Despite having carried out terrorist attacks for the last thirty years and killed hundreds of people around the world, the terrorist group Hezbollah is, unbelievably, still not on the European Union’s list of banned terrorist organisations.
In today’s Wall Street Journal. Daniel Schwammenthal lays out the imperative case for putting them on that list. Officially the EU claims that there is a difference between the terrorist group’s political and military wings. But that is not so, any more than it is the case for Hamas (which the EU does recognise as a terrorist entity).
In his piece Schwammenthal rightly points out the global reach that Hezbollah has had, killing 241 US Martines and 58 French soldiers in 1983 and carrying out suicide bombings as far away as Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994. Yet Hezbollah are partly able to operate in this way because of their substantial material and moral support-base in Europe.
The Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, said a few years back that if the EU designated his terrorist group as such it would ‘destroy’ the organization as ‘[t]he sources of our funding will dry up and the sources of moral, political and material support will be destroyed.’ As Schwammenthal points out, ‘Europe has the power and moral obligation to finally facilitate this destruction.’
Not designating Hezbollah as a terrorist entity is not just something which demonstrates the EU’s failings today, but something for which history will excoriate it.
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