I'm sorry but I can't buy the notion that Hezbollah are any better than the IDF. If given the go-ahead, and perhaps slightly better weaponry, they'd kill as many Israeli civilians as possible.
The only reason Hezbollah haven't killed more Israelis is because they're under attack, and having to fire inaccurate artillery missiles. One of them will eventually hurt a lot of folks - its just a matter of time.
Also, how on earth can one justify the risks Hezbollah took inviting the Israelis into Lebanon? Given how the IDF was conducting itself in Gaza, they were just asking for trouble. In the days immediately following the capture of the Israeli POWS, every Lebanese newspaper forecasted this inevitability.
I condemn Hezbollah on the grounds that they were willing to sacrifice Lebanon's civilian population to the IDF. They instrumentalized Lebanon's population as part of their desire to become the hegemonic political force in the country.
In closing, and on a more general level, what is the value of leftist anti-capitalists in the west supporting Islamist guerrilla organizations and theocratic political formations?
Fighting empire and the market should not come at the expense of supporting theocratic movements, even if fundamentalists claim to speak in the name of the oppressed.
On Jul 24, 2006, at 3:12 PM, www.leninology. blogspot.com wrote:
>
>> First, you have me wrong - particularly the pious comment. I'm
>> secular.
>
> My apologies, but I was thinking of the pious tone of some of the
> things I've read in Tikkun...
>
>> Second, do you think its possible that violent resistance - of
>> this sort - when practiced by the oppressed, might possibly lead
>> to the oppressed becoming morally indistinct from their oppressors?
>
> No, but I do accept that the oppressed can become oppressors. I
> don't think that Hezbollah are morally indistinct from the IDF.
> That's simply untrue, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
>
>> The Jewish/Zionist experience during the 20th century is quite
>> instructive. I personally decided during the last Lebanon war -
>> when I came of draft age - to not do my obligatory IDF service on
>> this basis.
>>
>> I've never regretted it.
>
> That pleases me more than you would bear to hear. However.
> Regarding the Zionist experience, surely the point here is that an
> ideological clique was able to persuade people on the basis of
> quite pressing and obviously rational fears that they should take
> to Palestine? Let me put it like this: if LEHI had used its
> methods in Munich rather than Palestine, I wouldn't have had a
> problem. If Haganah had been busily blowing up German railroads, I
> think I should have considered them heroic. In this case,
> Hezbollah is not colonising or ethnically cleansing anyone, nor is
> it stealing land. It is engaging in tactics that I personally
> would not use (because I tend to prefer political mass action to
> military vanguardism), and I certainly don't think it's a good or
> even wise tactic to send rockets into Haifa. But it is not
> indistinguishable from its oppressors.
>
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