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Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah
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BEIRUT,
Sept 6 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Lebanese Shiite movement
Hezbollah Friday, September 06, 2002, slammed U.S. threats against the
militia, and warned it would confront any "aggression"
against its country.
"We
declare to our nation clearly that the U.S. administration would bear
the responsibility of any aggression against Lebanon and we assert
that we are totally ready and prepared to confront all the
possibilities and defend our people," said a Hezbollah statement.
It
was reacting to comments from U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage, who said Thursday, September 5, that Hezbollah may be the
"A-team" of terrorism and that the United States would act
against the group "in good time."
"These
threats will not prevent us from carrying out our duty to our nation,
we consider that what Armitage claimed is but a series of lies to
deceive public opinion in order to justify the (U.S.) aggressive acts,
and discloses its hatred for the people of the region," Hezbollah
said.
The
threats confirm the U.S. "total bias and submission to the
political, security and military requirements and conditions of the
Zionist enemy" Israel, it said.
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U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage |
"These
threats come as a real expression of the aggressive American policies
toward the regimes, people and political forces of our regime,"
it said.
"It
is not the first time that this administration utters false
accusations and allegations through its officials," it added.
Armitage,
speaking on the impact the September 11 attacks had on U.S. foreign
policy, said "Hezbollah may be the 'A-team' of terrorists."
"They're
on the list, their time will come, there is no question about it. They
have a blood debt to us and ... we're not going to forget it," he
said.
"Hezbollah
may be the 'A team' of terrorists, may be al-Qaeda is actually the 'B
team'," Armitage claimed.
"All
in good time we're going to go after these problems just like a high
school wrestler goes out for a match: we're going to take (them) down
one at a time," he told the conference hosted by the U.S.
Institute of Peace.
Washington
suspects Hezbollah was behind a series of deadly anti-U.S. attacks
during Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war, which were then claimed by
underground groups.
Hezbollah,
backed by Lebanon, Syria and Iran, never claimed any anti-U.S.
operations, and insists its combat was strictly limited to fighting
Israeli troops occupying Arab lands.
Following
the September 11 attacks on the United States, Iran, Syria and Lebanon
came under increased pressure to rein in the group, which Washington
blacklisted as a terrorist organization.
However,
the group is absent from the recently updated European Union list of
terrorist groups.
The
group's guerrilla war was instrumental in forcing Israeli troops out
of southern Lebanon in May 2000, ending a 22-year occupation of the
area.
Hezbollah
now continues to launch attacks on the Lebanese Shebaa Farms border
area, still occupied by Israeli troops.
Armitage's
remarks come as Hezbollah continues to threaten complicating the
Middle East situation with attacks on Israeli interests, just as
Washington gears up for a possible military action on Iraq.
Observers
in the Middle East, meanwhile, believe that Armitage’s threats are
meant only to serve Israeli interests, rather than U.S. ones. In
August, a prominent Saudi writer told IslamOnline that “the Jewish
lobby within the U.S. administration managed to hijack the Sept 11
tragedy, employ it to serve its own agenda of upholding Israeli
interests, not U.S. ones”.
Saudi
political analyst and the deputy editor in chief of Saudi Arabia’s
English-language Arab News, Jamal Khashoggi said that the U.S.
administration is duty bound to protect its citizens and to prevent
another Sept. 11 from taking place. However, it cannot hope to succeed
in doing that by making trusted advisers of such dubious “experts on
Islamic terror” as Daniel Pipe, Steven Emerson, and Laurent
Murawiec.
“These
people and others like them have their own agendas that begin and
end with upholding Israel’s interests. Such so-called experts
deliberately mix the good with the bad, and combine sound advice with
ill intentions. Truth is thus lost, taking American security along
with it.
“The
Bush administration, by following their advice, will discover that it
has abandoned what it should be doing and will find itself fighting
Hamas and Hizbullah just because they are enemies of Israel,” he
added.
Khashoggi
went on to explain that the “Israelis, as a matter of fact, are
overjoyed to have the most powerful nation on earth fight their own
wars, while they focus on rebuilding their economy, shattered as a
result of occupying other people’s lands. It is consequently
illogical to expect them (advisers like Murawiec) to criticize
American behavior, or to warn the U.S. against involving itself in the
morass of occupation and humiliation that is the daily lot of the
Palestinian people”.
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