The warning could not be more timely: If Hezbollah succeeds in destroying Israel, its next target will be the United States.
In “Lightning Out of Lebanon,” U.S. Attorney Kenneth Bell calls Hezbollah “the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world.”
Authors Tom Diaz, a a senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, and Barbara Newman, a documentarian, have written a book that does not underestimate Bell’s assessment of Hezbollah — the self-styled “Party of God” whose aim is to destroy the state of Israel and drive the United States from the Middle East.
“Lightning out of Lebanon” focuses on the successful prosecution of a Hezbollah “sleeper” cell in Charlotte, N.C. In turn, the book serves as a small compendium of all the issues raised by the 9/11 Commission.
The authors show how Hezbollah has metastasized by planting sleeper cells in the Western Hemisphere, to raise funds and provide logistics for local attacks, such as those in Buenos Aires. There a Hezbollah suicide-bomber leveled the Israeli Embassy in 1992, and two years later another destroyed the Jewish Community Center. Such cells are under investigation in at least 14 cities in the United States.
After 9/11 an al Qaida operative, Ali Mohamed, told a New York federal court: “The premise underlying [al Qaida’s] terror campaign was that Hezbollah had shown, by driving American forces out of Lebanon, that the Americans could be forcibly ousted from the entire Middle East.”
Chief among the vividly portrayed terrorists is Mohammed Youssef Hammoud, born in a filthy, war-torn Lebanese slum, who joined Hezbollah as a teenager. In 1992 he was sent to the United States to organize a cell in Charlotte, a city where petty criminals could “fly below the radar” of the federal authorities. The terrorists got by with phony marriages and visas. They smuggled cigarettes and committed credit-card fraud.
Diaz and Newman describe Hezbollah in fiercely colorful language. Its true face was glimpsed in the videos Hammoud screened every week in Charlotte.
The videos typically feature Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, shouting “Death to America!” to a crowd that roars back the slogan three times. It was those videos that shocked a group of investigative agencies, at last, into working together to break up the Charlotte cell and prosecute its members. The terrorists were rounded up in a surprise raid in July 2000. Most of the credit for this victory is given to Bell; Bob Clifford and Rick Schwein of the FBI; and Bob Fromme, deputy sheriff of Iredell County.
The authors justly praise their courage and dedication, and insist, in no uncertain terms, that Americans owe more appreciation to the agencies that protect them.
What they can’t tell us is “whether even more hidden layers of Hezbollah’s dark enterprise lie undetected, coiled to strike in America.”
Meanwhile Hezbollah remains in Lebanon, armed with a cease-fire and protected by Syria and Iran and busily recruiting Palestinian terrorists. To understand this book, the reader will need to concentrate on learning Hezbollah’s mode of thinking and then placing that in an American context.
It’s well worth the effort because, as the book shows, Hezbollah is capable of launching a deadly attack, far worse than 9/11, on American soil. To prevent this, the authors call for better border control and a consistent form of national identification.
“Lightning Out of Lebanon: Hezbollah Terrorists on American Soil” by Tom Diaz and Barbara Newman (250 pages, Ballantine Books, $24.95).