MSM's Revisionist History of Hezbollah

Had Hezbollah and allies won yesterday's elections, no doubt, we would be seeing a lot of coverage looking at the organization's history.

And if Time is a reasonable indicator of what the mainstream media thinks it knows about Hezbollah, then we dodged a wave of inaccurate, revisionist coverage. Reporter Alyssa Fetini describes Hezbollah as:

Originally a small-scale guerrilla group in Southern Lebanon formed to resist Israeli invasion in the 1980's . . .

In fact, Hezbollah was founded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to be a beach head for Tehran's ruling mullahs, but was quickly co-opted to a degree by Lebanon's Syrian overlords. As a young boy, Lebanese journalist Hussain Abdul-Hussain was an eyewitness to Hezbollah's 1982 origins in Baalbek:

This was an Islamic republic in formation. Hezbollah's slogan at the time was "the Islamic Revolution in Lebanon." But the Syrian regime was in control of most of Lebanon, including Baalbek, and was unwilling to see an Iranian seed sprout in its backyard. Syria therefore inspired its loyalist Shiite group, Amal, to wage battles against Hezbollah, and these continued until the conclusion of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, when Iran and Syria reached a deal over the role of the party. According to the deal, Hezbollah would be allowed to maintain its arms, but its role would be limited to "resistance."

Hezbollah became a joint Iranian-Syrian venture and turned its slogan into "the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon." Hezbollah was also integrated into the Lebanese political fabric. Later, it would win a parliamentary bloc and gain a say in all of the nation's affairs.

Its history was rewritten. Today, most academics have it that Hezbollah was founded in Beirut in 1985 as a resistance movement against Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. The truth is that Hezbollah was founded in Baalbek in 1982 as the nucleus of a hoped-for Islamic republic in Lebanon.

Read Abdul-Hussain's full account.

The March 8 coalition's defeat is good news, but Lebanon's political stalemate will likely continue. Unfortunately, the MSM's revisionist approach to Hezbollah's history will likely continue too.

Posted at 01:43 PM