You might not be surprised to learn that a terrorist who blew up a Jewish community center didn’t like Jews.
Then again, you might not have learned it at all, since so many of Hassan Nasrallah’s obituaries avoided mentioning both the bombing and the bigotry.
Nasrallah was the head of Hezbollah when the group detonated an explosives-laden van at the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) Jewish center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. He later called Jews the most cowardly and lowly people in the world, and said that the Jewish ingathering in Israel would save his followers the effort of hunting them down in the diaspora.
Or did he? Anti-Israel terror groups reliably have their apologists, and so doubts have been raised about whether Nasrallah really made the two statements that follow:
• “If we search the entire globe for a more cowardly, lowly, weak and frail individual in his spirit, mind, ideology, and religion, we will never find anyone like the Jew—and I am not saying the Israeli: we have to know the enemy we are fighting.”
• “Among the signs … and signals which guide us, in the Islamic prophecies and not only in the Jewish prophecies, is that this State [of Israel] will be established, and that the Jews will gather from all parts of the world into occupied Palestine, not in order to bring about the anti-Christ and the end of the world, but rather that Allah the Glorified and Most High wants to save you from having to go to the ends of the world, for they have gathered in one place—they have gathered in one place—and there the final and decisive battle will take place.”
Charles Glass, a former ABC journalist, has suggested both are false. After writing warmly about Hezbollah in the New York Review of Books—his piece’s opening conceit comparing Hezbollah to anti-Nazi Frenchmen after the Second World War echoes the exact same analogy by Nasrallah—he took to the magazine’s letters section to spar with critics who referenced the antisemitic statements.
Glass insisted that the latter quote is “in all likelihood” a “fabrication.” Why? It’s unclear. Maybe because it was “circulated widely on neo-con websites,” as Glass noted in his rejoinder. Maybe because a Lebanese journalist who wrote of the quote later “moved to Washington.” One editor questioned that journalist’s agenda, readers are told. And another editor told Glass that the journalist never directly interviewed Nasrallah.
Perhaps not. But he wouldn’t have needed to. Nasrallah’s words weren’t shared in an interview, but were part of a publicly broadcast speech, the relevant audio of which Yair Rosenberg posted some years later on Tablet Magazine’s website. So much for being a fabrication.
To discredit the former quote, Glass pointed out that a book appends an erroneous footnote to the quote. And while the author of that book told Glass that, despite the mistake, she’s certain the quote is accurate, he is unassuaged: “[U]ntil someone discovers where and when Nasrallah uttered the words above, the case is unproved.”
Nasrallah uttered the words on Sept. 13, 1997. That’s according to a deeply researched compilation of Nasrallah’s speeches (“Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyad Hassan Nasrallah,” edited by Nicholas Noe, Verso Books, 2007, pg. 171).
The editor of that compilation explains that his team combed through “archives provided by the Lebanese daily newspaper As Safir, in addition to the several Arabic volumes of published Nasrallah speeches available on the market in Beirut.” He also relied on “transcriptions of original recordings provided by Lebanese media outlets and official transcripts provided by the Lebanese National News Agency, as well as … bound volumes of Hezbollah’s weekly magazine Al Intiqad, going back to its founding in the mid-1990s.”
Hezbollah was informed of the materials the editor sought to print, and copies were provided to a third party approved by the organization for comment related to the accuracy of the texts and translation.1
Glass’s haughty letters continue to misinform readers of the New York Review of Books. A Wikipedia article on Hezbollah’s ideology conveys Glass’s skepticism about one of the quotes, but unsurprisingly fails to mention the proof of Nasrallah’s words. And though the Washington Post’s Liz Sly worked to spread doubts, she couldn’t bring herself to forthrightly correct after the doubts were disproved.
In his correspondence with critics, Glass also raises doubts about a third quote, in which Nasrallah denies the Holocaust and describes the Jews as a cancer. The reasons for his skepticism are that the quote “comes from the Israeli government’s website,” and was denied by a Hezbollah spokeswoman. Notably, the Hezbollah spokeswoman who issued the denial also insisted that the very real quote about Jews gathering in Israel was a fabrication.
An excerpt from the speech published elsewhere in 2002 appears to predate its publication on Israel’s Foreign Ministry website. And considering Glass’s record—and that of Nasrallah—it seems reasonable to assume that this quote, too, is accurate.
1.^ Noe’s collection also includes excerpts from the speech in which Nasrallah spoke of Jews gathering in Israel so that they wouldn’t have to be hunted all over the world—but not that section. The book acknowledges there were elisions in the source material [recheck], and while Noe initially argued the omitted section was unlikely to include the damning quote, and questioned its authenticity, he later acknowledged that the quote is authentic after a researcher named Tony Badran found the unabridged speech.
Originally reported by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.