|
NewMediaJournal.us
Hizballah was founded by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards, Pasdaran, in 1981. Its military organization responsible for terror operations is part of the Consultative Council (al majliss al Istisharee), which is Hizballah’s supreme command, along with, the organization's legislators, Fatwa clerics, financial executives and political operatives. This "politbureau" of Hizballah oversees the military, security, doctrinal and political actions of the entire apparatus -- there is no structural delineation. Furthermore, the Jihad Council, Hizballah's War Department, which issues the orders for acts of terror, is headed by the Secretary General of the organization, Hassan Nasrallah and includes many of the organization’s "political leaders”: Hashem Safi al Din, Hussein al Khalil, Abbas Ruhani, Ibrahim Aqil, Fuad Shukr, Nabil Kauq and others. Hizballah is not the IRA, which had a clearer delineation between its militia and its military wing, the Sin Fein. Moreover, Lebanon is not Northern Ireland. Yes, British citizens can be easily led to make the comparison by government using the clichés by which most Britons remember the IRA, but the attempt to fool the public will be short lived. The lack of separation between Hizballah’s political and military operations is well documented in public sources. Any suggestion to the contrary is simply ridiculous. If the British government wishes to make that distinction, they will find themselves incapable of answering the most basic questions. Mr. Nasrallah, Hizballah’s secretary general and purported partner in any dialogue, is a la fois the chief political executive of the organization and Hizballah's supreme military commander. How then will meeting Nasrallah be political, when he is the commander in chief of the militia and its security apparatuses? Will diplomats meet with him between 9 and 11 AM when he is a secretary general and avoid him at other hours when he wears his military hat? It simply doesn't make sense. If the British government wishes to engage in talks with a terrorist organization, it must make that case and not obfuscate its true intentions of working with the Hizballah’s political wing. At the end of the day, Hizballah will remain who it is, who it says it is and who it will continue to be: a terrorist organization devoted to Jihad against the West. It is more honest to try to convince the public that time to talk with Hizballah, Iran and Syria, and even perhaps Hamas, has come. It will be more productive to acknowledge that some liberal democracies aren't able to carry the load of a confrontation with the jihadists than to attempt to rewrite history and reality. Even if the British government chooses to engage with Hizballah -- which is certainly a questionable strategy -- they should not do so on the false pretense that there are "two Hizballah’s” just as there were two IRA’s. There are not, and the British people are well aware of that fact. Moreover, any negotiations which are premised on such a mis-characterization of the interlocutor cannot possibly succeed for the British. Hizballah, on the other hand, can and likely will. About Dr. Walid Phares Dr. Walid Phares is the Director of Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, a visiting scholar at the European Foundation for Democracy and the author of the War of Ideas. Dr. Phares was one of the architects of UNSCR 1559. He is also a Professor of Middle East Studies at Florida Atlantic University and a contributing expert to FOX News. Dr. Phares teaches Global Strategies at the National Defense University. He serves as the secretary general of the Transatlantic Parliamentary Group on Counter Terrorism. Professor Phares’ is the author of two critical books on the Islamofascist threat to Western Civilization, "Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against the West  ”
and "The War of Ideas: Jihadism
Against Democracy." |
