A New Testament to Hezbollah

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Hezbollah has no need of testimony from anyone, but the nations of colonialism, of exploiting peoples, and of European bloodshed insist on giving it a testimonial anyway: that it is a party faithful to its nation and its religion, committed to its principles and goals, and determined to resist the occupation and lay the foundations for genuine Lebanese and Arab independence. This is an age in which right is defined by might, and if the European states imagine themselves capable of sorting people into terrorists and moderates, the misguided and the rightly guided, then parties like Hezbollah will overturn the table so that might comes to be defined by right, and so that tyranny retreats in favor of the oppressed and downtrodden.

Who is the sort of person praised by the Americans, the Zionists, the British, and the French? Or what sort of party earns such praise?

It is the traitor — the treacherous person, or the treacherous party, prepared to bargain away Arab causes and Arab interests for the benefit of the people of the West and their protégé, Israel. We have never found any European or American party praising a patriotic Arab leader, a patriotic Arab thinker, or a patriotic Arab religious scholar, whether Muslim or Christian. Instead, we hear them praising the traitors, the deviants, the bargainers, and the collaborators who stand ready to abandon Arab interests and Arab political, economic, and social causes, in order to bend the sons of the nation and its institutions to Western will and Western desires and interests.

No spy, traitor, degenerate, base creature, corrupt figure, or collaborator ever climbs to a position of responsibility in the Arab homeland without the people of the West and Israel mounting campaigns of glorification, praise, and adulation for him, describing him in the sweetest and finest terms, and putting their media to work marketing him as the singular genius, the inspiration, the savior, the redeemer, the hero who will take his people by the hand to the shores of safety, where prosperity, well-being, joy, delight, and rapture await.

[…] and enabled the Zionists to seize us by the throat. Had our rulers any shame, had their faces retained even the slightest trace of decency, they would never have established relations with these unclean states, Britain and France chief among them.

Before Europe presumes to look down on others, it ought to search first for its own independence — to search for a will that has been trodden underfoot by American and Israeli boots. Europe is not free in most of its foreign policies; it cannot defy American policy; indeed, it is now programmed to obey, and to adopt American and Israeli policy in the Arab-Islamic region. Whoever has lost his own will has no right to look down on those who consider their free will something sacred, for whose sake souls are willingly given up.

To the debased Arab leaders, this must be said: those who support you, preserve your rule, and enable you to grip the nation’s throat will not last forever, and when they vanish from our homeland, you will vanish with them. We are well aware that Lebanese and non-Lebanese leaders alike have rejoiced at the European decision, hoping it might hasten Hezbollah’s fall and disappearance — but Hezbollah will endure, and it is they who are bound to vanish.

But the great irony lies in the fact that several Arab and Islamic parties and groups, having themselves been branded terrorist by the West, still go on hurling insults at one another, still stand ready for internal bloodletting. The West weaves its conspiracies and musters its forces to lay waste to our homelands and preserve its grip over us, while some of our own parties, branded with terrorism, pant after internal strife, sorting people into Shia and Sunni, Orthodox and Maronite, Arab and Kurd. The true Muslim is the one who fights whoever has fought us, driven us from our homes, and incited our expulsion — and these are the French, the British, the Americans, the Zionists, and most of the Arab rulers.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “شهادة جديدة لحزب الله” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.