The next time you see a bunch of poseur schmucks waving “We are Hezbollah!” signs, please hand them a copy of this editorial posted at NOW Lebanon:
This weekend, while young Arabs were no doubt downloading music from iTunes and wondering how the job interview with the multinational went, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once again bored us by announcing that the 9/11 attacks were a “big lie,” while in Lebanon, on the eve of the national dialogue, his proxy army, Hezbollah, gave the middle finger to Lebanon’s shaky democratic principles by announcing that its weapons, which have apparently tripled in number since the 2006 war with Israel, were non-negotiable.
Tragically, the Arab world is built on suspicion and conspiracy, a paranoia fuelled by one very powerful drug: Israel. Ahmadinejad is a potent peddler of the line that Israeli and US ambitions are inextricably tied, and that a secret Jewish cabal controls Washington and concocts the most outrageous evil to achieve common goals.
The Arabs have learned to blame Israelis or Jews for the many problems facing the world. It is easy and shifts responsibility from our own shoulders onto a more powerful enemy, a giant bogeyman….In Lebanon, the plot takes a more cynical twist. Here, Hezbollah has succeeded in styling itself as the one entity in the last seven decades to successfully stand up to the Zionist enemy, one that it claims poses a permanent threat to Lebanon’s independence and sovereignty. And yet, in its pursuit of standing up to this perceived threat (we say perceived because we do not know what Israel’s military posture would be if Hezbollah did not exist) at the behest of Syria and Iran, Hezbollah tramples on the very sovereignty it claims to protect, while using fear to keep an obedient constituency in check.
No wonder our best and brightest seek jobs abroad. They have spoken. They ache for a bite at life’s cherry. They want respect; they want prosperity and they want security. They won’t find it in a region that still flounders in the swamp of conspiracy and conflict.
