. . . in an interview with the newspaper Al-Wahda al-Islamiyya in February 1989, when Nasrallah was still only a Hizbullah field commander, he remarked: "The future is one of war [against Israel], not settlement; the line that [Yasser] Arafat is pursuing will only lead him to a closed door, and the day will come when warfare and the elimination of Israel will be the only options." (For a rundown of Nasrallah's statements translated into English, read the indispensible "Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah", edited by Nicholas Noe.)Read the rest.
Why is the topic important? Because over the years academics, analysts, journalists, and others, particularly the Westerners among them, who write about militant Islamist groups, have tended to project their own liberal attitudes and desires onto such groups, misinterpreting their intentions and largely ignoring what these groups say about themselves. Inasmuch as most such observers cannot really fathom the totalitarian strain in the aims and language of armed Islamists, totalitarian in the sense of pursuing a total idea, total in its purity, they cannot accept that the total idea can also be apocalyptic. Where Nasrallah and the leaders of Hamas will repeat that Israel's elimination is a quasi-religious duty, the sympathetic Westernized observer, for whom the concept of elimination is intolerable, will think much more benignly in terms of well-intentioned "bargaining." Hamas and Hizbullah are pragmatic, they will argue, so that their statements and deeds are only leverage to achieve specific political ends that, once attained, will allow a return to harmonious equilibrium.
This argument, so tirelessly made, is tiresomely irrelevant. No one has seriously suggested that Hizbullah or Hamas are not pragmatic. But one can be pragmatic in the means and not in the ends. If anything, pragmatism is obligatory in the pursuit of an absolute idea. [...]
Crossposted on Soccer Dad
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