Was it Fair to Chant “Hezbollah is a Terrorist” at the Victims’ Families Gathering?

Hezbollah deserved to get an earful, but the wrong chant was chosen.

Yesterday I got into a Twitter back and forth about the Hezbollah is a Terrorist chant that took place at the victims’ family protest next to Adlieh.

Joseph’s point was straightforward: “This does not help the course of justice or judge Bitar,” and it got me thinking about whether it was fair to single out Hezbollah in the families’ chants, and whether this will backfire on the perception of impartiality of the process by the many Lebanese who support Hezbollah..

Judge Bitar’s isolation had many cooks, and it was in fact Ex Minister Nouhad Machnouk who directly caused it (double curse him). Moreover, some activists seem to have infiltrated the gathering, to the consternation of at least some parents who did not want the event to be politicised.

But hold on, I still don’t think that Hezbollah should have been left off the hook; Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has again and again, in his speeches, thrown doubt on the impartiality of Judge Bitar’s investigation, called it politicised, and as far back as February implied that the investigation was for the sake of greedy insurance companies, and that as far as he was concerned, it was over. Then it all culminated in the threat that Hezbollah’s senior offical Wafic Safa made to “remove” judge Bitar, which the party didn’t even bother to deny, in a chilling display of power and unaccountability.

The isolation of Judge Bitar followed a typical Hezbollah playbook script in these years of their complete dominance: They provide the incentive, the cover, and then they let someone else, usually from the corrupt Lebanese ruling class (Gebran Basil, Nouhad Machnouk..etc) pull the trigger. This gives them not only deniability, but also spreads the false notion that somehow all Lebanese players are equally bad and evil.

All this is to say that I still believe that people should have chanted against Hezbollah. But they should have chanted instead: “Hezbollah is the master mind who carefully, over time, orchestrated the discrediting of the investigation and the isolation of judge Bitar”.

Too bad it’s not as catchy as “Hezbollah is a terrorist”.