Accusers of Hezbollah, themselves chief sponsors of terror: Academic

Press TV has interviewed William Beeman, a professor at the University of Minnesota, about Saudi Arabian attempts to demonize the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, which has been fighting the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Seems today the definition of terrorism has been reversed, and in the opinion of Saudi Arabia, those who fight ISIS terrorists are terrorists. How can this be and so who are the real terrorists?

Beeman: I quite agree. I think that people throw around this term “terrorism” any time they want to just simply denigrate one group or another. One might have claimed that, in the 1980s, that some of actions of Hezbollah might have been defined as terrorist actions. In fact, they were self-defense for the Shia community in southern Lebanon.

These days, Hezbollah is engaged in rather normal military operations and they’re fighting against ISIS in Syria. The problem is of course that a great deal of support for ISIS is coming from the nations of the Arabian Peninsula.

And the fact is Hezbollah and other groups are making headway against ISIS. So, it is ISIS, or ISIL or Daesh—whatever you want to call them. So, I’m not sure why the members of the Arab League are saying this except that they maybe want to say something bad about any Shia forces fighting any Sunni force, but this accusation has no substance whatever. They can’t demonstrate how the operations of Hezbollah conform to any definition that we know of terrorism.

So, I think that this is just a simple case of name-calling.

Also, I should tell you that this is one way for the Arab nations who are... during this name-calling, to make it seem that they are less guilty than they actually are; and they are in fact the chief state supporters of terrorism in the region now.

Press TV: And of course how likely will those countries supporting ISIS terrorists receive backlashes on their own soil?

Beeman: Well, I don’t think they’re going to, because the ISIS or ISIL is a Salafist organization and princes in Saudi Arabia, the majority of the population identify themselves as Salafis. And so, the public support for Daesh or ISIL or ISIS is in fact very large in Saudi Arabia, it’s large in Kuwait, large in the UAE.

And so, whereas the government reluctantly at the behest of the United States has denounced ISIS, the popular view in those countries is that they should be supporting ISIS. And I will tell you that we know definitively that private contributions to ISIS have been made from the Arabian Peninsula.

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