Imad Mughniya Assassination and History

The other day Marten Kramer sent his readers over here, to Ruminations. Today I'm sending them back.

Kramer treats the Mughniya assassination as historians ought to do, by trying to remember farther back than yesterday's news and last week's headlines. It turns out that over the years Hizbullah obfuscated all sorts of things about Mughniya, his connection to them, their activities beyond southern Lebanon and so on. I even personally remember that the Economist, a respectable paper by most accounts, refused to admit that Hezbullah was a terrorist organization back in the years I used to read it regularly (i.e. before 2001), claiming this was an American and Israeli idea not accepted by others. So Kramer mentions a few of the useful idiots who fell for this nonsense then, and compares it to the Hezbullah fury now.

For future reference, and future useful idiots, Zvi Bar'el comments that Hassan Nassrallah this week quite clearly announced his intention to engage in international terrorism irrespective of any political situation between Israel and Lebanon.

Maybe I should write more about American politics. They're less depressing.