This was an article that I wrote on 19 July 2006. It is not very good, but I hope that it proves informative to the reader and strikes the reader as relatively objective. I am reasonably sure that, given the responses I received from other diaries of mine on these issues, that I will be flamed for this (much of which may be OT, as this seems to be the precedent).
109th Congress's second session considers House Resolution 921 "Condemning the recent attacks on the state of Israel, holding terrorists and their state-sponsors accountable for such attacks, supporting Israel's right to defend itself, and for other purposes."
The US State Department considers Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. However, in the 2005 Lebanese elections the "terrorist group" Hezbollah won 8 new seats, which gives the group 23 seats in the 128-member Lebanese Parliament along with 3 ministers in government. If this is the case, then why does the US government not support the Lebanese in their choices for democratically-elected government officials when the same government has lost over 2500 American Soldiers in Iraq with the purported mission of "bringing democracy to Iraq." Perhaps they feel that the Lebanese people, because of their proclivities to radical Islam, are not capable of making the right decisions; yet Pres. Bush in a speech for the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy said:
"Some skeptics of democracy assert that the traditions of Islam are inhospitable to the representative government... It should be clear to all that Islam -- the faith of one-fifth of humanity -- is consistent with democratic rule. Democratic progress is found in many predominantly Muslim countries... More than half of all the Muslims in the world live in freedom under democratically constituted governments. They succeed in democratic societies, not in spite of their faith, but because of it."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/...
However, the US government's interest in demonizing Hezbollah seems to have little to do with democracy or even proportionality. In March 2005, the House of Representatives voted 380 to 3 for a resolution condemning "the continous terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hezbollah" (Chomsky 168). So the question is what terrorists attacks are Hezbollah responsible for?
* a series of kidnappings of Westerners in Lebanon, including several Americans, in the 1980s;
* the suicide truck bombings that killed more than 200 U.S. Marines at their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983;
* the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, which featured the famous footage of the plane's pilot leaning out of the cockpit with a gun to his head;
* two major 1990s attacks on Jewish targets in Argentina--the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy (killing twenty-nine) and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center (killing ninety-five).
* a July 2006 raid on a border post in northern Israel in which two Israeli soldiers were taken captive. The abductions sparked an Israeli military campaign against Lebanon to which Hezbollah responded by firing rockets across the Lebanese border into Israel (http://www.cfr.org/...).
This means that when that House resolution passed Hezbollah had not been given responsibilty for a major terrorist attack in 11 years. Could this have been an intentional prelude to the current actions against Hezbollah? That same year the US was actually able to get the UN Security Council to issue a condemnation of Hezbollah for attacks on northern Israel which "marked the first time the Security Council has ever reprimanded Hizbullah for cross-border attacks on Israel" (
http://www.themiddleeastnow.com/...).
The final item on the list of Hezbollah terrorist attackes was from an incident HR 921 calls "a completely unprovoked attack that occured in Undisputed Israeli territory on 25 June 2006..."