Hezbollah leader Nasrallah defeated ISIS, protected Lebanon’s Christians, fought Israeli colonialism
VIDEO/Geopolitical Economy/Youtube
Syed Hassan Nasrallah (1960-2024)
by IQBAL JASSAT
Resistance Will Stand. Lebanon Will Persist. Israel Will Fall
“He led the Resistance, which will not bend but grow as his memory and example seed a new generation. He fought for his people despite the immense personal cost and was hated by his enemies because he defeated them.
“I saw him speak in Beirut in 2013, a most impressive man and a brilliant strategic thinker. His loss is a blow to Lebanon, but he has taught two generations how to succeed him.
He is drinking now from the fountain of Kawthar.”
The above recollection by Vijay Prashad of Syed Hassen Nasrallah, reminds me of the time my colleagues at MRN and I had to opportunity to meet the revered leader of Hezbollah in Beirut.
It was during 2003 when I had the privilege of being invited by Hezbollah to present a talk on my impressions on the Arab media’s coverage of Palestine at a conference hosted by the group.
The conference which had journalists and media professionals from the region and beyond, was officially opened by the Lebanese President General Emile Lahoud and the keynote address delivered by Nasrallah.
Spread over a number of days, the event culminated with a dinner hosted by Nasrallah, followed up with a visit to the site of the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla, and a trip to South Lebanon and the liberated Khiyam Detention Camp.
Israel’s murderous onslaught of Lebanon which began with its disastrous occupation that lasted for almost two decades, was finally uprooted through the valiant resistance by Hezbollah led by Nasrallah.
Though Israel suffered various defeats at the hands of Hezbollah since then, it is clear that the right-wing racist regime headed by extremist fascists, has failed to heed lessons.
The settler colonial regime’s current military assault on Beirut’s densely populated residential neighborhood of Dahiya, has resulted in horrific slaughter of countless civilians.
Since Friday’s massive air strikes using at least 15 X 5000lb buster bombs to assassinate Nasrallah,
emergency operations continue battling to rescue people trapped in the rubble of the entire block of eight residential buildings housing several hundred civilian families.
Addressing the media shortly after the horrendous bombings, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, not only failed to distance America from the strikes, but shamelessly sought to justify it by repeating the mantra of “Israel’s right to defend itself”.
Without batting an eye, Blinken’s remarks focused entirely on securing the interests of America’s proxy Israel. The language he used as well as the talking points he repeatedly made, come straight out of the Zionist regime’s playbook.
Like his boss Joe Biden, Blinken was unable to provide a rational response to questions about the so-called US/French “Ceasefire” initiative that was presented a week earlier as having been agreed upon by Israel.
Yet Netanyahu shot it down causing huge embarrassment in the state department, but Blinken remained aloof from Israel’s intransigent rebuttal. It confirms that the colonial entity is not only a renegade but a huge liability to its main ally.
As is well known, Israel’s dependence on American arms and ammunition including full political and diplomatic backing, is the main reason for the impunity whereby the Zionist regime behaves like a distempered dog.
While the Friday attack is being claimed by the Polish immigrant Mileikowsky/Netanyahu to have targeted Hizbullah’s operation center, most mainstream media fail to mention that without American arms and ammunition, its client-regime would not be able to reduce residential buildings to dust.
Earlier on Thursday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that the US would continue to provide military aid to Israel, ignoring the idea of “red lines,” even as he warned that an all-out “conflict between Israel and Hezbollah” would be devastating.
Netanyahu and his criminal gang of warlords are fully aware that by being party to a joint US/French agreement and subsequently defying it by pressing ahead with devastating bombings that have killed hundreds in Lebanon, will have no consequences in the White House.
As far as the Biden admin and all previous American governments are concerned, “red lines” are applicable for others, not Israel.
BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen described Western impotency in the face of Israel’s war on Lebanon as “powerless”. And on Blinken’s remarks that there was room for negotiations, Bowen said his assertion is “hollow”.
As Netanyahu continues his mayhem in Gaza, the Occupied West Bank, Syria and Lebanon, I join Prashad and million others who are thinking of their friends and comrades resisting Israel’s illegal attacks:
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Israel’s Nasrallah Assassination – More Horror Beckons w/. Palestinian Analyst Mouin Rabbani
by OWEN JONES
Israel’s cheerleaders are triumphalist about the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah – which involved the mass slaughter of countless Lebanese civilians in Beirut. But what next? We’re joined by brilliant Palestinian-Dutch analyst Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya, on the Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, the risk of regional conflagration, and the root of the current evil – the genocide against Gaza.
Israel’s assassinations can’t kill resistance
by BELEN FERNANDEZ
After assassinating Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah in a devastating air strike on Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighbourhood, the Israeli army took to the platform X to boast triumphantly that Nasrallah would “no longer be able to terrorize the world”.
Granted, the objective observer would be forgiven for failing to detect how it is that Nasrallah is supposedly responsible for terrestrial terror when he is not the one who has been presiding over genocide in the Gaza Strip for nearly a year. Nor, obviously, is he the one who just killed more than 700 people in Lebanon in less than a week.
Israel takes the credit for all of that, just as it takes the credit for pulverising numerous residential buildings and their inhabitants in the quest to kill Nasrallah – as good an example as any of “terrorising the world”.
And while Israel is marketing Nasrallah’s elimination as a decisive blow to the organisation, a brief glance at history reveals that such killings unsurprisingly do nothing to root out resistance and instead intensify it.
Case in point: Abbas al-Musawi, Hezbollah’s co-founder and second secretary-general, was assassinated in 1992 in southern Lebanon by Israeli helicopter gunships, which also killed his wife and five-year-old son. On this occasion, too, Israel was quick to congratulate itself on its bloody feat – yet the celebration was woefully premature. Following al-Musawi’s assassination, Nasrallah was elected secretary-general and went on to turn Hezbollah into a formidable force not just in Lebanon, but throughout the region.
Under his leadership, Hezbollah expelled Israel from Lebanese territory in 2000, thereby putting an end to a brutal 22-year occupation, and successfully fought back during the 34-day war on Lebanon in 2006, dealing the Israeli military humiliating blows.
Meanwhile, Israel’s continuing obsession with killing Hezbollah figures did little to weaken the group. The 2008 joint Mossad-CIA assassination in Syria of Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh, for example, simply propelled the man to ever more mythical status in the Hezbollah Hall of Fame.
Then, of course, there are the myriad assassinations of Palestinian leaders going back decades – none of which have deterred the Palestinians from wanting to, you know, exist.
The Associated Press notes that several leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) were killed in their Beirut apartments in 1973 by Israeli commandos “in a nighttime raid led by Ehud Barak, who later became Israel’s top army commander and prime minister”.
As per the AP report, Barak’s team “killed Kamal Adwan, who was in charge of PLO operations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank; Mohammed Youssef Najjar, a member of the PLO’s executive committee; and Kamal Nasser, a PLO spokesman and charismatic writer and poet”
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Killing Hassan Nasrallah
by BINOY KAMPMARK
The Illusion of a Solution
The ongoing Israeli operation against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group so dominant in Lebanon, is following a standard pattern. Ignore base causes. Ignore context. Target leaders, and target personnel. See matters in conventional terms of civilisational warrior against barbarian despot. Israel, the valiant and bold, fighting the forces of darkness.
The entire blood woven tapestry of the Middle East offers uncomfortable explanations. The region has seen false political boundaries sketched and pronounced by foreign powers, fictional countries proclaimed, and entities brought into being on the pure interests of powers in Europe. These empires produced shoddy cartography in the name of the nation state and plundering self-interest, leaving aside the complexities of ethnic belonging and tribal dispositions. Tragically, such cartographic fictions tended to keep company with crime, dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing and enthusiastic hatreds.
Since October 7, when Hamas flipped the table on Israel’s heralded security apparatus to kill over 1,200 of its citizens and smuggle over 200 hostages into Gaza, historical realities became present with a nasty resonance. While Israel falsely sported its credentials as a peaceful state with dry cleaned democratic credentials ravaged by Islamic barbarians, Hamas had tapped into a vein of history stretching back to 1948. Dispossession, racial segregation, suppression, were all going to be addressed, if only for a moment of vanguardist and cruel violence.
To the north, where Lebanon and Israel share yet another nonsense of a border, October 7 presented a change. Both the Israeli Defence Forces and Hezbollah took to every bloodier jousting. It was a serious affair: 70,000 Israelis displaced to the south; tens of thousands of Lebanese likewise to the north. (The latter are almost never mentioned in the huffed commentaries of the West.)
The Israeli strategy in this latest phase was made all too apparent by the number of military commanders and high-ranking operatives in Hezbollah the IDF has targeted. Added to this the pager-walkie talkie killings as a prelude to a likely ground invasion of Lebanon, it was clear that Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, figured as an exemplary target.
Hezbollah confirmed the death of its leader in a September 27 strike on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh and promised “to continue its jihad in confronting the enemy, supporting Gaza and Palestine, and defending Lebanon and its steadfast and honourable people.” Others killed included Ali Karki, commander of the organisation’s southern front, and various other commanders who had gathered.
Israeli officials have been prematurely thrilled. Like deluded scientists obsessed with eliminating a symptom, they ignore the disease with habitual obsession. “Most of the senior leaders of Hezbollah have been eliminated,” claimed a triumphant Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani.
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called the measure “the most significant strike since the founding of the State of Israel.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated with simplicity that killing Nasrallah was necessary to “changing the balance of power in the region for years to come” and enable displaced Israelis to return to their homes in the north.
Various reports swallowed the Israeli narrative. Reuters, for instance, called the killing “a heavy blow to the Iran-backed group as it reels from an escalating campaign of Israeli attacks.” Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr opined that this “will be a major setback for the organisation.” But the death of a being is never any guarantee for the death of an idea. The body merely offers a period of occupancy. Ideas will be transferred, grow, and proliferate, taking residence in other organisations or entities. The assassinating missile is a poor substitute to addressing the reasons why such an idea came into being.
A dead or mutilated body merely offers assurance that power might have won the day for a moment, a situation offering only brief delight to military strategists and the journalists keeping tabs on the morgue’s latest additions. It is easy, then, to ignore why Hezbollah became a haunting consequence of Israel’s bungling invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Easy to also ignore the 1985 manifesto, with its reference to the organisation’s determination to combat Israel and those it backed, such as the Christian Phalangist allies in the Lebanese Civil War, and to remove the Israeli occupying force.
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