Author: Robert Rabil

In the summer 2004, I faced a critical decision: whether to join the U.S. government as an intelligence analyst or continue my path in academia. After careful consideration, I chose the latter. I believed then—as I do now—that I could contribute more effectively to my country outside the constraints of government bureaucracy.

The writer, a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University, was a chief of emergency of the Red Cross in East Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war and a project manager of the US State Department-funded Iraq Research an a discursive look at the myriad of statements on Israel’s war with Iran issued across social media reveals the extent to which the Jewish state has been criticized or vilified for attacking Iran.

Members of the MB were caught planning sabotage activities in Amman. Jordan’s interior minister Mazin al-Farrayeh, declared a total ban on the group in a press briefing, saying that “any activity by the group, regardless of its nature, is considered a violation of the law”. He also emphasized that “affiliation and any interaction with the group is now banned and that promotion of its & ‘ ideology ‘ will result in criminal prosecution.”

Lebanon has been integral to both cradles of civilizations and hotbeds of conflicts. A Semitic people, the Canaanites, occupied the littoral of Lebanon, out which emerged the Phoenician civilization that was held together by a string of independent Phoenician city-states from the north to the south of the country.

The Lebanese Shi’a Islamist party, Hezbollah, emerged at the intersection of three momentous developments. First, beginning in the 1960s, Shi’a religious scholars began mobilizing their marginalized community with the objective of empowering it on the communal and state levels.