Nasrallah’s Fantasy

According to this news report, Hezbollah’s leader Nasrallah is declaring that the Saudi airstrikes against Yemen are “Saudi-American aggression.” Is he serious? Has he taken a look at what the White House is saying? Sure, we are nominally on the side of the Saudis, or maybe we aren’t because Obama seems to rooting for the Iranians, who back the Houthis. Whatever the case, to insist we are part of this is nothing but using tired propaganda from the past in the hope of inflaming opinion against it, as well as forcing the Saudis, the Egyptians, and everyone else who wants to support it into showing that they aren’t being mere puppets of America. Nasrallah also claims the operation is doomed to fail. That remains to be seen.

What we can say about this conflict is this. The left’s insistence that Muslims are besieged and that they have every right to use violence to lash out at others hasn’t helped this situation at all. Instead of promoting peace, leftists have always excused Muslim violence. Sooner or later, these people will turn on each other, but that is only to be expected when one encourages aggression. One group decides another group is insufficiently committed to the cause, for example. Or that they are really working with the enemy, etc. The left doesn’t need to invade another country to be partly responsible for the chaos there. Their rhetoric can do the job, too.

Comments

[Charles N. Steele]

I do think Nasrallah is serious. These are words used as political weapons, and truth is irrelevant. He just picked the bogeyman appropriate for his audience.

But more importantly, I think you are quite right about how the left (and popular media) has mischaracterized Islam and the entire Middle East. Israel is usually presented as the big problem, but the divides between Sunni-Shia, religious party-secular party, and various ethnic & tribal groups (especially Persian-Arab) are far more destructive, and they are certainly of indigenous origin, not something imposed by outsiders from the West.