PHOTO: REUTERS/SHARIF KARIM
BERLIN – There are a great many reasons whirling
around within European foreign ministries to list Hezbollah as a
terrorist organization. Compelling arguments include the Lebanese
Shi’ite group’s role in supporting the Syrian regime’s murder spree
against its population to the October car bombing of the pro-Western
intelligence director Maj.-Gen. Wissam al-Hassan in Beirut.
From the Israeli perspective, the deeply
ingrained, lethal anti-Semitism of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah
organization provide additional justifications.
“Hezbollah is an openly and
proudly anti-Semitic movement. Indeed, the movement goes out of its way
to stress that its animosity toward Jews does not derive from its
opposition to Zionism,” Dr. Jonathan Spyer told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.
Spyer is a senior research fellow at the Global
Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, and the author of
the highly acclaimed book The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict.
Spyer added that the Hezbollah “movement deputy
leader Naim Qassem said that ‘the history of Jews has proven that,
regardless of the Zionist proposal, they are a people who are evil in
their ideas.’ Nasrallah, meanwhile, has said that ‘God imprinted
blasphemy on the Jews’ hearts.’”
The Jew-hatred of Hezbollah chief Hassan
Nasrallah has drawn condemnations from European capitals over the past
week. In a response to a Post query outlining anti-Jewish quotes from
Nasrallah and Hezbollah, including “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,” the Austrian and Norwegian foreign ministries
rebuked Hezbollah.
“If this is what he [Nasrallah] said, it would
fall into the category of anti-Semitic statements that we strongly
reject,” Kjetil Elsebutangen, a spokesman for the Norwegian Foreign
Ministry, wrote to the Post by email on Saturday.
Alexander Schallenberg, a spokesman for the
Austrian Foreign Ministry, told the Post, “From our perspective,
anti-Semitic statements... are totally unacceptable, regardless from
what corner or personality they come from.”
Hezbollah has transformed — as have most
anti-Semitic movements — its anti-Jewish rhetoric into lethal
anti-Semitism. In an email to the Post on Sunday, Dr. Matthew Levitt, a
senior fellow and director of the Stein Program on Counter-Terrorism and
Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote,
“Hezbollah’s anti-Semitism goes well beyond the offensive remark. It
includes hijacking a plane in Europe and going up and down the aisle
looking for passports with Jewish sounding names (TWA 847) and targeting
expressing Jewish (not Israeli) targets, including the AMIA Jewish
community center in Buenos Aires in 1994.”
Levitt is a leading international expert on Hezbollah and his new book, Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, is slated to be published in 2013.
Spyer, the Israeli expert who has written extensively about Hezbollah and Lebanon, told the Post that
“Hezbollah sees its struggle against the Jews and Israel as a
continuation of Muhammad’s struggle against the Jews of his day,
specifically the Bani Qurayza of the Medina area. As such the movement’s
rallies often invoke the battle of Khaibar, in which Muhammad and his
followers defeated and destroyed this Jewish tribe, executing the
surviving men of the tribe and taking the women and children into
slavery.”
The growing attention to Hezbollah’s
anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial was featured in an expose in late
October on the website Now Lebanon titled: “American ‘leftists’
whitewash Nasrallah.”
Now Lebanon posted a video link to a Nasrallah
speech from 2006, in which he begins by lamenting that “Salman Rushdie
hasn’t been murdered yet” and declares, “A few years ago, a great French
philosopher, Roger Garaudy, wrote a scientific book in which he
discussed the alleged Jewish Holocaust in Germany. He proved that this
Holocaust is a myth. The great French philosopher Roger Garaudy was put
[on] trial... Why? Because freedom of expression extends [only] to the
Jews.”
European countries, both EU members states and
nonmembers, pride themselves – and boast euphorically at times – about
grasping the historical lessons of the eliminatory anti-Semitism between
1933 and 1945 and the indifference that led to the destruction of
European Jewry.
Hezbollah’s lethal anti-Semitism is under way in
Europe. The joint Iran- Hezbollah suicide bombing in Burgas, Bulgaria,
in July, which American and Israeli security sources say caused the
deaths of five Israelis and a Bulgarian bus driver, is one telling
example. The foiled July terror plot in Cyprus involving a man of
Lebanese descent who holds a Swedish passport could have resulted in the
deaths of Israelis and Cypriots.
All of this helps to explain that Hezbollah’s lethal Jew-hatred is a radical force that the EU needs to combat.
The writer is a European affairs correspondent for The Jerusalem Post and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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