White House official calls terrorist group “a very interesting organization”  


By W. Thomas Smith Jr. —— Bio and Archives May 20, 2010

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The downward spiral toward coffee and pastries between the White House and one of the world’s bloodiest, most-notorious terrorist organizations continues. And based on a Tuesday report in Reuters, this spiral may be tightening into an irrecoverable flat spin.

According to the report, “The Obama administration is looking for ways to build up ‘moderate elements’ within the Lebanese Hizballah guerrilla movement and to diminish the influence of hard-liners, a top White House official said on Tuesday.” But wait; the soft-soaping gets worse. The article goes on to say – and this is frankly hard to believe – that John Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, told a Washington conference, "Hizballah is a very interesting organization," and apparently defended his comment by “citing its evolution from ‘purely a terrorist organization’ to a militia to an organization that now has members within the parliament and the cabinet.” Brennan adds, “There is certainly the elements of Hizballah that are truly a concern to us what they’re doing.” Oh really? “And what we need to do is to find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build up the more moderate elements,” Brennan adds. Within hours of the report, I was receiving emails from those both directly and indirectly associated with the U.S. intelligence community expressing shock and disbelief. Then Wednesday, Mr. John Hajjar, the U.S. director for the World Council of the Cedars Revolution (Lebanon’s largest worldwide pro-democracy movement) issued a statement on behalf of the WCCR, a portion of which reads, “Brennan is wrong and his statements are confusing the American public. We haven't seen any statement or document by Hizballah members who call for moderation. We haven't seen so-called moderates calling for disarming the militia. Mr. Brennan said Hizballah has members in the Lebanese parliament. Although true, Mr. Brennan draws the wrong conclusion as this means that the terrorist organization has used its weapons and money to penetrate the Lebanese legislature and not the other way around.   “We in the WCCR ask Mr. Brennan to give the U.S. public and Lebanese Americans one example of a moderate official inside Hizballah. He can’t because there are none. This is an organization that tolerates absolutely no dissent or nuanced views. It executes the orders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Mr. Brennan's statements about Hizballah’s ‘moderates’ are an insult and an affront to the Lebanese who were assassinated by the terror organization, to the U.S. citizens and military personnel who were killed by the Iranian funded group and to the Lebanese American community that has been working hard on exposing terror inside Lebanon and on implementing UNSCR 1559 and 1701.”   Hajjar then called on Brennan to either apologize for the “insult” or resign. “Two million Lebanese Americans won't stand by idle as a U.S. official is disfiguring the truth in Lebanon,” Hajjar adds. Disfiguring truth indeed.

Let’s not forget, Hizballah – which former U.S. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff says, “makes al Qaeda look like a minor league team” – is perhaps the most dangerous terrorist army (let’s not mince words here) on the planet. The group is heavily funded by Iran, and operationally supported by Iran and Syria. It has a capable military wing in Lebanon where it maintains huge stockpiles of military grade weapons – staged throughout the country which have never been adequately challenged (in violation of both United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1701). Hizballah has operational cells worldwide, including here in the U.S. It has a media / propaganda arm that is second to none. Its military wing is stronger – and frankly has more political leverage – than the Lebanese army and police (both of which have been heavily infiltrated by Hizballah). And if Hizballah doesn’t get what it wants from the so-called democratically elected government of Lebanon, the terrorist group and its allies will attack the Lebanese people as they did in May 2008 with impunity.  Hizballah's leader, Sec. Gen. Hassan Nasrallah, says “Our motto which we are not afraid to repeat year after year is ‘Death to America.’” Yet officials within the current administration view Hizballah as “a very interesting organization” and publicly admit there may be members worthy of befriending? Perhaps the blood on the hands of Brennan’s so-called moderates is not as much as others. I suppose a “moderate” amount of blood is acceptable.