Charles Glass on accusations about Hizbullah]
[from the current LRB]
Too fair to Hizbullah? From Charles Glass
Eugene Goodheart asks whether I am familiar with two statements he
attributes to Hizbullah’s secretary-general, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah
(Letters, 7 September). Goodheart uses the inflammatory quotations to
accuse Nasrallah of being ‘an anti-semite with fantasies of
genocide’. If I am unfamiliar with the statements, it is because they
are in all likelihood fabrications.
The first (’If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel it will save us
the trouble of going after them worldwide’) was circulated widely on
neo-con websites, which give as its original source an article by
Badih Chayban in Beirut’s English-language Daily Star on 23 October
2002. It seems that Chayban left the Star three years ago and moved
to Washington. The Star’s managing editor writes of Chayban’s article
on Nasrallah, that ‘I have faith in neither the accuracy of the
translation [from Arabic to English] nor the agenda of the translator
[Chayban].’ The editor-in-chief and publisher of the Star, Jamil
Mrowe, adds that Chayban was ‘a reporter and briefly local desk sub
and certainly did not interview Nasrallah or anyone else.’ The
account of Nasrallah’s speech in the Lebanese daily As Safir for the
same day makes no reference to any anti-semitic comments. Goodheart’s
second quotation – ‘They [the Jews] are a cancer which is liable to
spread at any moment’ – comes from the Israeli government’s website
at http://tinyurl.com/99hyz. For the record, a Hizbullah
spokeswoman, Wafa Hoteit, denies that Nasrallah made either statement.
Goodheart wonders whether, as a former captive of Hizbullah, I may
have succumbed to Stockholm syndrome; may I ask in return whether he
is succumbing to the disinformation that passes for scholarship and
journalism in certain quarters in the United States?
Charles Glass Paris