Militant turns beliefs into career Hezbollah leader a respected politician
Hasan Nasrallah is exactly where he always wanted to be.
"Ever since I was 9 years old, I had plans for the day when I would start doing this," the Hezbollah chief reflected on his leadership quest, when I visited him in the southern slums of Beirut not long ago.
"When I was 10 or 11, my grandmother had a scarf. It was black, but a long one. I used to wrap it around my head and say to them that I'm a cleric, you need to pray behind me."
Nasrallah is a man of God, gun and government, a cross between Ayatollah Khomeini and Che Guevera, an Islamic populist as well as a charismatic guerrilla tactician.
The black head wrap -- signifying his descent from the prophet Mohammed -- is now his trademark, and he is Lebanon's best known politician. Lines from his speeches are popular ring tones on cell phones. His face is a common computer screensaver. Wall posters, key rings and even phone cards bear his image. Taxis play his speeches instead of music.
At 46, Nasrallah is also the most controversial leader in the Arab world, at the center of the most vicious new confrontation between Israel and its neighbors in a quarter-century. Yet he is not the prototypical militant.
His career has straddled the complex line between Islamic extremist and secular politician.
Robin Wright
Well, well, well. Here we have a nifty little piece of agit-prop with some blatant historical revisionism thrown in for good measure. The anti-Israel crowd in the Left isn't even waiting until the actual events are over before attempting to re-cast the mold in their own image. Miss Wright appears to inhabit an alternate universe in which Hizbollah has all the gravitas of an actual state and its armed incursion into Israel for the purpose of killing and kidnapping Israeli soldiers, as well as its rocket attacks on Israeli towns along the border somehow constitute "cross-border acts of war by Israel."
"Ever since I was 9 years old, I had plans for the day when I would start doing this," the Hezbollah chief reflected on his leadership quest, when I visited him in the southern slums of Beirut not long ago.
"When I was 10 or 11, my grandmother had a scarf. It was black, but a long one. I used to wrap it around my head and say to them that I'm a cleric, you need to pray behind me."
Nasrallah is a man of God, gun and government, a cross between Ayatollah Khomeini and Che Guevera, an Islamic populist as well as a charismatic guerrilla tactician.
The black head wrap -- signifying his descent from the prophet Mohammed -- is now his trademark, and he is Lebanon's best known politician. Lines from his speeches are popular ring tones on cell phones. His face is a common computer screensaver. Wall posters, key rings and even phone cards bear his image. Taxis play his speeches instead of music.
At 46, Nasrallah is also the most controversial leader in the Arab world, at the center of the most vicious new confrontation between Israel and its neighbors in a quarter-century. Yet he is not the prototypical militant.
His career has straddled the complex line between Islamic extremist and secular politician.
Robin Wright
Well, well, well. Here we have a nifty little piece of agit-prop with some blatant historical revisionism thrown in for good measure. The anti-Israel crowd in the Left isn't even waiting until the actual events are over before attempting to re-cast the mold in their own image. Miss Wright appears to inhabit an alternate universe in which Hizbollah has all the gravitas of an actual state and its armed incursion into Israel for the purpose of killing and kidnapping Israeli soldiers, as well as its rocket attacks on Israeli towns along the border somehow constitute "cross-border acts of war by Israel."
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