I walked this evening with a mixed group of Turks, Poles, Russians, Georgians, Jordanians, and a few others to the Hezbollah anti-government tent camp in Beirut. It was quite interesting. A relaxed atmosphere generally, with the soldiers on the one side vigilant but not hostile and the demonstrators generally cool. It wasn’t really a party, but it was mainly kids out with their friends to hang out. There were a few spontaneous parade/demonstrations of a dozen or two people, such as the one of youths from Baalbek who were chanting that they wanted their right to grow and do drugs, as well as followers of Michel Aoun in orange Santa hats singing Arabic Christmas carols, and rowdy teenagers chanting “Shia! Shia! Shia!” or random insults directed toward prime minister Fouad Siniora (with Arabic chants that rhymed his name with bodily organs and the like). There were also merchants selling roasted nuts, sweets, and drinks, as well as Hezbollah banners, banners for Michel Aoun’s party, and so on.
Here are a few photos I snapped (I admit I’m not a great photographer) with some descriptions:
A Mini Party Chanting Hezbollah Slogans and Dancing
Hezbollah’s Tent City
Three Popular Leaders
The Response of the Anti-Hezbollah Forces:
“We Want to Live” in large type, “I Love Life” in small
The Anti-Hezbollah Message of Life in English and in French
Is that a hammer and sickle flag in the first picture? Ewwww….
Chavez is in the bunch with the Hezbollah marchers. All this exposes is that Chavez coming to power in Venezuela is that Chavez is very less likely to promote a free society and align himself with some of the worse type of tyrants and terrorists who use civilians as human shields.
Just simply yuck is what I have to say.
What makes this blog and his author, too, quite stunning are sentences like: “For fun, I’m reading and enjoying Anthony Everitt’s Augustus’. Now put this back in context: Imagine you are on a long distance plane over the ocean, you worked like mad during one week to catch up because you were away in, say Guatemala, so you hurry to buy a book to relax, and you pickÃ?Â?Ã?¢Ã?¢?Ã?¬Ã?Â?Ã?¦Roman history “just for fun”. After which, you land, jet lag, tired, you got meetings and what do you do? You go :
“I’ll wander off a bit later to visit the Hezbollah camp in front of the prime minister’s office”Ã?Â?Ã?¢Ã?¢?Ã?¬Ã?Â?Ã?¦Hezbollah as is Hez-bo-llah and prime minister office as in-Ã?Â?Ã?¢Ã?¢?Ã?¬Ã?Â?Ã?¦ wellÃ?Â?Ã?¢Ã?¢?Ã?¬Ã?Â?Ã?¦where people sometimes got liquidated in the past. Vraiment, il n’y a qu’un Tom Palmer! NV
Thank you for the inspiring photos of the “I(heart)Life” billboards. What a beautiful response to the Hezbollah flag, which features the Kalishnikov assault rifle.
“Vraiment, il n’y a qu’un Tom Palmer!”
No doubt about that…
Very cool photos.
Re Hugo Chavez, is there any real connection between him and Hezbollah? Isn’t his visage displayed here on a par with the Soviet flag, just one more symbol of defiance against the U.S.?
I seriously doubt that Chavez is involved. (The other person, Nasser, is dead, so he’s not involved, either.) Charles is right, that Chavez is taken as a symbol of standing up to the U.S., the West, Israel, etc. He’s also been quite cozy with Iran (weapons sales, public embraces, etc.), which funds Hezbollah. In the case of the Communist flag, however, there is a Lebanese Communist Party and they are actively supporting Hezbollah’s bid for power. Speakers at the rallies have, I am told, regularly mentioned them, as well as Michel Aoun’s party and various odd fascist-oriented splinter parties. Lebanese politics is remarkably complicated.
Palmer,
I would still be worried that Chavez is professing his solidarity with Hezbollah and its leaders. Chavez has proclaimed to protect Iran’s nuke program at all costs and what’s worse about that is the Iranian President being quite frank about his views such as the holocaust and all that other dicey stuff. More importantly, the Iranian President has received a lot of praise from the Western neo-Nazi/neo-Fascist circles (to which many of them collaborate with each other in Libya) and that’s sure isn’t a good sign.
As for the Lebanonese Communist Party backing Hezbollah, that’s certainly not a big surprise. The LPC is linked with its Syrian counterparts in the Baathist government along with the Syrian branch of the Communist party. What else is quite unsettling are its links with the Muslim Brotherhood which also operate in that region of the world. Things can get pretty hairy with those types of people.