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 Shiite 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 the Iranian 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 anti-Semitism.
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.
