From AP:
An Iranian holds a flag of the Lebanese Hezbollah guerrilla group outside the Netherlands Embassy to condemn the production and broadcast of the film ‘Fitna’ by right-wing Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, in Tehran, April 5, 2008.
(AP Photo/Hasan Sarbakhshian)
All right, let me get this straight. This guy is upset about the film Fitna because it shows Muslims committing acts of violence in the name of Islam. And no doubt he believes, or wants us to believe, that Islam is a religion of peace. So in service of that he goes to protest the film at the Dutch embassy, carrying a flag from Hizballah.
Isn’t it ironic that someone would protest against linking Islam with violence by carrying a Hizballah flag? After all, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizballah (party of Allah), has called the destruction of Israel a “sacred” goal: “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.–
Nasrallah roots his bloodlust squarely within the Islamic tradition: “Anyone who reads the Koran and the holy writings of the monotheistic religions sees what they did to the prophets, and what acts of madness and slaughter the Jews carried out throughout history … Anyone who reads these texts cannot think of co-existence with them, of peace with them, or about accepting their presence, not only in Palestine of 1948 but even in a small village in Palestine, because they are a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment.”
His demonization is explicitly of Jews as such, and not simply of Israeli “occupiers”: “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.” He has also dehumanized Jews, using Qur’anic language in calling them “grandsons of apes and pigs” (cf. Qur’an 2:62-65; 5:59-60; 7:166), and characterizing them as “Allah’s most cowardly and greedy creatures.”
Not surprisingly, therefore, Nasrallah has also said that “there is no solution to the conflict in this region except with the disappearance of Israel.” He has accordingly exhorted his followers: “Put a knife in your shirt, then get close to an Israeli occupier and stab him,” and has proclaimed that “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.”
Nor does he intend to stop there, apparently: Nasrallah has also made no secret of his desire to destroy all Jews, not just those in Israel. He has said: “[I]f they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” Similarly, a 1992 Hizballah statement vowed “open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.”
Yet not only are there no protests among Muslims against Hizballah’s genocidal intentions, but instead they direct their indignation against a Westerner who has dared to point out that this hatred and bloodlust exists among many Muslims.
