On this day: Hizbollah publishes its manifesto

Indeed, although since 1992 Hizbollah has tried to cement power through elections in Lebanon and has built social networks within the Lebanese populations, like other terrorist groups in the region, its tactics have mostly included suicide bombings and kidnappings, not least the taking of two Israeli soldiers in July 2006 which triggered the Second Lebanon War.

Considered a terrorist group by Israel and the United States, experts expect Hizbollah will soon be implicated by a UN tribunal looking into the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

What the JC said: Israel’s confrontation with Hizbollah is not just a fight against a ruthless terrorist organisation openly committed to the destruction of the Jewish state, nor even a war-by-proxy against the fanatic Islamist regime in Tehran, Hizbollah’s founder and patron, and its radical Syrian ally. It is a frontline battle in the global struggle to contain the most recent manifestation of the millenarian jihad for a universal Islamic empire...For Hizbollah is neither an ordinary political party or a national-liberation movement, nor a social-welfare organisation committed to the betterment of the lives of ordinary Muslims. It is not out of concern for a Palestinian right to national self-determination but as part of a holy war to prevent the loss of a part of the “House of Islam” that Hizbollah and like-minded Islamists inveigh against the Jewish state of Israel.

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