other than trying to overthrow Saddam, which was heroic. But, did they really think he was going to condemn Hizbullah and take Israel's side?

...

Things have changed, and I am not at all suggesting that a vindictive attitude is appropriate, but Dawa has a background as a terrorist organization. While in Tehran, it spun off a shadowy set of special ops units generically called "Islamic Jihad," which operated in places like Kuwait and Lebanon. The Dawa's Islamic Jihad appears to have been at the nexus of splinter groups that later, in 1982, began to coalesce into Hezbollah (the 1983 truck bombing of US Marines is often blamed on "Hezbollah," but that organization barely existed then.) The current al-Dawa leadership repudiates these anti-West actions, and blames them on cells of al-Dawa temporarily taken over by Iranian elements.

Informed Comment

Best I understand it, then as now, the number suspects in the Beirut bombings was the Iranians and settled logic at the time from the experts was al Dawa, a clearinghouse for Iranian aligned, Islamic Jihadist whatevers -- they liked blowing up Lebanese Christians as well as moderate Arabs.

Iran had to retract it's support to these groups including the Hezbullah when Saddam's Iraq attacked Iran and so Iran needed their little revoluntionary foots soldiers scumbags closer to the homeland fight. So Hezbullah without that direct control simply became a more nationalist type of group primarily dedicated to resisting Israeli occupation and over time has very little to do with the grand schemes of some of the Iranian fundie jerks.

[cool user name]

2. Kicking ... n/t

[maalak]

3. and launching 4000+ rockets at civilians isn't a terrorist act....

right?

[cool user name]

6. Please tell me where I said that.

Or are you arguing with a phantom?

[maalak]

10. relax, meant to reply to the original post.

[furman]

4. This article contradicts itself

In much of the foreign media - in particular among the acrobatic apologists of the Lawrence of Arabia Left - Hezbollah is identified variously as a guerrilla organization, a group of farmer-by-day resistance fighters, a political party and coalition partner in the ruling Lebanese cabinet, or a vast and vital social welfare network for the poorest of Lebanon's citizens.

All of this is true, and the terrorism as well. That is precisely the problem with the facile label. Hezbollah is all of these at once, and thus, no single one of these labels is accurate.

They use terror tactics against Israel, therefore they are a terrorist organization.

Is it a terrorist organization? No. Not because it doesn't engage in terror, but because its real power in the world of radical Islam, Israel-hate and America-hate, comes from this new model of the Islamic super-state.

Hezbollah engages in terror; that makes it a terrorist organization. Plain and simple.

Hezbollah provides social services and is involved politically in order to win "hearts and minds" and deliver their propaganda.
Their mission calls for the destruction of the State of Israel and the rise of a fundamentalist Islamic state in the region.

Hezbollah has been in clear violation of UN Resolution 1559 that calls for their disarmament.
Even now they say they will not disarm but simply hide their weapons.
Do you really think this will appease Israel? Of course not.

[ShortnFiery]

8. But Israel's bombing of Lebanon's Infrastructure and areas

where there were a high population of innocent civilians is also A War Crime, but of the "state sponsored" variety.

No, Israel will not be punished because it welds all the power. However, it will take millions to clear up the Oil Spill off the coast. Did Israel have to bomb that installation? As a consequence, wildlife and fishermen will suffer.

Did Israel have to bomb the power plants and the bridges? That was also against international law.

No one is innocent, but Israel will not ever admit to promoting State Sponsored Terrorism albeit a large percentage of The World believes that to be true. :(

[maalak]

11. so many experts on "International Law"....

one has to wonder why they aren't out prosecuting Israel, while most of the people who actually do know about the laws don't seem to think they have a case.

Hezbollah has spent years ingraining itself into the civilian fabric and infrastructure... in waging war on Israel, they made any and all installations that enable Hezbollah to conduct it's attacks a target. Israel even went so far as to provide advance notice of where it was going to strike... how much advance notice did Hezbollah provide in launching it's 4000+ rockets?

if Hezbollah had disarmed.. you know, as they were supposed according to the original agreement so many years ago... then NONE of this would have happened.

[Marrak]

16. [i] if Hezbollah had disarmed [i]

"...you know, as they were supposed according to the original agreement so many years ago... then NONE of this would have happened."

Dang...why didn't they think of that?:think:

[bemildred]

12. Odd piece.

Historically speaking, he makes some bizarre statements, my favorite being:

"For the first time since Islam lost Spain, radical Islamists have begun to believe that the caliphate can be restored",

wherein he speaks for all "radical islamists" since the prophet, apparently, and pontificates on what they each and all have believed or do believe. It would seem like an article of faith with all "radical islamists" that the caliphate can be restored, and not something newly come to belief.

What he means, I think, is that recent events have got the "radical islamists" hopes up about near term success.

There are a number of other such broad assertions that he makes, all apparently pulled out of thin air.

On the other hand, I agree completely with the main thrust of his argument, and I think he states it well. You can't make peace if you are unwilling to talk, and terrorists are just wantabe statesmen that have not yet convinced their peers in the sovereign use of force that it would be more expedient to work with them than to try to wipe them out.