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Episode: How Hezbollah Is Destroying Lebanon

Author: The Free Press
Duration: 00:56:55

Episode Shownotes

In the last year, we’ve witnessed a disturbing trend among some on the fringe left, who cheer those they think are resisting Western imperialism. Even when those anti-imperialists are. . . designated terrorist groups. This misguided support was on full display on the anniversary of October 7, when protesters marched

through London chanting, “I love Hezbollah”, and in New York, where they flew flags for the Iran-backed militia group flags and carried “New York for Hezbollah” signs. It was a remarkable sight, but unsurprising when you consider the distorted lens through which these extremists look at the war in the Middle East. To them, Hezbollah, the group responsible for killing 241 Americans in a 1983 terror attack and for murdering 85 innocents in Argentina in 1994, is simply a resistance group defending Lebanon from Israeli aggression. But is that how the Lebanese see Hezbollah? An armed Shia group as the defender of Lebanon, a country of many different religious and cultural communities? Defender of Beirut, a city that one Lebanese journalist recently called “a tolerant and diverse cosmopolitan center”? On today’s show, Michael Moynihan sits down with three people with intimate knowledge of what Hezbollah really is: a totalitarian force in Lebanon, an occupying force in Syria, the perpetrators of narco-terrorism and sex slavery, and the foot soldiers of Iran’s imperial project in the Middle East. Joseph Braude is an expert on Arab culture and politics, and the founder of The Center for Peace Communications, which partnered with The Free Press to produce the animated series Hezbollah’s Hostages. Hezbollah’s Hostages, which you can watch on The Free Press’s YouTube channel, interviews the victims of the terrorist group in Lebanon and Syria, who have spoken out at great personal risk. Episodes have covered the story of a Lebanese fighter’s indoctrination from childhood, the account of a Syrian woman abducted and forced into sex slavery, and the enlightening narrative of a Syrian who became a drug smuggler for the organization. Please check the series out, if you haven’t already. Makram Rabah is a history lecturer at the American University of Beirut and, through his frequent appearances on pan-Arab television, a fierce and courageous critic of Hezbollah. Makram lives in Lebanon, where his life is routinely threatened. Finally, Hanin Ghaddar is a Lebanese journalist and author of the book Hezbollahland: Mapping Dahiya and Lebanon's Shia Community. She is a leading expert on the group’s history and its role within Lebanese society. We discuss the history of Hezbollah, its function as an Iranian proxy, its unpopularity in Lebanon and in the broader region, the group’s criminal activities, like drug and sex trafficking, and the path forward for Lebanon now that Israel has significantly weakened Hezbollah’s military capabilities. And if you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_05
From the Free Press, this is Honestly. I'm Michael Moynihan.

00:00:12 Speaker_05
In recent years, we've witnessed a disturbing trend among some on the fringe left, who cheer those they think are resisting Western imperialism, even when those anti-imperialists are designated terrorist groups.

00:00:54 Speaker_05
This misguided support was on full display over the last year, and most recently on the anniversary of the October 7th pogrom, when protesters marched through London chanting, I love Hezbollah.

00:01:06 Speaker_05
And to New York, not far from where I live, they flew Hezbollah flags and carried New York for Hezbollah signs.

00:01:19 Speaker_05
— It was a remarkable sight, but unsurprising when you consider the distorted lens through which these extremists look at the war in the Middle East.

00:01:27 Speaker_01
Hezbollah, the group responsible for killing 241 Americans in a 1983 terror attack… — A truck filled with explosives was driven into a compound in the midst of a Marine battalion headquarters, a four-story building at the Beirut airport, and the explosives were detonated.

00:01:46 Speaker_05
is reclassified as a resistance group defending Lebanon from Israeli aggression. But is that how the Lebanese see it? An armed Shia Islamist group as the defender of Lebanon. A country of many different confessional communities.

00:02:01 Speaker_05
Beirut, a city that one Lebanese journalist recently called a tolerant and diverse cosmopolitan center. On today's show, I'm sitting down with three people with intimate knowledge of what Hezbollah really is.

00:02:13 Speaker_05
A totalitarian force in Lebanon, an occupying force in Syria, the perpetrators of narco-terrorism and sex slavery, and the foot soldiers of Iran's imperial project in the Middle East.

00:02:25 Speaker_05
Our first guest is Joseph Browdy, an expert on Arab culture and politics and the founder of the Center for Peace Communications, which partnered with the Free Press to produce the animated series Hezbollah's Hostages.

00:02:38 Speaker_05
Hezbollah's Hostages, which you can watch on the Free Press' YouTube channel, interviews the victims of the terrorist group in Lebanon and Syria who've spoken out at great personal risk.

00:02:48 Speaker_05
Episodes so far have covered the story of a Lebanese fighter's indoctrination from childhood, the story of a Syrian woman abducted and forced into sex slavery, and the story of another Syrian — — who became a drug smuggler for the organization.

00:03:03 Speaker_05
Please check it out if you haven't already. Our second guest is Makran Raba. Makran was a history lecturer at the American University of Beirut, and through his frequent appearances on Pan-Arab television, a fierce and courageous critic of Hezbollah.

00:03:18 Speaker_05
Makram lives in Lebanon, where his life is routinely threatened. And finally, Hanin Ghadar is a Lebanese journalist and author of the book Hezbollah Land. She's a leading expert on the group's history and its role within Lebanese society.

00:03:33 Speaker_05
We discussed the history of Hezbollah, its function as an Iranian proxy, its unpopularity in Lebanon and in the broader region, the group's criminal activities like drug and sex trafficking, and the path forward for Lebanon now that Israel has significantly weakened Hezbollah's military capabilities.

00:03:50 Speaker_05
We'll be right back.

00:03:55 Speaker_04
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00:04:06 Speaker_04
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00:04:40 Speaker_04
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00:04:56 Speaker_05
Joseph Braude, Makrim Raba, Haneen Ghadar. Welcome to Honestly.

00:05:01 Speaker_02
Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us.

00:05:03 Speaker_00
Thanks so much, Michael.

00:05:05 Speaker_05
Makram, I want to start with you because this morning I saw when we're recording this on Thursday, October 3rd, that there were a couple of strikes in the center of Beirut. You are in Beirut right now, are you not?

00:05:19 Speaker_06
Actually, yes, I am in the heart of Beirut. And strikes that you were referring to are actually a couple of blocks away from where I grew up and where I live right now.

00:05:29 Speaker_05
Can you tell me a little bit about that? I mean, what is the reaction on the ground there? I mean, what is the general feeling in Beirut right now?

00:05:39 Speaker_06
Well, particularly Beirut over the last two weeks have transformed into a huge refugee camp because many of the people who are leaving their destroyed villages and homes

00:05:49 Speaker_06
across Lebanon, particularly in the south of Lebanon and east of the country, are seeking refuge in Beirut. Yesterday, the strike on a somewhat highly populated and highly sectarianly diverse area was a new phase in the escalation.

00:06:04 Speaker_06
Yesterday, the Israeli Navy targeted a building which Hezbollah uses right in the heart of the city, which was technically a healthcare facility, as well as office they use for their military or their one of their MPs, basically.

00:06:20 Speaker_06
So this led to a kind of a frenzy and chaos, and many people who were fleeing already from danger in the south had to actually relocate.

00:06:29 Speaker_06
This also goes hand in hand with the ongoing strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut, which is historically the Hezbollah stronghold. In a way, Beirut, which is basically one of the nice cities on the Mediterranean, was transformed overnight

00:06:44 Speaker_06
to a jungle because we have a lack or a complete absence of government and of the security and army. So everyone is there to tend for themselves. We had refugees storm empty apartments or empty buildings and take them for refuge.

00:07:00 Speaker_06
And we have people who have been living out in the open and not to mention that we are almost into the fall and the winter season. So I wouldn't want these people to stay out in the open if this war continues.

00:07:14 Speaker_05
Malcolm, let me ask you a quick follow-up there. You said the building that was hit yesterday was a healthcare facility, but also doubles as a Hezbollah communications center.

00:07:26 Speaker_05
I don't know exactly what it was, but is that a common thing, that Hezbollah will embed themselves in something like a healthcare facility in an ethnically diverse neighborhood in the center of Beirut?

00:07:40 Speaker_06
Well our main problem with the international community and western audience that they're used to having this dichotomy between a kind of a military wing and a political wing this doesn't exist with any of the factions within the Iranian axis because over time these people have proved that they have

00:07:56 Speaker_06
any form of political tool or actually a political dictionary to use so ultimately anything which has a civilian use is usually weaponized and this is why ultimately I think we are caught between a rock and a hard place because even though the Israelis might not want to kill me as a civilian I might actually lose my life just because I'm sitting right next to a Hezbollah fighter who is buying groceries

00:08:21 Speaker_06
So, ultimately, either I die because I'm against Hezbollah or I die just because I'm sitting next to one.

00:08:27 Speaker_05
Hanin, you've written a book, Hezbollah Land. I'm going to ask you the probably most difficult question that sounds as if it's the simplest question.

00:08:37 Speaker_05
For the people that are seeing all this news flashing across their screens in the United States and in Europe, who aren't particularly familiar with this conflict, who are Hezbollah?

00:08:48 Speaker_02
Oh, well, Hezbollah...

00:08:51 Speaker_05
Yeah, oh well, sorry about that question.

00:08:53 Speaker_02
No, oh well in the sense that we all know here who Hezbollah is, but explaining it briefly is going to be difficult because Hezbollah shifted and had many roles throughout the years. Hezbollah is not just an Iranian proxy.

00:09:07 Speaker_02
You have a lot of Iranian proxies in the region, Iraqi Shia militias, Hamas to a certain extent, and the Houthis in Yemen.

00:09:14 Speaker_02
However, Hezbollah started as an integral and organic part of the IRGC, the Quds Force, which is the regional arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. which means that Hezbollah is a part actually of the Iranian regional army.

00:09:31 Speaker_02
They have been set up in Lebanon to serve the interest of the Iranian or the Islamic revolution regime in Iran to expand in the region. They are the first expansion the first success story of the Iranian regime in the region.

00:09:48 Speaker_02
And they started as a resistance group in a way in order to impose themselves as a threat against Israel, but also eventually to take over Lebanon's state institutions and Third step was to help Iran take over the region.

00:10:05 Speaker_02
So at the beginning, it was focused on the south of Lebanon, resisting Israel, et cetera. And that was until year 2006, which was the last war until now that Hezbollah fought. And then since then, they

00:10:18 Speaker_02
definitely moved into Lebanon, used their arms against Lebanese people, and terrorized Lebanon in order to take over state institutions and impose themselves as an Iranian hegemony or Iranian occupation by proxy, basically, into Lebanon.

00:10:35 Speaker_02
And then, of course, when they went to Syria, under the leadership of the Quds Force former commander, Qasem Soleimani, they went into the third stage, which is help Iran in taking over

00:10:46 Speaker_02
the rest of the region, which is the land bridge that goes from Beirut to Tehran through Syria and Iraq. And of course, eventually they helped also the Houthis to set up in Yemen.

00:10:59 Speaker_02
This meant that one, they were stretched out, distracted from, you know, like Lebanon, but also Their priority, yes, they are Lebanese. Yes, they are holding Lebanese passports and speak the Lebanese accent and Arabic and you name it.

00:11:13 Speaker_02
But however, we see them as an Iranian occupation of Lebanon because their interest is not Lebanon's. Iran's interest come first before Lebanon's interest. And their role with everything that happened, I can go into the details of how they did this.

00:11:30 Speaker_02
But as their role in Lebanon and the region grew also, their support in Lebanon and the region shrunk. So the bigger they became, the less support they get. And this was through certain crossroads.

00:11:46 Speaker_02
The Syria war obviously was a big crossroad, but also the 2019 revolution in Lebanon, which they have used violence in order to crack and really oppress.

00:11:59 Speaker_02
Then that was the last crossroad, which meant that the people in Lebanon realized that they are the authority. They will side with the corrupt political regime in Lebanon against the people.

00:12:10 Speaker_02
So they exposed, finally, the real face of an Iranian occupation rather than a party that calls for justice, et cetera, et cetera. And I think this series really exposes this face of Hezbollah in that sense.

00:12:24 Speaker_05
That word justice, Joseph, people who don't know a ton about this but tend to follow a particular political direction and want to project their own vision onto people like Hezbollah. And you hear it referred to as a resistance movement.

00:12:42 Speaker_05
This is a social services movement that provide things for the Lebanese people.

00:12:47 Speaker_05
When you hear that in your interactions with people who have themselves either been in Hezbollah, interacted with Hezbollah, been kidnapped by Hezbollah, what do you make of this kind of read that you often get in the West that this is merely a resistance movement that is not necessarily an arm of Iran, but they do a lot for the people of Lebanon and they're popular in Lebanon?

00:13:11 Speaker_00
It's a reading that is at odds with the experience of the majority of the Lebanese population and Syrians and so many others in the region who know Hezbollah to be quite the opposite of a movement for social justice, social welfare, or resistance.

00:13:26 Speaker_00
But in fact, as Hanin pointed out, a tyrant in Lebanon, an occupying force in Syria that served to protect the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad from his own population,

00:13:40 Speaker_00
It's meanwhile a mafia of sex slavery and drug trafficking across the Middle East and beyond.

00:13:47 Speaker_00
And of course, it's the nerve center of this Iranian imperial aspiration across the region, such that the Houthis in Yemen, myriad Iraqi militias and others look to Hezbollah for coordination and a measure of leadership.

00:14:03 Speaker_00
So it is really a very different animal than the way it is portrayed in so much of the Western discussion. And it's regrettable that

00:14:14 Speaker_00
When the focus is on war between Hezbollah and Israel, in some ways it reinforces the image that Hezbollah wants to cultivate as a resistance movement and obscures its larger role in an imperial project of Iran.

00:14:32 Speaker_05
Makram, I'm in New York City, and there was a protest. There'd been protests for the past year since October 7th. And I saw one a week ago, and there were people flying Hezbollah flags in New York City.

00:14:48 Speaker_05
And, you know, people with pictures of Hassan Nasrallah. Some of these people did not look Lebanese. If I were to take you to something like this and say, go over that person who is clearly not Lebanese with the Hezbollah flag,

00:15:03 Speaker_05
What would you say to them?

00:15:04 Speaker_06
Well, first, I would tell them to go seek help and to basically call me up till I tell them what this flag has done to my people and to my friends. Particularly, I will give them information about my late friend.

00:15:19 Speaker_06
Luqman Slim, who was assassinated in the south of Lebanon in an area under the full control of Hezbollah. Luqman Slim was an outspoken advocate of liberalism, liberal values, and as someone who is

00:15:33 Speaker_06
openly pro-liberal values, pro-American liberal values, I feel insulted that someone has audacity to carry a flag of people who are guilty of killing 241 servicemen in the U.S. Marine barracks bombing. These people did not come here as occupiers.

00:15:50 Speaker_06
These people were part of the multinational peacekeeping force.

00:15:54 Speaker_06
not to mention the fact that the president of my own university, the famous Malcolm Kerr, was gunned down by Hezbollah and I myself have to move around with the security detail which I have to pay out of my pocket just because I just want to live in peace and prosperity.

00:16:11 Speaker_06
As someone who has gone to Georgetown and studied at UB and all of this, I consider this to be an insult to everything that the U.S. stands for.

00:16:21 Speaker_06
And obviously, when someone like Norm Finkelstein, who is a very outspoken champion of Palestinian rights, comes up to someone and tells them, stop chanting from the river to the sea because you're actually hurting our cause, and they ridicule and laugh at him.

00:16:35 Speaker_06
I think the student movement and anyone who claims that he wants to help the Palestinians need to reconsider what they're doing.

00:16:42 Speaker_06
Because ultimately, if you are carrying the flag of Iran, in a way you are killing the Palestinians and killing the Lebanese.

00:16:49 Speaker_06
Because ultimately, when you have someone like Sanwar who hides out in tunnels like a rat and lets his own people die, he's no different from someone who is killing the Palestinian people or the Lebanese. Macron, why do you do it?

00:17:01 Speaker_05
I mean, couldn't you have an easier life if you decided, I'm going to take a fellowship at Georgetown, or I'm just going to make my peace with this militant group that, and that's a euphemism I don't like, this terrorist group who will kill me for saying things that would be very commonly said in the United States or in Western Europe.

00:17:22 Speaker_05
Why stick it out?

00:17:24 Speaker_06
Well, basically, I do understand why people might relocate because they feel in danger, but someone has to keep guard of the house. This is the Lebanese house, which we cherish. I'll simply move back to D.C.

00:17:34 Speaker_06
when the house is doing well, and I actually do plan on doing this, because ultimately, I'm someone who grew up in Beirut, but I'm originally from Mount Lebanon. We are people who are attached to our land. We're people that cannot be pushed around.

00:17:47 Speaker_06
just simply by people who believe that everything can be fixed on the edge of a bayonet. At the end of the day, these people are not freedom fighters. These people are not fighting for prosperity and for liberation of land.

00:18:01 Speaker_06
I say this, and I continue on saying it, these are drug dealers and pimps who masquerade as freedom fighters. And what is happening is basically they are paying the price for what they did to the Syrian people and what they did to my people.

00:18:15 Speaker_06
It is not a coincidence that the entire Syrian population, including the Alawites who support Bashar al-Assad, are happy and gloating about the death of Nasrallah. Nasrallah did not die because he lacks technology or weapons.

00:18:28 Speaker_06
He died because his narrative was shattered, because he moved from a small Lebanese organization that was basically linked to Iran to someone who is a strategic consultant of the Iranian axis. These are the Booz Allen and the McKinsey's of terrorism.

00:18:44 Speaker_06
They come in with their laptops. And the last guy who was killed in Beirut, Mohammed Sroor, has a video of him using a PowerPoint presentation to teach the Houthis how to kill.

00:18:54 Speaker_06
And from someone from a country that is renowned for sending scholars and academics to teach people about liberal values or someone who teaches people how to kill. Killing people isn't really a craft. Making them live is actually what we seek.

00:19:09 Speaker_05
Hanin, I want to ask you something that was asked of me. why I am seeing images of people in various so-called Arab streets celebrating and handing out, you know, candies and baklava and things like this.

00:19:24 Speaker_05
When you look at Lebanon, you say there's Sunni and there's Shia and there's Druze and there's Maronite Christians.

00:19:31 Speaker_05
Can you explain to me the position of Hezbollah and the popularity or unpopularity of Hezbollah in so many places, particularly in Syria, which I don't think people really understand?

00:19:44 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's like, I think Ibn Karam already touched on this when he talked about Syrians celebrating.

00:19:49 Speaker_02
And when you look across the region, there isn't much love for Hezbollah left, even in countries that were not real victims of Hezbollah, like Lebanon and Syria and Iraq and Yemen, you know, like Iran and Hezbollah rocked havoc in all the countries from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, even Tehran itself.

00:20:11 Speaker_02
These are the victims of Iran and Hezbollah, and I'm sure they're celebrating either in silence in a private or in public like you see in the non-Assad regime areas. We're talking here about Idlib, for example.

00:20:25 Speaker_02
In Assad regime areas and in Lebanon, we didn't see a lot of celebrations or in the middle of Iran where people are afraid, but a lot of people are celebrating in silence. I know people who celebrated in their homes, opening champagnes.

00:20:40 Speaker_02
But beyond this region, even if you go further to the Gulf, for example, Egypt or Jordan, There's a huge difference.

00:20:50 Speaker_02
We saw more demonstrations and more anger during the Gaza war, because there is still, you know, some kind of like a Palestinian cause that guides people in certain directions.

00:21:02 Speaker_02
When it comes to, you know, like Gaza and the Palestinians, there is always something that hard to crack in the streets. And there's always a tendency to go and chant Palestine and support for Palestine, but Hezbollah is a completely different story.

00:21:18 Speaker_02
It's not a Palestinian movement. It's an Iranian movement and it's linked to the Persians rather than the Palestinians. And this is a huge difference in the street.

00:21:29 Speaker_02
You know, when Gaza was raging, we saw much more demonstrations in Jordan, for example, or in Lebanon, especially in Jordan. But we don't see that much today. You know, especially after Nasrallah died, we saw more celebration rather than opposition.

00:21:47 Speaker_02
There is very little love left for Hezbollah, very little love left for Nasrallah. Their cause actually is not the Palestinian cause.

00:21:55 Speaker_02
And the region today understands that when Hezbollah started its attacks against Israel on October 8, one day after October 7, they said that this is to support Gaza and Hamas, etc.

00:22:08 Speaker_02
One year later, what we see actually is that he did nothing to support anybody. On the contrary, the war in Gaza continued. Israel went in, finished what they needed to do in Gaza. We still have some stuff left.

00:22:24 Speaker_02
What Hezbollah's achievement was, basically, is to drag the war to Lebanon. Now we're talking about full-fledged war or to the region.

00:22:33 Speaker_02
Everybody sees that Hezbollah did not really help the Palestinians the way the region wanted them to help the Palestinians. They did not really use their military assets.

00:22:42 Speaker_02
Until now, they haven't launched a long-range missile or a precision-guided missile at Israel. So when the Palestinians were calling Hezbollah to actually help, they didn't.

00:22:55 Speaker_02
So that really was the crossroad for the regions that Hezbollah, if we want, you know, like the solution for Palestine or like two-state solution or ceasefire in Gaza or whatever, you know, the Arab world would be calling for.

00:23:08 Speaker_02
No one sees Hezbollah as part of this because they saw that Hezbollah actually betrayed the Palestinians rather than help them.

00:23:16 Speaker_02
And the mere fact that they did this is only to reap the benefits of any solution, which is now too late for them, obviously. But it's actually to serve Iran's interests. And that's why no one is cheering for Hezbollah.

00:23:28 Speaker_02
Everybody's celebrating their demise.

00:23:30 Speaker_05
Joseph, I want to talk about Hezbollah's Hostages, which is the name of this series that your organization has produced and is releasing along with the Free Press.

00:23:41 Speaker_05
And you know, the first thing that struck me about these are animated and they are voiced by people who have been affected by Hezbollah. You have a sex slave that has been kidnapped.

00:23:54 Speaker_03
Why don't you work?

00:23:59 Speaker_05
Somebody who has become a drug dealer.

00:24:02 Speaker_05
These are things that one would imagine are haram within Islam, but this is a cult of sex and drugs, and then the first episode you released of a combatant who is forced into service of Hezbollah, or persuaded into, and then forced to remain.

00:24:21 Speaker_05
Talk a little bit about these people and how you get them to come and sit down and talk to you about their experiences when there's obviously so much threat that if they were found out to be doing so, I'm sure it would shorten their life quite a bit.

00:24:39 Speaker_00
There is a yearning to be heard on the part of these people. The sense that the way the West looks at and understands Hezbollah is based on a lot of incomplete information, a lack of awareness of the harm that Hezbollah has caused.

00:24:55 Speaker_00
to Lebanon, to Syria, and to the broader region for so long. And so when a person whose circumstances do not allow them to speak out openly, where they would be in serious danger, finds out that there is a way to safely

00:25:11 Speaker_00
communicate with a global audience. They tend to take the opportunity because they want to be heard. They want the world to know these stories. They feel that they're doing a service to others like them who have suffered.

00:25:26 Speaker_00
The drug mule in Hezbollah's massive narcotics trade, who agreed to speak with us and tell his story, did it because, as he put it, Hezbollah has created a region of broken homes.

00:25:40 Speaker_00
And by the way, it's the sex and the drugs is a big part of how they fund their operations and their war machine, that together with Iranian financial support.

00:25:50 Speaker_05
And Joseph, sorry to interrupt you, but who are they selling these drugs to? What is the market? And when you have sex slaves, I mean, they're not running open bordellos. I mean, how is that working?

00:26:01 Speaker_00
So the trade in Captagon, which is a synthetic psycho-stimulant overwhelmingly manufactured in Syria as a joint venture between the Assad regime and Hezbollah, it's exported to 17 countries from Italy to Malaysia, and it is a multi-billion dollar industry.

00:26:20 Speaker_00
It is a lifeline of the Assad regime and the Hezbollah system. I mean, we don't hear about it as much in the U.S.

00:26:29 Speaker_00
because we are not one of its major markets, but it is a wrecking ball through Arab and non-Arab societies in the West, in Europe, and the Middle East.

00:26:42 Speaker_00
Makram, as a matter of fact, is kind of an expert on the issue of the abuse of women to serve the Hezbollah war machine.

00:26:50 Speaker_00
He's written about it in the past, but two senior Hezbollah financiers who were sanctioned by the US Treasury Department as designated terrorists, were managers of sex trafficking operations, and that is a matter of public record.

00:27:09 Speaker_00
And we see periodic busts of these rings in the Bekaa in Lebanon, also in Syria. There's also, by the way, abduction of non-Arab women in sub-Saharan Africa by Hezbollah.

00:27:21 Speaker_00
So it is a massive industry and yes it may sound surprising that a group that dons the mantle of Islam would do this and yet they of course find justification, they furnish themselves with religious edicts that somehow make this acceptable based on their warped reading of what religion means.

00:27:41 Speaker_05
Makram, you've written about this. Would you care to add to that?

00:27:46 Speaker_05
I mean, I think that is one of the surprising things, and I'm sure you can find a hadith to justify anything, but it is really surprising to see, you know, sex rings being run by Hezbollah.

00:27:58 Speaker_06
Actually, Hezbollah doesn't really care about money per se, but they need networks to money launder and to acquire information and to be able to basically bully people and whatever.

00:28:10 Speaker_06
So if, let's say, boba tea or bagels make them money, they will set up shops for that. And ultimately, I do believe that they have religious fatwas that justify what they were doing.

00:28:21 Speaker_06
We've seen how the Obama administration fumbled the ball on the Cassandra project, where DEA and FBI agents who were tracking people deep in Latin America and different parts of Europe.

00:28:33 Speaker_06
Pimp or Hezbollah drug dealer doesn't really look like a traditional Hezbollah member.

00:28:39 Speaker_06
You have one who is basically someone who trades in blood diamonds who owns a Basquiat and owns a Picasso and he has pictures of him parading art and he has in downtown Beirut in one of the most lavish areas. drinks and he travels to Europe.

00:28:55 Speaker_06
So basically, their access to the underworld is not that different from other militias across the world. But the only difference here is that these people are not only criminals and killers, they're also hypocrites.

00:29:06 Speaker_06
And this is where I actually find it very offensive. When you have someone who claims to be basically on the pulpit preaching about the liberation of man and liberation of land,

00:29:17 Speaker_06
At the end of the day, he goes into Syria and turns innocent women from their Zohr into a life of prostitution.

00:29:24 Speaker_06
When I actually was one of the first people, and maybe because I'm reckless, I wrote about this four or five years ago, everyone was saying, because you hate them, you're writing against them. And this was basically in the news.

00:29:37 Speaker_06
First of all, the place where they set up the bordello is in the east of the country. in a very tribal place, which goes against the traditions and the customs of this area. So basically, they don't care.

00:29:47 Speaker_06
Second, and more importantly, people are not only too afraid to speak out, sometimes they're too stupid to do so, because they believe that ultimately someone else will come and clean their house.

00:29:58 Speaker_06
In the case of Syria, I feel that we are directly responsible as Lebanese for letting the beast out of our border into Syria. And basically, we did not hold them accountable. On the contrary, we made them more difficult to deal with.

00:30:13 Speaker_06
And I think that the reason why these people are being hunted down by Israeli drones and Israeli intelligence services is because they exposed themselves in Syria. So, this is somewhat of a divine justice in a way.

00:30:25 Speaker_06
And here, the reason why, if you would allow me, we're not gloating, because ultimately, we are from an Arab culture. We don't gloat when someone dies. Even when you kill him yourself, you don't express joy.

00:30:37 Speaker_06
I have a friend, her seven-year-old kid was actually telling her, so why did they kill Nasrallah? And she was telling them because they don't like him, and he was a bad man. And a kid who's seven years old, he says, why didn't they put him in jail?

00:30:51 Speaker_06
So rather than endorsing Hezbollah's way of doing things, I would like to listen to this kid, who for him, justice comes through the judiciary system, not through the Quran or any other cleric who is dealing in drugs and prostitution.

00:31:10 Speaker_05
Up next, what does a post-Hezbollah future in Lebanon look like? If you look at what's happened recently, and let's take it from Soleimani being killed in a drone strike to today, a lot has happened.

00:31:31 Speaker_05
But in Lebanon, there has been a government since 2022, and that's probably, I would say, it's as a result of Hezbollah.

00:31:39 Speaker_05
What are the odds that all of this stuff happening now can lead to a positive result that the Paris of the Middle East that we hear so much about

00:31:51 Speaker_05
could maybe come back and be a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic city that has its problems and its hostilities, but generally lives in peace.

00:32:00 Speaker_02
Well, this is a little bit far-fetched to get to the Paris of the Middle East to get back there. This is going to take ages. But this is a huge opportunity, what's happening today. Qasem Soleimani was killed. He wasn't really replaced.

00:32:14 Speaker_02
Nobody was able to fill his shoes. But what's happened to Nasrallah is very different. It's much bigger than that. What's happening is not just an assassination of Hassan Nasrallah. What's happening is an assassination of Hezbollah.

00:32:26 Speaker_02
When we talk about Israel demolishing Hezbollah's military capabilities, that means that Hezbollah without their arsenal, the big arsenal, they are going to eventually lose their political power in Lebanon. This opens a huge space, huge void.

00:32:46 Speaker_02
It can go both ways.

00:32:48 Speaker_02
It can be filled with a sovereign state and which is something that needs to be done right away by the election of a sovereign independent president who will form a sovereign independent government and fill that void along with army taking charge of the security.

00:33:05 Speaker_02
And Makrem can tell you more about the insecurity that is happening in the streets of Lebanon today.

00:33:11 Speaker_02
We don't have to wait for ceasefire for this to happen because you have to set up a system, a sovereign system, that would take charge after ceasefire and actually implement 1701 or whatever resolution that will happen.

00:33:25 Speaker_02
But you can't wait for ceasefire, otherwise you'll just plunge into chaos. The problem today is that Hezbollah's allies are pushing for a consensus candidate. We want, this is not the time for consensus anymore.

00:33:39 Speaker_02
This is an opportunity because consensus means very lack of sovereignty. And I want to stress that the border security between Lebanon and Israel is not just a line on the map, a line in the sand. It's not about that border per se.

00:33:55 Speaker_02
That border will only be secure and war can only be prevented if This border is linked to sovereignty. A sovereign state can own the decision of war and peace.

00:34:07 Speaker_02
A sovereign state can implement Resolution 1701 and 1559, which strips all militias from their arms and give them to the Lebanese army. And then it's linked to another thing, to the other borders, which are the very porous and definitely vulnerable

00:34:26 Speaker_02
when it comes to, if you have a sovereign state and you have a ceasefire, you need to contain Hezbollah in the sense that you do not grow, which means that you have to really pay attention to the borders of Lebanon, Syria, Syria, Iraq, et cetera, et cetera.

00:34:41 Speaker_02
That is the first step. You have a party that, with an ideology that is rooted, been rooted for 40 years in the mind of a lot of Shia, not everybody, and we see in this series that there are a lot of Shia

00:34:55 Speaker_02
I would say the silent majority who do not want this ideology. But it's rooted in there. It's rooted and you have to work on it. And this only happens with a national unity where the Shia are represented in the new system.

00:35:09 Speaker_02
The non-Hezbollah Shia are there in the new system, which is definitely not repeating the mistakes of 2005.

00:35:17 Speaker_00
I'd like to chime in, I think the question about how do you reclaim Lebanon's tradition of cosmopolitanism, which never truly vanished.

00:35:26 Speaker_00
There are multiple Lebanons, there are different cultural milieus within the same country, but Hezbollah has come to dominate. This is part of the reason why we created the series.

00:35:38 Speaker_00
We wanted to introduce a Western audience to the voices of the kinds of people who want to reclaim their country from Hezbollah. We want Americans to understand that they are not spectators on this issue.

00:35:54 Speaker_00
For generations, Iran has poured billions of dollars into molding Lebanon or molding as much of Lebanese society as it could, beginning with the Shiite population, in the image of its ideology through education and

00:36:12 Speaker_00
religious leadership and media domination, there was no equivalent effort by any other power to challenge those ideas or to support the elements on the ground that sought to challenge those ideas themselves.

00:36:27 Speaker_00
And so while Shia Islamism in the mold of the IRGC was given tremendous resources to propagate and impose its ideology on the public, The people who stood for the cosmopolitan Lebanon were political orphans on the international stage.

00:36:47 Speaker_00
No one stood with them. No one asked, how can we equip you, support you, assist you, amplify your voices, etc. And the golden opportunity that Hanin and Makram are both referring to, the possibility that at a moment when Hezbollah is weakened,

00:37:03 Speaker_00
some other elements can stand up and say, this is what we want the future direction of Lebanon to be, and this is how we're going to chart that course. They need help.

00:37:14 Speaker_00
And it's not just a matter of military assistance and weakening Hezbollah's war machine. It's a matter of supporting

00:37:23 Speaker_00
the development of a cosmopolitan Lebanon through its schools, through human engagement on a much more elaborate scale, through media work to counter these depraved ideas. And there is a role for outsiders to play in making that happen.

00:37:40 Speaker_05
Macron, you know, in the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, the IRA put down its weapons and then pushed itself into its political wing Sinn Féin, which is now the most popular political party in all of Ireland, in the Republic and Northern Ireland.

00:37:56 Speaker_05
And they have made a go at governing. I mean, I look at Hezbollah's relationship with electoral politics and I think of the assassination of Rafiq Hariri.

00:38:06 Speaker_05
I don't see a group here that at any point will say, OK, we have a political wing and we're done with violence. What do you do to get back to a functional country?

00:38:17 Speaker_05
in which you have these people that have this ideology, either that's molded on their own or molded by Iran, where do those people go and how do they fit into a future non-violent political process?

00:38:30 Speaker_06
Well, let me clarify a couple of points. This is very important. Basically, what's happening in Lebanon is letting Mr. Magoo drive by letting them drive and they can't see the road, they end up crashing and killing us all.

00:38:45 Speaker_06
The difference between the IRA and the Shem Fed and all of this is basically when you decide, even if you're Che Guevara or Castro, you have a set of beliefs. Once people give it to you, let's say now I want to run a Marxist revolution in the US.

00:39:01 Speaker_06
If everyone says, okay, we will accept dictatorship or the proletariat, you technically stop killing people. In the case of Hezbollah, the weapons themselves are their ultimate aim.

00:39:13 Speaker_06
Their job specification and their DNA is not politics because at the end of the day they have a messianic vision of the world

00:39:21 Speaker_06
what they're doing will bring back the Mahdi and thus justice will prevail and we don't have the luxury of time in my case and this idea the reason and here we're not saying that we will not accept these people if these people want to be stupid and they want to worship someone who doesn't exist let them do this I don't really care and I don't really want them to take off the veil or to start drinking alcohol like I do

00:39:46 Speaker_06
But when we are in public, we're on a public beach or a public space, there should be the rule of law. And this is why one of the most important things that we should do, and you happen to mention Rafael Hariri, is to end impunity.

00:39:59 Speaker_06
Rafael Hariri, who is responsible for rebuilding modern Lebanon, and Rafi Hariri is the reason why Lebanon survived since 05.

00:40:08 Speaker_06
We are running on fumes from the political project of Rafi Hariri who paid the ultimate price for his life by accepting that he has what we call a two-state system where you have

00:40:19 Speaker_06
Hong Kong which is flourishing and making money and Hanoi that wants to fight. Ironically, Hanoi now is one of the most attractive destinations in the world. So we want us to go back to normal.

00:40:30 Speaker_06
The thing that one has to understand and this is where I have been in the last couple of days very outspoken that we need to be very empathetic to the people that believed Hezbollah for a long time because these people

00:40:43 Speaker_06
are not even allowed to mourn and to cry because this is a sign of weakness. We want them to cry. We want them to feel sorrow for the people they lost.

00:40:52 Speaker_06
We want to bury these people with dignity and we ask them to give their weapons up and join the Lebanese army if they want to defend themselves because ultimately Hassan Nasrallah used to repeat that he is there to protect the Lebanese and to protect the Shiites.

00:41:06 Speaker_06
He couldn't even protect himself. So here, ultimately, we have to be very careful and to wear basically gloves when dealing with these people. And ultimately, whatever happens, the first order of the day should be a ceasefire.

00:41:22 Speaker_06
And these people should be given the dignity to go back to their homes. As it stands, Michael, I think we won't be able to rebuild the Lebanese South or the Bekaa for the next 10 years if this goes on. And these people will ultimately

00:41:37 Speaker_06
and in a kind of ironic twist of fate, they'll be like the Syrians who they displaced from their homes in the Qalamoun.

00:41:44 Speaker_06
Or the Palestinians, who to be fair, and Hanin here being from the South knows that the Shiites don't have any empathy whatsoever to the Palestinians.

00:41:53 Speaker_06
Actually, the Maronites in Lebanon who are accused of being anti-Palestinians like the Palestinians more than the Shiites. So no one here is under any illusion that this Iranian weapon can liberate

00:42:07 Speaker_02
100% agree with Makram. Two things on this. If you look at the first episode of this series, Hezbollah hostages, the Hezbollah fighter, you can see how the shifts, this really represents the shifts within the Shia community.

00:42:24 Speaker_02
At the beginning, the support, the myth of Hezbollah,

00:42:27 Speaker_02
the belief in the not just the ideology it's really not about the ideology it's the fascination with this party as a mess as something that really beyond imagination and the action and the victory etc and that's how he went to Syria and what really he faced

00:42:46 Speaker_02
in reality and how this shifted. It's not ideological. One, that yes, the Shia are less ideological than Hezbollah. And I think the ideology can really erode very quickly once the Shia realize that they can go back to Lebanon.

00:43:03 Speaker_02
And this is an opportunity to bring them back to Lebanon. And this series really shows you how a typical Shia who became a fighter went back to his Lebanese identity. But I also want to add to what Mike Graham said.

00:43:16 Speaker_02
I was there in 1982 during the Israeli invasion.

00:43:20 Speaker_02
The Shia are the most, basically the main community, the most communities that suffered from the PLO, the Palestinian hegemony over Lebanon, because they were mostly based in the South, controlling all the resources and taking decisions on behalf of everyone.

00:43:35 Speaker_02
And when the Israelis came in and liberated basically the South from the Palestinian factions, people cheered. People were happy. The problem is that the Israelis overstayed their welcome and this incursion, if you want, turned into an occupation.

00:43:52 Speaker_02
And that's what everybody is afraid that is going to happen now. But in addition to that, that's one of the factors why they actually the Shia do not want to do with anything with the Palestinians.

00:44:01 Speaker_02
They like Palestine because it's like, you know, Hezbollah brought it to the Shia mentality and collective. collective thinking, but they don't like the Palestinians. There's a difference between Palestine and the Palestinians.

00:44:13 Speaker_02
But more importantly, if you go really, really, really back historically, culturally, religiously, Jerusalem doesn't exist in Shia cultural texts. It doesn't exist. It's not part of the collective Shia history. Definitely not.

00:44:29 Speaker_02
Maybe a little bit in the Sunni collective history, but Jerusalem is very new to the Shia collective understanding of the Middle East. Jerusalem is not really something that exists. So that really explains why

00:44:43 Speaker_02
This is an opportunity for these people to come back to their Lebanon identity. One, because this is a new identity that can be stripped away. I mean, the Iranian ideology, it's not part of this. It's imposed on the Shia, so you can remove it.

00:44:59 Speaker_02
But at the end of the day, they have no one but Lebanon to go back to. And they want this at this point. They really, really want this.

00:45:05 Speaker_00
Michael, if I may offer one story that I think provides a kind of a case in point about this nexus of Shiites, Lebanon, cosmopolitanism, post-Hezbollah, and so on. The final episode of Hezbollah's Hostages that will roll out on November 4th

00:45:23 Speaker_00
is the story of a number of young Shiite men who, by their own account, consider themselves Lebanese first, Shiite second, who went out with their girlfriends in the time-honored Lebanese pastime of hiking in the beautiful woods of the country's south, and found themselves brutally beaten by Hezbollah fighters who considered their very presence

00:45:47 Speaker_00
as hikers with women to be a defiling of the land of the resistance. They were so brutally beaten that they were seriously wounded and hospitalized and so on. And they made a fateful decision to sue the Hezbollah fighters in court in Lebanon.

00:46:09 Speaker_00
They knew that Hezbollah is very capable of manipulating the court system and ultimately twisting outcomes in its own favor. They knew that Hezbollah fighters and their families would come to their families and threaten them.

00:46:25 Speaker_00
maybe offer them money to drop the charges, any combination of pressure and incentives, et cetera.

00:46:32 Speaker_00
And yet these young men, knowing that the system is rigged against them and Hezbollah is the dealer and the dealer always wins, nonetheless decided to take a stand for the rule of law.

00:46:45 Speaker_00
The principle that there is a public space in this country, like any country, and that Lebanon belongs to all Lebanese.

00:46:53 Speaker_00
and that only a rules-based system with laws that are applying to everyone will guarantee that public space and the continuity of a place called Lebanon.

00:47:05 Speaker_00
And so they just continued to struggle in a civil, lawful way against an illegal, unlawful, and brutal force that they knew they couldn't beat. And these are Lebanese Shiites.

00:47:21 Speaker_00
So I think it's important to recognize that these people are there, to recognize and admire their courage in such an unfair and unlevel playing field, and ask what can be done to empower them?

00:47:36 Speaker_00
What can be done to help them level the playing field and struggle on equal terms for their vision of a cosmopolitan Lebanon?

00:47:45 Speaker_05
Makram these strikes that Israel is taking and you know today in Beirut as you said very close to where you grew up could have the effect of Turning people towards Hezbollah not against them that could have that backlash effect

00:48:06 Speaker_05
We're hearing from all of you that say, hey, look, there's a very, very different vision of Lebanon, and even amongst the Shia who have problems with this dictatorial, almost mafia-like force.

00:48:18 Speaker_05
Do you worry, and obviously this is, you know, 40-plus years of history here, do you worry that this kind of military action can have the opposite consequence of actually emboldening Hezbollah in the position they're in now?

00:48:36 Speaker_06
Well, I believe that tool that kills us is not the bullets and the rockets, but rather the compromise that follows. Every time the Lebanese have been butchered by the U.S.

00:48:46 Speaker_06
administration, whoever it is, Democrat or Republican, be it, let's say, the Bush administration in 1990 and the end of the war,

00:48:55 Speaker_06
or what Biden and Obama did has to do how the country was given to Hezbollah not by their use of weapons, but through a political compromise. By giving these people a legitimacy to cash in their weapons,

00:49:08 Speaker_06
for political dominance and hegemony, you're actually making it easier for them. I believe that Hezbollah was never able to dominate Lebanon through their weapons, but through politics.

00:49:19 Speaker_06
And I believe that if we are to, as a historian, if I do survive this war and end up writing a book, I would actually start with 2016 when the entire political corrupt institution, the ruling establishment basically agreed to elect one of the most corrupt and the most dangerous

00:49:38 Speaker_06
Maronite politicians here, Michel Aoun and Hezbollah, they belong to something we call the alliance of minorities. The alliance of minorities, unfortunately, which also is actually endorsed somewhere in DC.

00:49:52 Speaker_06
He believes that it is a good idea to stand up against Sunni Islam because Sunni Islam gives you Bin Laden and gives you Zawahiri and gives you ISIS. This is not true. ISIS is a joint stock company which was partly owned by Iran.

00:50:07 Speaker_06
They invested heavily in it and ultimately my ultimate anger was the fact that the Obama team and his people and particularly Rob Malley for example wanted me to believe

00:50:18 Speaker_06
that Qasem Soleimani was Ferdowsi or was Al-Khayyam, he was a Persian poet, whereas in fact he was a cold-blooded killer.

00:50:25 Speaker_06
And ultimately when I tried to write an article about him, none of the liberal, quote-unquote liberal, US media would publish this for me. And this guy should go to jail because this guy

00:50:35 Speaker_06
is a spy for the Iranian government and this guy was working against people who are liberal and outspoken and who are dumb enough to say that they are pro-American in the good sense of the word.

00:50:48 Speaker_06
So here the people who kill us are not only these terrorists who shoot bullets but diplomats like Amos Hochstein who comes here with his laugh and his photo ops and he allows this political establishment to come off as

00:51:03 Speaker_06
Policymakers and politicians were in fact, they're just people who'd go to jail for many reasons at this.

00:51:10 Speaker_05
I want to read you something before we go to that point and how certain figures in the Middle East are viewed through the prism of certain newspapers. This is from the obituary of Hassan Nasrallah from the New York Times.

00:51:27 Speaker_05
And I will give them the credit, and I don't want to be unfair to them, that there's criticism of Hassan Nasrallah in there. But here is a couple sentences.

00:51:35 Speaker_05
He came across as less dour than most Shiite clerics, partly because of his roly-poly figure, a slight lisp, and a propensity to crack jokes. He never pushed hardline Islamic rules like veils for women in the neighborhoods that Hezbollah controlled.

00:51:52 Speaker_05
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. That's from the New York Times. So I think the Washington Post, by the way, was no better.

00:51:58 Speaker_05
So to your point, Makram, some of the visions that some of the people in the West have of some of these figures, particularly those that have threatened your life many times, really surprised me when I see them.

00:52:12 Speaker_06
Well, I think that whoever wrote this obituary doesn't know that Nasrallah and his gang used to throw acid at women because they were not decent, and decent here because they were not wearing a veil, not because they were parading in West Beirut with a bikini, basically.

00:52:30 Speaker_05
Joseph Proud, Makram Raba, Hanin Ghadar, thank you for joining us on Honestly.

00:52:36 Speaker_00
Thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. My pleasure.

00:52:39 Speaker_02
It was absolutely our pleasure. Thank you very much for having us, Michael.

00:52:47 Speaker_05
Thanks for listening. And thanks so much to our guests for coming on the show today. If you like this conversation, please share this episode with your friends.

00:52:55 Speaker_05
And if you want to support the work we do here, go to the fp.com and become a free press subscriber today. See you next time.