In an attempt to justify the statements that he made after the Gulf states and the Council of Arab Interior Ministers classified Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation, the leader of the Tunisian Ennahda Party, which was originally inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Rachid Ghannouchi said that his party cannot absolutely declare Hezbollah’s activities as “terrorist”. He also pointed out that there are many points of difference between Hezbollah and his party and that he does not support all of the organisation’s activities at present.
In remarks to Asharq Al-Awsat, Ghannouchi said that he appreciates the great role that Hezbollah played in resisting the Israeli enemy in the years 2000 and 2006 and everyone acknowledges that role but that he totally disagrees with its support for the counter-revolution in Syria and siding with the Assad regime against the will of the Syrian people”. The truth is that this is simply not true. First, what it is attributed to Hezbollah regarding the conflict with Israel in the year 2000 is actually known as the Israeli unilateral withdrawal from the safety zone plan. As for the war in 2006 in Lebanon, the facts say that there wasn’t any Arab consensus or recognition of Hezbollah’s role. Rather, there was a famous historical Saudi speech during the era of the late King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz in which the war in 2006 is described as an “adventure”. The matter does not end there- Ghannouchi’s bad luck would have it that a television interview was held during which the leader of the terrorist organisation Hassan Nasrallah says very clearly that if he knew that kidnapping two Israeli soldiers would have led to the 2006 war, he would not have allowed this to happen.
On top of this, when the leader of the Tunisian Ennahda Brotherhood party said that he “completely differs with Hezbollah in its support for the counter-revolution in Syria and siding with the Assad regime against the will of the Syrian people”, he is not speaking clearly but according to the new Brotherhood way that is known as “the pious Sunni” way. According to him, what Hezbollah is doing in Syria is not classified as supporting the counter revolution – this is not true at all. The truth is that Ghannouchi wants to score points; he considers what happened in Egypt in opposition to Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood as a “counter revolution” and therefore wants to say now, specifically to his followers, that he is against those who support counter revolutions everywhere. However, the truth is that what Hezbollah is doing in Syria is criminal and classified as terrorism and not “a counter revolution”.
According to the British Foreign Office’s Twitter account, 470,000 Syrians have been killed and 1,000,500 wounded so far and the criminal of war is one man- Bashar Al-Assad. How can Ghannouchi say after all this that he “differs with Hezbollah” and that he believes that what he is doing in Syria is only “supporting the counter revolution”? Who is Ghannouchi trying to convince when he justifies the Muslim Brotherhood’s positions that support Hezbollah and Iran?