Hezballah deserves humiliation

Jeff Jacoby:

According to a pair of Gallup polls released last week, 83 percent of Americans say Israel is justified in taking military action against Hezbollah, while 76 percent disapprove of Hezbollah's attacks on Israel. Yet when asked which side in the conflict the United States should take, 65 percent answer: neither side. Indeed, 3 in 4 Americans say they are concerned that the US military will be drawn into the fighting, or that it will increase the likelihood of terrorism against the United States.

Gallup's numbers suggest two things. First, that most Americans, sizing up the warfare in northern Israel and southern Lebanon, recognize that Hezbollah is the aggressor and that Israel is fighting in self-defense. And second, that most Americans believe this fight has nothing to do with the United States.

Welcome to Sept. 10.

For years Osama bin Laden had preached that it was "the duty of Muslims to confront, fight, and kill" Americans. His adherents had responded by blowing up the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and slamming a boat laden with explosives into the USS Cole. Yet most Americans paid no attention to Al Qaeda and its threats -- until 3,000 people lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001.

Has nothing been learned from that experience?

Hezbollah's barbaric assault on Israel -- kidnapping and murdering soldiers who weren't engaged in hostilities, firing waves of missiles into cities and towns, packing rockets with ball bearings meant to maximize suffering by shredding human flesh -- is part and parcel of the radical Islamist jihad against the free world. Nothing to do with the United States? It has *everything* to do with the United States. Hezbollah hates Americans at least as implacably as Al Qaeda does, and rarely misses an opportunity to say so.

"We consider [America] to be an enemy because it wants to humiliate our governments, our regimes, and our peoples," railed Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, at an enormous rally in February 2005. (Video of Nasrallah's speech, which was broadcast on Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV, has been posted on the internet by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute.) "It is the greatest plunderer of our treasures, our oil, and our resources. . . . Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: 'Death to America!' "

And from tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters came the answering cry: "Death to America! Death to America! Death to America! Death to America!"

...

Primative chants of impotence are not much to worry about, but Nasrallah is definitely an enemy of the US and we should do everything we can to ensure his destruction or at a minimum the degrading of his military forces. I will be writing more about Al-Manar TV and 9-11 later.