Nasrallah's speech yesterday was full of drama. As a TV show, it was quite effective. I polled my readers on Facebook and they were uniformly impressed (and most of those who contribute on my wall are rather secular). But make no mistake about it: it is doubtful that he won new converts inside Lebanon: minds are made, and nothing can change them in the sectarianly divided lousy homeland. There was a skillful use of images and music and short clips and texts. It was well-prepared, but not as well-prepared as it would have been. There were sections that had high drama of documentation, but there were other sections that had no documentation or evidence. So it was mixed. He was (unlike appearances from the last two years) relaxed and not agitated or angry. He came across as confident. So it worked well, for his own home front, and for those who support resistance against Israel. And even for the community of the Hariri camp: public opinion surveys do indicate that the credibility of the court has been declining among Sunnis and Christians. Suspicion of Israel is very common (and justified, of course). But I am not necessarily convinced that the Israel killed Hariri: Israel should be the most usual suspect for any and every crime in our region given its long consistent record of crimes, atrocities and murders. But I still believe that Hariri was good for Israel, and that Israel would have benefited from his reign, especially that his son is such an incompetent fool, literally really. Nasrallah began by revealing information about the military consultants to the court. This is information that we did not know at all. He basically said that those military men are linked to US intelligence, but here he failed to provide any evidence or documentation. He then dwelled on the case of Robert Baer: and he revealed (I never knew this before) that he is a consultant to the court. Now that in itself is damning. That this guy whose official job in Lebanon was to chase and hunt down key Hizbullah figures is assigned to advise the court on its work. Most incredible. Imagine if the UN team that investigated Israeli war crimes in Gaza hired Khalid Mish`al or his security adviser as a consultant to the UN team. Very damning indeed. (Personally, I think that Baer is an interesting writer but tends to exaggerate, and his list of languages that he claims he knows, makes me even more skeptical about his tall tales. But his first book is a good read: the one on Saudi Arabia has nothing new, although I appreciate his criticisms of US foreign policy toward Saudi Arabia. On Israel, I find Baer to be inconsistent: he speaks one way to Fox News, and another way to Arab media). But that section of the speech was revealing in terms of names but needed further documentation (like what is the evidence that the Egyptian-Australian military guy works closely with the Americans?). Then Nasrallah provided a most unusual document: a copy of a Israeli custom manifest that shows the transfer of 97 computers. Nasrallah claimed that the Hariri investigating team in Beirut, decided to transfer their computers through Israel, for no apparent reason. But An-Nahar today, claimed in response that this document talks about computers belonging to the Armistice committees and not to the Hariri investigating team. An-Nahar (the right-wing, sectarian Christian, racist anti-Syrian (people), anti-Palestinian (people), must have been tipped off by Israel. But still: what people will see in this section is the wide reach of Hizbullah intelligence. Living in the era of the failures of Arab intelligence against Israel, this ability to obtain a copy of Israeli custom document will impress the hell out of Arab audiences who were glued to the screen. Nasrallah then talked about the pro-Israeli biases of the president of the Hariri tribunal, Antonio Cassese. Here, the finding was due to pure diligence of Hizbullah researchers: through thorough google work, they stumbled upon a document in which Cassese advises the Israeli government and makes clear his admiration fo the terrorist state of Israel. He then showed a clip from a "security" conference in Israel, where the chair of one panel identified Cassesse as "great friend of Israel." That, to me, and to any fair minded person, is damning enough to disqualify the guy. Imagine, again, if the UN appoints a judge to a panel investigating some Israeli crime, and puts a guy as president who was identified by a Hizbullah official as "great friend of Hizbullah." This is rather absurd that the US/Israel (which in my mind run the affair of the Hariri tribunal) would appoint such a person, and not think that Arabs (who they view as dumb) would find out. And there was a Candid Camera moment in the show when a clip showed deputy to Mehlis, Gerhard Lehmann, taking a bribe for his sale of audio-tapes (they were subsequently sold to New TV in Beirut). There are so many holes dug into the case that, no matter who was guilty, the Justice Department would have dismissed the case if this was run here in the US. No evidence can now save the reputation of the court. Also, no one in the US media mentions, but so many people have resigned from the court in the last few years.
PS Nada Bakri (who is a fine and fair reporter on Lebanon) did not mention any of the content of Nasrallah speech in her piece today. She, like those articles in Saudi-funded Arabic press, merely mentioned that he rejected the indictment.
PS Nada Bakri (who is a fine and fair reporter on Lebanon) did not mention any of the content of Nasrallah speech in her piece today. She, like those articles in Saudi-funded Arabic press, merely mentioned that he rejected the indictment.
