A tribune on Imad Mughniyeh’s death

Thanks to Alain Gresh’s blog, I read the editorial of the Lebanese Daily Star daily, dated 14th of Feb. It was published after the assassination of the Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh.

It is interesting to notice that this newspaper, being read mainly among the Sunni and Christian communities in Lebanon, is rather close to the Western position.

I’m not trying to advocate any crime or defend any violent action (and this article does not either) but one must recall the local context before issuing quick judgments.

Here is an extract :

‘Whether one chooses to condemn or praise Mughniyeh, it is worth recalling the context in which he arose to become one of the most wanted men in the world. Mughniyeh had not yet been born in 1948, when Israeli forces entered Lebanon and killed dozens of civilians in the village of Hula, and he was just a toddler when the Jewish state sent commandos to Beirut International Airport to blow up 13 passenger planes. During Mughniyeh’s childhood and early adolescence, Israel systematically destroyed dozens of Muslim, Christian and Druze villages in Lebanon, making much of the South of the country uninhabitable and forcing scores of civilians to flee from their ancestral homes to the southern suburbs of Beirut. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Mughniyeh’s response to the criminal brutality that he witnessed in his formative years, one cannot deny the role that these events played in making him the man that he eventually became: Mughniyeh, like Hizbullah itself, arose as a direct response to Israeli aggression.’