What Sayyed Nasrallah Wants

Banners by Hezbollah welcoming the Pope

To understand Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s calls for protests against the Innocence of Muslims movie, a call that puzzled observers who saw Sayyed Nasrallah as a rational player with no interest in fanning flames at the moment, it is important to look at two driving forces in Hezbollah’s strategic thinking: 1) The competition for the hearts and minds of Lebanese Christians, and 2) The narrative for Syria and for the region in general.

Establishing a contrast

When two Lebanese Christians are fighting over politics in Keserwen, Jbeil, Batroon, Zgharta, Baabda and other places in the Lebanese Christian heartland, they are likely fighting over the question: “Who is more dangerous for Lebanon’s Christians? The Sunnis or the Shiaas?” Both sides have strong arguments that favor their positions, so many Christians are undecided and are open to persuation. This matters to Hezbollah because the Christians will decide whether or not the “party of god” and its allies will get a majority in the next parliamentary elections.

While the Sunnis are busy being angry and clumsy, Sayyed Nasrallah was showing the Christians how much “the people of the resistance” (code language for ‘Shiaa’ ) care for them and for their Pope, by organising its own little Pope love-fests which provided a cute spectacle of veiled Hezbollah supporters carrying signs expressing their adoration for the Holy See.

Of course Hezbollah doesn’t want to lose a large section of its biggest supporters, ie the religious Shiaas who are also upset by the Innocence of Muslims movie. So they will organize protests against it, protests that will paradoxically also prove to the Christians that the Shiaas are better for them. How? By showing that even in anger, Hezbollah can organize well disciplined protests that, unlike “out of control” Sunni mobs, will leave all KFCs and foreign personelle intact.

Don’t forget the great Satan

The narrative that Hezbollah, Iran and Assad are promoting for Syria (and for why Bashar should stay in power), is that America and its allies are sowing strife in the region and pushing Arabs to fight each other for the benefit of Israel.

Sayyed Nasrallah knows that the Americans can’t control every movie published on YouTube, but why let such a minor inconvenience stand in the way of an opportunity for propaganda? “There are goals for such an insult to Islam and its Prophet”, a disingenuous Nasrallah said as he blamed the great satan for Innocence of Muslims, “one of these is to incite strife between Muslims and Christians and to drag them into a religious, sectarian and bloody conflict”.

( Psst, Christians, notice that we are also protesting in your name , please don’t be afraid of us).

Innocence of Muslims is not, in Hezbollah’s worldview, a random movie by a fanatic that was published on the web, it was a premeditated effort by the American administration to sow strife in the region. This is completely ridiculous and baseless, but everybody will believe it. Sayyed Nasrallah knows his audience very well.