It was Friday afternoon, March 2011, when I turned on my television just in time to catch Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah’s Friday speech on PressTV, broadcast live from Lebanon. With an English translation provided by PressTV, I was stunned to hear Nasrallah call for the entire world to support…what turned out to be the US/NATO war on Libya.
That’s right, no slip of the tongue; Hassan Nasrallah made it crystal clear that he wanted to see the end of the Libyan government led by Muammar Gaddafi and that the whole world should support this objective.
The next day, Saturday, PressTV repeated Nasrallah’s speech, and we heard it all again. It wasn’t a mistranslation, as comrades fluent in Arabic heard it and verified the accuracy of the PressTV translation.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any record of this on PressTV’s website, perhaps understandably, given that it took place over 13 years ago.
Still, why is it that this fact—that Hezbollah’s top leader supported what quickly became the US/NATO war against Libya—remains almost completely unknown among international activists? And if they do know about it, as any well-informed activist following the news at the time should have, why have they kept silent?
I have been repeatedly called a liar, slandered viciously, and threatened for pointing this fact out.
So why did Hassan Nasrallah support this Western crime against the Libyan people, where over 100,000—maybe even upwards of 250,000—Libyans were slaughtered by Western bombs and missiles, the same bombs and missiles that are killing Palestinians and Lebanese people today?
Nasrallah’s animosity towards Gaddafi stemmed from the mysterious disappearance of one of his primary mentors while visiting Libya years earlier. A prominent religious leader in Lebanon’s Shi’ite community vanished without a trace, and Gaddafi claimed to know nothing about it.
Many scenarios exist to explain this disappearance, from Gaddafi falling out with his guest to Gaddafi being betrayed by his intelligence service—something entirely credible given events since then—or even the possibility that the CIA orchestrated this crime to provoke inter-Arab conflict while eliminating a leader of Hezbollah, a rising movement in Lebanon that posed a threat to the US’s ally in West Asia, Israel.
Whatever the reason, Nasrallah’s mentor went missing while under the protection of Gaddafi, who offered no explanation for the event.
So, understandably, Nasrallah had grounds to be angry with Gaddafi. But to support a Western war against Libya led by the very powers backing his enemy, Israel—powers responsible for numerous crimes against the Lebanese and Palestinian people?
We were living in Eritrea in 2011 when we saw Nasrallah’s bombshell speech, and it became a hot topic of discussion among our circle of friends. We all wondered why Nasrallah would do this when those set to destroy Libya and enable Gaddafi’s brutal murder would likely come after him and his movement someday.
And sure enough, what so many international commentators had called the “iconic leader” Hassan Nasrallah met the same fate as Gaddafi at the hands of their shared enemies: the Western-backed colonial, settler, racist apartheid regime in Israel.
As an educator and historian, I consider what I have just described an accurate account of a crime: the Western destruction of Libya in 2011 and Hassan Nasrallah’s support for it.
I have to ask: if any leader anywhere supports Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinian and now Lebanese people, would we be praising that person?
So perhaps it’s time for people to know the true history and start asking the hard questions. As I respond to my critics when raising this issue, “don’t shoot the messenger.” Instead, seek a better understanding of the very complex crisis developing in West Asia today, based on the real history of the region.
