By Thomas C. Mountain
Friday post lunchtime, March 2011, and I turned on my television in time to catch Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah’s Friday speech on PressTV carried live from Lebanon. With an english translation provided by PressTV I was astounded to hear Nasrallah call for the entire world to support…what turned out to be the US/NATO war on Libya?
Thats right, no slip of the tongue, Hassan Nasrallah made it crystal clear that he want to see the end of the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi and that the whole world should support this goal.
The next day, Saturday, PressTV repeated Nasrallah’s speech and we heard it all again. It wasn’t a mis-translation because comrades who were fluent in Arabic heard it and verified the accuracy of the PressTV translation.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any record of this on PressTV’s website, maybe understandable since it took place over 13 years ago?
Still, why is this fact, that Hezbollah’s top leader supported what quickly became the US/NATO war against Libya almost completely unknown amongst international activists? And if they do know about it, as any well informed activist following the news at the time should have, why have they kept silent about this fact?
I have been repeatedly called a liar, slandered viciously and threatened for pointing this fact out.
So why did Hassan Nasrallah support this western crime against the Libyan people where over 100,000, maybe upwards of 250,000 Libyans were slaughtered by western bombs and missiles, the same bombs and missiles slaughtering Palestinians and Lebanese today?
Nasrallah hated Gaddafi because one of his main mentors disappeared while visiting Libya some years before. A prominent religious leader in the Shi’ite community in Lebanon disappears without a trace and Gaddafi claimed to know nothing about it?
There are many scenarios of how and why this happened including he fell out with Gaddafi while in Libya to Gaddafi being betrayed by his intelligence service (something entirely credible based on events since this took place) or that the CIA cooked up this crime to stir up inter-Arab conflict and at the same time take out a leader of a growing movement in Lebanon, Hezbollah, that was starting to be a threat to the US attack dog in west Asia, Israel.
Whatever the reason, Nasrallah’s mentor went missing while a guest of Gaddafi who had vouchsafed his security and Gaddafi had no answer to why or how this happened.
So, understandably, Nasrallah had good reason to be angry about Gaddafi. But to support a western war against Libya by the very same powers that supported his enemy, Israel, that had committed so many crimes against the Lebanese, and Palestinian people?
We were living in Eritrea in 2011 when we saw Nasrallah’s bombshell speech and it was a hot topic of discussion amongst our circle of friends. We all wondered why Nasrallah would do this when those who were about to destroy Libya, and enable the brutal murder of Gaddafi, were sure to come after him and his movement someday?
And sure enough, what so many international commentator’s called “the iconic leader” Hassan Nasrallah met the same fate as Gaddafi at the hands of both their enemies, in this case the western backed colonial, settler, racist apartheid regime in Israel.
I describe myself as an educator and historian and what I have just described is an accurate history of a crime, the western destruction of Libya in 2011, and the support by Hassan Nasrallah for this crime.
I have to ask, if any leader anywhere supports the western attack dog Israels genocide against the Palestinian, and now Lebanese people, would we be praising this person?
So maybe knowing the real history of this people may have to start asking hard questions? Like I answer to my many critics when I raise this question, “don’t shoot the messenger”, instead try and grasp a better understanding of the very complex crisis developing in west Asia today based on the real history of the region.
Thomas C. Mountain is a educator and historian with over 40 years background in matters African and west Asian.
26 October 2024
Source: countercurrents.org