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Can the Obama Administration Learn from the Death of Ayatollah Fadlallah?
A senior editor at CNN lost her job for tweeting about him. Thousands of Lebanese Shiites poured into the streets to mourn him.
Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammed Fadlallah, often characterized in western media as the "spiritual adviser to Hezbollah," died of natural causes in Beirut this week at the age of 75. Many western leaders considered him a terrorist.
I've met Ayatollah Fadlallah, and he was no terrorist.
The CIA and other intelligence agencies tried to murder Fadlallah several times in the 1980s because they mistakenly thought he was responsible for the bombings of the US Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. But Fadlallah's survival only enhanced his reputation.
Apparently his aura continues to haunt the West. On July 7 Octavia Nasr, CNN Senior Editor for Middle East Affairs, sent out a tweet that she had "respect" for him and was "sad" about his passing. That was enough to get her fired.
Fadlallah held views with which I strongly disagreed. But dismissing him and other Middle East leaders as terrorists only makes solving problems more difficult. So far President Obama continues the same wrong-headed policies as his predecessors.
I interviewed Ayatollah Fadlallah in Beirut at the end of 2008. I had traveled to the region with actor/writer Peter Coyote to research an article that appeared in Vanity Fair. Fadlallah welcomed us to his compound in west Beirut.
Fadlallah made a dramatic entrance wearing dark brown robes and the black turban of a sayyed, a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammad. His hair and beard were already silver-grey. Shadows formed large crescents under his eyes. His dark raiments and worn visage belied his still sharp mind.
Fadlallah said he was never a "spiritual adviser" to Hezbollah. Hezbollah preferred Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a man with whom Fadlallah had many religious and political differences.
Fadlallah confirmed that the CIA and Saudi intelligence had tried to assassinate him with a car bomb in 1985. Eighty people died and 200 were wounded as the bomb blew up a Beirut apartment building. Fadlallah escaped unharmed. The CIA's participation was revealed in Bob Woodward's book "Veil." After the horrific attack, Fadlallah's followers hung a huge banner over the ruins reading, "Made in the USA."
Bob Baer, a former CIA field officer in Beirut, told me that Fadlallah was not responsible for the US Embassy or Marine barracks attacks. Fadlallah was falsely accused by Christian Phalangists and others anxious to demonize him in the eyes of the US military and CIA.
Despite the bombing, however, Fadlallah did not take reflexively anti-US positions. He opposed seizing American hostages during the Lebanese Civil War, for example, and actually worked to get them freed.
Fadlallah went on to build a network of hospitals, schools and other social programs that served Lebanon's impoverished Shia Muslim community. After the end of the Civil War in 1990, Fadlallah emerged as a highly respected cleric with ties to Hezbollah, but also with a fierce independent streak. Lebanese knew him as much for his religious fatwas opposing smoking and favoring women's rights, as for his ties to Hezbollah.
Walid Jumblatt, a Lebanese parliament member strongly opposed to Hezbollah's ideology, told us, "Sometimes Fadlallah sides with Hezbollah, sometimes not. Fadlallah has his own independent way of thinking. He always challenged the Iranian leadership in spiritual issues."
And that's an important point often overlooked in Washington. Just as Fadlallah and Hezbollah don't always agree, neither do Hezbollah and Iran. Hezbollah enjoys political and military support from Iran, but it makes independent political decisions. For example, Hezbollah no longer seeks to create an Islamic state in Lebanon.
But the US and Israeli governments choose to ignore Hezbollah's changed views.
Hezbollah initially favored a "one-state" solution in which Palestinians would control all of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Jews who were born or arrived in Israel after 1948 would have to leave. Such a "solution" is both unreal and immoral.
In recent years Hezbollah leaders began to face reality. They now say Palestinians must decide this question for themselves. "At the end, this is primarily a Palestinian matter," says Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah. "I, like any other person, may consider what is happening to be right or wrong.... I may have a different assessment, but at the end of the road no one can go to war on behalf of the Palestinians."
In short, if Israelis and Palestinians make peace based on a two-state solution, Hezbollah won't interfere. If Israel also withdrew from the occupied Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms, Hezbollah would focus on domestic Lebanese politics, not attacking Israel.
But neither President Obama nor Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu have ever seriously explored talks with Hezbollah as part of a wider peace-making process. Instead, they lumped together Fadlallah, Hezbollah and al Qaeda as enemies in a phony War on Terror.
Fadlallah made clear to us that he opposed al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups. He was among the first Muslim leaders to condemn the 9/11 attacks on the US, for example. Hezbollah also strongly opposed the World Trade Center terrorist attacks on American civilians.
The US made a huge mistake by labeling Ayatollah Fadlallah a terrorist and trying to assassinate him. Fadlallah was a learned man who applied his understanding of Islam to politics. When we talked about the role of religion and government, justification for suicide bombings, or the history of Jews in the Middle East, we strongly disagreed.
Yet the US and Israel had similar disputes with PLO leader Yasser Arafat, and both sides sat down for peace talks.
So far the Obama administration has made rhetorical criticisms of Israel without substantively impacting the Israeli occupation of Palestine. And when it comes to the War on Terror, the Obama administration prefers troop escalations, commando raids and drone attacks to undercutting the political appeal of terrorists by changing US policy.
Even before Obama took office, Fadlallah expressed concern that the new president would not break from the past. "U.S. presidents talk about supporting democracy," he says, "but in the Middle East, and the third world in general, they support the worst and ugliest kind of dictators."
Looks like Fadlallah may have been right.
22 Comments so far
Show AllHow do you spell Obama? Hoover
Obama maybe smart and good with words but he doesn't understand.
I think that Obama is not only smart and good with words, but he DOES understand, which is worse, in a way.
Can Obama learn? Of course. It's very likely he already knows all of these things. I mean, much was made of Obama's voracious reading on his summer vacation at Martha's Vineyard last year (I truly believe that was propaganda and meant to point out his intellectual superiority over Bush). Obama has his marching orders and he is a collaborator.
This is a good article. The chauvinism of the USA is again evident, meaning they are again on the line of reasoning that insists things are what they say they are despite all evidence to the contrary. Shadows of Cheney.
But now, I feel it necessary to sound a note seemingly off topic, but it is very possibly not really so; very possibly something along similar lines of insistence but gigantic in comparison.
The present Naval exercises in the western Pacific are a warning to China and Russia. I think this is accepted. But not only are there exercises. I understand that up to four nuclear submarines each carrying a formidable armoury of attack missiles are congregating in the area. Japan is simultaneously making aggressive moves to deny China's claims to territorial waters granted at the end of the Second World War. Israeli and US ships are in congress off the southern coast of Iran. There is much talk of air routes for bombers from Israel to and from the location of Iran.
If this exercise and the presence of these submarines are a warning to China and Russia it is clear it is to keep China and Russia out of something. Keep out of what? An Israeli/US attack on Iran? Both have invested heavily in Iran.
I am not in a position and am simply not qualified to go further than these questions and suggestions. They could be simplistic, juvenile eyewash for all I know. But there is an uncomfortable collection of events in the interior of the continent there and the seas of that area. There is also an uncomfortable, possibly catastrophic reality about the US economy that the USA cannot keep secret and war is a way of avoiding payments of debts, not answering and facing up to real and uncomfortable questions, employing masses and ridding the country of unemployment for the short to mid term future. Can Common Dreams, with its access to the media come up with something that makes sense of it all?
Sorry if this is nonsense, and thank you for the article.
I hope Mr. Erlich understands that there are one-state solutions that don't involve ejecting anyone from anywhere, except perhaps some of the more objectionable West-Bank settlers.
Yes, I am aware that some progressives and leftists advocate a one state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians would co-exist in one, democratic state. But there are also fundamentalists and right-wingers in the Arab world who agree with Fadlallah that one state should exclude Jews not born in Palestine before 1948. That's why in my opinion two states as outlined in many international proposals makes the most sense. By the way, in 2006 all the Palestinian parties, including Hamas, agreed to a two-state solution. Israel consistently blocks that option.
let none be holocaust deniers. but, consider as well that there were 3.5 million soviet prisoners of war who died in camps. had the germans the food to feed them, would they have died? the blockade of germany made food scarce. had the germans the food denied by the blockade, would the jewish death toll been lower?
these are not denier questions, just inquiries. no doubt the germans were using euthanasia and other methods to weed out the bad genes of their own population, even before they started losing the war. but how many jews were simply worked to death? how many were gassed? there are probably objective answers to be had to these questions, and while it is true that all deaths were forseeable consequences of an aggressive war, there is a difference between a known consequence and one that should have been anticipated but was not anticipated. such is the difference between first degree murder and reckless homicide.
Mr. Erlich, do you believe that the
99 -- 0 Senate
408 - 8 House
is an Act of War and also a Prelude to War against Iran?
Do you believe that the U.S. invasion, destruction and
occupation of Iraq was to secure permanent military bases
in the Middle East while at the same time stealing Iraq's
oil for international investors?
If your answer is yes to either one of these questions,
then the whole dialogue about a one state or two state
solution needs to be changed.
"Can the Obama Administration Learn from the Death
of Ayatollah Fadlallah" ?????????????????????????????
What is your answer????????????????????????????????????????
Did the Obama Adminstration learn anything from a million
or so deaths in Iraq?
Does the Obama Administration give a rat's ass how many
civilians get killed in Afghanistan or Pakistan?
Did anyone learn anything from the
Senate 99 -- 0
House 408 -- 8
vote and president Obama's great media signing event
making this bill a law?
Did anyone learn from the WMD lie getting us into Iraq and
now we a pursuing the same WMd lie on Iran?
Does anyone still believe the War on Terror bullshit and
not believe these are resource wars???
I have questions tooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fadlallah probably did get a bad rap, on the whole. He is a holocaust trivializer, though. He should have known you don't go around disputing numbers surrounding that horrific event, if only because of the horrid awfulness of it, unless you want some kind of rap to be laid on you. What kind of credentials was he going after, when he said it wasn't anything like 6 million? A-hole of the year award? Twit.
He probably said a lot of other stuff that he didn't have any business saying if he wanted to be taken seriously as a peacemaker type.
The CNN reporter couldn't have been very smart, either. Couldn't she just have a nice talk with a close friend on the phone, just why did she have to twitter? Another twit.
"Fadlallah probably did get a bad rap, on the whole. He is a holocaust trivializer, though."
Well, that's enough, isn't it? Blasphemy against the One True Faith will not be tolerated!
It may be that Obama doesn't have the power that we all think he has. It seems to me that the military/CIA along with the international corporations, are the ones in charge. They use the mainstream, corporate media to broadcast their propaganda to us ignorant peasants, and most of us have agreed to believe it.
Obama started out very progressive, but as time went on, he became more and more cautious. I think that he hit the wall of his own impotence. It may be that he reached a point where he had a choice of telling the public the truth about who was really calling the shots, or caving. I think he caved. I see him as a hostage, who is allowed to operate within certain parameters, but can't exceed them. I do not judge him, I don't think that any one person could overcome the military/industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about. The only power that can end this tragic situation is that of the American people, but we are at present, disorganized and dispirited. The status quo will continue for now, but fear not, this too shall pass.
genierae, Obama was never a progressive. If you need proof, just Google Obama admires Ronald Reagan, have a good read.
we ourselves do not have a democracy. we are a capitalist republic. democracy would give "the people" the right to decide every issue by popular vote. our founders feared democracy. without liberty and minority rights, i, too, fear it.
the way i've explained the difference to the unlearned is by asking them to imagine themselves at a restaurant table. they order off the menu, the waiter transmits their orders to the cook, who gives the customers exactly what they want. that is short order democracy. by contrast, in a republic you would elect the cook by popular vote and hope he prepares you what you want. this is the republican method by which we elect our congress. we elect people, but we don't decide issues.
please, everyone, quit using the term democracy in reference to anything about our government. correct people who do. change the vocabulary and you will soon change the discourse.
Might as well throw out "republic" too as it implies a degree of representation that seldom is seen here.
-TIA
Does it occur to people that nowadays people can be called ``terrorists'' and ``extremists'' and ``radicals'' at will by the Western press indiscriminately without any real semblence of fact checking ? If these terms are overused, then they probably lose their depth.
This cleric does not seem to have been a bad man at all, and if he gains respect from Christians like Octavia Nasr, then he must have done something right.
Observing the death of Fadlallah from Beirut, where I am at this moment, I see all the more poignantly how counterproductive and immoral it is to willy-nilly declare someone a terrorist and in effect criminalize all the decent people who admired the man, plus, potentially, anyone who makes friends with anyone who loved him. Folks from many of the disparate confessions here may see him through rose-tinted glasses, but they emphasize his moderating role on Hezbollah, his defense of women against spousal abuse, his use of science in determining when holidays begin, and his advocacy of secular governments. We caricaturize Arabs and Lebanese in terms of political and religious categories, when really they are just families trying to cope in the context of events and institutions over which they have little control. For a look at some Palestinians in Lebanon as human beings, see my “Wavin’ World Cup Flags" at http://brokenturtleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/wavin-world-cup-flags-in-beirut-and.html.
"Fadlallah confirmed that the CIA and Saudi intelligence had tried to assassinate him with a car bomb in 1985. Eighty people died and 200 were wounded as the bomb blew up a Beirut apartment building. The CIA's participation was revealed in Bob Woodward's book "Veil"."
Does the above count as Terrorism?
What really strikes me in your posts is the arrogance of owning the Truth..... What you believe and what your media propagates is the Truth, to the degree that Fadlallah was cursed for objecting to the number of Holocaust victims while no one objected to CIA killing innocent civilians to assassinate a man for merely having different political views "different than your Truth" and strategies.
Even in the progressive media as CD and through the posts of progressives there is still this air of "we are right you are wrong " just because you belong to the "other's" camp.
You have to realize a few basic definitions to understand our foreign "policy."
1. Anybody who objects to our invasion or occupation of their country is, by definition, an insurgent or a terrorist. They and thier families, friends, places of worship, all become target zones.
2. Anybody who has any sympathy, or knowledge of history that implies criticism of our actions, foreign or domestic, or has sympathy for any freedom fighter or group of fighters is, by definition, a terrorist sympathizer, a homegrown terrorist, or an agitator.
3. If a free election is held, supervised by neutrals to see that it is a free election, and the result is not that desired by the US, then the election is invalid. For example, Hamas. It was the winner in a fair election. Our answer, backed by our minions, was to starve out the Palestinians until they would elect the party of OUR choice. Hamas might quite possibly have become a good government, had they had the chance, but since we (the West) absolutely refused to deal with them, it left very little choice.
4. Israel is a poor, defenseless state, surrounded by heavily armed bloodthirsty enemies, and dependent upon US and the West for its survival. We must pay no attention to the 200-400 nuclear armed missiles in Israeli silos on hair trigger alert. Pay no attention to the latest fighters and bombers (mostly supplied to them by the US and paid for by US taxpayers)that the IDF has.
5. The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex (MICC) is a profit driven association that has found that its highest profits come from war and war related activities. Committing peace means loss of profits. Corporations will not permit that.
Once you accept these definitions, it all becomes plain. Things are going exactly according to plan.
Many years ago, a person who worked with me had a side business. He bought foreclosed homes, then offered the owners to stay in their homes at rack rents. He used these homes as collateral for more purchases. He sucked a number of my co-workers into investing in him.
I asked him one time, "Joe, the Egyptian pyramids have lasted so long because they were built on a solid foundation, and rose to a point. You are building an upside down pyramid with all the weight on the point. Eventually, it will become unstable and collapse. What are you going to do?"
He laughed and told me, "I have a few properties that I own outright. I'll just start over."
"What about the guys you've conned into investing their money into you and your schemes. What happens to them?"
He laughed again and said, "Fuck 'em!"
Joe would fit quite well into our modern government, wouldn't he? Those who have made their money by raping, pillaging and burning the world, including We the People, have lots of solid assets around the world. Islands, bunkers, tons of gold and other precious metals and gems. When this all goes to smash, they expect to lay low until the dust settles and start over again.
As to We the People, who made it all possible, they would have the same answer that Joe had. "Fuck 'em!"
Once the points above are understood and accepted, it makes it easy to understand the vendetta against the cleric, and against the person who saw him as human and concerned for his people.
Mother Earth has been stabbed in Her vitals and is bleeding to death. The corporations and their minions are even profiting from that. (You've no doubt noted that the volcano in the Gulf has now been moved to page 19, just ahead of the want ads. Stale news.)
minitrue
We should call you sotrue :)
Just sad and tired.
Well I was also so sad and tired until I started looking at things differently. My English is not helping me so I'll try. Any situation 'good or bad' is just like any other situation, it all depends about what we're going to do about it, all depends on our choices. Of course, this is easier said than done, but believing that helped me to become positive.