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Hezbollah Designated a Terrorist Organisation -- Three Decades Late
[ENG.MAJALLA] March 2, 2016 was the day that (finally!) heralded official recognition of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization by an important bloc of countries in the Arab World. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—comprised of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman—announced their decision to designate the Shi‘i Lebanese Militia a terrorist group based on Hezbollah’s engagement in “hostile acts” throughout the region and its endangerment of “Arab national security” through arms smuggling, inciting violence, and recruiting terrorists. While the momentum for this decision had been building for some time, it can still be understood as an escalation of the regional rivalry between the Sunni Arab monarchies and their arch-nemesis—Shi‘a Iran.But the real question remains, what took so long for Hezbollah to be revealed as the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing that it has always been? The answers lie in the perfect storm that has emerged in the post-Arab uprisings period in which Iran’s expansive, destabilizing ambitions have gone too far to remain uncontested by the Arab World; Hezbollah pretense of championing the Palestinian cause has been revealed to be a farce; and chaos in the streets from Tunis to Sanaa have led Arab regimes to renew their emphasis on security, and to clamp down on terrorists of all stripes and their funders. There was a time in the Middle East and North Africa that Hezbollah enjoyed approval ratings in the high nineties, and its Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah was seen as Batal al-‘Alam al-‘Arabi (a hero of the Arab World) alongside Saddam Hussein and others. In fact, the organization enjoyed this status as recently as 2006 in the immediate aftermath of its war with Israel. So what happened? It finally became clear to the majority of the Arab World that Hezbollah was not an indigenous socio-political resistance movement dedicated to fighting Israel—a cause that most of the region could rally behind for much of the 20th century—but rather a dangerous Iranian puppet whose ideology, training, funding, materiel, and direction were coming directly from Tehran. Now while the Gulf Monarchies seem to be acutely aware of this reality in light of their ongoing proxy-war with Iran, it has in fact always been apparent. Hezbollah’s 1985 manifesto very clearly pledged loyalty to then Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini , and urged the creation of a greater Islamic State governed by Imam Khomeini, in keeping with his idea of wilayat al-faqih (authority of the jurist-theologian). These sentiments were regularly echoed by Nasrallah himself as early as his undated speech from the late eighties prior to assuming his position as Secretary General of Hezbollah, and as recently as his televised speech at the 2015 Second Annual Conference of Renovation and Intellectual Jurisprudence of Imam Khamenei. Iran has been directing Hezbollah toward these aims since the beginning. For example, during the Fourth Conference on Islamic Thought in Tehran in 1986, several key meetings were held between the Lebanese and Iranian clerics to work on a constitution for the so-called Islamic Republic of Lebanon, modeled on the Iranian constitution. This republic, had it emerged, would have retained local authority, but would ultimately be answerable to Tehran. Posted by: Fred 2016-08-24 |
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