I am here to glorify the resistance, Hezbollah. I am here to glorify the leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah

The title of this post is taken from a speech George Galloway made at a demonstration at the weekend against the war in Lebanon - or, rather, against the Israeli side in that war. Until today, I have had almost no web access for a week, so didn't know about this.

We are living in a time when the Guardian allows Hezbollah scum op-ed space. The groups who dominate the Stop the War coalition are Islamofascist fellow travellers. Look at the grotsquely anti-semitic and pro-terrorist placards from the demonstrations here and here.

The worst offenders:

1. George Galloway, newly bearded vaguely socialist "MP"Galloway calls Hezbollah, along with Iran theocracy, the "resistance". This discourse, of terrorism as resistance, is what links the moonbat white left with political Islam.

Listen to his speech at "anti-war" site deutsche. Listen to the crowds go wild, particularly when he says he wishes more of the leaders of the Arab world were like Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. Gene: "This wasn't an antiwar rally; it was a pro-fascist rally."
Adele says one "cannot find a single word that could describe the grotesque beast of nature that is George Galloway". I can think of lots of words, mostly with four letters.

2. The Socialist Workers Party, "Marxist" fringe cult

The SWP also glorify Hezbollah using the discourse of "resistance". Harry: "'Socialist Worker' also gives the game away when it approvingly refers this week to Hezbollah as being part of an "arc of resistance stretching through Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine." Think about what that means for a minute." Gene analyzes this use of the word "resistance" here.

In a "fact" sheet about the conflict, the SWP say:
The US and Israel claim that Hizbollah is a “terrorist” group. In fact Hizbollah is a Shia Muslim resistance movement that grew out of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the early 1980s.
The resistance spearheaded by Hizbollah forced the Israelis out of the country in 2000.
Today it has 23 MPs and provides a rudimentary welfare network running schools and health centres.
Hizbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah is admired across the Middle East because of his stand against Israel.
And they actually publish Galloway's glorification of terrorism. How far will they go in their appeasement of political Islam, as Pete Radcliffe asks?

See also Daniel here. Lots of video of the demo, by the way, has been posted on YouTube by SWP hack Leninology.

3. The Muslim Association of Britain

Here is Voltaire's Priest at Shiraz Socialist on MAB leader Azzam Tamimi:
Azzam Tamimi, speaking at a meeting of the UK's largest "peace" movement, the Stop the War Coalition:

"Israel cannot exist in peace with anyone. Israel, the Zionist entity, is made of evil."

For some more utterances from this Great Man Of Peace, watch and listen here. Note the loud cheering from assembled "peaceniks". Who presumably have forgotten what the word "peace" actually means.

You know, I dig my heels in and argue with people like the Eustonites (and Jim!) who think that the UK anti-war movement is a sick joke. After listening to and seeing that godawful spectacle, I wonder why I bother.
See also Gene.

4. Yvonne Stockholm Syndrome Ridley, blonde, hijab-clad "journalist" who converted to Islam after being held hostage by the Taleban

Yvonne Ridley is another Respect leader who exemplifies the disease eating at liberal Britain. Here is her homage to Basayev, one of the most viscious terrorist thugs of our time, a Chechen Wahhabi death cultist. Again, the discourse of "resistance: "Basaev led an admirable struggle to bring independence to Chechnya and resorted to targetting Russian civilians in the latter years of his struggle to try and bring the plight of the Chechen struggle to the wider world." (Via Wardy.) And here she is attacking pop music. How can a party that claims to be socialist have someone like this as a candidate and spokesperson?


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While I'm on a kind of Lebanon tip, here are two good posts from Simply Jews: The mask is coming off and An open letter to the Lebanese bloggers. Here's statement by the Workers Advice Centre in Israel.

And, finally, just to repeat the point I made yesterday that, however wrong Israel's way of waging this war, Hizbollah are not an "anonymous guerrilla movement" as Voltaire's Priest thinks. They are the region's third most effective military force, a heavily organised army. On this issue, also read "Context overlooked" at Never Trust a Hippy.




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Comments

Of course Hizbollah are a guerilla movement. They're a guerilla army (what else would you call them? they're clearly not a conventional army, are they?), tied to a political party.

Ergo, guerilla movement.
bob said…
OK, I think maybe I was wrong. Hezbollah is not an army, but the military wing of a political movement - or, rather, a poltical party that is part of a wider movement. It is not a conventional army, but a guerrilla army, although more heavily armed than most guerrilla armies, and with access to much more sophisticated technology. This is why it is important to think of it as a serious military force - and not a ragtag bunch of amateur rebels, or a grassroots movement, as lots of left commentators think it is. In other words, it is a guerrilla movement, but it is not *just* a guerrilla movement. And certainly not a "resistance" movement.
Anonymous said…
On April 9, 1948, members of the underground Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, or IZL, led by Menachem Begin, who was to become the Israeli prime minister in 1977, entered the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacred 250 men, women, children and the elderly, and stuffed many of the bodies down wells. There were also reports of rapes and mutilations. The Irgun was joined by the Jewish terrorist group, the Stern Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir, who subsequently succeeded Begin as prime minister of Israel in the early '80s, and also by the Haganah, the militia under the control of David Ben Gurian. The Irgun, the Stern Gang and the Haganah later joined to form the Israeli Defense Force. Their tactics have not changed.

The massacre at Deir Yassin was widely publicized by the terrorists and the numerous heaped corpses displayed to the media. In Jaffe, which was at the time 98 percent Arab, as well as in other Arab communities, speaker trucks drove through the streets warning the population to flee and threatening another Deir Yassin. Begin said at the time, "We created terror among the Arabs and all the villages around. In one blow, we changed the strategic situation."

From about 1938 on to the founding of Israel, Begin was the leader of the Irgun. That group regularly assassinated English soldiers in Palestine and frequently hung their booby-trapped bodies in public places. Under Begin, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 97 British civil servants. The Stern Gang, under Shamir, also assassinated the U.N. representative to Palestine, Count Bernadotte, in 1948.

But Deir Yassin was not the only massacre by the Israeli Defense Force. That army, under Moshe Dayan, took the unarmed and undefended village of al-Dawazyma, located in the Hebron hills, massacred 80 to 100 of its residents, and threw their bodies into pits. "The children were killed by breaking their heads with sticks ... The remaining Arabs were then sealed in houses, as the village was systematically razed ..." (Nur Masalha, The Historical Roots of the Palestinian Refugee Question).

We read further. According to Yitzhak Rabin's biography:

We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Alon repeated his question: "What is to be done with the population?" BG waved his hand in a gesture, which said: Drive them out! ... I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.
bob said…
Not sure what Caledonia's point is in pasting text from William Martin's Counterpunch article (widely reproduced on neo-Nazi/Holocaust denial websites). Presumably, by making the (correct) observation that terrorist gangs were involved in the creation of the state of Israel - and indeed later led the state - anti-Israeli terrorism isn't so bad after all.

I believe the Stern gang and Irgun visciously killed hundreds of innocent people. But that doesn't make me feel any differently about the - much more highly militarised, much more technologically capable, much more strategically sophisticated - fascist paramilitaries of Hezbollah.

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