Earlier this month, while he was in Lebanon to highlight the plight of Christians in the Middle East, in particular those fleeing the fighting in neighboring Syria, Terry Waite, the former special envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, kissed and made up with Hezbollah, the militant Shia group that held him captive in Lebanon between 1987 and 1991. One probably shouldn’t blame Waite, now 73, for wanting to exorcise any residual demons of his 1,763-day nightmare, but in doing so he unwittingly gave Hezbollah dangerous and unwarranted legitimacy.
Talking to the UK’s Channel 4 news on his return, Waite declared, rather naively that he simply wanted to help ‘provide some degree of stability’ to Lebanon, a country he said was in ‘desperate difficulties, surrounded on all sides by dissention and trouble’.
Hezbollah, he added, ‘has moved in recent years from being an organization that seemed to be primarily concerned with terrorism… to becoming a fully fledged party’.
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