Nothing new about Norton's apology of Hizballah

Reader comment on: Hezbollah

Submitted by Ely Karmon (Israel), Jul 26, 2007 13:54

Norton is a known apologist of Hizballah since the 1980s, when he began to write about the Shi'a in Lebanon. He minimized the terrorist and violent activity of Hizballah and predicted that it is on its way to become a legitimate political movement concentrating in advancing the interests of the Shi'a community in Lebanon.

See for instance Augustus Richard Norton, "Hizballah and the Israeli Withdrawal from Southern Lebanon," Journal of Palestine Studies, XXX, No.1 (Autumn 2000), pp. 25, 33-4.

A year after publishing this article, confronted with the reality of Hizballah's aggressiveness against Israel's northern border, Norton recognized that he was mistaken when he "expected the border region to be calm and saw the Israeli exit as a remarkable opportunity for Lebanon to get on the path of recovery."

Referring to Hizballah's pretext of the Israeli occupation of the Sheeba farms, Norton acknowledges that "[w]hen the issue first arose in the spring of 2000, few Lebanese had even heard of the Shebaa farms, and even senior Hizballah officials were ignorant of the case." But again he refused to recognize the aggressiveness of Hizballah and its active interference in the Palestinian intifada: "I am not aware of any credible evidence to support Israel's claims that Hizballah is active on the ground in Gaza or the West Bank." See Augustus Richard Norton, "Addendum," in Martha Neff Kessler, George Emile Irani, Peter Gubser, Augustus Richard Norton, Lebanon and Syria: Internal and Regional Dimensions, edited transcript of the twenty-fifth in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council, May 23, 2001.

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