Nasrallah's press conference

Nasrallah's press conference

In Arab political culture, this press conference will be regarded as a great political show. Nasrallah ended the conference by admitting that he did not present an evidence. Indeed, he has not. He presented circumstantial evidence to lobby the Hariri court to at least investigate the Israeli possibility.

But that is not the matter here: personally, as you all know: I don't give a damn about who killed Rafiq Hariri and don't believe that Lebanon should spend a penny to find out. Israel has a history of killing Lebanese and Palestinians in Lebanon and I would rather investigate other Israeli murders in Lebanon. I don't want Hariri to be more valuable than other victims.

But Hizbullah did something entirely different in this press conference: it recaptured Arab political opinion.

It was great TV: the production was so well-done: with images, and visual effects and background music and graphics. The most important revelation is that Hizbullah was able to intercept the footage of Israeli spy planes. That is an incredible coup for Hizbullah. This will most impress Arab audiences worldwide.

A leftist secular atheist friend wrote during the press conference that he now will call himself "Abu Hadi" (after Nasrallah).

The expectations were high for the speech: in Lebanon, Hizbulalh's enemies did not want anything less than pictures of Israelis pulling the triggers on Hariri. That was not provided. But I think that Nasrallah was not aiming at Lebanon: this was aimed at Arabs and Aljazeera carried the 2 hours live.

Dumb mini-Hariri is now in a more difficult situation: but he is too dumb to notice. I don't think he actually thinks. A person who met him recently told me: that you talk him, and his adviser, Hani Hammud, answers.

Posted by As'ad at 12:42 PM

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