Mick Hartley

Michael J Totten links to an article in Reason Magazine by Michael Young, of Lebanon’s Daily Star, on how the recent funeral of Imad Mughniyeh – eulogised as a martyr and mourned by Hezbollah leaders and tens of thousands of supporters – rather contradicted the line that Hezbollah had previously maintained and that the Western media had dutifully reported, that Mughniyeh was an insignificant figure:

Hezbollah is adept at turning contacts with the party into valuable favors. Writers and scholars, particularly Westerners, who lay claim to Hezbollah sources, are regarded as special for penetrating so closed a society. That’s why their writing is often edited with minimal rigor. Hezbollah always denied everything that was said about Mughniyeh, and few authors (or editors) showed the curiosity to push further than that. The mere fact of getting such a denial was considered an achievement in itself, a sign of rare access, and no one was about to jeopardize that access by calling Hezbollah liars.

Totten relates his own experience of Hezbollah to reinforce the point. Young goes further though:

But there was more here than just manipulation. The Mughniyeh affair highlights a deeper problem long obvious to those who follow Hezbollah: The party, though it is religious, autocratic, and armed to the teeth, often elicits approval from secular, liberal Westerners who otherwise share nothing of its values. This reaction, in its more extreme forms, is reflected in the way many on the far left have embraced Hezbollah’s militancy, but also that of other Islamist groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad—thoroughly undermining their ideological principles in the process.

The primary emotion driving together the far-left and militant Islamists, but also frequently prompting secular liberals to applaud armed Islamic groups as well, is hostility toward the United States, toward Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, and, more broadly, toward what is seen as Western-dominated, capitalist-driven globalization. […]

A bizarre offshoot of this trend has been the left’s elevation of Islamist “resistance” to the level of a fetish. You know something has gone horribly wrong when the writer and academic Norman Finkelstein volunteers to interpret Hezbollah for you, before prefacing his comments with: “I don’t care about Hezbollah as a political organization. I don’t know much about their politics, and anyhow, it’s irrelevant. I don’t live in Lebanon.”

In a recent interview on Lebanese television [here], Finkelstein made it a point of expressing his “solidarity” with Hezbollah, on the grounds that “there is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question.”

It is indeed uncomplicated if you remain mulishly unwilling to move beyond the narrow parameters you’ve set for discussion. But the reality is that Hezbollah is an immensely complicated question in Lebanon, where a majority of people are at a loss about what to do with a heavily armed organization that has no patience for state authority, that refuses to hand its weapons over to the national army, that is advancing an Iranian and Syrian agenda against the legal Lebanese government, and that functions as a secretive Shiite paramilitary militia in a country where sectarian religious assertiveness often leads to conflict. That many Lebanese should have seen Finkelstein praise what they feel is Hezbollah’s most dangerous attributes was surpassed in its capacity to irritate only by the fact that he lectured them on how armed resistance was the sole option against Israel, regardless of the anticipated destruction, “unless you choose to be [Israeli] slaves—and many people here have chosen that.”

But Finkelstein is no worse than Noam Chomsky, or that clutter of “progressive” academics and intellectuals who, at the height of the carnage during the 2006 Lebanon war, signed on to a petition declaring their “conscious support for the Lebanese national resistance,” described resistance as “an intellectual act par excellence” and condemned the Lebanese government for having distanced itself from Hezbollah, even though the party had unnecessarily provoked a devastating Israeli military onslaught that led to the death of over 1,200 people.

This behavior comes full circle especially for the revolutionary fringe on the left, which seems invariably to find its way back to violence. In the same way that Finkelstein can compare Hezbollah admiringly to the Soviet Red Army and the communist resistance during World War II (“it was brutal, it was ruthless”), he sees in resistance a quasi-religious act that brooks no challenge, even from its likely victims. What is so odd in Finkelstein and those like him is that the universalism and humanism at the heart of the left’s view of itself has evaporated, to be replaced by categorical imperatives usually associated with the extreme right: blood; honor; solidarity; and the defense of near-hallowed land.