Resisting What In Lebanon?

Eamonn McDonagh
Z-Word Blog
15 October '10

I don’t think many will contradict me if I say that the verb “resist” is usually transitive. That means, for example, that it doesn’t make sense for me to praise “Mike’s resistance” unless I am sure that my interlocutor knows about Mike’s attempts to stop his landlord from evicting him.

I make this statement of the obvious in the context of Ana Carbajosa’s report of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to south Lebanon in El País of Madrid. The story’s subheading reads,

Ahmadinejad praises Hezbollah’s resistance four kilometers from Israeli soil.

In the body of the text Carbajaosa herself speaks of,

Bint Jbeil, the epicenter of Lebanese Shiite resistance.

Nowhere in the text is direct mention made of what Hezbollah is supposed to be resisting so it seems reasonable to assume that the journalist and her newspaper believe that the object of Hezbollah’s resistance is obvious and doesn’t need to be spelled out.

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