Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - A row in Australia over a Muslim leader's visit to Lebanon has focused attention again on Hizballah, the Iranian-backed group that claims to be a legitimate "resistance" movement despite the terrorist designation applied by the U.S. and others.

The Shi'ite group participates in Lebanon's political life and its black-turbaned leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, is highly regarded in the Arab world.

Hizballah claims as its greatest achievement Israel's decision in 2000 to withdraw its troops from a narrow buffer zone it had maintained in southern Lebanon for 18 years.

But while it insists its fight has been solely against Israel, according to the State Department, Hizballah is responsible for terror attacks both inside Lebanon and abroad.

They include suicide bombings in Beirut in 1983 which killed more than 300 people, including 241 American servicemen and 58 French troops; and the bombings of the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish community center in Argentina in the early 1990s, at the cost of 114 lives.

Israeli researchers have also linked Hizballah to a wave of bombings in Paris in 1986, which killed 13; an unsuccessful attempt to carry out attacks in Cyprus in 1988; a conspiracy -- foiled by Spanish police -- to carry out attacks against Jewish targets in Europe in 1989; an abortive attempt to detonate a car bomb outside a Jewish community building in Bucharest, Romania in 1992; the bombing of a small passenger plane carrying 12 Jews among the 18 passengers, in Panama in 1994; and a planned 1996 attack, also foiled by police, on an Israeli institution in Paris.

Nasrallah's title is general-secretary, a position he has held since 1992, but the Israel-based International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT) says he is Hizballah's "commander of operations."

In January 2002, the ICT reported that Nasrallah hosted a "religious convention" in Beirut that month, at which clerics from across the Arab world issued an official declaration in support of suicide bombings against Israel.

"The suicide attacks against Israel are legitimate according to the Koran," the statement said, adding that the bombings were "a strategic weapon which enable us to regain the strategic balance with the Zionist enemy."

Later that same year, Nasrallah was quoted in a U.S. newspaper report as urging Hizballah to conduct a global suicide bombing campaign.

The statement was seen as instrumental in a decision by the Canadian government in December 2002 to outlaw Hizballah.

The Lebanese government subsequently charged that Nasrallah had been misquoted, according to a report published that month in Beirut's Daily Star newspaper.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage in 2002 described Hizballah as part of "the A-team of terrorists."

See also:
Australian Muslim Leader Criticized for Praising Suicide Bombers (Feb. 19, 2004)

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