While in Beirut, French President Emmanuel Macron has met a member of the Lebanese parliament from Hezbollah. While the French government has not acknowledged the meeting, Hezbollah said that talks between Macron and one of its officials had given the movement “international recognition”.
A group of 27 prominent French figures has called on French President Emmanuel Macron to declare the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement a terrorist organisation and not to block European Union efforts to blacklist the group.
Their call came in a petition published by French daily Le Figaro as Macron visited Beirut for the second time in one month following the explosions in the Lebanese capital’s port which claimed the lives of almost two hundred people and mutilated thousands of others.
The signatories of the petition included former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, former Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, former Environment Minister and party leader Corinne Lepage and philosopher and novelist Pascal Bruckner.
They highlighted Hezbollah’s nefarious role in Lebanon, which they said rendered any reforms in the country virtually impossible.
“During the last twenty years, Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation, has avowedly created a state within the state and established itself as a substitute for the Lebanese army,” they said, calling on the international community to “recognize the major problem that is constituted by Hezbollah’s in the country’s reconstruction.”
The signatories also stressed Hezbollah’s destabilizing influence in the region and the world.
“Hezbollah increasingly and without any scruples exerts its power of nuisance in Lebanon at the same time that it weighs on regional, European, and intentional security,” they said.
They described the Shia group as “an actor with regional ambitions whose power and resources emanate from the outside, especially from Iran.”
They asked the French president to not block “the designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation by the European Union.”
“This is not a form of interference .. but is part of our global struggle against terrorism”
They note that several countries, including the United States, Israel, Arab Gulf countries, the Arab League, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Lithuania have already designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation.
“Without a firm condemnation of Hezbollah, France’s action, in trying to lend support to an old friend in the region, would be futile,” concluded the signatories.
Despite Germany’s move earlier this year to ban Hezbollah entirely, France is the only ‘’big’’ EU member state to continue vehemently to refuse to recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. It is still making an artificial differentiation between Hezbollah’s ‘’military’’ and ‘’political” wings.
The French position, which is based on the fact that Paris ‘’wants to maintain a dialogue with a political force in Lebanon,’’ prevents the EU as a bloc to blacklist Hezbollah as a whole and not only its ‘’military wing’’.
According to daily Le Figaro, when he first visited Beirut last month, French President Emmanuel Macron called on the Lebanese leaders to implement political reforms and he met a member of the Lebanese parliament from Hezbollah, Mohammed Raad. He reportedly told him to “prove you’re Lebanese”, due to the movement’s role as a proxy of Iran.
He spent eight minutes with Raad , who is head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, which marked the first time a French leader has met an official from the organization since its establishment in 1982.
The French president told Raad that he wanted to work with Hezbollah on finding a solution to the Lebanese political and economic crisis but that he must prove his loyalty is to Beirut and not Tehran.
“I want to work with you to change Lebanon but prove that you are Lebanese,” he told Raad, according to the Le Figaro journalist, Georges Malbrunot, a specialist of the Middle East who was held hostage for several months in Iraq in 2004.
While the French government has not acknowledged the meeting, Hezbollah said that talks between Macron and one of its officials had given the movement “international recognition”.
When he returned to Beirut on Tuesday, Macron sternly rebuked the Le Figaro journalist who wrote the article, at the end of his visit.
“What you have done, taking into account the sensitivity of the subject, is irresponsible,” Macron told Malbrunot to his face, according to footage broadcast by the LCI TV channel.
“You have always heard me defend journalists, I always will. But I tell you frankly, what you did was serious, unprofessional and mean,” he added.
LCI said Macron was angered by the article detailing head-to-head talks between the French president and the Hezbollah official.
But it appeared Macron was angered most by a previous article penned by Malbrunot saying the president was considering sanctions against Lebanese politicians who resist reform.
Macron had mentioned the article during the press conference, criticising those who write “the worst nonsense… without any verification.”
https://youtu.be/MMoBghIaSI4
When he returned to Beirut on Tuesday, Macron sternly rebuked the Le Figaro journalist who wrote the article, at the end of his visit.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) established Hezbollah in 1982 to export Iranian terror around the world. In 1983, at the Iranian regime’s direction, Hezbollah carried out suicide bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut (killing 63 people, including 17 Americans), and the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut (killing 241 American marines and other U.S. service personnel). Hezbollah suicide attacks from 1982-1986 murdered 659 people .
Iran/Hezbollah also provided explosives, planning and training for the deadly terrorist bombings of Khobar Towers in 1996 (19 Americans killed and hundreds wounded) as well as the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 which killed over 200 people. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York also concluded that Iran and Hezbollah played key roles in planning 9-11 and training the 9-11. In January 2020, Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah called for all of Iran’s allies to exact “ revenge ” on the United States.
Hezbollah has carried out numerous terror and rocket attacks against Israelis and Jews, including bombing the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1992 (19 people killed), the bombing in Buenos Aires of the AMIA Jewish Community Center in 1994 (85 people killed and hundreds injured), firing 4,000 rockets into Israel during the 2006 Lebanon war, planting explosives near the border that have injured Israelis and firing further missiles into Israel, including firing missiles into an Israeli farming community in September 2019. Hezbollah continues to threaten Israel with annihilation, is expanding its massive missile arsenal in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and is converting its huge arsenal of 150,000 rockets pointed at Israel into precision guided weapons.
Hezbollah operatives were behind the bombed of a bus with Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria, that killed six people in July 2012 and wounded several others.