July 2006

Hezbollah in Lebanon










Hezbollah man in civilian clothes poses for
photographer in Lebanon with a chrome-plated
AK 47 . Background: junk yard tires burn, hit by
artillery round in recent Israel-Hezbollah fighting.

How big is Hezbollah?
Its core consists of several thousand militants and activists, the U.S. government estimates.
What major attacks is Hezbollah responsible for?
Hezbollah and its affiliates have planned or been linked to a lengthy series of terrorist attacks against the United States, Israel, and other Western targets. These attacks include:
a series of kidnappings of Westerners in Lebanon, including several Americans, in the 1980s;
the suicide truck bombings that killed more than 200 U.S. Marines at their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983;
the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, which featured the famous footage of the plane’s pilot leaning out of the cockpit with a gun to his head;
two major 1990s attacks on Jewish targets in Argentina—the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy (killing twenty-nine) and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center (killing ninety-five).
a July 2006 raid on a border post in northern Israel in which two Israeli soldiers were taken captive. The abductions sparked an Israeli military campaign against Lebanon to which Hezbollah responded by firing rockets across the Lebanese border into Israel.

Does Hezbollah play an active role in the Lebanese politics?
Yes. After the 2005 elections, Hezbollah won fourteen seats in the 128-member Lebanese Parliament. In addition, Hezbollah has two ministers in the government, and a third is endorsed by the group.
Hezbollah did not disarm when it entered Lebanese politics, and experts say the group's new political involvement is not an indication that the group is becoming more moderate.

Hezbollah Position on Jews and Judiasm

Hassan Nasrallah has a history of making anti-Semitic statements (e.g. “if they [Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide”^[55]). Despite Nasrallah's remarks, Hezbollah's official Web site marks a distinction between "Zionist ideology" and Judaism. It sees the rejection of Zionism as an attitude hold across "races, religions, and nationalities". It likens Zionism to "the concept of creating 'Israel' by the use of force and violence, by stealing the Arabs’ lands and killing Palestinians". "[O]pposing the Zionists ideology is not opposing setting a home for Jews".^[56] Amal Saad-Ghorayeb a Shiite scholar and Assistant Professor at the Lebanese American University, however, argues that Hezbollah is not anti-Zionist, but actually anti-Jewish. She quotes Hassan Nasrallah as saying, "If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli." Regarding the official public stance of the organization as a whole, she argues that while Hezbollah, "tries to mask its antiJudaism for public-relations reasons..a study of its language, spoken and written, reveals an underlying truth." In her book, "Hezbollah: Politics & Religion," she examines the, anti-Jewish roots of Hezbollah ideology, arguing that, "Hezbollah believes that Jews, by the nature of Judaism, possess fatal character flaws, and that their", "Koranic reading of Jewish history has led its leaders to believe that Jewish theology is evil.^[57] "

In 2004 the Hezbollah-owned television station Al-Manar was banned in France on the grounds that it was inciting racial hatred. The court cited a 23 November broadcast in which a speaker accused Israel of deliberately disseminating AIDS in Arab nations.^[58]

source Wikipedia