High upon his perch atop the New York Times editorial page, Bret Stephens offers a full-throated call for the United States to launch a war of aggression against Iran. This featured opinion piece in the “paper of record” is noteworthy because it reflects the detritus that’s currently swirling around the minds of U.S. foreign policy elites concerning a big war with Iran.
Mr. Stephens serves up so many glaring omissions in this op-ed that when you finish reading it your eyes will burn as if you had been staring at the sun. He begins with a paragraph-long quotation from the late Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who Israel assassinated on September 27th with over 80 two-thousand pound “bunker buster” bombs in the Dahiya Shia quarter of South Beirut. He uses the quotation to strongly suggest that Nasrallah’s only real motive in fighting against the Israelis was to “kill all Jews.” Stephens knows how to get a rise out of his readers.
By smearing Nasrallah as nothing more than an “antisemite” he purposely overlooks the reasons for Hezbollah’s existence in the first place. There was no Hezbollah until after the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its military occupation of the country that lasted for eighteen years. The IDF and their Lebanese proxies killed approximately 17,000 civilians. Nasrallah was born in Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon on August 31, 1960. He was a young man during the years of Israeli occupation; and like many Lebanese, he wasn’t very keen on seeing a large piece of his country become another Gaza Strip or West Bank. In 1985, a new resistance group bounded onto the scene as part of the ongoing struggle to push the Israelis out of Lebanon: Hezbollah, “The Party of God.”
Hellbound and Down 