In today's New York Times appears a lengthy article which attempts to matter-of-factly describe life in Lebanon for the followers of Hezbollah. The author cannot help using a positive tone to describe what Hezbollah has accomplished in Lebanon:
Hezbollah Seeks to Marshal the Piety of the Young
At a time of religious revival across the Islamic world, intense piety among the young is nothing unusual. But in Lebanon, Hezbollah — the name means the party of God — has marshaled these ambient energies for a highly political project: educating a younger generation to continue its military struggle against Israel. Hezbollah’s battlefield resilience has made it a model for other militant groups across the Middle East, including Hamas. And that success is due, in no small measure, to the party’s extraordinarily comprehensive array of religion-themed youth and recruitment programs.
You must dig deep into Hezbollah's theology to understand that their "military struggle against Israel" should be more properly described as an entire religion organized around a paranoid delusional system. Consider the education of young women, for whom donning the hijab is of paramount importance in entering into the Islamic world of their parents:
Again and again, the girls were told that the hijab was an all-important emblem of Islamic virtue and that it was the secret power that allowed Hezbollah to liberate southern Lebanon. The struggle with Israel, they were told, is the same as the struggle of Shiite Islam’s founding figures, Ali and Hussein, against unjust rulers in their time. [All emphases mine-SW]
The boys have their own version of indoctrination into the tenets of Shia Islam, including their own version of the boy scouts, though few Americans would recognize much overlap in the philosophy of our boy scouts and the Shia scouts:
Another difference from most scout groups lies in the program. Religious and moral instruction — rather than physical activity — occupy the vast bulk of the Mahdi Scouts’ curriculum, and the scout leaders adhere strictly to lessons outlined in books for each age group.
Those books, copies of which were provided to this reporter by a Hezbollah official, show an extraordinary focus on religious themes and a full-time preoccupation with Hezbollah’s military struggle against Israel. The chapter titles, for the 12- to 14-year-old age group, include “Love and Hate in God,” “Know Your Enemy,” “Loyalty to the Leader” and “Facts About Jews.” Jews are described as cruel, corrupt, cowardly and deceitful, and they are called the killers of prophets. The chapter on Jews states that “their Talmud says those outside the Jewish religion are animals.”
In every chapter, the children are required to write down or recite Koranic verses that illustrate the theme in question. They are taught to venerate Ayatollah Khomeini — Iran has been a longtime supporter of Hezbollah, providing it with money, weapons and training — and the leaders of Hezbollah. They are told to hate Israel and to avoid people who are not devout. Questions at the ends of chapters encourage the children to “watch your heart” and “assess your heart” to check wrong impulses and encourage virtuous ones. One note to the instructors reminds them that young scouts are in a sensitive phase of development that should be considered “a launching toward commitment.”
This is a religion devoted to Jew hatred, and just so there is no confusion about their hatred, the one person in the article willing to criticize Hezbollah, after noting that he was being watched, decided that further communication might not be wise and sent the author a note:
After Mr. Sayyed had been talking to a foreign journalist in the coffee shop for more than an hour, a hard-looking young man at a neighboring table began staring at him. Suddenly looking nervous, Mr. Sayyed agreed to continue the conversation on the cafe’s second floor. But he seemed agitated, and later he repeatedly postponed another meeting planned for the next week.
Finally, he sent an apologetic e-mail message explaining that he would not be able to meet again.
“As you know, we live in a war with Israel and America,” he wrote in stumbling English, “and they want to war us (destroy) in all the way.”
The is an explicit connection for Hezbollah between hatred of Isreal, which rests upon anti-Semitism, and hatred of America.
For those who wish to delude themselves that anti-Zionism is distinct from anti-Semitism, feel free; the Muslims of the Middle East suffer from no such confusion. To quote Moshe Yaalon from his extensive article offering A New Strategy for Israel and the Palestinians:
But, as we now know, Arafat never for a moment abandoned his dream of bringing about the elimination of the Jewish state. Under his leadership, the Palestinians supposedly recognized “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security.”5 But they entirely rejected Israel’s Zionist self-definition. In their view, the Jews simply had no right to establish a national homeland in Palestine. Rabin was therefore forced to completely forgo demands for such recognition in the Oslo accords, and settled for Arafat’s commitment to remove the clauses that reject Israel’s right to exist from the Palestinian National Charter. These clauses, however, were never removed.6 Still today, Palestinian speakers—even the most dovish among them—refrain from expressing support for a “two states for two peoples” solution.7 At most, they advocate the establishment of two states between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea: a Palestinian state and a “binational” state—in other words, one without a distinct Jewish identity. This fact emphasizes the extent to which the commonplace view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as centered on a territorial dispute is a misconception. The real tragedy, so far as the Palestinians are concerned, is not the “occupation” of 1967, but rather that of 1948, which brought about the establishment of the State of Israel and turned many of them into refugees. For this reason, they staunchly refuse to renounce the “right of return”—that is, the repatriation of millions of Palestinian refugees to Israel proper—which would lead, they know full well, to the dismembering of the Zionist entity and would be, they believe, the correction of the historical injustice inflicted upon them.
I have written extensively on the damage that anti-Semitism does to the person and culture that becomes infected with the disease. The Palestinians, and much of the Arab world in fact, have devoted themselves to removing the blot upon their existence that is Israel. It is the existence of Jews controlling their own land in the Middle East that is the Nakba, the great catastrophe, for the Arabs. In the 50s and 60s the cries of pushing the Jews into the sea were ubiquitous. They failed but discovered that with better PR (one only threatens to kill Jews in Arabic, never in English) and their new tools of terror, they could blackmail the world and kill Jews with little direct consequences. What they have conspicuously failed to do is focus on building their own civil societies and joining the modern world. The Arabs would rather kill a Jew than build a country. Even today, when Hamas has so utterly failed to build a viable state in Gaza, the majority consistently support terrorist attacks against Israel and Hamas does nothing to control the rain of rockets that they send to Israel daily, despite their faux cease fire.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, Iran, even so called moderate states like Saudi Arabia, and secular states like Egypt, continue to teach the most vile anti-Semitic canards. The long discredited "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" remians a best seller in Turkey and TV shows based on the forgery are yearly productions throught the Middle East. It often seems as if Islam itself depends upon hatred of the Jew. In this way, the Arab world continues to show themselves to be insecure in their faith, with deep seated feelings of inferiority and failure, committed to a theology of death. Until they begin to teach their own children that there is much that is good about life, and that other people are merely people, neither monsters nor demi-Gods, the Arab world will remain trapped in a self-destrucitve spiral which can only end in tragedy.
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