Hasan Nasrallah was a coward, a genocidal maniac who wallowed in the trough of the basest human emotions. It was only fitting that this purveyor of the unconscionable finally met his end hiding like a quivering sewer rat in a dank borrow hundreds of feet under residential buildings in central Beirut.
Hezbollah had deliberately located its headquarters under dwellings in this crowded part of the city hoping that the fear of killing innocent civilians above ground would prove to be a sufficient deterrent for pursuers. Clearly, Israel was willing to bet on the precision of its firepower to smoke out Hezbollah without causing too much collateral damage. And when one considers that Israel has had almost a year of practice in Gaza as it hunted for Hamas in its tunnels, Tel Aviv was right to back itself.
Hezbollah’s burrowing mus maximus and mus minimus were toast before they could say “JDAM”. The Israel-fired and American-made “bunker busters” bore through the civilian citadel above before vaporising their quarry underground. Almost all of Hezbollah’s top brass were eliminated.
Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, was the first to feel the aftershocks as they rippled through West Asia before buffeting India’s Islamised Kashmir valley.
Here, thousands hit the streets, politicians pulled out of ongoing electioneering and even Members of Parliament took to condemning “terror state” Israel.
But why would anyone think such a nasty parasite was worth putting on a pedestal? Especially here in India.
As it turns out, the reasons vary. For some Indian Muslims, he is a “martyr”, a “crusader” for Islamic rights against the “oppressor” Israel. For others a “talisman’’ for the Palestine “cause” — a struggle against the West that Nasrallah accused of reducing Muslims to second-class status in their land.
But while people have a right to elevate anyone to mythical proportions there are fundamental problems with this sympathy spree, especially among Indians.
First, support for Nasrallah egregiously normalises antisemitism. The fact is that the day after the Hamas-led massacre on October 7 in Israel, Hezbollah also launched unprovoked attacks. These forced more than 60,000 Israelis on the northern border with Lebanon to leave their homes, becoming refugees in their own land. Nasrallah hoped to piggyback on Hamas to finally rid the land of Jews from the “river to the sea”. For Nasrallah, the world’s Jews are the “source of all corruption and deception” who he claims even faked the Holocaust. Do Indian Muslims share this view? Surely not?
And it isn’t just his antisemitism. Nasrallah is also an Islamophobe. Nasrallah has killed more Muslims than Jews. A thousand times more. Hezbollah has facilitated the mass murder of Sunnis during the Lebanese, Iraqi, and Syrian Civil Wars. Hezbollah has slaughtered even the followers of their fellow Shia Amal group. How then could Indian Muslims — the third largest grouping of Muslims in the world — think he speaks for them?
Finally, and most pertinently for Indians, Nasrallah has always viewed Kashmir as an “occupied territory” to be liberated. It boggles the mind that today, Indian Members of Parliament who are sworn to uphold the Indian Constitution are shedding tears for anti-India Nasrallah.
This inexplicable break in logic recalls the words of Dr BR Ambedkar who famously said: “The Brotherhood of Islam is not the universal brotherhood of man. It is the brotherhood of Muslims for Muslims only. There is a fraternity, but its benefit is confined to those within that corporation. The allegiance of a Muslim does not rest on his domicile in the country which is his but on the faith to which he belongs. In other words, Islam can never allow a true Muslim to adopt India as his motherland…”
One would hate to think Ambedkar was right.
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