Saturday, July 02, 2011

Nasrallah's Speech Regarding the International Tribunal

I have just listened "live:" the Hezbollah's chief, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, regarding the Special Tribunal for Lebanon's indictment.

The speech was verbose, but here are the interesting points that Nasrallah has raised:

  1. The Tribunal is biased for many legal and procedural reasons, but especially because it is headed by a friend of the "Zionist Entity", referring to Israel. As evidence he produced two pieces of evidence:

    • Cassese was invited to Herzliya conference sponsored by the Institute for Policy and Strategy in 2010, but did not attend. Another participant was asked by Cassese to excuse his absence, and the said participant qualified Cassese as a "friend of Israel".

    • Cassese wrote a legal opinion where he qualified Israel as a country respecting human rights. Nasrallah, trying to show his magnanimous fairness, did mention, in addition, that the report (written by Cassese) referred to Gaza as being under "Occupation", and did criticize some action undertaken by Israel.

    The evidence presented by Nasrallah is weak at best. He failed to mention the following obvious and not so obvious facts:
    • Cassese is most famous for his heading the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, where he tried Serbian (Christian) war criminals for crimes against humanity committed against Moslem Bosnians. Maybe Cassese should be also branded as a friend of the Moselms, or friend of the Sunnis?

    • Cassese is recognized internationally as a chapion of human rights, and has issued a legal opinion (http://www.stoptorture.org.il/files/cassese.pdf) where he qualified the extra-judicial targeted killing of Palestinian civilian militants by Israel as war crimes. This is certainly a far stronger piece of evidence of the neutrality or even hostility of Cassese to the practices of the State of Israel.

  2. Narallah on more than one occasion in his speech admitted that the persons who were targeted by the indictment, are indeed members of Hezbollah. This is a new fact that even the most militant members of the pro-democracy March 14 alliance did not dare state.

  3. Nasrallah stated in no uncertain terms that the Lebanese government is not capable of executing the arrest warrants, thus admitting that Hezbollah is indeed a state within the Lebanese State, and that his militia does not answer to Lebanese law or the Lebanese authorities.

  4. Nasrallah accused "certain Christian parties" within March 14 of attempting to stir confessional infighting between the Sunnis and the Shia. Is Nasrallah then trying to create anti-Christian sentiment on the part of both his supporters in the Shia community as well as the Lebanese Sunnis?
Nasrallah's speech, and his arguments were weaker than usual, and were mostly geared towards his supporters, i.e the "converted". What he said was far too unconvincing to change anyone's disposition towards the Tribunal and its indictment, even the undecided.