'Jihadiwood' and America's auto-immune disease

 

by Melanie Phillips

 

As the days have passed, it has become ever clearer that the deadly ambush laid by the Lebanese army for the IDF, in which Israeli Lt Col Dov Harari was killed (his funeral is pictured here) along with three Lebanese soldiers and one Lebanese journalist, was a Hezbollah operation.

 

In the Washington Post, Israel’s ambassador to the US Michael Oren wrote:

 

Although the maintenance work was fully coordinated with the U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, and the fatal shot was fired by the nominally independent Lebanese Armed Forces, Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, sent a television crew to film the ambush. He applauded the murder as a ‘heroic confrontation’ and threatened to ‘cut off the arm’ of Lebanon's enemies, ostensibly by firing his Iranian- and Syrian-supplied arsenal of more than 42,000 rockets at Israeli cities and towns.

 

It is hardly surprising that the ambush turns out to have been another staged performance from the Jihadiwood Production Company, since blogger Emet m’Tsiyon reports that the Lebanese ‘village’ of Adeissa, where the ambush took place, is not a functioning village at all but a Hezbollah military stronghold, consisting merely of an elaborate system of bunkers and shooting platforms designed to look like houses...

 

But there is a further surreal twist to the affair. In the Tablet, Yoav Fromer asks whether American arms supplied to the Lebanese army are now being used against Israel. The answer is almost certainly yes.

 

The pictures speak for themselves: Freshly uniformed Lebanese soldiers, armed with U.S.-made M-16s and backed by U.S.-made M113 armored personnel carriers, can be clearly seen firing at Israeli soldiers who are standing on Israeli territory. Given the generous military aid that Lebanon has been receiving from the United States in recent years—aid that included sophisticated sniper rifles of the kind that may have been used to target and kill the Israeli officer, Lt. Col. Dov Harari—one cannot ignore the possibility that the same U.S. weapons intended to help stabilize Lebanon and secure the northern Israeli border may be having the opposite effect.

 

According to the Los Angeles Times, Lebanon is now the second-largest recipient of American military aid per capita after Israel. Yet the evidence strongly suggests it has become a Hezbollah fiefdom. Arming the Lebanese forces therefore means arming Hezbollah. Hezbollah, like its sponsor Iran, regards itself as in a holy war against America and the west. Let us remind ourselves of some of the ways in which Hezbollah has targeted not just Israel but also America over the years (condensed from World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win, by Norman Podhoretz):

 

In April 1983, Hezbollah exploded a truck in front of the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon killing 63 employees, including the Middle East CIA director., and wounding 120.

 

 In October 1983, a Hezbollah suicide bomber blew up an American barracks at Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. Marines in their sleep and wounding another 81.

 

In March 1984, the CIA station chief in Lebanon, William Buckley, was kidnapped by Hezbollah and then murdered.

 

In September 1984, the U.S. Embassy annex near Beirut was hit by yet another truck bomb (also traced to Hezbollah).

 In June 1984, Hezbollah operatives hijacked still another airliner, TWA flight 847. An American naval officer aboard the plane was shot, and his body was hurled onto the tarmac.

 

Oh – and Hezbollah has also been trafficking in drugs on the Mexican border with the US.

 

And so what does the Obama administration say about its arms to Lebanon policy? When asked about this after last weekend’s ambush Philip Crowley, Assistant Secretary at the State Department, replied:

 

This is not the first time we’ve had incidents of this nature. We want to see that they don’t happen again. But we do have interests on both sides of the border. We are committed to Israel’s security, but we’re also committed to Lebanese sovereignty. These interests are not mutual exclusive. They’re not in contradiction.

 

Let us not forget that a major factor behind the Hezbollah/Iranian takeover of Lebanon is that America so shamefully betrayed its nascent democracy movement, when the US failed to press for the indictment of Syria over the murder of Lebanese President Rafik Hariri. As Lee Smith points out in his fine book The Strong Horse, this stopped dead in its tracks the 'Cedar Revolution' in Lebanon and thus in turn the movement for democracy in the wider Middle East, empowering instead Iran and its terrorist proxies.

America appears to have developed the political equivalent of an auto-immune disease – nourishing those who would kill it, while attacking those who are vital to its health.

 

 

Melanie Phillips

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