Hostages: Tehran 2007 and Beirut 1987
By: Joseph Hitti
Boston, Massachusetts
March 31, 2007

As one of Hezbollah and Iran’s allies in Beirut said last year, when asked about Hezbollah’s past kidnapping and murdering of Western hostages in Beirut in the 1980s, “They were not all tourists, you know”. Indeed, they were university administrators, teachers, journalists, priests and ministers, theologians, UN staff, US and French Embassy officials, but they were kidnapped by Hezbollah at the behest of Iran and Syria – American, British, French, Italian, Irish, Indian, and others – and were used as bargaining chips in Syria’s and Iran’s successful blackmail of the West. Some were killed, some died of disease during their ordeals, and many lived to write their stories.

The purpose was to drive the West out of a land that has always brought East and West in very close proximity, and Hezbollah succeeded in that decade to drive the West out of Lebanon – educators and peacekeepers alike – to replace it with the Syrian occupation and direct Iranian influence. The Lebanese people who treat Hezbollah today as liberators ought not to forget that Hezbollah “liberated” Lebanon three times at enormous cost: Last July by direct divine inspiration into the ear of Hassan Nasrallah, in 2000 by driving the Israelis out of the Lebanese south, and in the 1980s by driving the West from Lebanon.

Like the British sailors’ kidnapping this week by Iran in the Shatt Al-Arab waterways, and they too were not tourists, the Western hostages were displayed on television and made to read statements condemning the West, like puppets in a puppet show. And this unfolding drama of the absurd came home to remind me of the Western hostages in Beirut of the 1980s. Twenty years apart, but the similarities are inescapable.

Like Iran and its deadly roadside bombings in Baghdad, Hezbollah bombed and lynched and hijacked and kidnapped ad libitum until all theWest had left Lebanon and Syria moved in to complete its takeover. Hezbollah – along with its sister Amal militia led by the former US green card holder Speaker of today’s Lebanese Parliament, Nabih Berri –massacred many more Palestinians in the War of the Camps between 1984 and 1987 than Israel since the first Palestinian Intifada. Yet somehow the Lebanese people, in dire need for heroes to get out of the brutalizing monotony of their pitiful lives under the feudal lords, men of the cloth, and other divinely-inspired demi-gods who run their lives, elevated Hezbollah to their pantheon. Never mind that Hezbollah’s hands are dirty, bloody, stained with the blood of Lebanon’s friends, the blood of the same Palestinians Hezbollah today claims to want to free from the Israeli occupation, and even the blood of those Lebanese whom Hezbollah captured at random and handed over to the Syrian forces of occupation over the years and many of whom were never heard from again, as they continue to rot somewhere in the dungeons of the Syrian regime.

This is truly a case of a collective Stockholm syndrome that has taken over the Lebanese people in a giant kidnapping case by Hezbollah’s gunmen pointing their guns at the necks of anyone among the Lebanese who do not submit themselves to the Iranian will in the Middle East. As the myth of Hezbollah continues to be magnified by a credulous and dangerously liberal Western press, the Hezbollah fighter is portrayed as the liberator, the freedom fighter, the honest fighter who selflessly shells, bombs, and kills, then humbly returns to become the peasant, the worker and the engineer in his pastoral Shiite village, yet untouched by the Western evil of globalization, in the Lebanese South.

In the Shiite mythology, where being a victim is the definition of one’s existence, it does not matter if you have traded and smuggled hashish in Lebanon, cigarettes in the US, diamonds in Africa, and made money by colonizing the poor countries of West Africa (where Lebanese Shiite immigration dominates, making billions of dollars that are sent back to Lebanon). It does not matter that Hezbollah receives 200 million dollars a year from Iran. The Lebanese Shiites – like their Iranian brethren – will always claim to be the dispossessed and the downtrodden because that is the cultural genetic heritage of the Shiites. It does not matter that the Speaker of Parliament – with all the power of that No. 2 position in the Lebanese political pantheon – has always been a Shiite. It does not matter that Hezbollah runs a military empire within the Lebanese Banana Republic, with a militia that the Lebanese army cannot defeat, with 30,000 rockets lined up in the South waiting for the signal from Tehran. None of this really matters. What matters is to pay every Shiite woman and girl to wear the Islamic black robe and head scarf, pay every Shiite man to let his beard grow the “Islamic way”, and then pay every young Shiite man to join Hezbollah. This way, with the beards, the black robes and the Kalashnikovs, the condescending Western press will feel within its zone of comfort at seeing the Shiites of Lebanon in their proper pigeon holes as “poor” and “disenfranchised”, while that the suit-clad and jeans-clad Sunnis, Christians and Druze, by extension, become the pro-Western cultural traitors trying to dominate the Shiites.

Iran’s kidnapping of the British sailors and its parading them with televised public “confessions” will probably not make Robert Fisk feel a shiver down his spine. He will soon write a column in the Guardian – if he hasn’t already – to remind us for the millionth time that he has lived long enough in Lebanon to earn the reputation of a modern Orientalist who knows more about the “Orient” than the Orientals themselves, a modern day journalistic Lawrence of Arabia, and in that column he will blame the US and President Bush for having pressured Iran so much recently that something had to give in and the Iranians had to kidnap the British sailors to rectify the injustice. Maybe he will find a justification in his thorough understanding of the depths of the Islamic mind, something along the lines of the international waters between Iraq and Iran having been in fact drawn up by the British colonialists some hundred years ago, and it is their fault for venturing back near that line. Britain, truth be told, did carve out Kuwait out of the Iraqi-Saudi desert – just look at the articial borders of Kuwait in the sands – and used the Kuwaitis as their local poodles to keep control of the oil fields. But Robert Fisk never questions the existence of Kuwait like he does the existence of Lebanon that – lest we forget – hosted him, the famous Orientalist with the golden heart, for decades to engage in toto in his neo-Orientalist “diarrhoeal” drivel. From his neo-colonialist vantage point, Mr. Fisk still has a bone to grind against the French who, according to him, carved out Lebanon out a mythical Greater Syria.

Yes, Iran’s kidnapping of the British sailors and its parading them with televised public “confessions” remind me of the Western hostages being paraded by Hezbollah and its Syrian patron on television before grateful Western governments in the 1980s. One interesting fact about that Hezbollah epic of 1980s Beirut was that, while the hostages were kidnapped, held, abused and released in Lebanon, the television parades took place in Damascus. In other words, the investment in the hostages was made in Lebanon, but the payoff was cashed in Damascus with a cut to the Islamic Republic in Tehran.

The Western hostages were held by Hezbollah in the same Southern Suburbs that were razed to the ground by Israel last summer. For those Westerners who, like Robert Fisk, are “in the know” since they have lived there for many many years, they know that the trip from the Southern Suburbs to Beirut Airport is literally 5 minutes – and those same localized Orientalist Westerners who have lived there so long will nostalgically and jokingly add “…actually only 2 minutes if you drive like the locals”. Similarly, the trip from the Southern Suburbs where Hezbollah kept the hostages to the Lebanese government centers anywhere in Beirut is 15 minutes at best. Yet, when the hostages were released in a trickle in the mid to late 1980s, they were, every single one them, dragged on a 3-hour journey from Beirut to Damascus to parade them on Syrian television under the imposing, yet benevolent, portrait of Hafez Assad, the former dictator of Syria. Once the payment was made and Damascus took the credit, the Hezbollah kidnappers, humbly and modestly vanished into the population and returned to their homes, villages and families, having selflessly served their cause.

One thing that the kidnapping of the British sailors will hopefully do is show the world what Iran and its poodles in the region are really like behind all the veneer of respectability that a romantic liberal Europe bestows on them. To those on the left here in the US and elsewhere who have begun forgetting that there is an enemy out there and who the enemy really is, this childishly dangerous display by the Islamic Republic of Iran should remind them of how the debacle of the West in Lebanon in the 1980s in the face of the Iranian-Syrian assault – and the first suicide car bombing ever in which 240 US Marines and 58 French paratroopers were blown to shreds by Hezbollah in Beirut - came back to haunt the West with the September 11 attacks. Any appearance of giving in will never be understood by the Islamic Fascists in the civilized framework of reason and an invitation to rational negotiations; it is always understood as a retreat and an invitation to ask for more. All you have to do is ask the Lebanese who have experienced this first hand since the 1970s. Any precipitous withdrawal of the West from the region will be another debacle that will come back to haunt it a couple of decades later. Colonialism may have ended, but human nature has not changed and neither has the will of militant Islam to clash with the non-Islamic world on the basis of Neolithic beliefs.