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

Its principal targets, however, are Jews. This is in accordance with the core belief that drives the global jihad: that the West is a conspiracy to destroy Islam and that the puppet-masters of the West — and the embodiment of cosmic evil who must therefore be obliterated — are the Jews.

So in 1992 a human bomb attack destroyed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. In 1994 in the same city, a car-bomb attack on a Jewish community building was the largest single incident of terrorism against Jews since the second world war. Eight days later, the Israeli embassy in London was car-bombed by two Palestinians linked to Hezbollah.

Now British Jews, who already have to be guarded against Islamist terror at every communal event, find themselves even more threatened as British counter-terrorism officials say they are raising the alert for attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets in Britain.

And now Iran has explicitly singled out Britain as a target for attack — not because of Lebanon or any other recent event, but because of the British Balfour Declaration of 1917, which led eventually to the restoration of the Jews to part of their ancient homeland in the state of Israel.

In an Iranian TV interview on 23 July, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that ‘England was the founder of this sinister regime’ (Israel) and, like America, was ‘an accomplice to all its crimes’.

This ignores the fact that Britain actually reneged on its promise to found a Jewish national home in mandatory Palestine, sided with the Nazi-supporting Arabs and eventually abstained in the UN vote on establishing Israel. The country that actually swung it for the Jews happened to be the Soviet Union — so the proper target of Ahmadinejad’s grievance should surely be his current patron, Vladimir Putin.

But hatred of Israel is itself a proxy for the Islamists’ hatred of the Jews. According to Nasrallah, ‘If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli.’