CASABLANCA – Lebanese daily Al-Mustaqbal published an article claiming that Hezbollah has morphed from being a resistance organization to a “Frankenstein’s monster” controlled by Iran and an occupier of Arab lands.
The writer, poet and literary critic Paul Shaoul, asserts that Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon took with it Hezbollah’s raison d’etre, leaving the Shi’ite terror organization to replace Israel with new Sunni Arab enemies that include Saudi Arabia. It has since become a “mercenary” that seeks to destroy Lebanon and redraw borders across the Arab world.
“Hezbollah’s existence depends on the existence of a permanent enemy, imaginary or not,” Shaoul writes, explaining that Iran originally created the group to resist its enemies – chiefly, Israel.
“In the natural course of things, when the enemy withdraws the resistance withdraws as well, for it is no longer needed. But in the absence of an enemy, the slogan of ‘resistance’ must still be maintained in order to maintain legitimacy,” the article, translated by MEMRI, continues.
Even though the newspaper belongs to Hezbollah’s rivals in Lebanon, the March 14 Forces, the article marks an unusual challenge in the Lebanese news media to Hezbollah’s legitimacy as a so-called resistance organization.
Shaoul further charges that rather than uniting the country, Hezbollah is benefiting from being a dividing and destructive force.
“It became a militia without any identity [of its own], a mercenary, but possessing very large ambitions, starting with destroying its country, which it has begun to pulverize with its weapons,” he writes, adding that Hezbollah “has turned Lebanon into military base … from which to attack the Arab world, which has become its enemy instead of Israel.”
The group, according to Shaoul, is now occupying several Arab countries including Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. It no longer views the “Americans as the Great Satan, Israel as absolute evil, or Russia as the imperialist regime of the Orthodox” Church.
Instead, the enemy is now “Sunni Islam, represented by Saudi Arabia, and Arabism, represented by the majority of the Arab nation – which [according to Iran] must both be dismantled in order to redraw the borders and create new states or mini-states, or even new peoples.”
Finally, Shaoul blasts Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei for deserting the Palestinians despite their pledges to the contrary.
“Well, what have you done for Palestinians except thwart any solution of establishing an independent [Palestinian] state with its own borders and government?” he writes. “You have done nothing for them worth mentioning, but only harmed them and plotted against them.”
Shaoul ends by noting that parts of the Arab world are starting to take note of Iran and Hezbollah’s plot to “wipe them off the map,” as evidenced by the Gulf states recent designation of Hezbollah as a terror organization.
“It has become a battle of life and death,” he concludes.
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