Hezbollah on bus bombing: We wouldn't target tourists for revenge

Some speculate that the Bulgaria bus bombing that killed five Israelis was revenge for the death of a Hezbollah commander, but Hezbollah said it does not consider tourists an equivalent target.

|
Courtesy of Interior Ministry/Reuters
Debris from a bus that was damaged in a bomb blast on Wednesday is seen outside Burgas Airport, about 248 miles east of Sofia on Thursday, July 19. A suicide bomber carried out an attack that killed eight people, including five Israelis, in a bus transporting Israeli tourists in Bulgaria.

The Israeli government has wasted little time in blaming Iran and its Lebanese ally, militant Shiite Hezbollah, for yesterday's bus bomb blast that killed eight people, including five Israelis, in Bulgaria.

“For over a year, Iran, along with its protégé Hezbollah, has been waging an international terror campaign,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, in a televised statement today. He called Iran “the world’s No. 1 exporter of terror” and Hezbollah its “long arm.”

But the attack by a suspected suicide bomber bore little resemblance to past bomb spectaculars pinned on Hezbollah that left hundreds dead and in 2002 earned the organization the tag “the A-team of terrorists” from a Bush administration official. 

Both Iran and Hezbollah have denied any involvement in the attack.

“We will not seek revenge over the death of Imad Mughniyah by harming tourists,” a Hezbollah spokesman told Lebanese media channels last night. Mr. Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s top military commander, was assassinated in a car-bomb explosion in Damascus in February 2008. Hezbollah blamed Israel for Mughniyah’s killing and vowed to take revenge.

Still, Israel’s accusations are based on a series of foiled or bungled bomb and assassination plots over the past two years that have spanned the globe, from India to Turkey, Azerbaijan, Thailand, Georgia, Kenya, and Cyprus. Some of the perpetrators of the planned attacks have been linked to Iran and to Hezbollah. 

If Hezbollah were involved in any of these attempted attacks, it almost certainly had nothing to do with avenging Mughniyah, but was connected to the covert war presently being waged by Iran and Israel. Several Iranian scientists involved with Iran’s nuclear program have been murdered in the past two years and computers at Iranian nuclear facilities have been struck by highly sophisticated viruses. Iran has accused Israel of the assassinations and cyber attacks, raising the possibility that it is seeking to effect a form of deterrence through limited attacks of its own against vulnerable Israeli targets.

From Hezbollah’s perspective, avenging Mughniyah requires selecting a target with reciprocal value, such as a high-profile political or military figure in Israel. However, one reason for the lack of retaliation 4-1/2 years after Mughniyah’s death is the possibility that it could spark a fresh, and in all likelihood, highly destructive war between Hezbollah and Israel, an outcome that neither seems to desire at the present time.

Certainly, Hezbollah has acquired a reputation for honoring its promises of vengeance. A month after Israeli helicopter gunships killed Hezbollah leader Sheikh Abbas Mussawi in February 1992, the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was blown up, killing 29 people. Two years later, a Jewish center also in Buenos Aires was destroyed in a bomb blast that left 85 people dead. The bombing came six weeks after Israeli jets and helicopters killed more than 40 Hezbollah recruits at a training camp in eastern Lebanon.

In the 1980s, Hezbollah was accused of mounting massive bomb attacks against US Marines in Lebanon and twice against the American embassy in Beirut. Those attacks collectively left more than 300 people dead.

Hezbollah has consistently denied involvement in the attacks of the 1980s and the two Buenos Aires operations, and for the past decade and a half appears to have abandoned major international attacks against Israeli or Western targets. Indeed, the last large-scale attack against a Western target in which Hezbollah was accused of playing a role – which it also denied – was the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which left 19 US servicemen dead.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Hezbollah on bus bombing: We wouldn't target tourists for revenge
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2012/0719/Hezbollah-on-bus-bombing-We-wouldn-t-target-tourists-for-revenge
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe