Another "Lebanese and Iraqi Shias resent, are contemptuous of, and will not take dictation from Iranians" Update: "Hizbollah fighter tells Israel he trained in Iran," from the Hizballah News Agency, aka Reuters, with thanks to Nick:
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A Hizbollah fighter captured by Israel has told interrogators he received training in Iran and arrived there on a flight from Syria, a tape of the interrogation released by the Israeli army showed on Monday.During questioning the man also confessed to taking part in the cross-border raid on July 12 in which two Israeli soldiers were captured, the incident which sparked the current conflict.
"We trained in Iran," the man, who gave his name as Mahmoud Ali Suleiman, told the interrogator. "We went from Beirut in civilian cars... to the airport in Damascus."
Suleiman, who gave his age as 22, said between 40 and 50 people went with him for the training, which involved instruction in the use of anti-tank weapons. He didn't say when the training took place or how long it lasted.
Maybe this terrorist-soldier (hard to call him a soldier) will be instrumental in the return of the two Israeli soldiers HE helped capture.
Iran may be next on Israel's list of targets. Go Israel!
Suleiman?
That name sounds familiar. Would that name be something like Hatfield or McCoy only in the jihadi world?
you know, tgusa, i was thinking the same thing. i'd swear i recognize that name from somewhere iraq-related. can't think of the specifics off the top of my head but i'm SURE i recognize that name....
eff
eff -
Perhaps you're thinking of a famous Islamic leader named, Suleiman. He reigned during the Ottoman Empire (1520-1566), and he was the 10th Osmanli Sultan known as "The Lawgiver"; he even has a mosque named after him located in Istanbul -- ring any bells?
eff_Islam,
I wonder if someone at JW could do a search of past articles for that name.
It is good to know that I am on the same page as someone out there. I was starting to think it was my own creepy jihadi paranoia. I see them behind almost everything these days. Better than being blind, deaf or dumb I suppose.
champ,
No champ I know of Suleiman.
It is recent, probably from something I have read here. It “will” come to me, I just don’t know when.
Don't you hate that -- it'll come to you when you aren't trying to figure it out.
An idiot with that Name was the Taliban spokesman in Pakistan. He was from Kuwait. He is in custody.
Ah Hah!
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30C14FC385D0C738FDDA90994DE494D81&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fR%2fReligion%20and%20Belief
I Knew it!
Sorry, wrong number.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9500E1D8173AF93AA15752C0A96E958260
Champ to eff
"..ring any bells? "
No, actually they yodel loudly from a mineret, much to the chagrin of Detroit area residents.
(the bells are for us)
We've heard this idiocy before about differences in the enemy camp. Back in the Viet Nam War years, we were always told how much Ho's people hated the Chinese (the Soviets were supposedly, "good, peac-eloving COmmunists" then)--and were never told how one of Ho Chi Minh's chief lieutenants took the nom-de-guerre Truong Chinh, the Vietnamese form of "Chang Zheng-Long March"; and how Chinese advisors aided Communist North Viet Nam implement collectivization in the 1950's, even presiding over Vietnamese courts that tried and executed "landlords" (anyone who rented a patch of groundto someone else).
I think it is thoroughly clear that Iran has always been backing the Hezb, Amal, and other Lebanese Shi'ite movements. Saying otherwise is just wishful thinking on the part of Westerners.
Ha Ha Ha....I'm glad I live in California!
Kepha,
Since you are talking Vietnam,
How bout the French? After WW2 the French were feeling mighty low. And to bolster their nonexistent self confidence we, the Allies gave them back their former colony of… Yep Vietnam. And what did they do? What do the French always do? Cause trouble as by raping pillaging and generally treating the population, well like the French treat everybody. Ho Chi Min asked for assistance from the then OSS (CIA now) but because of sensitivity to the French plight, having lost their country and all, he was denied. How stupid of us! And we all know the history from there. Could that be the beginning of PC BS?
How much more evidence does Israel require before Israel bombs Syria and Iran into oblivion?????
>>>How much more evidence does Israel require before Israel bombs Syria and Iran into oblivion?????
Posted by: Texican
CAMERA.org | August 7, 2006
Since February 1992, Hassan Nasrallah has headed Lebanon's
Hezbollah (or "Party of God") as Secretary-General of the
Iranian-backed terrorist group, reportedly receiving
$100-200 million of funding from Iran and other supporters
in the Arab world.
Nasrallah is virulently opposed to recognizing the
legitimacy of Israel, terming the country a "cancerous
entity" of "ultimate evil" whose "annihilation ... is a
definite matter." As leader of Hezbollah, he has used its
resources to foment violence in the region by inciting,
supporting, and funding terrorist attacks on Israel, both by
Hezbollah and Hamas.
Nasrallah's Background
In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Nasrallah
revealed his early ambition:
Ever since I was 9 years old, I had plans for the
day when I would start doing this this .... When I was 10 or
11 [I would say] that I'm a cleric, you need to pray behind
me. (July 16, 2006)
Religion seems to have shaped the 46 year old Shiite
cleric's life. Nasrallah, who claims to be a descendant of
the Muslim prophet Mohammed and whose name means "victory of
God," was born in 1960 in Beirut to parents of modest means.
The eldest of nine children, Nasrallah was fascinated by the
Koran from an early age. When civil war broke out in Beirut
in 1975, the 15-year-old and his family were forced to move
to south to Bassouriyeh, Lebanon. There he met the the
religious leader Moussa Al Sadr and joined his Amal
movement, a Shiite militia in south Lebanon. At sixteen,
Nasrallah traveled to Najaf, Iraq to continue his study of
Islam. He became the protégé of Sheikh Abbas Musawi, a
fellow Lebanese who would eventually become the leader of
Hezbollah. In 1978, along with hundreds of other radical
Lebanese clerics, Nasrallah was expelled from Iraq. He
returned to Lebanon to study and teach at a school
established by Musawi, and became deeply involved with Amal.
In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, Iran sent Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to train Lebanese groups to
attack Israel and to eventually create an Islamic state in
Lebanon. Musawi and Nasrallah left Amal to form a new group
which would become Hezbollah. Nasrallah maintained close
ties with Iran and moved there in 1987 to continue his
Islamic studies. After returning two years later, when
hostilities intensified between rival factions in Lebanon,
Nasrallah quickly rose through the ranks of Hezbollah,
becoming leader of the organization after Israel
assassinated Musawi in February 1992.
Nasrallah and Jews
Within a month of Nasrallah's taking over as leader,
Hezbollah (with the help of Iranian intelligence) bombed the
Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and injuring
over 200. The next attack perpetrated by Hezbollah-again
with Iranian help-was the bombing of the Jewish community
center in Buenos Aires, killing 86 and injuring over 200.
The widening arena of Hezbollah's attacks stemmed from
Nasrallah's perception that Jews anywhere are legitimate
targets. In fact, Nasarallah has said:
If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us
the trouble of going after them worldwide. (Daily Star, Oct.
23, 2002)
Shiite scholar Amal Saad-Ghorayeb analyzed the anti-Jewish
roots of Hezbollah ideology in her book Hezbollah: Politics
& Religion. In it, she quotes Hassan Nasrallah describing
his antipathy toward Jews:
If we searched the entire world for a person more
cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind,
ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the
Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli. (New Yorker, Oct. 14,
2002)
Nasrallah also incoroporates anti-Semitic rhetoric in
speeches. For example, he has characterized Jews as the
"grandsons of apes and pigs" and "Allah's most cowardly and
greedy creatures." (MEMRI: Al- Manar, Feb. 3, 2006)
Despite his anti-Semitic invective, there are few references
to this in the mainstream media.
Nasrallah and Israel
Hezbollah's attacks against Israel have escalated under
Nasrallah's leadership. In 1993, a year after he became the
leader of Hezbollah, 26 Israeli soldiers were killed (twice
as many as the year before). The group fired almost 150
Katyushas in 1993, and more than doubled that number in 1996
when it sent nearly 500 rockets into Israel. As a result,
Israeli casualties from Hezbollah attacks continued to
mount. In 1997, nearly forty Israeli soldiers were killed
battling Hezbollah. Suicide bombings and other terrorist
attacks by the group took a toll on Israelis, and the group
was largely credited with driving Israel out of Lebanon in
2000, an event regarded as Israel's only defeat by an Arab
group. Nasrallah's Lebanon success and the fact that his
eldest son, Hadi, fought and died while confronting Israel
in 1997 heightened the respect for the Hezbollah leader in
the region.
In an oft-quoted speech just after Israel pulled out of
southern Lebanon in May 2000, Hassan Nasrallah vividly
described his view of the Jewish state as fragile and easily
destroyed despite outward appearances of strength:
O people, our beloved and our dear brothers in
Palestine, I want to tell you that this Israel, which
possesses nuclear weapons and the most powerful air force in
the region, by God, it is weaker than a spider web .... (May
26, 2000)
Just a few days later, Nasrallah elaborated on Hezbollah's
goals:
One of the central reasons for creating Hizbullah
was to challenge the Zionist program in the region.
Hizbullah still preserves this principle, and when an
Egyptian journalist visited me after the liberation and
asked me if the destruction of Israel and the liberation of
Palestine and Jerusalem were Hizbullah's goal, I replied:
"That is the principal objective of Hizbullah, and it is no
less sacred than our [ultimate] goal. The generation that
lived through the creation of this entity is still alive.
This generation watches documentaries and reads documents
that show that the land conquered was called Palestine, not
Israel." We face an entity that conquered the land of
another people, drove them out of their land, and committed
horrendous massacres. As we see, this is an illegal state;
it is a cancerous entity and the root of all the crises and
wars and cannot be a factor in bringing about a true and
just peace in this region. Therefore, we cannot acknowledge
the existence of a state called Israel, not even far in the
future, as some people have tried to suggest. Time does not
cancel the legitimacy of the Palestinian claim. (Hasan
Nasrallah, interview, Egyptian television, June 2, 2000).
Hezbollah's tactics became a model for other terrorist
groups confronting a strong enemy. Nasrallah explained to a
Washington Post reporter that "The Israeli Air Force could
destroy the Lebanese army within hours ... but cannot do
this with us ... we exercise guerilla warfare" (July 16,
2006).
Nasrallah sought to inspire the Palestinians with
Hezbollah's success against the Israelis. "Palestinians," he
said, need to "struggle for their freedom ... and Lebanon is
a good example." He said: "We have liberated Lebanon, next
we'll liberate Jerusalem." He urged Arabs to "put a knife in
your shirt, then get close to an Israeli occupier and stab
him." (Nightline, Oct. 19, 2000)
Perhaps, not surprisingly, the Palestinians launched their
deadliest assault against Israel in September 2000 only a
few months after Israeli forces left Lebanon.
Nasrallah, Incitement, and Al-Manar TV
Incitement was always part and parcel of Hezbollah's
strategy. In an interview with Al-Safir, Nasrallah described
his priorities and methods in the first months of
Hezbollah's formation:
The main effort at the time went into mustering and
attracting young men and setting up military camps ....
The second effort was spreading the word among the
people, first, in a bid to raise their morale, and second to
instil in them a sense of animosity towards the enemy,
coupled with a spirit of resistence...this required us to
use the language of indoctrination rather than realpolitik.
People then were not in need of political analysis, they
were in need of being incited and goaded. (Hala Jaber,
Hezbollah Born With a Vengeance, Columbia University Press,
1997, pp. 49-50)
Nasrallah purveys his message via Hezbollah's own television
network, Al-Manar, a primary engine of incitement to
violence against Jews, Israelis and Americans. Al Manar's
stated mission is to "wage psychological warfare against the
Zionist enemy." This is often done by glorifying attacks,
particularly suicide missions against Israel. Last year,
Nasrallah appeared on Al-Manar encouraging "martyrdom" among
children, saying:
How can death become joyous? How can death become
happiness? When Al-Hussein asked his nephew Al-Qassem, when
he had not yet reached puberty: "How do you like the taste
of death, son?" He answered that it was sweeter than honey.
How can the foul taste of death become sweeter than honey?
Only through conviction, ideology, and faith, through
belief, and devotion.
We do not want to...leave our homeland to Israel...
Therefore, we are not interested in our own personal
security. On the contrary, each of us lives his days and
nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake
of Allah. (MEMRI: Al-Manar TV , Feb. 18-19, 2005)
In May, Nasrallah appeared on Al-Manar TV to explain that
"our nation's willingness to sacrifice their blood, souls,
children, fathers, and families" is an advantage over the
Jews "who guard their lives." (MEMRI: Al-Manar TV on May 23,
2006.)
Nasrallah and the Palestinian-Israeli dispute
Nasrallah has inflamed tensions between Israel and the
Palestinians by using Hezbollah's resources to assist
Palestinians attack on Israelis. He told AP that Hezbollah
supplied Palestinian terrorists with weapons until 2001 when
Israel intercepted a boat with supplies bound for the West
Bank. Hezbollah, he acknowledged, continued to provide other
forms of support for Palestinian terrorists including
"financial, political and media support." (AP, April 26,
2006)
Nasrallah has denounced every peace agreement made between
Israel and the Palestinians, instead encouraging them to be
violently rejected. He believes that "lands can [only] be
returned through Holy War, martyrdom, blood, sacrifices and
bullets."(Chicago Tribune, Nov. 27, 2000)
For example, when the Palestinians were considering
modifying their charter by taking out references to Israel's
illegitimacy, the Hezbollah leader responded:
The Palestinian National Charter will live on as
long as there is a knife in a Palestinian woman's hand with
which she stabs an Israeli soldier or settler ... as long as
there are suicide bombers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv ... and
as long as there is a child who throws a stone in the face
of an Israeli soldier. (AP, Dec. 12, 1998)
Nasrallah and the Palestinians in Lebanon
While Nasrallah urges Palestinians to die fighting for their
"rights" and "freedom" against Israel, he rejects giving
citizenship rights to Palestinians who live in Lebanon:
The Lebanese refuse to give the Palestinians
residing in Lebanon Lebanese citizenship, and we refuse
their resettlement in Lebanon. There is Lebanese consensus
on this...we thank God that we all agree on one clear and
definite result; namely, that we reject the resettlement of
the Palestinians in Lebanon. (BBC Monitoring: Al-Manar TV,
Nov. 5, 2003)
Anti-Americanism
While Israel is the main focus of Hezbollah's enmity,
Nasrallah's anti-American sentiments are continuously on
display. He fuels anti-American attitudes in the Middle East
with charges such as his statement that Americans "have
outdone Hitler." (AP, Oct. 2, 2001) During one TV broadcast,
Narallah accused the US of many "sponsored plans for
extermination, eradication and genocide" against the people
in the Middle East. (BBC Monitoring: Al-Manar, Feb. 8, 2002)
A 2002 appearance on Al-Manar illustrates his deep hostility
toward the United States:
Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the
Great Satan [America] is absolute ...
I conclude my speech with the slogan that will
continue to reverberate on all occasions so that nobody will
think that we have weakened. Regardless of how the world has
changed after 11 September, Death to America will remain our
reverberating and powerful slogan: Death to America. (BBC
Monitoring: Al-Manar, Sep. 27, 2002)
Nasrallah boasts about Hezbollah's designation as a
terrorist group by America:
It is our pride that the Great Satan (U.S.) and the
head of despotism, corruption and arrogance in modern times
considers us as an enemy that should be listed in the
terrorism list...I say to every member of Hezbollah (should)
be happy and proud that your party has been placed on the
list of terrorist organizations as the U.S. view it. (United
Press International, Nov. 4, 2001)
At a rally in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, Nasrallah encouraged
worldwide suicide bombing against the West:
Martyrdom operations - suicide bombings - should be
exported outside Palestine. I encourage Palestinians to take
suicide bombings worldwide. Don't be shy about it.
(Washington Times, Dec. 6, 2002)
Global Reach
The group is reported to have worldwide influence and reach.
According to Magnus Ranstorp, the director of the Centre for
the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, at the
University of St. Andrews in Scotland:
It [Hezbollah] has served as a role model for terror groups
around the world ... Al Qaeda learned the value of
choreographed violence from Hezbollah ....
According to both American and Israeli intelligence
officials, the group maintains floating "day camps" for
terrorist training throughout the Bekaa Valley. ... In some
of them, the instructors are supplied by the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran's Ministry of
Intelligence. In the past twenty years, terrorists from such
disparate organizations as the Basque separatist group ETA,
the Red Brigades, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, and the
Irish Republican Army have been trained in these camps" (New
Yorker, Oct. 14, 2002)
Nasrallah and his well-funded terrorist organization have
promoted violence worldwide and have helped thwart peaceful
resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Terrorists being trained in Iran and exported to anywhere to kill, rape, plunder and dominate????
Who woulda thunk that???