On 9 October, Tom Bossert, President Trump’s Homeland Security Adviser, published an opinion column in which he assures [quite seriously], with neither laughter nor remorse:

“Hezbollah remains a threat for the United States, the security of the States in the Middle East and beyond. It is time that other countries join the United States by presenting this killer organization for what it is, attacking its networks and support systems and preparing a global response to the threat that it presents to the civilized world. (...) Hezbollah has built its political power at a cost to its victims, among which is the former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri and tens of other Lebanese leaders. The Lebanese people is never completely free to express its political will, as it is constantly threatened by Hezbollah’s violence and coercion” [1].

On 10 October 2017, Nathan Sales (US ambassador for the Fight against Terrorism) and Nicholas Rasmussen (Director of the National Centre Against Terrorism), have given a joint press conference at the Department of State on the twentieth anniversary of Hezbollah being added to the US’s list of terrorist organizations. They have revealed the United States was threatened by Hezbollah and denounced “a global threat” (sic).

This is Washington’s custom - to declare that it is threatened. Thus, when Reagan was president, a delegation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had made a tour of Nato members to present the plan to invade the United States by … Nicaragua. Yet another example: when Bush Jr was president, the CIA had declared that Iraq had both chemical weapons and intercontinental rockets, and was preparing to strike America.

So, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has decided to offer a reward of 7 million dollars to anyone who will provide him with information capable of supporting the arrest, “anywhere in the world” of Talal Hamiyé, Hezbollah’s Head of the Department of External Security, and 5 million dollars for information on Fouad Chokr, another Party Officer.

According to Sales and Rasmussen, Talal probably played a key role in planning and launching an attack against the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, during which 241 US soldiers died. In this example, it was actually the Marines who were occupying Lebanon and not the other way round.

For a number of years now, Israel has been attributing attacks committed all over the world (Argentina, Bulgaria, etc.) to Hezbollah. However, apart from the fact that the Party of God has always denied any involvement, the local police services has never been able to support these imputations. However these imputations feature in countless encyclopaedia as verified facts.

In actual fact, it seems that the Trump administration considers quite wrongly, that Hezbollah would only be an Iranian pawn, and is seeking to apply pressure on Teheran by stigmatizing it.

Translation
Anoosha Boralessa

[1It’s Time to Mobilize a Global Response to the Terrorist Group Lebanese Hizballah”, by Tom Bossert, Voltaire Network, 10 October 2017.