Mughniyeh and Hezbollah manipulation of academics

Martin Kramer has a current important post at MESH about Hezbollah's recently reversed policy of denying that Mughniyeh was a member and the tendency of academic "experts" on Hezbollah to just echo Hezbollah evasions. Discussing the book "Hezbollah: The Changing Face of Terrorism" by Judith Palmer Harik, Kramer comments that Harik

spends a few embarrassing pages agonizing over this question: “Was Mughniyeh a member of Hezbollah?”

Now that Nasrallah’s eulogy has placed Mughniyah officially in the pantheon of Hezbollah’s greatest martyrs (with Abbas al-Musawi and Raghib Harb), this question looks absurd. That it ever arose is a testament to the discipline of Hezbollah in sticking to lies that serve its interests. One of its paramount interests is concealing from scrutiny that apparatus of terror that Mughniyah spent his life building.

In the comments, Michael Young observes:

This is emblematic of a wider problem. Hezbollah has been very adept at turning contacts with the party into a supposedly valuable favor. Scholars, particularly in the West, who can claim to have a Hezbollah contact are already regarded as “special” for having penetrated a closed society, so that readers are less inclined to judge critically the merits of what the scholars got out of Hezbollah. The same goes for book editors. Since Hezbollah denied knowing Mughniyah, few were willing to say “This is rubbish, I’m going to push further.” The mere fact of getting that denial was regarded as an achievement—one the authors were not about to jeopardize by calling Hezbollah liars.

I am reminded of the fact that when Human Rights Watch attempted to follow its reports criticizing Israel's conduct during the Lebanon war with one critical of Hezbollah, its relationship with Hezbollah immediately soured. You have to wonder what price it paid for its previous access to South Lebanon. More on Mughniyeh and the experts here.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

Tags: Hezbollah, academia, Kramer, Michael Young