Hezbollah cells await Iran’s orders

02 August 2006

Hezbollah sleeper cells in Western Europe are awaiting instructions from Tehran, says Melanie Phillips. Sunni and Shia are uniting in their hatred of the West, and Britain may soon be another front in a war that extends far beyond Lebanon

But then Britain at this moment isn’t really sane. It is gripped by a kind of collective derangement in which, blinded by hatred of Israel, it thinks that the current war against Israel by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, and its ally Syria, is a war by Israel against ‘innocent’ Lebanon. As a result, it is quite unable to grasp that Hezbollah’s war against Israel, which is desperately trying to bring Israel to an end once and for all, is a key salient in Iran’s escalating war against the free world.

Because Hezbollah is Iran. Every weapon in Iran’s arsenal is potentially available to Hezbollah. A few days ago the London Arabic daily, Asharq Alawsat, detailed the extensive assistance being provided to Hezbollah by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Hezbollah’s commander Hassan Nasrallah leads an Iranian jihadi army that exports terror round the world. And just as it did with the rival jihadists of al-Qa’eda, Britain — a prime target of Iranian terror — is once again allowing itself to become a theatre of the Iranian jihad and a weak link in the chain of resistance against it.

Many on the British Left mistakenly believe that Hezbollah is merely another Muslim liberation movement to add to its collection. (The thinking which leads the Left to classify genocide as liberation is a story in itself.) As a result, the comrades of ‘Stop the War’ march behind placard images of their new hero Nasrallah, while George Galloway MP proclaimed at the demonstration, ‘Hezbollah is not a terrorist group and I am here to glorify the Lebanese resistance movement.’

What was also notable at that demonstration was that Dr Azzam Tamimi was whipping up the crowd to a hysterical frenzy against Israel. Dr Tamimi is a key official of the Muslim Brotherhood and closely associated with Hamas. The Brotherhood, however, are Sunni Muslims while Hezbollah are Shia — religious and political rivals.

But now the Sunni Brotherhood and the Khomeinist Shia have united in common cause to bring murder and mayhem to the world. Iran is now helping to fund Hamas; at the demonstration the crowd chillingly roared approval when Tamimi screamed that Hezbollah, along with Hamas, was now active on their behalf. Nasrallah has become the new global poster boy for jihadis everywhere. Sunni and Shia are now marching together in the Islamist version of the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact.

In Britain there are thought to be relatively few Khomeinists compared with Sunni terrorists. But there are enough to form a serious potential security threat if Iran decides to unleash Hezbollah against targets in the UK. And that is now a real possibility.