On Hezbollah’s Supporters..

We don’t want your food! said the refugees…

A story making the rounds here in Tripoli is that when the Future Movement activists brought food and aid to southern refugees, they were booed and heckled, and M.P. Hariri was called an American and Israeli stooge.

This of course is shock material to predominantly Sunni Tripoli. “Oh my, those people actually like Hezbollah,” Tripolitans seemed to wonder.

The mostly Shiaa refugees were upset because of the comments Hariri made when he was in Saudi Arabia. A clearly deranged Hariri had echoed the Saudi king by placing the blame on Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventure”, and asking for accountability.

The point of this post is not that Tripoli Sunnis are from Mars and Nabatieh Shiaas are from Venus. The point is to question the conventional wisdom that Hezbollah has many sympathizers because of its clinics and the social services it provides to poor people.

We have to wake up to the fact that public support for Hezbollah is ideological and well entrenched. As anyone who’s met a Hezbollah supporter outside of Lebanon knows, there are many rich southern Lebanese who send remittances to “the resistance”. Some even say that half of Hezbollah’s money comes from Diaspora.

That is food for thought, and it shouldn’t be refused.