Jacoby: Hezbollah at war with America

One of the few voices of reason on the Boston Globe op-ed page is Jeff Jacoby. He took time yesterday to remind us of Hezbollah's unceasing and murderous attacks on Americans. Like an elephant, we should never forget.

"We consider [America] to be an enemy because it wants to humiliate our governments, our regimes, and our peoples," railed Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, at an enormous rally in February 2005... "...Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: 'Death to America!' " And from tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters came the answering cry: "Death to America! Death to America! Death to America! Death to America!" These are anything but empty threats. Prior to 9/11, Hezbollah was responsible for more American casualties than any other terrorist organization in the world. Among its victims was Army officer William F. Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut who was abducted by Hezbollah in March 1984 and who died after 15 months in captivity of torture and illness. And the young Navy diver Robert Stethem, singled out during the 1985 Hezbollah hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and brutally beaten before being shot to death. And William Higgins, a colonel in the Marine Corps and commander of the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, who was seized by Hezbollah in February 1988, tortured, and eventually hanged. (As Michelle Malkin perceptively noted last week, the tape of Higgins, bound and gagged and swinging from a rope, was one of the first publicly disseminated jihadi snuff films.) And the 241 US servicemen murdered by Hezbollah on Oct. 23, 1983, when a suicide bomber drove a truck rigged with 12,000 pounds of TNT into their barracks at the Beirut airport. And the 19 US servicemen killed in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. ...9/11, it was said time and time again, "changed everything." No longer would Americans walk around with eyes wide shut, oblivious to the threat from the [extremists]. Not our war? Listen again to the Hezbollah hordes: "Death to America! Death to America!" They're serious about it -- deadly serious. Why aren't we?

Why indeed.

Boston Globe: Hezbollah is our enemy, too by Jeff Jacoby