SWITCHING SIDES: WHY IS OBAMA COURTING HEZBOLLAH?
Pamela Geller 12-10-13 Obama romancing Hezb’allah. NRO calls it “deeply bizarre”; I call it treason. I called it years ago, and Media Matters nearly choked on its own poison.May 8, 2012
Sean Hannity invited anti-Muslim “hate group” leader Pam Geller onto his Fox News show to analyze current events again, and Geller used the opportunity to accuse President Obama of being in league with terrorists.
“Fox Guest Pam Geller: Obama “Is Consistently On The Side Of Jihadic Islamic Supremacist Regimes” July 2, 2o12 Media Matters
“Switching Sides” March 10, 2010, American Thinker
Three more years of this terrorism. Imagine where we will be then. Imagine the body count. When I first heard the news of Obama’s secret billet-doux with Hezb’allah I wrote, surrender to Iran in Geneva, now this. Is there any murderous jihad group that Obama won’t sanction? Hezb’allah is a designated terrorist organization responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans.
In April 1983, Hezb’Allah (party of Allah) allegedly blew up a van filled with explosives in front of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 58 Americans and Lebanese. In October 1983, Iranian proxy Hezb’allah bombed our Marine barracks in Beirut, taking the lives of 241 Americans and 58 French. Funded by Iran and Syria, Hazb’allah has been at war with the US since its creation in 1982.
In 1984, William Francis Buckley, Beirut CIA Station Chief/Political Officer, was kidnapped from his apartment by Hezb’Allah:
Major General Carl Stiner stated that “Buckley’s kidnapping had become a major CIA concern. Not long after his capture, his agents either vanished or were killed. It was clear that his captors had tortured him into revealing the network of agents he had established.” According to the US, Buckley had undergone 15 months of torture by Hezbollah before his death. In a video taken approximately seven months after the kidnapping, his appearance was described as follows:
Buckley was close to a gibbering wretch. His words were often incoherent; he slobbered and drooled and, most unnerving of all, he would suddenly scream in terror, his eyes rolling helplessly and his body shaking. … The CIA consensus was that he would be blindfolded and chained at the ankles and wrists and kept in a cell little bigger than a coffin.
Obama is working with these savages, exactly as I warned in my book The Post American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America.
Why Is the Obama Administration Courting Hezbollah? By Jonathan Spyer & Benjamin Weinthal, NRO December 9, 2013Evidence has recently emerged suggesting that the U.S. has opened a line of direct communication with the Lebanese Shia Islamist organization Hezbollah. Details of the contacts have emerged from a variety of sources. Most notably, an article by respected Washington based journalist Hussein Abdul Hussein in the Arabic language newspaper al-Rai contended that the direct contacts are handled by British diplomats, who transfer messages back and forth between Hezbollah and the Americans.
It is worth recalling that the Clinton administration designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization in 1995. The apparent revival of direct communication with an organization responsible for the killing of 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1983 is not taking place in a vacuum. Rather, it is one element of what looks like an attempt at an extremely ambitious, even historic shift currently under way in U.S. regional policy. This is the effort to transform the Islamic Republic of Iran from the West’s main enemy in the Mideast region to a valued ally and partner.
Iran is Hezbollah’s strategic partner in the Middle East. In 2007, Hezbollah operative Ali Mussa Daqduq played a significant role in the killings of five U.S. Armed Forces soldiers in Iraq. The Iraqi government snubbed Obama in 2012 by releasing Daqduq, who promptly returned to Hezbollah’s militia in Lebanon.
While the U.S. the Netherlands, Israel, and Canada consider Hezbollah to be a monolithic terrorist organization, Britain maintains an entirely fictional distinction between the ‘political’ and ‘military’ wings of Hezbollah. This notion enables its officials to talk to representatives of the ‘political’ wing.
In Abdul Hussein’s article, he notes that the British channel of communication has only recently been revived. He quotes a diplomatic source explaining that the dialogue is “designed to keep pace with the changes in the region and the world, and the potential return of Iran to the international community.”
Another Kuwaiti newspaper, Al-Anbaa, also noted that “relations between Hezbollah and the U.S. are developing positively.” The paper cited Lebanese opposition sources in support of this assertion.
It’s noteworthy that the only real and unalloyed enemy in the Middle East whose existence the Obama administration acknowledges is the Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda network. This enemy, of course, is also the adversary of the Iranians.
On a couple of occasions in recent months, Washington appears to have tacitly acknowledged this commonality with the mullah regime. When Hezbollah fighters joined the Lebanese army in battling the Sunni Islamist followers of Sheikh Ahmed al-Assir in the Lebanese town of Sidon in June this year, the U.S. backed the army and made no reference to the key role played by Hezbollah fighters in the action. Similarly, the U.S. condemnation of the recent al-Qaeda linked bombing at the Iranian embassy in Beirut did not contain any reference to the presence of Iranian and Hezbollah fighters in Syria.
All this, it must be said, is deeply bizarre. The Iranians have not changed their regional strategy. Hezbollah remains their main instrument in the Levant and Assad’s Syria their main pathway to it. The murderous tactics they have employed in the Syrian civil war, their virulent hatred of America, and their openly stated ambition to destroy Israel are all plain to see – as is their emerging non-cooperation with the nuclear deal.
America’s Gulf allies just imposed “necessary measures” on Hezbollah, which include new financial and visa sanctions, for its terrorist activity in Syria.
The Obama administration ought to be working to influence a change in the behavior of its European allies to compel the EU to evict Hezbollah from its territory. The EU’s policy mirrors the U.K.’s bogus Hezbollah distinction.
The desire for dialogue with Hezbollah seems to be the latest manifestation of the Obama’s administration’s odd ambition to act against allies and appease obvious and declared enemies in the Middle East. It will not end well.
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