July 30, 2006

ATTAC Report This Week



A Surprise Behind the Hezbollah Mask
(Transcript)

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War in the Middle East: Hizbullah is capturing the headlines with hostage-taking, rockets, and gun battles. But the real architect of chaos is the organization behind Hizbullah.

Hello. I’m your host, Boruch Ellison, and this is “ATTAC Report This Week” for July 30th, 2006.


The scenes of terror and destruction speak for themselves: rockets streaking through the sky, striking often without warning, slamming into homes, apartment buildings, schools, and synagogues. Men, women, children, the elderly — no one is exempt from the waves of exploding missiles that shatter residential buildings and create fireballs, leaving dozens of civilians dead, hundreds wounded, and tens of thousands displaced.

While Israel hesitates in near paralysis, unwilling to strike at anything but minor or symbolic targets, the international terror group Hizbullah continues to attack from Lebanon with round after round of deadly missiles deep into the heart of Israel. Hizbullah’s well-trained, highly armed units have already fired over 2,000 missiles and thousands of mortar shells and artillery rounds mainly at civilian targets, not military ones.

Hizbullah claims it’s fighting for Arab interests. But the group has aimed many of its missile salvos specifically at Arab towns and villages in Israel, deliberately creating a high casualty count among Arabs. Often the same towns have been targeted mutliple times. Dozens of Arabs have been wounded and several killed, including young children, as Hizbullah’s rockets have destroyed their homes, damaged at least one mosque, and left entire families devastated.

The name “Hizbullah” means “Party of G-d,” painting an image of a Muslim religious organization. Yet its terrorist methods defy Islamic law, and its latest provocative attacks against Israel have drawn condemnation from the religious, Muslim kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

So if Hizbullah is a defender of neither Arab nor Muslim interests, what is its real agenda?

The group was established in 1979 in Iran, shortly after the Soviet-backed revolution had seized power. Hizbullah functioned as the international wing of the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s dreaded death squads that had been formed and trained by Yassir Arafat’s branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO.

That connects Hizbullah directly with the Communist Bloc and its revolutionary network inside Iran. The PLO itself is a Marxist terror group tightly supervised by the Soviet Russian KGB and supported by Red China, North Korea, and other Communist regimes, and it, in turn, trained and built several Marxist revolutionary groups in Iran associated with the Tudeh Party, Iran’s Communist movement. From its very beginning, Iranian Hizbullah worked closely with the PLO and Iranian Marxist terrorists to advance the international Communist revolution, and it has been supported by the Communist governments of North Korea, Syria, and Iraq.

Hizbullah didn’t appear in Lebanon until 1982, when it was founded by the PLO under the supervision of a Soviet KGB agent. At that time, PLO forces were entrenched in southern Lebanon, where they were building a massive, Soviet-armed military preparing to attack Israel. A lightning invasion by Israel ended those plans within days, and had it not been for the protection of the Reagan Administration, the PLO would have been entirely destroyed. The PLO was forced to leave Lebanon, but it left behind some of its armed units under the Hizbullah flag.

To this day, Lebanese Hizbullah consists of little more than PLO fighters taking orders from a top PLO commander while using the “Hizbullah” label as a diversion. Like the rest of the PLO, Hizbullah receives heavy military support and orders from Communist Bloc nations. Its arsenal of over 10,000 missiles, for example, includes Soviet Russian Katyusha rockets, North Korean-designed Fajr missiles, Iranian Zilzal missiles, 220mm rockets made in Communist Syria, and radar-guided Silkworm missiles from Red China.

The PLO has good reason to hide behind the “Hizbullah” flag. It receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the United States each year, much of which helps Hizbullah. That fact alone could galvanize Americans to terminate PLO funding.

Thank you for listening. From all of us at ATTAC Report, good-bye.

(“ATTAC Report This Week” is available at www.ATTACReport.com.)