The Party of God

During the civil war in Lebanon the Lebanese hatred for the Palestinian refugees -- who had streamed into the country along with Yasser Arafat and his PLO after Jordanian troops fought to throw them out of Jordan where they were creating cross-border incidents with Israel -- was manifest in the contempt in which they were held. On the one hand, the Palestinians felt it was their right to invade areas of Lebanon, to treat it as their own occupied territory; on the other hand, the Lebanese were resentful of the arrogance of the Palestinians and had little sympathy for them.

Syria and Iran entered Lebanon at a time of great violent upheavals that incorporated a UN peacekeeping mission, and made themselves comfortable in the country, even as Israel was occupying areas of Lebanonin an attempt to dislodge the PLO from its vantage points from which it continued to launch raids across the border into Israel. Lebanon was torn by its own vehement politics and violent factions, its Christian, Shia and Sunni Muslim groups all opposed to one another taking advantage over the other.

Revolutionary Shi'ite Iran saw an opportunity for itself to gain adherents to its brand of Islamism within Lebanon. Palestinian-originated Shia militants began to pay attention to the message of Iranian revolutionary zeal in promoting their version of Islam as a religion of death and martyrdom. Hezbollah formed under Iranian tutelage and influence as the Party of God, absorbing martyrdom for the cause into their philosophy of Islamism. Its attacks against French and U.S. troops in Lebanon stunned by their vicious death-rate in explosive successes marking its debut into the world of terror and conflict.

Hezbollah became entirely beholden to the Islamic Republic of Iran; becoming its non-state militia upon which Iran could call to do its terrorist bidding. When Israel targeted Hezbollah's military commander Imad Mugniyah, Hezbollah vowed to avenge his death, and they continue to work on that project while at the same time satisfying Iran's direction to its satellite terrorist militia to target Israel and the presence of Israeli tourists internationally.

Because of Iran's financial difficulties resulting from the sanctions placed upon it in by the United Nations and the U.S. in an effort to persuade the Republic to surrender its goals for nuclear technology which the world fears with good enough reason is meant for the creation of a nuclear arsenal, the funding that it provided for Hezbollah in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually was withheld. Hezbollah needed to provide for itself financially.

And it does just that; the Party of God, sanctimoniously serves Allah by being an important cog in the international drug trade, making millions in those transactions it takes part in, taking place in Mexico, the U.S., Canada and wherever else it can make a killing. Hezbollah has operatives infiltrating throughout Europe and North America, raising funds from expatriates living there from their Middle East and South Asian origins.

Hezbollah's decision to enter Syria in the service of the Alawite Shia regime of President Bashar al-Assad turned from a covert operation to a well-documented overt dedication to aiding the regime in combating the Islamist Sunni forces of foreign terrorists streaming into the country, originally to make common cause with Syrian rebels, and latterly to prevail over the regime, to destroy it and re-create Syria as a Sunni Shia-led Islamist country.

The deadly triad of Iran, Hezbollah and Syria represent the terrorist threat writ large, along with the threat of nuclear arms reaching both rogue governments and terror groups who may have little hesitation in using those weapons of mass destruction to further their ends.