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Hizbullah in Its Entirety Must Be Banned by the UK Government
(The Conversation-Australia) James Mendelsohn - In the UK, the annual al-Quds Day rally regularly features the parading of the Hizbullah flag. Hizbullah is an Iranian-backed Shiite militia group whose bombing of French and American bases in Beirut in 1983 claimed 299 lives. Hizbullah's emblem features a stylized assault rifle and its forces have adopted the "Hitler salute." In 2002, Hizbullah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said that if all the world's Jews were to gather in Israel, this would make it easier to kill them. Under current UK law, the government has banned the "military wing" of Hizbullah only, but not the "political wing," since it holds positions in the Lebanese government. Yet such distinctions are unpersuasive. The entire organization is banned in the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands and Israel. In 2013, Hizbullah's political affairs official, Ammar Moussawi, said: "Everyone is aware of the fact that Hizbullah is one body....Its military and political wings are unified." It makes no sense to maintain this distinction when Hizbullah's own representatives insist that there is no real division. The writer is a senior lecturer in law at the University of Huddersfield in the UK.