Good news out of England – Parliament is expected to approve a motion to ban Hezbollah as a terrorist group. This refers to the whole of Hezbollah, its so-called “military wing” and also now its so-called “political wing.”
What took so long?
It is hard to believe that until now, England and the European Union only classified the “military wing” as a terrorist entity, but not the rest of the organization. That allowed political members of Hezbollah to operate freely in the United Kingdom, to appear waving Hezbollah flags – the one featuring the Kalashnikov rifle – at the annual al-Quds day rally in London.
Just to be clear, those rallies promote mass killings of Jews and the destruction of the Jewish state. Nothing less.
Britain had banned the “military wing” in 2008 because the Lebanese militia had attacked British soldiers in Iraq. However, the UK has allowed Hezbollah’s “political wing” to continue to operate.
This is a sham: the Shia terrorist organization is not compartmentalized between its “political wing” and its “military wing,” and it is an outright hoax to proffer the claim that there is any distinction. Indeed, the two “wings” are one and the same, part and parcel of a fundamentalist ideology that calls for the outright destruction of the State of Israel.
Hezbollah was formed in 1982 to wage war against Israel, under the management of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Hezbollah has not been shy in explicitly spelling out its genocidal intentions toward world Jewry: “The war is on until Israel ceases to exist and the last Jew in the world has been eliminated.”
In 1994, the statement was proven: in what is still the largest deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust, 85 people were killed when the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was bombed.
Hezbollah did it.
In 2006, the group kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, sparking a 34-day war. And in 2012, a terrorist attack at the airport in Burgas, Bulgaria, that was carried out by a suicide bomber on a passenger bus transporting Israeli tourists, killed seven and wounded 32.
In 2016, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) implicated Hezbollah in a drug-trafficking and money-laundering network that spanned four continents. According to a DEA report, the group had links with South American drug cartels in a cocaine-smuggling operation in Europe and the US.
Did we not know who and what this terrorist organization – all parts of it – has been about from day one? Even the terrorist group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, called the separation between the different parts of the organization a fake, saying, “The story of [a separate] military wing and political wing is the work of the British.”
The other countries who have banned the entire terrorist organization – who consider Hezbollah to be a unified terrorist entity without distinguishing between its military and political “wings” – are the United States, Netherlands, Canada, Israel and the Arab League.
Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan thanked his British counterpart, writing in a tweet that “all who truly wish to combat terror must reject the fake distinction between ‘military’ & ‘political’ wings. Now is the time for the #EU to follow suit!”
Heretofore, the European Union has only designated Hezbollah’s “military wing” as a terrorist organization, following the attack in Bulgaria. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has also refused to outlaw all of Hezbollah, despite German intelligence revealing that there are 950 Hezbollah members in the federal republic who raise funds, recruit new members and spread antisemitism.
In Europe, calls to outlaw the group’s “political wing” have been largely disregarded based on the belief that such action would damage relations with the Lebanese government. Hezbollah now controls three of 30 ministries in Beirut’s government, the largest number it has ever held.
But being part of a government coalition does not change who and what Hezbollah stands for. It would be wise for the rest of the world to call it like it is.