Inside the Middle East: Imad who?

As Hizbullah's official funeral of Imad Mughniyeh unfolded last week - Hizbullah's leader eulogized him over a coffin decked in Hizbullah's flag - it was useful to recall the party's denial of his very existence over all these many years. Mention of his name to Hizbullah officials would draw a blank stare or blanket denial. "Hizbullah professes no knowledge of the man," the New York Times reported in 2002. A journalist who interviewed a top Hizbullah official and parliamentary deputy, Abdullah Kassir, once asked him if he knew Mughniyah. "Kassir flashed a blistering look and responded curtly, 'I have no answer.'"

Hizbullah's leader, Hasan Nasrallah, followed a double tack: he would defend "freedom fighter" Mughniyeh, but not acknowledge him. "The American accusations against Mughnieh are mere accusations," he was quoted as saying. "Can they provide evidence to condemn Imad Mughniyeh? They launch accusations as if they are given facts." But when pressed, Nasrallah "refused to reveal whether Mughniyeh has a role in Hizbullah." Of course.

Another American academic wrote this precious paragraph in her book on Hizbullah:

For its part, Hizbullah has consistently denied the existence of any relationship with Mughniyeh, direct or indirect. As a matter of record, from the time of the party's inception, all Hizbullah officials have emphatically denied ever knowing a person by the name of Imad Mughniyeh. The apparent avoidance of this issue is clear in an answer to a recent question about the party's relationship with Mughniyeh. The response of a Hizbullah senior official was that Mughniyeh had never held a position in their organization, and was, in Deputy Secretary General Naim al-Qassim's words, 'only a name'.

The same author then spends a few embarrassing pages agonizing over this question: "Was Mughniyeh a member of Hizbullah?"

Now that Nasrallah's eulogy has placed Mughniyeh officially in the pantheon of Hizbullah's greatest martyrs (with Abbas al-Musawi and Raghib Harb), this question looks absurd. That it ever arose is a testament to the discipline of Hizbullah in sticking to lies that serve its interests. One of its paramount interests is concealing from scrutiny that apparatus of terror that Mughniyah spent his life building. Hiding the clandestine branch protects it from Hizbullah's enemies, and makes it easier to sell the movement to useful idiots in the West, who insist that the movement hasn't done any terror in years, and maybe never did any at all. They produce statements of such mind-boggling gullibility that one can easily imagine Mughniyeh chuckling to himself on reading them. The "literature" is rife with claims that Mughniyeh didn't really belong to Hizbullah, or he answered to Iran, or he had his own agenda - anything to dissociate his terrorist acts from the party.

The truth is (and always has been) a simple one. Hizbullah is many things, but it has always included within it a clandestine terrorist branch, and it probably always will. Indeed, Nasrallah's threat in his eulogy - to commence an "open war" with Israel outside the Israel-Lebanon theater - alludes to the "global reach" that Mughniyeh helped to build.

If Hizbullah were absolutely determined to distance itself from the terror tag, it wouldn't have accorded an official send-off to a most-wanted terrorist. Nor would its leader have stood over his coffin and threatened "open war." Assassinations of terrorists can boomerang, and so might this one. But it's already had the one merit of exposing the core of Hizbullah that lies deep beneath the schools, the hospitals, and all the other gimmicks the party uses to get support and pass in polite company. On page one of the International Herald Tribune yesterday, there were photographs of the aftermath of the Beirut bombing of the US Marines barracks (1983), the hijacked TWA Flight 847 (1985), and the ruins of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia (1996). That's Hizbullah too, and that was Imad Mughniyah - and they were one.

Update: For more reading on "expert" gullibility regarding Mughniyeh and Hizbullah, see this chapter-and-verse dissection by Tony Badran, and this analysis by Michael Young.