I have been following the Middle East events through a variety of sources including Al Jazeera English. I know that you need many sources and many of their articles or opinion pieces on Israel are a shambles but by and large I often learn something from the site, whether or not it was what was intended from the point of the article. However, from time to time, they really surprise you, especially on their opinion page.
This opinion piece on Hezbollah and their leader Nasrallah is something that I would have been surprised to see even in Fox News. It is titled “Arab Spring exposes Nasrallah’s Hypocrisy“.
Hezbollah is Iran and Syria’s stalking horse in the middle east, the thugs willing to mix it up and do the dirty work. They cloak themselves in higher minded principles, especially when talking to the US left or the Europeans, about “justice” and the “Palestinian cause”.
Thus this Al Jazeera article, of all places, punches right at the throat of Hezbollah for always crusading against injustice against Arabs and Muslims and yet failing to protest the horrendous slaughter of innocent protestors amongst their patrons Iran and most recently Syria. Hezbollah is funded by Syria and Iran and thus they are obviously changing their tune when their patrons and funding are impacted. From the article:
The Arab Spring, the transnational uprising of masses of millions of people from Morocco to Oman, from Syria to Yemen, is making the aging warrior redundant – his habitually eloquent tongue now stuttering for words. Two years ago, he thought he got away with rejecting the democratic uprising in Iran (whose brutal ruling regime is his principle patron and financier), as a plot by the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. And he did – aided and abetted by the moral and intellectual sclerosis of a segment of Arab intellectuals who thought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Islamic theocracy were the vanguard of “resistance” to US/Israel imperialism in the region and thus should be spared from criticism. And then Tunisia happened, and Egypt, and Libya, and Bahrain, and Yemen – and then, Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei’s nightmare, Syria happened. It is a sad scene to see a once mighty warrior being bypassed by the force of history, and all he can do is to fumble clumsily to reveal he has not learned the art of aging gracefully.
While I wouldn’t call him a once mighty warrior, those words have to sting a lot more coming from Al Jazerra.
Nasrallah, who could not care less for such revolting behavior by his patrons, now for second time in a row, was siding with brutal, vicious tyrants and their criminally insane security forces against the democratic aspirations of their people – once in Iran and now in Syria.
That is pretty direct stuff – I like the “criminally insane security forces” too.
The only language that Hassan Nasrallah understands is the language that keeps him in power, condemning the US, the EU, Israel, and the Saudis – all hitherto truisms that have, thanks to the Green Movement and the Arab Spring, lost their grip on reality even more than Nasrallah.
That is a great paragraph, too. The old “saw” of Israel and the US killing Arabs has to be updated since we obviously aren’t nearly as good at it as those that are willing to use tanks and heavy weaponry on their own people, such as Libya and Syria (and Iran probably would too, if it came down to that).
A very interesting opinion piece so I would recommend reading the entire article.
Hezbollah is an agent of Iran. Al Jazeera is owned by the sheiks who own Qatar. It would be odd if they were friendly to Hezbollah.
Still this is a good opinion piece no matter how you slice it. Even the US right doesn’t carve up Hezbollah like this.
Agreed that it all is damn complex, though. I can’t figure out who is on who’s side anymore.
What will Nasrallah do if Assad falls ? He has lived in Damascus, far from Mossad’s long arm, for a decade.
At the end of the story for power players, it is all about who has ,keeps, or gets the power as it is in the rest of the world. The USA and Israel are no threat to any established player unless they step outside undefined limits as Iraq did with its invasion of Kuwait. No middle east nation really thinks tiny Israel is a serious threat invade them and try to rule them. Israel found even the Gaza strip was much more trouble than it was worth even as a buffer against another arab army. The people have been tricked into supporting these uprisings with the promise that whoever replaces the current power will be better and that they just did not trade one tyrant for another with the same tirades against Christians and Jews. It is not to different from the game of musical chairs with many losers and dwindling numbers of players and what have they won in the end? All of their populations are growing much faster than their economies so their main product is desperate people. This can not end well.
Blaming Arab unrest on poor economic activity is easy to do, but it just isn’t so. It’s that religion that’s to blame. It not only inhibits economic growth and activity, it destroys it. Look at the Gaza Strip and the Sinai under Israeli occupation – they made the deserts bloom. Within a few years of Arab control, it all ended. The Arabs even physically destroyed the greenhouses the Israelis built, all because they in the Arab eyes they were built by the Jews. Didn’t lift a finger to rebuild them, or do anything productive for that matter. Just sat on their behinds and let Arafat whine about their miserable lot in life.
When the world – if EVER the world – admits the truth and faces up to the fact that Islam traps its people in poverty by religious edict then perhaps this vicious circle will be broken. Until then, Israel is a bad example of success by non-Muslims in the midst of Muslim failure.
Hezbollah was created for one thing. It was born of the Israeli occupation and it’s purpose is to resist Israel in any attack.
The rest is politics.