Hassan Nasrallah, the terrorist leader of Hezbollah who was killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in an airstrike on Friday, was a radical Islamist, antisemite, and Holocaust denier who wanted to destroy Israel and to expel the Jews.
The reality of his beliefs stands in contrast to the almost laudatory way in which some media outlets presented him.
His most infamous quote is: “If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” That statement from 2001 was reported in the New York Times in 2004, but only from a secondary source.
What is clear is that Nasrallah hated Jews and, at best, wanted to expel them from Israel to other countries.
In 2000, he delivered a speech at a Shiite Muslim ceremony in which he said (via Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs):
The Jews invented the legend of the Nazi atrocities. It is clear that the numbers they talk about are greatly exaggerated. They can speak of fabricated or exaggerated massacres that occurred during the Second World War, but we must forget the massacres that they committed against us and the peoples of the region which are documented and proven…
The only way to achieve just and comprehensive peace is not through the implementation of [United Nations Security Council] resolutions 425, 242 and 338 but by restoring all the Arab lands to their sons and owners, without war and conflict. Let us spare bloodshed. Let the Yemenite Jews return to Yemen, the Moroccan Jews to Morocco, the Ethiopian Jews to Ethiopia, the European Jews to Europe, and the American Jews to America. The Palestinian people will get their land back and establish their state…
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…
Hezbollah also targeted a Jewish community center in a devastating bombing in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1994, two years after Nasrallah had become the leader of the terrorist organization in 1993.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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