{"id":549,"date":"2008-02-15T11:48:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-15T16:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sandbox.blog-city.com\/imad_mughniyah_who.htm"},"modified":"2008-02-15T11:48:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-15T16:48:00","slug":"imad-who","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/2008\/02\/imad-who\/","title":{"rendered":"Imad who?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Hezbollah\u2019s official funeral of Imad Mughniyah unfolded yesterday\u2014Hezbollah\u2019s leader eulogizied him over a coffin decked in Hezbollah\u2019s flag\u2014it was useful to recall the party\u2019s denial of his very existence over all these many years. Mention of his name to Hezbollah officials would draw a blank stare or blanket denial. \u201cHezbollah professes no knowledge of the man,\u201d the New York Times<\/em> reported<\/a> in 2002. A journalist who interviewed<\/a> a top Hezbollah official and parliamentary deputy, Abdullah Kassir, once asked him if he knew Mughniyah. \u201cKassir flashed a blistering look and responded curtly, \u2018I have no answer.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Hezbollah\u2019s leader, Hasan Nasrallah, followed a double tack: he would defend \u201cfreedom fighter\u201d Mughniyah, but not acknowledge him. \u201cThe American accusations against Mughnieh are mere accusations,\u201d he was quoted<\/a> as saying. \u201cCan they provide evidence to condemn Imad Mughnieh? They launch accusations as if they are given facts.\u201d But when pressed, Nasrallah \u201crefused to reveal whether Mughnieh has a role in Hizbullah.\u201d Of course.<\/p>\n

Another American academic wrote this precious paragraph in her book<\/a> on Hezbollah:<\/p>\n

For its part, Hezbollah has consistently denied the existence of any relationship with Mughniyeh, direct or indirect. As a matter of record, from the time of the party\u2019s inception, all Hezbollah officials have emphatically denied ever knowing a person by the name of <\/em>Imad Mughniyeh. The apparent avoidance of this issue is clear in an answer to a recent question about the party\u2019s relationship with Mughniyeh. The response of a Hezbollah senior official was that Mughniyeh had never held a position in their organization, and was, in Deputy Secretary General Naim al-Qassim\u2019s words, \u2018only a name\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The same author then spends a few embarrassing pages agonizing over this question: \u201cWas Mughniyeh a member of Hezbollah?\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that Nasrallah\u2019s eulogy has placed Mughniyah officially in the pantheon of Hezbollah\u2019s greatest martyrs (with Abbas al-Musawi and Raghib Harb), this question looks absurd. That it ever arose is a testament to the discipline of Hezbollah in sticking to lies that serve its interests. One of its paramount interests is concealing from scrutiny that apparatus of terror that Mughniyah spent his life building. Hiding the clandestine branch protects it from Hezbollah\u2019s enemies, and makes it easier to sell the movement to useful idiots in the West, who insist that the movement hasn\u2019t done any terror in years, and maybe never did any at all. They produce statements of such mind-boggling gullibility that one can easily imagine Mughniyah chuckling to himself on reading them. The \u201cliterature\u201d is rife with claims that Mughniyah didn\u2019t really belong to Hezbollah, or he answered to Iran, or he had his own agenda\u2014anything to dissociate his terrorist acts from the party.<\/p>\n

The truth is (and always has been) a simple one. Hezbollah is many things, but it has always included within it a clandestine terrorist branch, and it probably always will. Indeed, Nasrallah\u2019s threat<\/a> in his eulogy\u2014to commence an \u201copen war\u201d with Israel outside the Israel-Lebanon theater\u2014alludes to the \u201cglobal reach\u201d that Mughniyah helped to build.<\/p>\n

If Hezbollah were absolutely determined to distance itself from the terror tag, it wouldn\u2019t have accorded an official send-off to a most-wanted terrorist. Nor would its leader have stood over his coffin and threatened \u201copen war.\u201d Assassinations of terrorists can boomerang, and so might this one. But it\u2019s already had the one merit of exposing the core of Hezbollah that lies deep beneath the schools, the hospitals, and all the other gimmicks<\/a> the party uses to get support and pass in polite company. On page one of the International Herald Tribune<\/em> yesterday, there were photographs of the aftermath of the Beirut bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks (1983), the hijacked TWA Flight 847 (1985), and the ruins of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia (1996). That\u2019s Hezbollah too, and that was Imad Mughniyah\u2014and they were one.<\/p>\n

Update: <\/span>For more reading on “expert” gullibility regarding Mughniyah and Hezbollah, see this chapter-and-verse dissection<\/a> by Tony Badran, and this analysis<\/a> by Michael Young.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Hezbollah\u2019s official funeral of Imad Mughniyah unfolded yesterday\u2014Hezbollah\u2019s leader eulogizied him over a coffin decked in Hezbollah\u2019s flag\u2014it was useful to recall the party\u2019s denial of his very existence over all these many years. Mention of his name to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2256,101311],"class_list":["post-549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-hezbollah","tag-imad-mughniyah"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}