Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary-General of the Hezbollah terror group, recently threatened to send Israel back "to the Stone Age" if it goes to war with Lebanon -- meaning defend itself against an Iranian-Lebanese attack:
"Today, I can present evidence, when I say to the [Israeli] enemy: You, too, will return to the Stone Age. The civilian airports, the military airports, the Air Force bases, the power plants and electricity distribution grid, the water plants, the main communication centers, various infrastructure – there is no need to go into detail. The oil, petrol, and ammonium nitrate plants. You can also add Dimona [nuclear] plant. All of these are located in a small territory [Israel]. If the fighting expands to the entire resistance axis, nothing will be left of Israel."
While Nasrallah's threat to destroy Israel is not new, he surely knows a thing or two about sending countries back to the Stone Age. His Iran-backed group, which functions as a state-within-a-state in Lebanon, is responsible for turning the Arab country, only a few years ago known as the "Switzerland of the Middle East" and its capital, Beirut as the "Paris of the Middle East" into a failed state, the "Venezuela of the Middle East."
Associated Press reported in September 2021:
"As Lebanon sinks deeper into poverty, many Lebanese are more openly criticizing Iran-backed Hezbollah. They blame the group – along with the ruling class – for the devastating, multiple crises plaguing the country, including a dramatic currency crash and severe shortages in medicine and fuel."
Two days after Nasrallah made his latest threat against Israel, Lebanon witnessed widespread blackouts, forcing Beirut Airport to run on electric generators. The Electricity Authority of Lebanon announced that the al-Zahrani and Deir Amman power stations ceased operations due to the operating company's financial debt. Lebanon's Central Bank refuses to approve additional credit to the company to operate the power plants without legislation backing such a move (the bank refuses to accept responsibility for the matter and wants Parliament to take responsibility).
Many Lebanese hold Hezbollah directly responsible for the four-year-long crisis.
"Lebanon has been hit by a debilitating new wave of hyperinflation, the imposition of its judiciary over the local investigation into the Port of Beirut blast, and a European investigation into the Central Bank," according to Fadi Nassar, an assistant professor in political science and international affairs at the Lebanese American University, and Saleh El Machnouk, a lecturer in political science at Saint-Joseph University in Beirut.
"On one side of the spectrum, France has largely characterized Lebanon's crisis as a consequence of a deeply-flawed power-sharing system that allowed sectarian allies to divvy up the spoils of the state to the point of bankruptcy. Lebanon's failure, therefore, is rooted in corruption and mismanagement...
"On the other side of the spectrum is the understanding that Lebanon was coerced into collapse by Hezbollah and its regional broker, Iran. Through political assassinations, forced paralysis, and a military takeover in 2008, Hezbollah filled the power void in Lebanon left by the [Syrian] regime's withdrawal in 2005. Central to that theory is that Hezbollah's costly regional military interventions – from Syria to Yemen – and coercion of its opponents, paralyzed the government and cut the country from its traditional Gulf economic lifeline...
"After years of confrontation between Hezbollah and the anti-Syrian March 14 forces, the former had managed –using both sticks and carrots – to either subdue or co-opt various political opponents into the so-called national unity governments. This process...culminated in 2016 with the election of a Hezbollah ally, Michel Aoun, as president. By then, Lebanon had fully delved into a Faustian, transactional arrangement between the militia (Hezbollah) and the mafia (the co-opted cartel of sectarian political elites)..."
The two Lebanese authors point out that Lebanon's Central Bank governor, Riad Salameh, acting as the mafia's financial architect, siphoned depositors' money from commercial banks to fund the elite's expanding clientelist network, resulting in the loss of life savings for hundreds of thousands of Lebanese. They added:
"The recent case of the US's sanctioning of Hezbollah-affiliated money exchanger Hassan Moukalled, accused of supporting Hezbollah's finances by acting as intermediary between the Central Bank and the black market, demonstrates how Salameh's control of the Central Bank is a key component of Hezbollah's evolving ability to capture state resources and circumvent international sanctions."
Dr. Ellie Abouaoun, Director of North Africa Programs and Regional Hub at the United States Institute of Peace, noted that multidimensional poverty in Lebanon rose from 53% (pre-2019) to 82% in 2019 because of what the World Bank described as a deliberate depression orchestrated by Lebanon's elite and one of the top three most severe economic collapses worldwide since the 1850s.
"Holding the community of nations solely responsible for Lebanon's mess is not only unfair, but essentially preposterous," Abouaoun argued.
"It is clear by now that some Lebanese citizens easily qualify as perpetrators, while the rest are either unwilling or unfit to be part of a solution, are held hostage by the current elite, or are just idle babblers, too politically immature to conceive and execute a way out of the quagmire...
"Lebanon is a country with endemic corruption, dysfunctional legislative, executive, and judiciary powers, where services are hardly accessible and poverty rates are alarming."
Baria Alamuddin, an award-winning Lebanese journalist and broadcaster, accused Hezbollah of destroying everything that made Lebanon great. "Does anyone know how many Lebanese prime ministers have been appointed over the past year?" she asked in an article in September 2020.
"With the resignation of Mustapha Adib at the weekend, Hezbollah has thwarted every attempt to form a competent, technocratic administration to steer Lebanon out of this catastrophe; demanding, like gangsters, that it must possess the Finance Ministry, Health, Transport, and everything else it can get its hands on.
"We have warned for years that Hassan Nasrallah...and Ayatollah Khamenei would burn Lebanon to the ground to protect their interests...
"Hezbollah and [former Lebanese president Michel] Aoun have destroyed everything that made Lebanon great. The Arab world's banking capital is bankrupt. Tourists don't frequent destabilized states run by terrorists. Former regional partners refuse to have anything to do with us. Our celebrated culture is trampled underfoot by barbarian theocrats. Beirut no longer has a viable port."
Further evidence that Hezbollah has sent Lebanon back to the Stone Age can be found in the August 4, 2020 explosion at the Port of Beirut, which killed more than 200 people, injured thousands more, and displaced half of Lebanon's capital city.
Although the ammonium nitrate the caused the massive explosion is not directly linked to Hezbollah, some people have been holding the terror group responsible for the tragedy, pointing out its previous use of the explosive. Hezbollah has been accused of preventing the stash from being disposed of after they were seized by Lebanese authorities in 2013 from a Moldovan-flagged ship en route from Georgia to Mozambique.
Hezbollah's name is tied up with ammonium nitrate in several historical cases. In 2020, Israel reportedly provided Germany with information about Hezbollah's activities on German soil, including the stashing of hundreds of kilograms of ammonium nitrate. In 2015, British intelligence, acting on a tip from a foreign intelligence agency, caught an alleged Hezbollah terrorist stockpiling more than three tons of the explosive packed in thousands of disposable ice packs in North West London. In a similar case in 2015 in Cyprus, a Hezbollah agent was found with 8.2 tons of ammonium nitrate.
Since the explosion at the Port of Beirut, Hezbollah has been trying to obstruct the investigation into the incident by the Lebanese authorities. "All indications, signs, and collected evidence of weapons and explosives, prove beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Hezbollah, backed by the mullahs in Iran, have turned Lebanon into a massive arms and explosives warehouse," said Saudi political analyst Mohammed al Shaikh.
"Hezbollah's militia, as was publicly and boldly recognized by its Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, is trying to convert Lebanon into an Iranian mullah's province, from which he receives his arms and all the funds and equipment he requires.
"Hence, the crimes committed by Hezbollah, including the Beirut explosion, are in fact an extension of Tehran's orders...
"Although they cannot be publicly vocal about it, all the Lebanese hold Hezbollah responsible for the port bombing. People know that if they do express their opinion, physical liquidation awaits them, as this terrorist party does with whoever opposes it, and Lebanese judges dare not press charges against it. The local jurisdiction is too weak to handle this brutal and bloody monster fairly and transparently."
Nasrallah and his masters in Iran care nothing about the suffering of the Lebanese people. What they care about is power, spreading their control to other Arab countries, and fulfilling their ambition to destroy the only successful and democratic country in the Middle East: Israel. Besides Lebanon, Iran's terror proxies have also wreaked havoc in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. How ironic that Nasrallah, the terrorist leader who has decimated his own country, is now threatening to take another state back to the Stone Age.
Bassam Tawil is a Muslim Arab based in the Middle East.
Jagdish N Singh