Hezbollah is a right wing, sociological, psychological, religious terrorist organization. Hezbollah provides an environment to protect and grow its cause through cultivation of its community by prescribed religious and academic teachings to develop a national and religious identity. Use of religious rhetoric combined with the demonization of all who do not subscribe to their specific brand of Islamic Shiitism; Hezbollah is able to re-enforce its fanatical military wing while maintaining a productive infrastructure. (Hezbollah – Capabilities And Role In The Middle East (Full Documentary))
Hezbollah’s origins took hold in 1982 when Israel invaded the southern border of Lebanon in the attempt to remove the Palestinian Liberation Organization out
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of Lebanese boarders. A revolution began and guerilla fighters intervein in response to Israel’s aggression. Information gathered and compiled by Jewish Virtual Library a Project of Aice depicts the rise of Hezbollah through means of assistance from Iran, “Hezbollah’s origins and ideology stem from the Iranian Revolution. “The revolution called for a religious Muslim government that would represent the oppressed and downtrodden. . . The organization itself started in 1982 as part of the Iranian government’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.” (Hezbollah: History & Overview) With the help of Iran Hezbollah guerilla fighters were trained into an effective military militia which currently maintains Lebanon’s southern border. The existence of Hezbollah is fueled by the lack of Lebanese governing ability to fully provide social and health services for its people along with the injection of foreign monetary, military, and political aid from Iran, Syrian, and benefactors for the Islamic Shi’ite religion.
Since its inception Hezbollah has done more than fight back invading entities, the organization has created an infrastructure which provides an education system, medical care, job and career opportunity assistance, housing, financial assistance for those who have martyred family members, and a sense of community strength and pride. (Duheaume, 2017) Hezbollah’s return of cultivated ideals merged with the nurturing of its umbrellaed populace are trained intelligent fighters and insurgents which are loyal to their core religious and organizations’ …show more content…
beliefs. The objectives of Hezbollah are to remove non-Lebanese influences from its boarders, Unite Lebanon under a Shi’ite Islamic religion and the liberation of Palestine from Israel’s occupation with the overall elimination of the Israeli government. (Palestine Liberation Organization, 2018) The Operations of Hezbollah are still linked to its core mission though the need for sustainment and proliferation can be seen through its involvement in Syria beginning in May 2013. Hezbollah and Syria are linked religiously through Shi’ite Islamic beliefs. Continued financial support from Iran is need to fund Hezbollah operations. (Loader) Hezbollah is considered a terrorist organization by the use of tactics which are deployed for the purpose of religious values and national policy changes among the Lebanese people.
Terrorism definitions are difficult to solidify mainly because of the overwhelming differences in perspectives. After review of 18 U.S. Code § 2331 certain dialect and shared commonalities have led to my own definition of terrorism which I define as; any activity that involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of criminal laws enacted by a sovereign region, for the purpose of policy change or gains through implementation of fear, directed towards non-participating entities. Tony Duheaume a critic and author which has spent over forty years following political and civil events in the Middle East, depicts events from his article, “Understanding Hezbollah’s history as a ‘proxy of Iran’” from the Al Arabiya English website concerning acts of terrorism which Hezbollah has claimed responsibility
for. . . . March 17, 1992, when Rafsanjani was alleged to have ordered the truck bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, when a 1985 Ford pickup truck containing approximately 225-340kg of TNT exploded near the front entrance of the embassy, destroying much of the building’s facade, killing twenty-nine people. Then two years later, on July 18, 1994, in the same city, the bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) took place, in which 85 people lost their lives, and Hezbollah claimed full responsibility for both terror attacks (Duheaume, 2017). Direct attacks against western establishments and those who harbor western ideologies are not condemned and are considered fruitful progression to Hezbollah’s cause. Dissociation of such atrocities conveys the depiction of a struggle between what is “good” and “evil”. Within the Hezbollah society any religious practices that do not align with its own are considered to be evil; there for committing evil acts against evil people is not considered evil but rather Gods will. Jihad Council the military wing of Hezbollah has evolved into a well-organized and effective force which maintains terrorism practices. Tully Mcloughlin provides an extensive list for ABC News website of recorded terrorist attacks claimed by Hezbollah, here are just a few: • April 18, 1983: Strike at US Embassy in Beirut, killing 63, including 17 Americans. • June 14, 1985: Hezbollah terrorists hijack TWA Flight 847. Hijackers kill Robert Stethem, a U.S. Navy diver, and take other hostages. • July 12, 2006: Hezbollah fires Katyusha rockets at Israel, crosses the Israeli border and kidnaps two Israeli soldiers. Event sparks protracted conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. (S. TULLY MCLOUGHLIN, 2008) Estimation of the military wing strength in numbers was found through a news organization called SouthFront here are their findings, “Iran‟s FARS news agency data from October 2016 put Hezbollah‟s armed strength at no less than 65,000 troops, including reserves. Of them, 21,000 are professional soldiers with constant training. According to the 2017 Military Balance, currently 5-8 thousand Hezbollah troops are fighting in Syria.” (SouthFront) The financial income of Hezbollah relies mainly on donations, illegal activities, and state assistance from other countries such as Iran and Syria. Donations in the form of civil relief funneled through Lebanon state funds or through charitable organizations which directly or indirectly funnel resources to Hezbollah. Lebanese parliament, readily accedes that the group receives funds from Iran, but maintains these are only for "health care, education and support of war widows." (Levitt, 2005) Fraudulent and illegal activities involving just about everything from T-shirts to identity theft, kidnaping and extortion around the world are some of the organizations’ more politically unappealing methods for accruing finances. “Western diplomats and analysts in Lebanon estimated Hezbollah receives closer to $200 million a year from Iran. . . Iranian cargo planes deliver sophisticated weaponry, from rockets to small arms, to Hezbollah in regular flights to Damascus from Tehran.” (Levitt, 2005)
Laura Deeb’s An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon seeks to rectify post-9/11 notions of political Islam as anti-modern and incongruous with Western formulations of secular modernity. Specifically, Deeb is writing in opposition to a Weberian characterization of modern secular Western societies as the development of bureaucracies through social rationalization and disenchantment. Within this Weberian framework Deeb asserts that Shia communities are in-part modern because of the development of beuorocratic institutions to govern and regulate religious practice. However, Deeb makes a stronger argument oriented towards dislodging the assumptions "that Islamism is static and monolithic, and that
Hoffman makes the argument that this “characteristic of self denial distinguishes the terrorist from other types of political extremists,” in that, under duress, even those extremists whose identification with their cause could prove illicit or disreputable, would admit to those appellations for themselves; however, this is not the case for the terrorist––Hoffman claims that those dubbed terrorists will “go to great lengths to evade and obscure any such inference or connection… The terrorist will always argue that it is society or the government or the socio-economic `system' and its laws that are the real `terrorists', and moreover that if it were not for this oppression, he would not have felt the need to defend either himself or the population he claims to represent,” (Hoffman 20). This is evinced by an anecdote offered by Terry Anderson, an American journalist taken hostage by Shiite Hezbollah militants for nearly seven years, wherein he details a conversation with one of his captors: upon reading a newspaper’s characterizing Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, the guard’s visceral reaction is a disassociation from the term, indignantly responding that “we are not terrorists, we are fighters” (Politifact). On the surface, the guard’s statement offers no tangible conclusion other than there exists a connotative
Categorical terrorism, according to Jeff Goodwin, is defined as “the strategic use of violence and threats of violence, usually intended to influence several audiences, by oppositional political groups against civilian or noncombatants who belong to a specific entity, religious or national group, social class or some other collectivity, without regard to their individual identities or roles.” More so, in terms of definition, according to a study done by Jeffrey Record in 2003, there was a count of over 109 definitions of terrorism, covering 22 different categorical elements. During the 70s and 80s, the United Nations struggled to define the term, finally coming up with the following definition: “Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them.”
Samii, Abbas William. "The Shah's Lebanon policy: the role of SAVAK." Middle Eastern Studies 33.1 (1997): 66+. World History in Context. Web. 19 May 2014.
As the relationship between Iran and the Amal movement was affected by the political differences between them which opened the door to the creation of Hezbollah, the same misunderstanding occurred between revolutionary Iran and the Fatah movement. Iran viewed the Palestinian revolution as a card in its struggle against the West, while the Fatah movement considered its relations with Iran as a way to enhance their power in the national struggle for the restoration of the occupied Palestinian territories. Just as the differences between Iran and Amal movement led to the birth of Hezbollah, the differences between Tehran and the Fatah led to the birth of Hamas and Islamic Jihad later.
In the post Osama bin Laden era al-Qaedist ideology is flourishing across the Arab world. A significant development has been the rise of al-Qaeda offshoots in the Middle East. The Abdallah Azzam Brigades franchise has increasingly become a noteworthy actor in terrorism. On May 8th, 2012 Thomas Nides, Deputy Secretary of State designated Abdallah Azzam Brigades as a foreign terrorist organization (Nides, T.R. , 2012). Abdullah Azzam Brigades may have only recently been added as a foreign terrorist group; nevertheless the organization has deep roots, lethal capacity, and is capable of contributing to supplementary instability in the Middle East.
After the Six Day War Israel security forces were attempting to cultivate and expand islamism. In between the years 1967 and 1987 the number of mosques in Gaza went from 200 to 600. While islamism was expanding at this time so were the other smaller nationalist terrorist groups, such as the PLO, were also expanding in the streets, and in schools. Hamas was founded in 1978, during the expansion of islamism and terrorist nationalist groups, by Ahmed Yassin as a Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The real terrorist acts from this group started happening around the 1990’s ...
It has been said that, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. When examining organizations that make this statement true, it’s hard to ignore Hezbollah. Hezbollah, also known as Hizbullah, or Hizballah, is a Shi'a Islamic militant group and political party established and residing in Lebanon.
Within the world today, there are many organizations with varying opinions about specific ideals. But some of the organizations will take things to the extreme, and will do almost anything to prove that their view is the right one. This extreme act to further an objective is known as terrorism, but what exactly is a formal definition of terrorism? Frank Schmalleger defines it as “[a] violent act or an act dangerous to human life, in violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any state, that is committed to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” (Criminal Justice Today, 2013 p.560). The American way of life and other aspects such as policy and the criminal justice system have been impacted by terrorism in many ways over the course of the twenty first century.
The world today has many problems, the main one being terrorism. It seems as if
Quarterly, inc. "Syria." The Middle East. 11th ed. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2007. 437 - 456. Print.
The U.S. Department of State defines terrorism as, “The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological”. Whereas the Belgium Red Cross says that terrorism is committed “for the purpose of intimidating the population, forcing a third party to act or destablishing or destroying the fundamental structures of a country or of an international organization”.
The word terrorism was first used during the French Revolution from the reign of terror inflicted by the French from 1784-1804 ("International Affairs"). It was used to describe the violent acts perpetrated on the French that inflicted terror on the various peoples and instilled fear within them. However, at the time it had a more positive connotation than the term that instills fear today. During the French Revolution this was because it referred to state-sponsored terrorism in order to show the need of state instead of anarchy, sometimes promoted by other groups (Hoffman 2). Therefore, even though terrorism has taken a new nature, terrorism can refer to official governments or guerrilla groups operating outside national governments ("International Affairs"). In order to encompass terrorism’s various sectors and explain it to the public, in both positive and negative aspects, many analysts have tried to put it into a few words. Terrorism is a method used by tightly of loosely organized groups operation within states or international territories that are systematic in using deliberate acts of violence or threats in order to instill...
Terrorism has many forms, and many definitions. “Elements from the American definitional model define terrorism as a premeditated and unlawful act in which groups or agents of some principal engage in a threatened or actual use o...
Terrorism is one of the most extensively discussed issues of our time and at the same time it is also one of the least understood. The term itself “terrorism” means many different things to different people, cultures, and races. As a result, trying to define or classify terrorism with one universal definition is nearly impossible. The definition of terrorism used in this research is a reflection of much of the Western and American way of defining it. The definition of terrorism is,