Lebanon’s Anti-Heroes

[bemildred]

Also posted by marmar in Editorials.

“We rely on Hezbollah and these other countries which are helping us now because it’s all we have,” Abu Khalil, an unemployed construction worker injured by bomb shrapnel during last summer’s war in Lebanon told me. As we stood talking in the warm spring sun outside his largely destroyed village of Aita Ech Chaab, a few hundred yards from Lebanon’s southern border, he added, “And we rely on Hezbollah to protect us again from the next Israeli aggression, because our own government cannot and will not do that job.”

In its savage 34-day assault on Lebanon, the Israeli government had hoped to knock down precisely that sentiment. One of the stated aims of the war, in which more than a thousand Lebanese and more than 40 Israelis were killed, was to turn the Lebanese against Hezbollah for having triggered the conflict. An ironic assumption considering that the creation of Hezbollah was a direct response to an earlier Israeli attack.

Formed in 1982 to resist the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah became a political entity in 1985. As a sworn enemy of staunch U.S. ally Israel, it has been labeled a “terrorist organization” by Washington. The sustained propaganda and bellicose posturing of the U.S. government regarding the outfit have kept most Americans ignorant of its true nature and of the fact that a large number of Lebanese are currently aligning with Hezbollah in a bid to thwart the policy of global hegemony being pushed by the Bush administration in Lebanon.

Another irony is that nearly half the members of the massive opposition alliance joining Hezbollah against the U.S.-backed Lebanese government are Christians.

Michel Samaha, a Maronite Christian who was Lebanon’s information minister from 1992 to ’95 and in 2003-04, is among the growing number of Christians, Druse and Sunnis to have joined the Lebanese Shiites in moving Hezbollah toward a democratic government in Lebanon. His reasons, like those of many others, lie in the perception of U.S. policy as being injurious to his country.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070521_hezbollah_lebanons_anti_heroes