Updated March 25:
We've heard quite a bit in the Western press lately about how Imad Mughniyeh (Hezbollah's top military tactician, killed by a car bomb in Damascus on February 13, apparently by the Mossad) was the most evil man that ever lived. Interestingly, he justified his crimes by saying he was just doing to the enemy what they were doing to his people.
US forces were supporting the Lebanese Christian Maronite state that, aligned with Israel, was committing massacres of, torturing and imprisoning thousands of Lebanese Shia in Southern Lebanon.
After Israel invaded Lebanon and the Shia started fighting back, Israel arrested thousands of Shia on vague charges of either joining the insurgency or supporting it. They were put in an Israeli prison in Lebanon and beaten there.
After the war got going, the Maronite regime was massacring Lebanese civilians in South Lebanon. The Maronites probably committed more massacres than any other faction in that war, despite Zionist and pro-US propaganda saying they were the good guys. These Maronites were also torturing Shia fighters. The US via its military advisors in Lebanon, was supporting the Maronites and Israelis who were doing this to his people.
Based on that, Mughniyeh saw his people in a state of war with Israel, the Lebanese state and the US. The first two are accepted by everyone, but the last for some reason is not. The US is painted as some kind of innocent bystander in that mess. That's a lie. We went there as peacekeepers, but pretty quickly took the side of Israel and our "peacekeepers" were regularly shelling Shia positions.
Our ships shelled civilian vehicles driving along the coast highway in Lebanon. I'm not cheering on the attacks on our Embassy or the Marines, but Mughniyeh seems to have a point that the US was acting in a de facto enemy role and was thus targeted as an enemy during wartime. Our Marines made themselves an enemy force to the Shia, and the Shia fought back against them and caused some casualties.
Calling Mughniyeh evil and a terrorist on the basis of his wartime actions is the same as calling the Viet Cong evil terrorists for fighting our guys in wartime. There are enemy sides in every war, and people with guns fighting US troops and targets are not de facto evil terrorists. Maybe sometimes they are just enemy forces in wartime.
The US said they had a debt with the guy, because he killed some Americans over 20 years ago. Why does this make him Dr. Evil? The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese killed way more Americans, and I don't see us running around settling accounts with them.
By the same token, Mughniyeh justified his kidnappings of mostly completely innocent Americans in Lebanon on the basis of what the Maronites and Israel was doing to his people. It was wrong to treat the prisoners they way Mughniyeh's men did, but the guys we were supporting were doing the same crap.
The hijacking of the plane in Greece in 1985 and killing of the US airman, Robert Dean Stethem, was pretty bad. So was the capture and killing of a US soldier in Lebanon. As Islamic Jihad (Mughniyeh's group) saw the US (rightly) as wartime enemies, it was acceptable to capture these two US soldiers as POW's, even on an airplane.
Robert Dean Stethem, US Navy diver, taken POW by Mughniyeh on a hijacked airplane and then executed in a war crime, not a terrorist act. It's impossible to commit terrorism against soldiers in wartime.In killing them they killed 2 US POW's. That's a war crime. It's also one that our Lebanese were doing on a regular basis and one the Israelis have been known to do quite often. It was sort of terrorist versus terrorist over there in Lebanon.
Mughniyeh's group also captured the top CIA agent in Lebanon, and killed him. I don't think killing enemy spies in wartime is a war crime or a terrorist act.
The bombing of an Israeli Embassy in far off Argentina was morally dubious and the attack on the Jewish Community Center was simply a horrible terrorist and anti-Semitic act. These two acts took place in the early 1990's.
Mughniyeh was an anti-Semite, and Hezbollah is still an anti-Semitic organization, but anti-Semitism is rife and ubiquitous in the Arab and Muslim World anyway. Hezbollah seem to be moderating their line lately on the Jews, but I am still not happy with it. Hezbollah seems also to be going to much greater lengths to play by the rules of war lately.
This is a typical evolution for an armed group. They start out pretty terrorist a lot of times, but as they get more successful and maybe start playing a role in politics, they get more sensitive to public opinion and start playing by the rules of war more.
Even Hamas declared a unilateral ceasefire as soon as they won the elections in Palestine. They have also kept that captured Israeli soldier alive for months now, and I think he's probably being treated fairly well. That's not only humane; it's also smart, because they want to trade him for Palestinian POW's. 15 years ago, I am afraid Hamas would have killed him.
Mughniyeh's killing has set off some truly regrettable remarks from the Iranians.
President Ahmadinejad said, "World powers have created a black and dirty microbe named the Zionist regime and unleashed it like a savage animal on the nations of the region." Sunday, February 17, General Hassan Firouz-Abadi, commander-in-chief of the Iranian military, said at a ceremony honoring Imad Mughniyeh, “Many millions across the world will soon receive the joyous news of the Zionist entity’s destruction.”
On February 18, head of the Revolutionary Guards Mohammad Ali Jaafari called Israel a “cancerous microbe.”
This is nasty talk, and, let's get honest, it's the language of genocide. That doesn't mean that the Iranians are really going to kill all the Jews in Israel or even lots of them, but I don't like that kind of Hitlerian language. Jews, not to mention Israelis, are paranoid enough, with good reason. No reason to add to it.
Hezbollah are hardly maniacal Islamists out to impose Sharia on Lebanon. That's supposedly their goal, but in recent interviews Nasrallah has toned that down by saying that that's only possible if, say, 80% of the population supports it. As 80% of Lebanon will not support any kind of Sharia in my lifetime, that's a roundabout way of saying that it's not really something they are trying to implement.
Another reason Hezbollah is toning down its program is that it is trying to win support from the non-Shia in Lebanon and also from more secular Shia groups. In the areas Hezbollah controlled in the South, it was not very harsh. Many women went about without headscarves. I think they even allowed alcohol to be sold again in recent years.
The Lebanese state does allow the arrest of homosexuals. In practice, this means men only. Hezbollah arrests men having sex with men in the areas it controls and beats them before turning them over for arrest. That's obviously not ok, but in Palestine and Iraq they are often killed, and in Iran they are beaten. Shia everywhere are not too keen on homosexuality and Sunnis seem to allow a lot more of it. Go figure.
Fadlallah, Hezbollah's spiritual leader, has issued some interesting fatwas. One allowed unmarried women to masturbate to meet their sexual needs. Another told women being beaten by husbands to fight back against them as hard as they could. That seems like nothing to us in the West, but in the context of an Islamist group, that's pretty revolutionary. Hezbollah's fairly progressive Islamism should be applauded as steps in the right direction.
The Shia have always allowed reinterpretation of Islam to meet the changing needs of the times. This is one reason that Sunni hardliners despise them as heretics, preferring instead the notion that Islam was codified once and forever 1,150-1,350 years ago in the Salafist version.
The PFLP site carried a eulogy for Mughniyeh that surprised me. A PFLP delegation visited Hezbollah in Lebanon to pay their respects to Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh's hands were pretty dirty, but in this fight I guess our guys need all the fighters they can get.
This is a cool graphic of George Habash, head of the PFLP who died recently, from the PFLP English site. It's nice that they finally got the English site up and running. For a long time, only the Arabic site was working, and that leaves me out, except for the pics.The article also carries a graphic that seems to make a hero out of him. As this graphic is exactly the opposite of his portrayal in the West, I'm going to run it, mostly just to make people mad.
Well folks, here it is. Another view of Imad Mughniyeh. Enjoy, or stamp your feet in rage, or whatever.Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
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