The Dominion - Lebanon

Artists Against Apartheid.

Stefan Christoff — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 07:04:33 +0000

Part of the 5th international week of action against the apartheid wall, initiated by the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, to oppose Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing and to support the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Leading up to ‘Palestinian Perspectives’, an evening of film screenings at the Cinéma du Parc in Montreal on November 29th, to commemorate 60 years of occupation and to celebrate the Palestinian voice. Featuring cutting edge cultural projects from Montreal & internationally, uniting in expression against Israeli Apartheid.

Performances by:

* Lubo Alexandrov: A Bulgarian-born guitarist, composer and singer, Alexandrov has developed a unique musical style, merging Bulgarian, Turkish and Roma musical traditions. Recipient of the 2007 Juno Music Award for the ‘Best World Album’. http://www.luboalexandrov.com

* Valerie Khayat: Poet, singer songwriter, Khayat has been active in folk, poetry and spoken word circles since 2004. She released her first book of poetry, ”The Road to Vesper”, and her first full length album, ”Resonance in Blue”, in 2007. http://www.myspace.com/valeriekhayat

* Kalmunity Vibe Collective members:

Jason Selman: Performance poet & musician
Mohamed Mehdi: Singer songwriter, poet.
Phenix: Hip-hop artist, poet of the Haitian diaspora.

* Ehab Lotayef: Writer, photographer, poet, activist and engineer.

* DJ Kandis: Middle Eastern, international beats, music from DJ Kandis.

Screening two films from the ‘Beyond Blue & Gray’ documentary project of Eyes Infinite Films, with an introduction by series producer Nirah Shirazipour:

Massacre memorial for Sabra and Shatila

Stefan Christoff — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:19:35 +0000

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from the Montreal Mirror.

by Christopher Hazou

Twenty-five years ago this week, the Israeli army surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut and sent in their Christian Phalangist allies. Over the next two days, between 800 and 2,000 Palestinian civilians were butchered in a scene of carnage that shocked much of the world.

This Saturday, Sept. 22, at 1 p.m., the Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine commemorates this sombre anniversary by protesting outside of the Indigo bookstore downtown (corner Ste-Catherine and McGill College), where they will call on Chapters/Indigo majority shareholder Heather Reisman and her husband Gerry Schwartz to end their support of so-called “lone sol-diers”—young Jews who emigrate to Israel alone to join the military.

“This is about direct support to the Israeli army,” says Ehab Lotayef, a member of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, another participating group. “The history of the Israeli army and what it represents is not consistent with the educational message that their bookstores should be advocating.”

It will be the 25th such protest against Chapters/Indigo in Montreal since they began in December, with similar demonstrations taking place in Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria and Winnipeg. For more info, visit www.cjpp.org

25th Commemoration of Sabra / Chatila Massacre.

Stefan Christoff — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:30:08 +0000

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Picket and Remembrance in Downtown Montreal...

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22nd, 1pm
Indigo Bookstore
Corner of St. Catherine & McGill College
(metro McGill)
Montreal, Canada

Between September 16th and 18th, 1982, Israeli military forces in Lebanon, under the direct command Ariel Sharon, former ‘Defense Minister’ of Israel, provided military logistics for the massacre of thousands of Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila by the right-wing Phalangists militia of Lebanon...

Full Information at Tadamon!

Montreal activists call on Brian Mulroney to Denounce Israeli Aparthied

Stefan Christoff — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 22:45:51 +0000

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Montreal, September 18th 2007: The Montreal network of the Coalition against Israeli Apartheid welcomed former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney during a launch of his autobiography at Indigo bookstore by unfurling a banner denouncing the apartheid situation under which Palestinians are living...

Full release from Tadamon! Montreal.

The Road to Nahr al-Barid: Lebanese Political Discourse and Palestinian Civil Rights

Stefan Christoff — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:18:11 +0000

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An excellent analysis article on the siege of Nahr el-Bared by the Lebanese Army throughout the summer of 2007...

Excerpt below, however read the full version on-line at: Tadamon!

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Lebanon: Shadows of War

dru — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 04:36:46 +0000

Rawi Hage’s <cite>De Niro’s Game</cite> renders civil war-era Beirut from the Diaspora

Turning the pages of De Niro's Game, one is transported to the war-torn streets of Beirut in the midst of Lebanon's 15-year civil war, a tragic reality of flying bombs and bullets. A debut literary work from Montreal author Rawi Hage, who conveys this era of Lebanon's turbulent history through the experiences of a pair of youths from Beirut, childhood best friends growing to adulthood in the political quagmire of civil war.

"De Niro's Game started as a short-story," Hage explains at a café in Montreal's Côte-des-Neiges district. "Initially I wanted to write a piece about an incident that I remember of some kids who started playing Russian roulette after watching The Deer Hunter, which screened in Beirut at the beginning of the war in the 1970s. Guns were available everywhere in Beirut so kids starting playing."

De Niro's Game is a fast-paced poetic novel detailing historical events and the gritty details of life in Beirut during Lebanon's civil war; from the bombs falling erratically on residential districts, to the dirty economy of armed political factions, to the soaring voice of Lebanese diva Fariuz echoing on Beirut streets and the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Israeli supported right-wing Lebanese militias at the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila.

Through the eyes of the novel's main characters, Bassam and George, Hage confronts the existential and pragmatic debate surrounding the question facing everyone living through the civil war era in Lebanon: to remain in mortal danger upon familiar ground, or to flee westward toward hostile nations? Expansive contemplations on forced migration from Lebanon's civil war appear in the first chapters:

Ten thousand bombs had landed, and I was waiting for George. Ten thousand bombs had landed on Beirut, that crowded city, and I was lying on a blue sofa covered with white sheets to protect it from dust and dirty feet.

It is time to leave, I was thinking to myself. My mother's radio was on. It had been on since the start of the war, a radio with Rayovac batteries that lasted ten thousand years. My mother's radio was wrapped in a cheap, green plastic cover, with holes in it, smudged with the residue of her cooking fingers and dust that penetrated its knobs, cinched against its edges. Nothing ever stopped those melancholic Fairuz songs that came out of it.

I was not escaping the war; I was running away from Fairuz, the notorious singer.

De Niro's Game has received broad acclaim in Canada and internationally, nominated for both the Governor General's Award for fiction, the Giller Prize for literature and winner of the Quebec Writers Federation's Prize for Fiction. A national best-seller in Canada, De Niro's Game is a startling success for a first-time author.

Hage, born in Lebanon, lived through nine years of the civil war in the achrafieh district of Christian East Beirut, in which the fictional narrative of De Niro's Game occurs. As a witness to a war that continues to haunt Lebanese politics until today, Hage through fiction offers a biting critique toward the sectarian fighting, foreign intervention and gangster politics which fuelled the civil conflict in Lebanon, resulting in over a hundred thousand dead.

"I grew up with Beirut divided," Hage recounts. "Through this novel I presented a secular element amidst all the sectarian chaos, as I think that Lebanon has maintained an understated, undermined secular element throughout the past 100 years, which is why I presented the main character in the novel as an atheist who doesn't believe in organized religion."

Currently Lebanon's confessional political system enshrines sectarian divisions in the nation's constitution, a fact which many Lebanese point to as a fundamental cause of the civil strife which still frames political life in Lebanon today.

Dating to Lebanon's independence from France in 1943, Lebanon's constitution divides the nation's 128 parliamentary seats equally between multiple Muslim and Christian religious communities. Lebanon's civil war ended in 1990 with the signing of the Ta'if Accord by warring Lebanese factions, an agreement sponsored by the US, Saudi Arabia and Syria that reinstated constitutional sectarian political divisions.

"De Niro's Game champions secularism," says Hage, "while illustrating how ugly sectarianism is, and the corruption of organized religion."

Hage's novel provides an essential historical context to current political turmoil in Lebanon, a nation which in the past two years has experienced an Israeli invasion, unprecedented internal political strife and a string of bloody assassinations of national political figures.

"I like to think of the novel as a small slice of the collective memory of Lebanon," explains Hage. "In Lebanon there was no conscious decision from the government to preserve the history of the war, to understand issues that created war in the first place."

"Quickly the entire downtown area of Beirut, where the major fighting took place was eradicated, no monument built, while the civil war is not in the national school curriculum," Hage adds. "Authorities in Lebanon are still not dealing with our history."

"Until now, there has been no governmental project of national reconciliation in Lebanon."

"I think that some of the only people who are attempting to deal with the history of war in Lebanon are independent artists and writers," says Hage. "I am one of those artists, who through writing, is trying to come to terms with and understand the history of war because I think that we have to deal with it, as Lebanese, for future generations."

De Niro's Game renders, in vivid prose, the deadly 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut, in which over 10,000 Lebanese and Palestinians lost their lives. A historical recount of the aerial attack offered by Hage will strike any current reader as a historical shadow to the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon.

Israeli jets flew over Beirut and bombed houses, hospitals and schools. The radios trumpeted from every window on our street. On the west side, people were fleeing for their lives, and on our east side, in the night, we could see flashes of resistance aiming at the skies. I went to the roof and looked at the west. The landscape was lit up under lightning bolts that fell from Israeli airplanes. There was one consistent line of red that reached to the sky. It never ceased, and I wondered if my uncle was shooting at the gods. And I wondered if cheap whisky bottles would turn into Molotov cocktails in Ali's hands.

Today, historical realities of war and conflict are not shades of a violent past but the looming crisis of the future, as political tensions are rife in a nation still recovering from the 2006 Israeli attack which resulted in major damage of the national infrastructure and 1,300 dead Lebanese civilians.

"I was extremely upset during the war this summer," reflects Hage. "It was a different type of war than the one I lived, conducted mainly from the air by a state trying to impose hegemony over the region without regard for the human costs."

Stefan Christoff is an independent journalist based in Montreal, you can contact him at: christoff -at- resist.ca

De Niro's Game, by Rawi Hage

Rawi Hage

Reuters on Hezbollah

dru — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 17:20:54 +0000

This Reuters story starts by saying...

Villagers in Shebaa were grateful to Hezbollah guerrillas for forcing out Israel. Now, some say Nasrallah's image has been damaged by the campaign he is leading against a government which they support.

...but ends by saying that "some" are religious leaders who are probably getting paid to oppose Hezbollah:

In Shebaa, some Sunni clerics and other local leaders have started criticizing Hezbollah, villagers said. "They are trying to impose sectarianism under financial incentives or ideological pressure," Ali said. "Frankly, it's political money."

Mark Mackinnon's Counter-Excerpt

dru — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 13:29:52 +0000

Mark Mackinnon sent in the highlighted article excerpt in response to the ongoing discussion about Mark MacKinnon's coverage in Lebanon.

For his remarks, read the discussion.

* * *

From "Hezbollah protestors rally against government," by Mark MacKinnon.

Published in The Globe and Mail on Dec. 2, 2006.

(snip)
The demonstrators accused the government, which has supported international calls for Hezbollah to surrender its weapons, of being run by the U.S. embassy. "Down with Feltman's government!" was a popular chant, referring to Jeffery Feltman, the U.S. ambassador.

Mark Mackinnon Quotes Hezbollah

dru — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 03:14:23 +0000

The following is a list of all the quotes (or near-quotes) I could find in nineteen articles written by Mark MacKinnon about the situation in Lebanon over a three week period. This serves as an appendix of sorts to our response to MacKinnon's response to the recent analysis of MacKinnon's reporting. But it also provides a degree of insight into how systematically MacKinnon avoids any discussion of the motivation factors behind the massive demonstrations that are still occupying downtown Beirut.

Globe and Lebanon

dru — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:34:38 +0000

Yesterday, the Globe and Mail published a half-decent piece about the sit ins in Beirut. I can't help but wonder if the sudden improvement in coverage (which is to say, conformity with well-established facts) had something to do with this analysis that the Dominion published two weeks ago of Mark Mackinnon's wildly misleading coverage of the same protests.

The crux of that analysis was that Mark Mackinnon probably wouldn't mind telling the truth, but likes having his job and pleasing his editors better than he likes telling the truth. (Not unlike a lot of people, probably...) And that, given the opportunity, Mackinnon probably wouldn't have a personal problem with reporting accurately. It's just that when his editors want something different, his career takes precedence.

The Manichean Middle East of Mark MacKinnon

dru — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 07:12:40 +0000

Globe and Mail coverage of Lebanon suffers from ideological interventions

When newspapers send correspondents afield to report on world events, the position is fraught with opportunity and responsibility. Opportunity to share meaningful insight into current events, and responsibility to accurately report on them.

In many cases, unfortunately, other motivations prevail. For the owners and editors of the few papers that shell out for foreign correspondents, the opportunity to shape public opinion seems too tempting to pass up, even if it comes at the expense of insight and accuracy.

The Globe and Mail's Middle East correspondent Mark MacKinnon has been publishing dispatches on the ongoing political crisis in Lebanon regularly from Beirut. It should be noted that MacKinnon's reports are often superior to the generic newswire reports carried by many newspapers. Regrettably, this speaks more to the skewed quality of wire reports and less to the Globe correspondent's capacity to promote accurate understanding of events in Lebanon.

It's no secret that the Globe and Mail prefers certain political actors in Lebanon to others. When in 2005, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese demonstrated in response to the assassination of former PM Rafik Hariri, eventually resulting in the withdrawal of Syrian troops, amidst intense US pressure on Damascus, the Globe ran a series of front page stories, touting the "pro-Western" "Cedar Revolution" that was sweeping the country. Globe editorialists praised the IMF-mandated "free market" reforms of "pro-Western" forces, which won a Parliamentary majority in the subsequent elections.

When larger street protests hit Beirut in recent weeks, however, Globe coverage was to be found in small doses, nowhere near the front page. It is in this context that Mark MacKinnon's frequent reports are published.

MacKinnon's reporting from Beirut is dominated by a neat division of Lebanese politics into "pro-Syrian" and "pro-Western" camps, a theme that is repeated multiple times in every one of 19 dispatches that were examined for this analysis. On the other hand, MacKinnon barely mentions the summer Israeli offensive that destroyed most of the country's civil-infrastructure, and killed thousands, mostly civilians. MacKinnon mentions the offensive in less than half of the reports we examined, and then usually only in passing.

A look at the evidence shows that MacKinnon's Syria-vs-West division is erroneous, while Israel's summer offensive is the defining factor in the current political situation on the streets of Beirut.

MacKinnon cites Gen. Michel Aoun, the Christian leader of the "Free Patriotic Movement" party, as one of the key supporters of the Hezbollah-led protests, which he constantly characterizes as "pro-Syrian." Overlooked by MacKinnon is the fact that Aoun was driven to exile in France by Syrian and allied Lebanese factions in 1990, and returned only with the withdrawal of Syrian troops in 2005. As a result, it is awkward to characterize Aoun as simply "pro-Syrian."

Hezbollah, on the other hand, maintains a strategic alliance with the government in Damascus, though this is far from the central focus of the current protests.

Why do these unlikely allies find themselves demanding a greater share of cabinet seats? Because, as MacKinnon mentions in passing in one article (but does not mention at all in 17 out of 19 reports on the subject), "recent opinion polls suggest Hezbollah and Gen. Aoun would combine to win more seats than the government in a snap election."

Why is this? It has everything to do with the Israeli bombing of Lebanon that killed 1,100 people, displaced a full quarter of the country's population, and systematically destroyed its key infrastructure, including roads, airports, power stations, hospitals, schools and refugee shelters.

During the assault, Hezbollah led fierce counter-attacks, ultimately limiting the Israeli army's ability to maintain a hold on the ground in southern Lebanon, and winning massive support from the Lebanese for their resistance.

The relatively well financed government and state institutions of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora--the leader of MacKinnon's pro-Western camp--by contrast, did almost nothing to provide aid to many affected by the war, and offered no military defence against the Israeli attacks despite multiple bombings of Lebanese military bases.

At the height of the Israeli bombings, Ghassan Makarem of the grassroots relief organization Samidoun, told CKUT Radio that the "internally displaced Lebanese support for the resistance hasn't wavered due to the level of aggression on the part of Israel."

"Until now, there has been no action from the government or by the government agencies," Maskarem added, "while many people in regions of Lebanon who are traditionally not supportive of Hezbollah are shifting their support towards the resistance."

In stark contrast to the silence of Lebanese state powers during the war, the Free Patriotic Movement, Gen. Aoun's political support base, mobilized hundreds of volunteers to provide frontline medical and humanitarian relief for internally displaced refugees from southern Lebanon, while thousands more opened their homes as impromptu shelters in the heart of East Beirut, a traditionally Christian area.

According to a broadly reported opinion poll conducted throughout the country in late July 2006 by Lebanon's main polling institute, the Beirut Center for Research and Information, 87 per cent of Lebanese supported Hezbollah during the war.

While widely recognized in Lebanon, this reality doesn't fit with the Globe and Mail's image of the region. MacKinnon in particular goes out of his way to warn readers that despite the specific political demands [which his reports do not mention], clashes between demonstrators in the streets are "an ominous sign that efforts by the Shia Hezbollah movement to bring down the Sunni-led government... could rapidly devolve into all out sectarian conflict."

The warning would have been tempered had MacKinnon mentioned that in addition to Gen. Aoun's Christian party, some significant Sunni and Druze political parties are also supporting the demonstrations. Could the message of demonstrators in Lebanon be driven by something other than religion given that parties from all religious sects in Lebanon are on the streets with Hezbollah?

It's not even clear from MacKinnon's reports what motivates Hezbollah's demands, or what motivates the thousands of demonstrators to remain in the streets of Beirut. Further inquiry revealed that the reason for this is that he did not ask.

In a recent interview with CKUT Radio in Montreal, MacKinnon was asked whether he had interviewed any of the leaders of the demonstrations.

"Since it began... No," MacKinnon responded, "because they are quite busy people and in the specific case of [Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan] Nasrallah he hasn't given any interviews since the summer war with Israel."

However, Hezbollah political leaders have been regularly speaking with the Western press at the Beirut demonstrations. Just this week Mahmoud Komati, deputy head of Hezbollah's political bureau gave a widely published interview to the Associated Press.

"Now we are demanding it [greater government share], because our experience during the war and the performance of the government has made us unsure. On several occasions they pressured us to lay down our weapons while we were fighting a war," Komati told the Associated Press on December 15th, presenting a political argument against the current government, not a sectarian one.

Despite the readily available Hezbollah spokespeople and hundreds of thousands of demonstrators clogging central Beirut, MacKinnon did not quote a single Hezbollah representative about the reasons for the demonstrations. He mentions the reasons for calling the demonstrations twice, and only in passing. MacKinnon, however, did manage to secure an interview with Sheik Sobhi Tufeili in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley.

Sheik Tufeili, a former secretary general of Hezbollah no longer associated with the party, has been comparatively absent from Lebanese politics in recent years. Living in a compound and flanked by bodyguards, Tufeili is wanted by the Lebanese authorities. Through fragmented quotations, paraded as confessions extracted by MacKinnon, Tufeili denounces the current Hezbollah leadership.

Highlighting Sheik Tufeili without featuring any of the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese on the streets of Beirut is puzzling.

It's not clear that the poor quality of his coverage is entirely MacKinnon's doing, though it is difficult to imagine that he is not aware that his coverage does not match the facts on the ground.

Indeed, MacKinnon's writing is more in touch with reality in his online diary than it is in reports that appear in print.

Shortly after the UN-brokered ceasefire in August, MacKinnon visited southern Lebanon. "No picture or 1,000 words of mine can ever capture what these places look like. In towns that once weren't much different from some places in Greece or Italy, there's simply nothing left standing," wrote MacKinnon. "Just piles of rubble where people's homes and lives used to be."

Today, a responsible journalist--or a minimally competent one--would have to ask why residents of the very same villages bombed by Israel and described by MacKinnon above are now demonstrating for political change in Beirut.

It's hard to imagine that MacKinnon is ignorant of this direct connection between the current demonstrations and the recent Israeli attack. A more likely explanation is that he is conscious of the interests of his own career, knows what his editors want to hear, and is willing to severely compromise his own journalism in service of both.

If MacKinnon were to be replaced, his successor may have a slightly different journalistic style. The ideological and political exigencies of the Globe and Mail's editorial board, however, would remain. We predict the result would hardly be an improvement, regardless of the skill of the correspondent.

In a recent op/ed in Montreal's La Presse, Fabrice Balanche took reporters to task for simplistic reporting along the same lines as MacKinnon's.

"Manicheanism is de rigeur," Balanche writes. "Certainly it is difficult to understand Lebanon and to explain it in a few minutes to [an audience], but all the same, lets stop the caricatures."

Balanche cites facts that show the story of pro-Syrian battling pro-West forces to be bogus. But while Balanche's modest appeal to pay attention to reality is compelling, corporate media like the Globe have long-standing and equally compelling reasons of their own to ignore it.

* * *

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that "Despite the readily available Hezbollah spokespeople and hundreds of thousands of demonstrators clogging central Beirut, MacKinnon did not quote a single Hezbollah representative while he was there." As written, this passage was inaccurate. The Dominion regrets the error.

Opposition Protests

Bombed Building, Beirut

dru — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 07:09:59 +0000

Israel's destruction of entire neighbourhoods during the summer war, and Hezbollah's status as the only source of serious resistance during the summer war, are the defining issues in Lebanese politics. The Globe and Mail has framed the protests as between "pro-Syrian" and "pro-Western" forces.

Opposition Protests

dru — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 07:02:59 +0000

Opposition demonstrations gather in Martyrs' Square in Beirut on December 1. [source].

Inaction on Lebanon deaths: El Akhras

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 09:14:06 +0000

Almost four months have passed since Montrealer Hassan El Akhras lost 11 family members to an Israeli air strike in the south Lebanese village of Aitaroun. Currently, legal representatives of the family are pressing the Conservative government for action on the case.

Despite existing legal efforts, Hassan El Akhras holds little faith in the current government. "The government has done nothing," says El Akhras. "Our family wants the Canadian government to launch an international investigation on the war crime committed against my family, but we have gotten no phone call, nothing."

The El Akhras family was well respected in Montreal and ran a successful pharmacy in Côte-des-Neiges. Their death shocked many Montrealers this past summer, stirring debate about the war that many felt was unjustified in its scale and choice of targets.

"Montreal's Lebanese community feels increasingly alienated from Canadian politics," says Bassam Hussein of the Lebanese community centre El-Hidaya. "Reaction on the part of the Conservative government concerning the El Akhras family enforces that alienation."

"Sometimes I feel that the Conservative government views Arab life as less valuable than others," says El Akhras.

Stefan Christoff

[This article originally appeared in the Montreal Mirror.]

Selectively Terrified

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 12:27:05 +0000

How Hezbollah became a terrorist organization in Canada

A Hezbollah flag hangs in Baalbek, Lebanon. Hezbollah enjoys popular support in much of the country. photo: moogdroog

Throughout much of the Arab world, Hezbollah is being celebrated as the champion that was, at long last, able to establish a victory over invincible Israel and its omnipotent western backers. In the Middle East, Hezbollah's victory has energized movements against imperialism and its system of client regimes.

In Canada, Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. It is thus illegal to "participate in or contribute to, directly or indirectly, any activity" of this Lebanese political party or even to urge anyone to act in a way that could be construed as benefiting Hezbollah.

Some explanation for the distance between these starkly different approaches to the same organization can be found in the story of how Hezbollah's political wing came to be placed on Canada's list of terrorist organizations in December 2002. Examined in detail, this brief history provides insight into how key Canadian foreign policy decisions are made.

Hezbollah's ideological roots lie in the 1970s "movement of the deprived," which advocated for the rights of Lebanon's historically marginalized Shi'a population and for all oppressed groups. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, killing as many as 14,000 and wounding another 20,000–the vast majority of whom were civilians–in the first two weeks alone. Hezbollah emerged out of the popular Shi'a militias resisting the Israeli occupation and participating in the civil war, formally announcing itself in an open letter to "all the oppressed in Lebanon and the world," published in 1985. The letter endorsed Khomeini and the Iranian revolution and proposed an Islamic state for Lebanon "which, alone, is capable of guaranteeing justice and liberty for all." It was stipulated that this should be achieved only through the will of all the people, however, and not by force. "Confessional privileges [the domination of one religious group over others] are one of the principal causes of the great explosion which ravaged the country," the letter noted. Since 1992, when the party first ran for national elections, Hezbollah's leadership has publicly endorsed the importance of co-existence and pluralism within a multi-religious, diverse Lebanon and the vision of an Islamic state has faded into the background.

Today, Hezbollah is at once a political party with 14 seats in the Lebanese Parliament, the main provider of social welfare throughout the poor areas of Lebanon, a social movement voicing the aspirations of the Shi'a, and a fighting force. It receives financial and logistical support from Iran and political support from Syria and, lately, Venezuela. Its ideological underpinnings blend Lebanese nationalism, Islamism, social justice and pan-Arab nationalism.

It would be a serious challenge to substantiate the claim made by Canadian Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day; that the "stated intent of Hezbollah is to annihilate Jewish people." An examination of official texts and speeches indicates, rather, that Hezbollah's opposition to Israel is based on Israel's history as a European colonial movement that occupied Arab lands, established an exclusionary state at the expense of the original inhabitants and has subsequently pursued a persistent pattern of settlement and expansion.

Hezbollah's military operations wound down in 2000 with the end of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, but a military wing was maintained on the grounds that Israel continued to violate the "blue line" established by the UN, illegally held Lebanese prisoners in their jails and occupied a tract of what Hezbollah considered to be Lebanese land in the Golan Heights.

By 2002, Canada had arrived at a typically Canadian, middle-of-the-road position: Hezbollah's armed wing–the Hezbollah External Security Organization–was classified as a terrorist group, while its political wing was not.

A campaign to list the Hezbollah political party started in July 2002, when the government failed to include the party in an expanded list of designated terrorist organizations.

Pressure to list Hezbollah came from the Canadian Alliance Party (the precursor to today's Conservative Party), senior Liberal politicians Irwin Cotler and Art Eggleton, B'nai Brith (a Jewish human rights organization, staunchly pro-Israel in orientation), and the Canadian Jewish Congress.

A series of articles by Stewart Bell published in the National Post–replete with terms like "terror suspects," "clandestine cells" and "masterminds," and based largely on information obtained from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), dating from the 1980s–documents the campaign. The National Post at the time was owned by ardent Zionist Israel Asper. Stewart Bell himself has been questioned about his role in CSIS's practice of selectively leaking information to the media.

Denis Coderre, Minister of Immigration at the time, recently claimed to have played a role in the campaign as well. Indeed, the arrest and deportation of a supposed Hezbollah "agent" took place in October 2002, with accompanying media fanfare.

Interestingly, both Jean Chretien and Bill Graham, then Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs respectively, resisted placing Hezbollah on the terrorist list. Chretien met with Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, in Beirut in October 2002. On November 28, a new set of groups was banned–and Hezbollah was still not among them. Irwin Cotler denounced the omission as "inexplicable and, given their [Hezbollah's] murderous ideology, unconscionable."

B'nai Brith responded the next day, on November 29, with a press conference in which they announced a lawsuit against the government, brought on the grounds that the government was failing to protect Canadians by refusing to ban Hezbollah.

The following day, November 30, the National Post picked up a story from the Washington Times claiming that, at a Beirut rally, Nasrallah had condoned and encouraged suicide bombing. Nasrallah was alleged to have said: "Suicide bombings should be exported outside Palestine"; and "I encourage Palestinians to take suicide bombings worldwide, don't be shy about it."

Two weeks later, after going to Beirut to investigate, CBC journalist Neil MacDonald exposed the story as a fabrication.

MacDonald traced the story to journalist Paul Martin. Martin had previously been accused of writing a false report about Palestinian militants under an alias in the same journal, the Christian-right Washington Times. MacDonald said that Martin, when challenged, "came up with three quotes [attributed to Nasrallah], one of which, to be charitable, was a gross mistranslation, and the other two were never even uttered." Martin named his source for the quotes as Lebanese ultra-nationalist and pro-Israel Walid Phares, currently a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), whose board and advisors is composed of well-known neo-con Zionists. Phares has also contributed policy briefs to the publication of Daniel Pipes's think tank, the Middle East Forum.

MacDonald reported on CBC on December 11 that, "Ottawa now knows that the Nasrallah quotes in the Washington Times about exporting suicide attacks were almost certainly never uttered."

However, the alleged comments by Nasrallah had already received enough attention to force the government's hand; a special Cabinet committee meeting was held the evening of December 10, 2002, in which it was decided to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. The Canada Gazette, official newspaper of the government, reported, "The change has been made on the basis of the close connection between the organization as a whole and the Hezbollah External Security Organization, and the recent statement by Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, encouraging suicide bombings."

Curiously, the decision came the same day as the high-profile arrest of "terrorist suspect" Mohamed Harkat under a security certificate, a top news story across the country which heightened public fear about terrorism. The security certificate was signed by Immigration Minister Denis Coderre on the recommendation of CSIS. The decision to arrest Harkat at this particular time may well have been taken independently of any other considerations. However, the timing of the arrest does not appear to have been linked to any exigencies in Harkat's own case.

The political significance of labelling Hezbollah a terrorist organization is extensive: it is an act of tangible alignment with the apartheid state of Israel and its American backers, both regionally and in Lebanese internal politics; it is a stand against the right of Palestinian self-determination and the Palestinian right of return; and it is an affirmation of the double-standard under which Israel's habitual disregard for international humanitarian law is tolerated. In Canada, the designation helps obviate the possibility of meaningful discussion about the causes of oppression and war in the region–witness the media storm around the visit by three members of Parliament to Lebanon in the aftermath of the Israeli assault, and around the participation of Quebec politicians in Montreal's August rally against the attack on Lebanon. It also eviscerates the political potential of the large Lebanese diaspora community in Canada by threatening them with the terrorist label should they dare question the official line themselves.

No revision of the decision appears to have been made in light of the exposure of the Washington Times' story.

Mary Foster tracks the history of Hezbollah and examines how it became a terrorist organization in Canada.