Contemptible Timidity

All the smug self-congratulatory statements coming out of the perceived success realized in moving the 28-country European Union to finally agree to recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist group and to blacklist it by the half-measure of dividing it into two units, one good the other bad, is a nonsensical bit of rubbish. It may make the European Union feel that it has solved one of those Solomonic puzzles about who owns the baby, but slicing Hezbollah into two separate portions would not lead to its death; only that of a contested baby.

While there may indeed be a political element (part of the Lebanese government's parliamentary representation) to Hezbollah, that element completely supports the non-state military portion of its agenda; the two 'sides' present an indivisible whole. Hezbollah, the "Party of God", is jihad-pathology run amok. It is a Shia-sect Islamist group, organized, funded and trained by the Islamic Republic of Iran, itself a fundamentalist theocracy whose use of terror tactics to subdue unrest from within its own population is well enough recognized.

Hezbollah is the proxy militia of Iran, just as the Republican Guard is the national military protector of the country's aspirational ideology, which is religious, political, social and economic in nature. For Islam is an all-encompassing devotion impacting on every moment of every worshipper's life, informing them when, how and why they must surrender their lives to the tenets of Islam. God, in Islam, is a rental agent, and the rent is always due.

Hezbollah, at the behest and direction of Iran, has infiltrated its presence throughout the world, not only where Islam dominates, but as well where Islamism, in good time, intends to dominate. Where good Muslims have migrated to countries in which they are a minority, a growing minority as it happens whose growth has already managed to unsettle the customs, legality and heritage of other countries, they present as a crop whose fruit is ready to be plucked.

A poster of Mohamed Hassan Shehade, a Hezbollah fighter who died in the Syrian conflict, hangs on a building in Adloun, south of Sidon in southern Lebanon, July 23, 2013. The European Union agreed to put the armed wing of Hezbollah on its terrorism blacklist, a move driven by concerns over the Lebanese militant group's involvement in a deadly bus bombing in Bulgaria and the Syrian war. (photo by REUTERS/Ali Hashisho )

Hezbollah retrieves from among expatriates living abroad, funding which it filters through laundered schemes representing large sums of money which it exchanges on the market for saleable arms. Such donations are not its only source of income; it is also involved in the drug trade, to secure immense profits from that type of entanglement as well. It requires huge sums because operating expenses in the acquisition of modern weaponry doesn't come cheap.

Incendiary devices are stockpiled against those times when their need becomes evident, like clashes with Israel, and more latterly bitterly blood-shedding clashes with their Sunni jihadi counterparts in Syria, for example. Europe knows how well Hezbollah supporters are integrated into its various societies; there is even ample evidence where the green Hezbollah flag makes its presence, even where it is outlawed, for example in Canada.

A supporter of Hezbollah stands next to a picture of the group's leader Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut. Photograph: Nabil Mounzer/EPA

In Germany, as an example, where the government is keen to implement the EU blacklisting of the "terrorist wing" of Hezbollah, the country is a hotbed of Hezbollah activity. The Netherlands is the only European country banning the entirety of Hezbollah, making no apologetic recognition of an imagined division. The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah has himself scorned the very notion of separate wings; Hezbollah is one, indivisible in purpose and design.

Perspective from Al-Monitor:

In his speeches, Nasrallah usually maintains a level of sobriety in shape and content. However, in his July 24 speech commenting on the EU decision, he intentionally broke his usual strict sobriety and said jokingly, “I will propose the appointment of members of the party’s military wing in the prospective government."
This joke — as Nasrallah himself described it — aimed to assert that the party does not see itself as consisting of two wings, and that the party’s militants are not classic soldiers who salute the flag in the morning, but are the whole party, one which maintains a structural and political project based on the idea of jihad.
Assuming the party wanted to go along with the international division between political and military wings, the latter — that is, the militants who control its key joints — will not allow any Hezbollah leadership to apply this division internally. The military and security personnel will not tolerate any leader in the party saying, "You have to pay the price, as we politicians dissociate ourselves from protecting you."
Nasrallah’s main aim today is to show the party’s solidarity, and that those designated by the international community as the political wing of the party will not abandon their comrades or compromise their roles.
In his two recent speeches addressed to the EU, Nasrallah said, "Soak your terrorist list in water and drink it," meaning that the EU decision is useless.

Nasser Chararah is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor's Lebanon Pulse, as well as for multiple Arab newspapers and magazines, and the author of several books on the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict. He is also the head of the Lebanese Institute for Studies and Publications and has worked for the Palestinian Research Center.