Our biggest concern

NOW Lebanon
29 April '10
Posted before Shabbat

Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah has had a torrid time of it lately. Hot on the heels of the recent Scud missile scandal, and on the same day that US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a press conference with his Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak that Hezbollah “has far more rockets and missiles than most governments in the world,” came news that an Egyptian court handed down sentences of between six months and 15 years to 26 members of a so-called Hezbollah cell arrested in late 2008 and January 2009. According to the court, the members had been plotting attacks on shipping in the Suez Canal as well as planning to create mayhem on the local tourist industry.

The defendants claimed they had intended to support Hamas in its struggle with Israel in Gaza. That this can be put forward as a defense says much about the perceived legitimacy of Hezbollah and the Iranian-Syrian axis that has used the Israeli struggle to forward its own regional ambitions and create a potentially apocalyptic confrontation with the West.

It is a legitimacy that now appears to transcend borders and national laws. Nasrallah has vowed to free what he called the “honorable fighters”, whose only crime was to take the fight to Israel in support of their Palestinian brothers. Whatever way you spin it, the judicial rulings are yet another example of how Hezbollah’s activities have now developed a genuinely regional scope and threaten to destabilize a part of the world that lives on a permanent hair trigger at the best of times.

Hezbollah wears many hats. On a national level it wears the beret of Resistance, protecting Lebanon’s southern border and restoring dignity in an area where Israel, not to mention the Lebanese state, ran roughshod over their co-religionists for decades. On a regional level, it is no secret that this same military muscle is at the disposal of an Iranian government that is currently involved in a dangerous standoff with the West and Israel. The party is also a useful tool for a Syrian regime that appears to think it can both run with the fox and hunt with the hounds in its negotiations with the West.

(Read full article)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.