Sunday, January 18, 2009
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
Matthew d'Ancona: In this war, Islamists have found a shared strategy. We haven't - 'David Miliband is misguided to claim that the terrorist threat is disaggregated and heterogeneous...prospective terrorists – the so-called "self-starters" – have rarely got anywhere without access to the jihadist network and training camps. LeT, the group believed to be responsible for the Mumbai attacks, may be rooted in Pakistan, but it recruits and proselytises all over the world. Hamas and Hizbollah are not simply militant Palestinian groups, but also strongly connected to the mains supply of global Islamism and (in this case) Iranian patronage. As the Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has put it with chilling clarity: "If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide."...'
Hamas and Hizbollah are not simply militant Palestinian groups,
Hezbollah is not "Palestinian" but created by Iran out of Lebanese Shia in the 1980s and used against American and French troops sent to stop the civil war there.
They are effectively Iran's Foreign Legion in Lebanon.
At the moment they are allied against the "local" Israelis and foreign America. If Iran succedes in all its fields of activities it will convert Hamas (it is currently in the process of converting Syrians), born out of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and Sunni, into a Shia sect.