The Daily Star yesterday reported on a speech given by Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Qassem.
“Israel is the main enemy,” said Sheikh Naim Qassem. “But the tactical priority depends on the direct threat, so our confrontation with takfiri groups derives from the direct danger they represent, and it does not affect our readiness to confront Israel.”
Qassem gave the speech in a conference organized by the Institute of Wisdom Knowledge as part of the Permanent Conference for Resistance. The institute is a research school close to Hezbollah that specializes in philosophical and religious studies.
Qassem, referring to Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon said that “[a]rmed struggle, on the other hand, had accomplished a unique victory for Lebanon and that “armed resistance” was the proper way to confront Israel. This contradicts a common assumption held prior to Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon that “the militia’s resistance to the presence of the Israel Defense Forces in southern Lebanon will continue until Israel withdraws.” Israel withdrew from Lebanon fourteen years ago and Hezbollah still regards Israel as the “eternal enemy to Lebanon and all Arabs.”
Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explained a possible reason that Hezbollah still fights Israel years after Israel left Lebanon is because it is an “emulation of Hezbollah which existed in Iran.” Badran who was analyzing a different speech of Qassem’s, wrote that Hezbollah was not formed initially to fight Israel’s presence in Lebanon, rather its “genesis is related to the network of Iranian revolutionary cadres, especially those loyal to Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, who were operating in Lebanon in the 1970s.”
Qassem has in the past boasted that Hezbollah would defeat the “takfiri” in Lebanon and highlighted Hezbollah’s ties to Iran. He also has dispelled the false distinction between Hezbollah’s political and military wings, “We don’t have a military wing and a political one; we don’t have Hezbollah on one hand and the resistance party on the other…Every element of Hezbollah, from commanders to members as well as our various capabilities, are in the service of the resistance, and we have nothing but the resistance as a priority.”
Qassem’s statements are a reminder that Hezbollah is not primarily an indigenous Lebanese organization but rather an extension of Iran’s military as Iranian Major General Yahya Rahim-Safavi recently boasted, “that Iran’s strategic defense perimeter has reached the Mediterranean Sea, above the borders of Israel.” Hezbollah’s continued interference in Lebanon’s presidential election is further confirmation that it serves a foreign master.
In Dreaming of a Lebanon at Peace with its Neighbors, published in the July 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine, Michael Totten wrote that for Lebanon to make peace with Israel would “require the destruction or transformation of Hezbollah.” In the March 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine Shai Oseran and Stéphane Cohen of The Israel Project wrote in Don’t Be Fooled. Hezbollah is Bigger and Badder than ever, “Iran is now sitting on Israel’s northern border, making the Iranian nuclear threat a lot more immediate for Israeli decision-makers.”
[Photo: Sebastian Baryli / WikiCommons ]