Umbilically yours, says Nasrallah to Iran

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
15 June '10

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general, has carefully cultivated a personality cult, a central tenet of which is that his word is always true. However, in a speech on the recent anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Nasrallah engaged in dizzying revisionism as he explained one of Khomeini’s most problematic doctrines: the export of the Islamic Revolution.

It was in itself telling, and natural, that this was the facet of Khomeini’s legacy that Nasrallah chose to emphasize. After all, exporting revolution is what lies behind Hezbollah’s very existence. And yet to hear Nasrallah describe it, Iran’s policy was solely destined to spread universal values – “the values of the great prophets of God,” as he put it – through preaching to the oppressed of the earth, who would then be free to find inspiration in these values or not.

According to Nasrallah, “badly-intentioned people” have sought to distort Khomeini’s position by claiming that he intended to dispatch Revolutionary Guards and volunteers “in order to topple regimes and impose values and ideas.” Nasrallah’s notion that there was a rigid dichotomy between Iranian proselytizing and paramilitary activities was in striking contradiction to what Iran’s constitution itself says.

Take this passage from the document’s preamble: “The Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps [IRGC] … will be responsible not only for guarding and preserving the frontiers of the country, but also for fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad in God’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world (this is in accordance with the Koranic verse, ‘Prepare against them whatever force you are able to muster…’)”.

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