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Hezbollah’s media offensive

All Hezbollah lacks is a group on Facebook

Lauren Booth

Wednesday, 31st October 2007

A tour of Beirut with the militia’s PR division

Dr Hussein Rahal is head of Hezbollah’s media centre. He dresses snappily in a short-sleeved plaid shirt and slacks. Like men in his job the world over, he compulsively checks his vibrating phone every 30 seconds, eyes darting about the restaurant we are in. He talks furiously about a BBC film broadcast on 21 August, made by Darius Bazargan, Lebanon — Hunting for Hezbollah. In it the journalist talks of coming across a Hezbollah military base, then being detained and interrogated by a patrol. ‘Lies, lies, lies,’ says Dr Rahal. ‘He just wanted to pretend to be a hero.’ So, I ask, what has his media office done to counter the claims? Dr Rahal looks nonplussed. ‘Done?’ Had they contacted the BBC, prepared a dossier to prove operatives were not in the area, reported the so-called ‘lies’ to other Arab media for them to follow up? ‘No. No one ever believes us anyway,’ he says a little sulkily. Does Hezbollah now have a website? ‘It was attacked last year by hackers. We are still working on it.’ Do they have a rebuttal unit, or people monitoring English-speaking news channels for output concerning them? ‘We want to do that in the future,’ he says, taking notes on a scrap of paper.

Perhaps I’ve just been overexposed to Sky News. Or perhaps I’ve been made hard by a decade of New Labour government where the message, not the facts, is what matters. Either way, the fact remains that Hezbollah is bereft of international clout when its dramatic clued-up leader is not on show. Sans website, sans Facebook, sans everything. It may have kept southern Lebanon (for now), but its enemies are winning the war for cyberspace.

Lauren Booth is a broadcaster and a journalist on the Mail on Sunday.

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