Tie the Wings

The British Foreign Office's ludicrous decision last month to differentiate between Hezbollah's "political wing" and its "military wing" was firmly renounced by Michael Totten on his blog. The FOs distinction, however, leads one to question into which boundary Hezbollah's support for the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) should be categorized. Of course, this merely exposes the absurdity of the FO's attempts. It's true that we must communicate with Hezbollah in the same way we must communicate with Iran. Indeed, Iran is largely responsible for Hezbollah's continued political and military firepower in the same way that Hezbollah is the main exponent of the SSNP's occupation of Beirut. I wonder if David Milleband would attempt to make a similar distinction between the SSNP's military and political wings.

The SSNP drew awareness recently when they beat the hell out of Christopher Hitchens on the famously secular Hamra Street, but that wasn't the first and last such attack. Youssef Bazzi, a Lebanese journalist and poet was the victim of an arson attack at his office on Hamra Street last year, and he, along with many other journalists and secular leftists, fled the region. A local television network, Future TV was pillaged this week by SSNP members, leaving a trail of their signatory flag: the spinning swastika that frequents the Hamra region. A reporter for that station, Omar Harquos was beaten up last year on Hamra Street by SSNP members and they were never bought to trial. The SSNP demonstrates all the signs of tribal occupation; their flag is flown wherever their is a street corner, they hang around in groups with motorcycles and weapons, and they've come to hold three main areas in the region, symptomatic of a typical occupation.

Before the Foreign Office makes any sort of communicative gesture toward Hezbollah's "political wing", Hezbollah must first excoriate the SSNP and come to recognize them as a fascistic terrorist group. They must stop supplying them with arms and money, and deprive them of all legitimacy among their own supporters. The British government has a moral responsibility to the good people of Beirut and to Lebanese democracy not to fumble their policies between petty, pathetic distinctions between politics and militancy. Unfortunately, in the Islamic states, the two go hand in hand.