Hezbollah: A return to Islamic glory [Archives:2006/972/Opinion]
By: Hassan Al-Haifi
In the long history of the Arabs, a former Deputy Secretary in the Foreign Ministry of the United Kingdom, Anthony Nutting, in his Short History of the Arabs, written in the 1960s, was more optimistic about the Arabs than the Arabs themselves. After the book went through a rapid dissertation on the ups and downs of the Arab Nation, especially from the time of the Prophet Mohammed (PBAUH) to the tumultuous period when the book was written, he commented towards the end of the chapter on the Palestine problem, that notwithstanding the pathetic state of the Arabs then (and now), the Arabs are bound to rebound and take their prominent place among world cultures and nations. He, of course , was not ready to note that the Prophet Mohammed (PBAUH), over 15 centuries ago stated that without Islam, the Arabs will have no place in history and that the Prophet's long forgotten prophesy is indeed true: Islam arose as a strange phenomenon and will return as a strange phenomenon and that the Arabs cannot expect any great place in the world without Islam. Ironically, non-Arab Moslems recognize this even better than the Arabs.
This observer notes the very warm greetings whenever I met non-Arab Moslems or whenever visiting non-Arab Moslem lands. Even in the lonely island of Rhodes, I remember walking through the old Moslem quarter of the Island and a Moslem shopkeeper signaled to me and three Arab friends (a fellow Yemeni, Bahraini, United Arab Emirati), to come to his artifacts store. He showed us evidence that he was a Moslem and that he was so glad to meet the people whom he regards as the vanguard of the Moslem Nation (Note this laws long before the distorted Wahhabis and their followers ran amok in this world). Then he showed us a picture of his young son, who he said was going to study the Qur'an secretly, because at that time Islam was anathema to the staunchly devout Greek Orthodox constituency of Greece (that has recently changed somewhat as Greece became a constitutional monarchy). This same affinity was accorded to this observer when I perchance met a Moslem Bosnian professor in the university I attended in the United States (twenty years before Milosevic sent his barbaric thugs to Srebrenicia and the other Bosnian cities, the populations of which were slaughtered by Krakaditch and Mladitch and their barbarian thugs).
Thus it should not be difficult to understand why indeed there were more demonstrations of support for the indefatigable Hassan Nasr-Allah and his Hezbollah fighters in non-Arab Moslem states than the Arab world, where the leaders of the latter have forgotten their history, their nation, their heritage and themselves. In fact Arab leaders did their best to suppress any show of support for their Lebanese and Palestinian brothers at arms or in prison in Lebanon and Palestine respectively. Perhaps, President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen is the only Arab leader, who without hesitation expressed his full support for the cause of liberation being fought by the likes of Nasr-Allah (Hezbollah leader) and Hemenia (Hamas), and he underscored this support by donating all the contributions he has received (US $ 5 million) for his bid for re-election as President of Yemen to the Palestinians and Lebanese to alleviate some of the sufferings they are going through as the Zionist thugs in Tel-Aviv annihilate them or strangle them to death.
Back to the Battlefield and the Mainstream Media:
As if Qana II (an earlier massacre by the Israelis during the same week when 55 innocent civilians mostly children were burned or torn apart) was not enough for the Israeli bullies, they went this week and really showed their horrendous taste for terror and blood and scored another massacre by carrying out another indiscriminate barbaric slaughter in the Al-Qa'a area of Lebanon killing at least 33 innocent civilians, most of whom were vegetable packers as far away from Hezbollah as anyone can get in Lebanon. They are neither members of the Shiite community, from which the grass roots followers of Hezbollah come from, nor associated with any active political or para-military association.
So, to carry on with their deceptive cover-ups, the Israelis insist that instead of tomatoes, these innocent workers were packing Katyushas with dynamite! Ironically, this never received “Breaking News” status in CNN and probably the other mainstream US media. In fact, at the same time this massacre occurred, CNN briefly made a note of it and miraculously reduced the number of dead to 20, although in his initial report on the incident Brent Sadler (CNN Beirut Bureau Chief) has said they were 33. In its bid to be objective, the BBC insisted that the number of dead were 28, although it was unequivocally reported by all the official people at the remote site where the massacre occurred that the number of dead victims was 33!
Hassan Al-Haifi has been a Yemeni political economist and journalist for more than 20 years.
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[archive-e:972-v:14-y:2006-d:2006-08-14-p:opinion]
