Hezbollah is no stranger to takfir

[Originally posted at NOW]

As Sunni jihadists alarm the world, the Party of God seeks to brand itself a bastion of moderate Islam. Nobody should be fooled.

One has to hand it to whoever had the idea for Al-Akhbar’s interview with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah earlier this month. Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri may have nicknamed Saad Hariri “Santa Claus” after his return to Lebanon bearing a billion-dollar gift from Riyadh, but the Future Movement leader’s goateed grin was no match for the jolly beam of the silver-bearded Sayyid at his avuncular best.

He follows the gossip on Facebook. He likes Maradona, and supported Argentina in the World Cup final, which he watched with his son. His favorite dishes include mulukhiyya. When he has time, he watches TV and reads novels or the poems of Khalil Gibran. Who knew the fearsome, black-robed warrior-sheikh from the podium was really just a regular guy like you and me?

The true knight’s move, though, was his mention that he’s been reading a lot lately on “the phenomenon of takfir;” the doctrine of jihadist groups like Islamic State (IS) that holds Muslim opponents guilty of kufr (disbelief), a charge punishable by death. He wants, he says, to understand its “history, causes, and orientations.” We’re invited to picture the bespectacled scholar frowning in puzzlement at strange tracts detailing the arcane teachings, innocently gasping in horror at the thought of fundamentalists using violence to advance sectarian agenda. The whole act would almost be amusing if it weren’t inevitable that many readers, including not a few Western pundits, will have fallen for it (an English translation was also published).

It’s considered terribly crass and indecorous nowadays to bring up the early years of the Party of God, when Christians were “invited” to convert, Shiite women were forcibly veiled and men couldn’t get a drink even in famously convivial Tyre. That period was an aberration, we’re now told; all the fault of the “horrific” then-leader, Subhi Tufayli, and some “crazy” Iranians, as the otherwise supportive Asaad Abu Khalil recently phrased it. That’s all changed, it’s said, under the civilized stewardship of Nasrallah; the party has matured; been tamed; been ‘Lebanonized’ (and its Khomeinist patrons, presumably, are no longer “crazy”).

Very well; let’s not dwell on the kidnapping and murder of Western journalists in Beirut in the 1980s, or the old black-and-white videos of Nasrallah calling for a regional Islamist empire (why does that sound familiar?) or his claim that “He who rejects the authority of the [Iranian Supreme Leader] rejects God […] and is almost a polytheist” (even though Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, in her highly sympathetic 2002 study, Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion, says that sentence “still provides a fair reflection of the party’s conception of the [ideology] today”). The following two examples from within the past 10 years should suffice to show the Party continues to have rather more in common with takfir, and Islamist extremism generally, than its fellow travelers care to acknowledge, and that such differences as exist tend to be, at most, ones of practice rather than principle.

In 2006, as anti-European riots erupted across the region following the publication of cartoons satirizing Islam in a Danish newspaper, Nasrallah took to the podium not to urge his co-religionists against the resort to violence but to say: “If a Muslim had implemented the fatwa of Imam Khomeini regarding the apostate Salman Rushdie, those despicable people would never have dared insult the Messenger of God” [italics added]. That’s to say, if only someone had murdered a British novelist for a work of fiction, artists the world over would be far too intimidated to ever consider satirizing our beliefs again (rather an odd outlook, incidentally, for someone who told Al-Akhbar he was a literature fan). Calling for a “severe” response to the cartoons (and getting his wish: days later, a mob torched the Danish consulate in Beirut and, for good measure, stoned a nearby church), he then went on to restate his belief that the Holocaust was all “fables” (asateer), as “proven” by 9/11 Truther Roger Garaudy.

Forgiving types would no doubt chalk this all up to mere ‘rhetorical posturing’ or some such formulation (as though calls for the heads of civilians were acceptable political currency). But we learn from Rushdie’s 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, that the Party’s Hussein Musawi took the cause, as it were, very seriously at the time, threatening to kill British hostages if the fatwa weren’t carried out and offering to spare one if Rushdie were delivered to Beirut. What’s more, Rushdie was told by British intelligence that Hezbollah operatives were themselves trying to liquidate him as late in the day as 1998. True or not, in any case, the ‘Affair’ is clearly something Nasrallah is unable to let go (he brought it up yet again in 2012).

The second example comes from a year later, when the journalist Thanassis Cambanis was granted permission by Hezbollah to spend a day in the company of their youth branch, the Mahdi Scouts (named, rather suggestively, after the Twelfth Imam, the messianic figure most Shiites believe will one day return from occultation to establish perfect justice worldwide). Describing the guided tour of one of the Scouts’ dozens of camps in his excellent book, A Privilege to Die, he recalls watching children as young as six enjoy activities ranging from puppet reenactments of Nasrallah speeches to Quran memorization to readings from a manual titled “I Obey My Leader.”

“The Mahdi Scouts is charged with building the interior of kids,” as scout chief Bilal Naim told him. Some 60,000 children, Cambanis writes, are thus indoctrinated year-round with Hezbollah’s “unvarnished ideology, beginning with wilayat al-faqih, the concept of absolute clerical rule first implemented by Ayatollah Khomeini.” The program is highly effective, he adds, not just at grooming future generations of fighters, but also at Islamicizing the wider Shiite public from the bottom up: “examples abound” of parents and siblings adopting the ideology acquired by their juniors at the camps.

Of course, Nasrallah’s pose of religious moderation to Al-Akhbar was calculated with Syria in mind; the war next door having at different times dragged the Party in contradictory directions. Early in the conflict, Nasrallah’s speeches could be overtly sectarian, equating Sunnis to the killers of the Imam Hussein at the 680 A.D. Battle of Karbala – the very event that sparked the Sunni-Shiite schism – and, naturally, portraying Shiites as the righteous descendants of the martyr.

But in a landmark February 2013 speech, a new script was born, with Nasrallah suddenly striking an almost neoconservative tone, insisting on the urgency of “confronting terrorism” and warning without a trace of irony that Sunni jihadists in Syria sought “to transform Lebanon into a part of their Islamic state.” This theme, intended to convince the outside world that the pro-Assad camp is the comparatively secular one in Syria, has generally been kept up ever since, though the mask does slip on occasion, like when in a rousing August 2013 appearance Nasrallah thundered, “We are the Shiites of Ali Ibn Abi Talib! […] We are Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamic Party of the Twelfth Imam!”

It will no doubt be argued by ‘realists’ and their kind that the brutality of groups like the IS is orders of magnitude greater than anything done by Hezbollah today – that, whatever its transgressions, the Party doesn’t round up and crucify or behead people, or threaten minority sects with extermination. Which is true enough, even if Hezbollah-trained Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq speak of their desire to ethnically cleanse towns of Sunnis, and even if summary executions and other atrocities committed by Hezbollah in Syria have been documented, as have the killings of opponents at home like Hashem Salman. The point is rather that the very debate over which kind of heavily armed Islamists to prefer over another is a debased and degrading one to begin with. The IS may be the worst of a bad bunch, but it would be a strange sort of ‘moderate’ or ‘progressive’ indeed who would be content with Holocaust-denying totalitarians in their stead.

One year on, no justice for murdered anti-Hezbollah activist

[Originally posted at NOW]

“Our case has been buried,” says brother of late Hashem Salman.

Salman and his fellow student activists were attacked the moment they arrived at the embassy last year (Source: lebanonews.net)

It was a killing in broad daylight, witnessed by dozens of onlookers, including state security forces and members of the local and international press.

Yet one year after student activist Hashem Salman was shot dead outside Beirut’s Iranian embassy during a peaceful demonstration against Hezbollah’s military intervention in Syria, his killers remain free and a spokesman for the agency undertaking the official investigation was unaware that it was even in his colleagues’ hands.

The case file is currently held at an Internal Security Forces (ISF) branch in the southwest Beirut neighborhood of Ouzai, according to lawyers and activists following up on the case with whom NOW spoke. However, when NOW contacted the ISF, the press officer said he knew nothing of it, and suggested contacting the Lebanese Armed Forces instead.

“I don’t know [if there has been any progress]. I don’t have any information about this case,” said Maj. Joseph Msallem. “Maybe the army [is handling it]. You can ask the army if you want and if you want also to pursue this case you can send a fax to me.” Subsequent requests for information sent to both the ISF and the army went unanswered.

NOW also made inquiries with the Iranian embassy, which had been asked at the time by then-President Michel Suleiman to assist in the investigation. A spokesperson told NOW Monday the embassy had no involvement in the investigation, and no information about it.

For the family of Salman, these are distressing indications that officials are either unwilling or unable – or both – to do anything to bring his killers to justice. “Our case has been buried, and nobody is helping us,” Hashem Salman’s brother Hassan told NOW Monday. “We’ve been left alone. Even the media [ignored] us. Nobody is investigating.”

This is despite persistent and repeated efforts by the family to press officials to move things forward, said Hassan.

“I personally met with everybody. I met with the president. I met with the ministers of justice and interior, in the current cabinet and the previous one. And I met with a lot of politicians. And they all just tell you, ‘We’re going to work on this, we’re not going to leave it,’ but in reality, nothing’s been done. Nothing at all,” he told NOW.

Compounding the family’s grief is, Hassan says, the abundance of evidence available implicating Iran’s principal Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, in the crime. At the time, a Reuters correspondent reported witnessing armed Hezbollah members firing on the demonstrators.

“This case doesn’t need investigation at all,” said Hassan. “They have the pictures of all the killers that were there, and they know to which militia they belong […] It’s the only case, of all the assassinations that happened since [former Prime Minister] Rafiq Hariri’s, that is very clear, with a lot of evidence and witnesses […] My brother was killed by the Iranian militia [i.e. Hezbollah] and it’s very clear, there’s no doubt about it.” Hezbollah has a longstanding policy of not commenting to most media outlets, including NOW.

Consequently, Hassan sees two key reasons why the case has been shelved. The first is that Hezbollah’s influence over the relevant state institutions, backed by its paramilitary muscle, is simply too powerful to overcome.

“Nobody is allowed to come near the Iranian militia. Who’s going to go to them and tell them, ‘Give us the murderers’? No one’s got the balls,” he told NOW.

The second, he believes, is that the anti-Hezbollah March 14 coalition has privately agreed to drop Hashem’s case in return for concessions from its pro-Hezbollah March 8 rivals, with whom it now shares a cabinet.

“There are deals under the table between politicians from March 14 and March 8 – you cover your eyes for this case, we cover our eyes for that case. You give us this, we give you that. This is how it’s working,” said Hassan.

Despite the long odds against them, Hassan says he and his family will continue their fight for justice, starting with a press conference Tuesday to highlight photographic and other evidence they have compiled.

“We’re not going to [abandon] the blood of our Hashem. It’s our blood, [and] we won’t sell it. Because lots of the politicians in Lebanon are buying and selling. They don’t believe in real freedom, they don’t believe in justice, they don’t believe in human rights and our right to be free. We adore freedom. Hashem adored freedom. Hashem died for freedom.”

“The case of Hashem is the case for all free people in the world, not only in Lebanon.”

How it happened

- On Sunday, 9 June, 2013, a small group of unarmed students arrived by bus to the Iranian embassy in Bir Hassan, southwest Beirut, where the interior ministry had given them permission to hold a demonstration calling for the withdrawal of Hezbollah fighters from Syria.

- As soon as the students disembarked, “men with handguns and dressed in black with the yellow arm-bands of Hezbollah” approached and began assaulting them with batons, according to a Reuters reporter at the scene.

- Moments later, according to the same Reuters report, “The gunmen drew their weapons and fired. Several protestors were hit.”

- The leader of the student group, Hashem Salman, was among those shot “in front of the Internal Security [Forces], in front of the Lebanese army,” said his brother, Hassan. According to multiple eyewitnesses, the Hezbollah forces prevented anyone from taking the severely wounded, but then still alive, Hashem to get medical care. “Nobody was allowed to help Hashem, nobody was allowed to take him to the hospital,” said Hassan. He died shortly afterward.

- The following day, Hezbollah officials refused to allow Salman’s body to be buried in the public cemetery in his south Lebanese home town of Adloun, compelling them to bury him on private land instead.

Myra Abdallah contributed reporting.

Don't fall for Rouhani's crude deception

[Originally posted at NOW]

It’s incredible how little it takes for otherwise rational people to give dictatorships the benefit of the doubt, and to rapidly un-learn facts they’ve spent years acquiring. To judge by the credulity of some reactions to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s recent charm offensive, culminating in his op-ed in today’s Washington Post, the cleric is only one step away from flying to Tel Aviv and singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in a gay bar.

If you thought Putin’s musings in the NYT last week were gut-twistingly hypocritical, you’ve seen nothing yet. Perhaps encouraged by how easy his comrade made it look, Rouhani allows himself to pontificate on Syria as though he were the president of, say, East Timor, rather than the primary state sponsor of the regime that has annihilated the country and its people.

He laments the “challenges” of “terrorism, extremism, [and] foreign military interference” that plague the world, and their association with “hard power and the use of brute force.” He tells us that, “Sadly, unilateralism often continues to overshadow constructive approaches” to global crises. “Militant extremists continue to wreak havoc,” he regrets, including in Syria, “a jewel of civilization, [which] has become the scene of heartbreaking violence, including chemical weapons attacks, which we strongly condemn.” He goes on to ask everyone to “join hands to constructively work toward national dialogue” in order that the “peoples of the region can decide their own fates.”

Before anyone pulls out their acoustic guitar for a fireside Kumbaya chorus, let’s remind ourselves about some of that “hard power” and “brute force” on the ground in Syria today.

As a brilliant Wall Street Journal report documented just four days ago, citing senior Iranian military sources including Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) members, Iran has taken its direct (and rather “unilateral”) intervention in Syria to unprecedented levels in recent weeks, rigorously training co-religionists from all over the Arab world in Tehran before sending them to fight what it tells them is an “epic battle for Shiite Islam” alongside its own nationals on Syrian soil itself. The very same Guards leaders who engineered the 2009 steamrolling of the ‘Green Movement’ have now been handed the Syrian file, and are controlling not just the Lebanese Hezbollah and various Iraqi militias, but a significant portion of the Syrian army itself – an IRGC commander was recently filmed in Aleppo stating that he’d been in charge of certain regime units for over a year and a half now. This is of course in addition to Tehran’s central role in building the 100,000-strong paramilitary “National Defense Force,” modeled on its own Basij, and the $4.6bn it has offered Assad in credit this year alone.

Speaking of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Khomeinists have only bolstered their presence in Syria since driving the opposition out of Qusayr and Homs. “Today, Hezbollah independently runs Qusayr,” says the WSJ. “The Lebanese militia has established an operations base in the town’s northern section that is off-limits to most Syrian civilians.” (The Party of God, needless to add, remains quite happy with the language of force inside Lebanon itself; repeatedly threatening war if the cabinet formation doesn’t meet its expectations, and gunning down Hashem Salman, a 28-year-old student, during a peaceful demonstration outside Beirut’s Iranian embassy in June.)

As for the crocodile tears over last month’s chemical weapons attacks, Rouhani (like Putin) only condemns them because he says the rebels were responsible for them (which recent Human Rights Watch analysis, based on the UN’s findings, shows is quite impossible).

In other words, whatever rhetorical yarns Rouhani spins at the UN General Assembly next week (to which he is cannily bringing along Iran’s only Jewish MP), Tehran’s actual policy will continue to follow the ethos embodied in the words of the IRGC’s Quds Force leader, Qasem Soleimani: “Syria is the front line of resistance. We will support Syria to the end.”

Embassy killing may herald hardened Hezbollah stance

[Originally posted at NOW]

Analysts fear new threats to freedom of expression after the Sunday killing of a peaceful student demonstrator.

Were it not for the young man in the bulletproof vest, leaning confidently on the butt of his AK-47 under the awning by the entrance, the La Diva building would have looked no different than any other apartment block in the elegant Mar Taqla neighborhood of Hazmiyeh, overlooking Beirut and the Mediterranean from the hills to the south-east.

As it happens, though, the multi-story building is the headquarters of the Lebanese Option (LO) Party, a small Shiite group opposed to the Hezbollah-Amal duopoly that wields almost total political control of Lebanon’s largest religious minority. NOW paid the office a visit Tuesday afternoon during condolences held for Hisham Salman, the 28 year-old head of the party’s student faction who was shot dead by presumed Hezbollah affiliates during a protest Sunday outside Beirut’s Iranian embassy. With reports of further harassment of LO members following the killing, Salman’s comrades were evidently taking few chances on security.

Inside, the walls of a large room on the ground floor had been lined with thick wooden chairs, some of them occupied by solemn men and women dressed in black. The party’s leader, Ahmad al-Assaad, was busy greeting those had come to offer their condolences, so NOW spoke in an adjacent office to Abir al-Assaad, the party’s youth chancellor who is also Ahmad’s wife.

“It was a peaceful demonstration, to oppose the decision to involve Hezbollah in Syria’s battles,” she told NOW. “We never imagined it would be dangerous, we had full permission from the interior ministry and notified them five days in advance. We thought this was Lebanon, we are allowed to say whatever we want.”

Instead, according to an LO statement as well as eyewitness accounts, the demonstrators had scarcely alighted from the bus on which they arrived before they were confronted by dozens of men wearing black shirts and yellow armbands, who beat them with batons and then fired on them. Salman was shot in the back, legs, and stomach, dying shortly afterward.

Though the identities of the gunmen have not been confirmed, they are widely believed to be affiliated with Hezbollah, the militia-cum-party with strong political, ideological, and financial ties to Tehran. Dr. Imad Salamey, professor of political science at the Lebanese American University, pointed to the fact that Hezbollah prevented Salman’s body from being buried in his hometown’s cemetery as further evidence implicating the Party in his death. Both the Hezbollah press spokesperson and the Iranian embassy declined to comment on the incident to NOW.

“They can only be those opposing our beliefs, which means either Hezbollah or the Iranian Revolutionary Guards,” said al-Assaad. “Whether they were Hezbollah members or just ‘supporters’ is irrelevant to us, the effect is the same.”

One of several unusual features of the story is that recent months have seen Hezbollah exercise notable restraint against Lebanese critics, some of whom – such as Sidonian Salafist Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir – have been far more physically provocative than the nonviolent, relatively obscure LO.

“Maybe it’s because we are Shiites,” said al-Assaad when NOW asked why the response had been so singularly violent in this case. “It’s forbidden to be a liberal Shiite who opposes the Party of God.”

“Or maybe the Iranian embassy is a holy site,” she jokes, alluding to Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria on the pretext of defending the Sayyida Zeinab shrine in Damascus.

Indeed, the Party’s unprecedented decision to send thousands of fighters to the inter-Arab war next door – and the hundreds of casualties incurred as a result – may be compelling it to take a firmer stance against internal dissent, according to Salamey.

“There’s blood on the ground,” he told NOW. “Hezbollah has lost a lot of people, and tensions are running high. They feel they’re in an existential struggle, in which they either live or die. So whoever opposes them now is being portrayed as part of the conspiracy against them, in which case justifying their extermination becomes easy.”

Accordingly, Salman’s killing may be a message from Hezbollah that the prior period of restraint with critics is over.

“This is very new for Lebanon, what happened in front of the Iranian embassy. We’ve never seen anything like this before. And it has very strong implications for the right to protest, the right to peaceful assembly. It’s the first time we see such a violent reaction to people voicing their views toward a particular policy.”

“This is the political culture sponsored by the Iranian brand of theocracy. What happened in Iran in 2009 is now being carried out by Iran’s supporters in Lebanon.”

Maya Gebeily and Yara Chehayed contributed reporting.