Nasrallah Weeps for his Mother

But Not for Anyone Else’s Mother

This is an extra unscheduled guest post from the JPF family by Nia Outis. For more of her brilliant non-fiction, start with this October 320th.

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Nasrallah Weeps for his Mother

Photo by Mony Misheal on Unsplash

Israel | 28 June 2024, 17:45 pm IST

1 | Hezbollah Unmasked

Watch this three-part investigative report about Hezbollah by filmmakers Jérôme Fritel and Sofia Amara — and then we’ll talk!

Note: If Part 3 of this documentary (above, which appears to be age-restricted) fails to play for you, here is the source and hyperlink: “Unmasking Hezbollah — Money laundering in Europe (3/3) | DW Documentary.” YouTube, uploaded by DW Documentary. 18 May 2024. <

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2 | The Summer of 2006

Hezbollah means Party of God, but of course, they are not unless your version of God is partisan, totalitarian, and savagely cruel; unless your God is a practicing jihadi who runs a global drug cartel, loves armed macho blowhards, and hates everyone else.

During Lebanon’s civil war (1975–1990), Hezbollah (est. 1982) helped itself to a thick slice of southern Lebanon because that is what the self-absorbed, arrogant, brutal men pushing radical Islam (down, ahem, the world’s throat) feel entitled to do: use Arab countries as launch pads in jihad’s obsessive Hundred Years’ War on the State of Israel’s existence.

In the summer of 2006, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah bombarded Israel’s third-largest city, Haifa, for 34 consecutive days.

I spent those air raids huddled with colleagues in the stairwell of the building where I worked or riding on public buses barreling past people sheltering behind vehicles on the side of the road, or in my flat (which lacked a reinforced room) doing artza—trans: Down!—on the floor with the dog, soothing us both by stroking her fur and whispering the Shema.

Heightened senses kick into gear in wartime. Your ears are attuned to the rumble of laden fighter jets harrowing the sky; to air raid sirens’ eerie, urgent wailing; to the whoosh of incoming rockets; to midair explosions (from Iron Dome interceptions) and the explosive thuds of unintercepted rockets piercing the earth’s body. You habituate to fight-or-flight anxiety and to brace for impact. (I speak as a civilian.)

In mid-August of that summer, Hezbollah agreed to UN security council resolution 1701—but of course, they didn’t mean it, and neither did the United Nations!

This according to the Guardian: “The key peace terms. . . laid out in UN security council resolution 1701 have never been implemented. Hezbollah was supposed to pull back from the border across the Litani River, about 20 miles away, and to disarm. It has done neither, and instead built up a fearsome arsenal, with Iran’s help, estimated at well over 100,000 rockets, with the potential to overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome defences and inflict significant damage on the country’s cities. UNIFIL has observed the buildup but has not prevented it.”

This makes the best argument for why Israel must never collude with UN demands that the State unilaterally cease fire on bordering quasi-states committed to her destruction.

Lest you misunderstand “never collude,” I mean that clearly, the United Nations has no desire to birth a sustainable Middle East peace inclusive of the State of Israel, and therefore cannot be an honest broker.

3 | The Summer of 2024

Should you care to doom scroll with me (saving the worst for last), click the hyperlinks:

• The Conversation: “Hezbollah announced in February 2022 that it had acquired the technology to build high-precision guided missiles that reach targets across the whole of Israel and could pose a threat to its Iron Dome defence system.”

• CSIS | Center for Strategic & International Studies: “Destroying Israel has been a part of [Hezbollah’s] core ideology since its founding. . . . [It ]is probably the most heavily armed non-state group in the world. . . . The accuracy of these weapons . . . provide Hezbollah with the capability to strike high-value targets, vital economic centers, and critical infrastructure.”

• Washington Post: “Ever since Oct. 7, Hezbollah has been shelling northern Israel, driving 60,000 Israelis from their homes. Israel has retaliated with airstrikes against Hezbollah leaders and positions. Now, the Israeli public is demanding that the military push Hezbollah away from the border so that Israel’s internal refugees can return to their homes in time for the start of the school year in the fall. But that risks throwing the already-exhausted Israel Defense Forces into another deadly quagmire while Hezbollah potentially fires its arsenal of 150,000 missiles at targets all over Israel.”

• Ynetnews, quoting Tal Beeri, Head of the Research Department at the Alma Research and Education Center: “Even if the government pursues a diplomatic agreement, it will only postpone the war that will break out whenever Hezbollah chooses and on its terms — by my estimation, no later than the end of 2026. . . . Any such agreement only means buying time, with Israel being the only side likely to adhere to it, while Hezbollah waits for an opportune moment to initiate a full-scale confrontation.”

• Calcalist, citing Reichman University’s Institute for Counter-Terrorism: “Israel’s war from the north will begin with a massive and destructive barrage of Hezbollah rockets nearly all across the country. The rocket fire will be intense, ranging from 2,500 to 3,000 launches per day, including less accurate rockets and precise long-range missiles. Periodically, Hezbollah will concentrate its efforts, launching massive barrages towards a single target area: a major IDF base or a city in the densely populated center of the country, which will be subjected to hundreds of daily rockets. The barrage will continue day after day until the end of the war, likely three weeks after its outbreak.”

So this is what we’re bracing for. . .

4 | Nasrallah Weeps

Meanwhile, Hassan Nasrallah is weeping for his mother — but not for anyone else’s mother! Not for Lebanese mothers and not for Lebanese children. Not for Israeli mothers and not for Israeli children. Not for Palestinian mothers and children either.

Because in radical Islam’s warped mind, the walking dead includes not only all Jews and all Infidels but also Muslims and especially Palestinians in their sacrificial millions.

Because in the deluded, death-enamored hive mind of jihadis everywhere, their women are breeders whose children are strategic pawns destined for mass martyrdom.

The Guardian: Nasrallah’s ideological attachment to “resistance” requires conflict with Israel — or the threat of it — to justify Hezbollah’s existence and the power it has accumulated in Lebanon.

Opportunistic, fanatical, deeply selfish Hassan Nasrallah weeps for his mother — only his mother — and for a utopian past-and-future Palestine that in historical fact was a neglected Ottoman backwater (1517–1917) before it became a British colonial outpost (1918–1948).

He does not weep for present-day, real Beirut (whose port he blew up in 2020, and whose civilian airport he is currently poised to detonate).

He does not weep for Haifa.

5 | Haifa

So let me tell you about Haifa (pop. 300,000), recently published footage of whose lower city Nasrallah’s surveillance drones have captured in such unnervingly sharp detail that I can easily recognize buildings I have entered and main streets and even pathways along which I have walked.

(A fast-paced, catchy soundtrack accompanies the footage; clearly, the Party of God’s tech bros had fun producing their video game.)

The footage lingers long and hard on Rambam Health Care Campus, adjacent to Haifa Naval Base. In 2006, 60 rockets fell within a half-mile radius of the medical center. By 2014, Rambam had completed the construction of an underground (and sub-marine) hospital meant to save the human lives that Nasrallah means to slaughter.

I don’t live in Haifa now, but when I looked at that drone footage, I recalled the hot summer breeze off the bay that carries with it the mixed-spice fragrance of salt-sea and eucalyptus bark and leaves. I don’t know a more delicious fragrance!

My Haifa is one of the prettiest small cities in the world. People say, and I can vouch for it, that its beauty would equal that of San Francisco or Wellington had the Brits not built oil refineries on Haifa Bay — which in their late-imperial heyday they could do because they felt entitled to exploit land and resources not their own.

To this day, those refineries are an eyesore and pollute the air and sea with carcinogens. Despite this, Haifa is beautiful!

One of its prettiest neighborhoods slopes down verdant Mount Carmel from the Bahai shrine and terraced gardens to the mountain’s base — thence straight to the port via a boulevard lined with restored 19th-century Templar homes and al-fresco eateries, coffee houses, and bars.

Charming as this neighborhood is by day, night gifts the admirer with a lovelier sight: The naked bulbs and fairy lights that canopy the dining patios make of restaurant row a festive light show, above which the shrine’s golden dome illuminates the darkened Carmel, and the lamps flanking the grand staircase carved into the mountain appear as beaded circlets or bracelets, or unclasped strands of strung pearls.

Haifa is beautiful and civilized and sane. Its people are at home in the present and look to the future while not denying the past. In today’s Haifa, Ahmadis, Baháʼís, Christians, Druze, Jews, and Muslims live and let live at work and at play. At peace.

6 | A Terrorist Slays a Lifeguard

Haifa is not a city that Hassan Nasrallah knows or could possibly care about because he is a sociopath bent on its destruction.

It might do him good to eat ice cream or a slice of pizza on the beach and to see the faces of the picnicking Arab and Jewish families (including families whose mothers look like his mom) whom he intends to slaughter because that’s what jihadis do:

• Because jihadis’ sense of entitlement to play with others’ lives goes well beyond anything of which people within the range of normal are capable.

• Because totalitarian zealots (which jihadis are) aim to lead entire societies — others’ societies and their own — to the brink and drive them off a cliff.

• Because they think that all human beings must submit with lemming-like docility and despair to the terrible fate that global jihad plans for the Near and Middle East and the West.

Of all the lives shattered by Nasrallah’s war on civilian Israel in the summer of 2006, the death of beloved Haifa lifeguard Mohammed (Don) Salum stays in mind. He also had a mother — for whom Nasrallah doesn’t weep!

The Jerusalem Post: A Katyusha rocket struck Salum’s home in the Arab neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas on August 6th. Ignoring his own shrapnel wounds, Salum raced into the home to rescue his mother and sister. He was injured further when a gas canister exploded. He was severely burned over most of his body, blinded, and lost one leg, and lay in Intensive Care until his death a year later.

Salum’s story speaks volumes about the cruelty of totalitarians who hate humanity versus the dignity of people who cherish ordinary, peaceful pleasures; about the contrast between a self-aggrandizing deathmonger who squanders lives — a Nasrallah! — and a genuinely heroic man: a lifeguard.