Posted by
J-GOP on Tuesday, April 01, 2008 11:00:58 AM
The terrorist organization Hezbollah is training children as young as six years old to become terrorists in training camps throughout Lebanon according to a report appearing in Time Magazine this week.
The camp trains some 200 children (boys and a few girls ages 6 to 18) about a dozen of whom live in the barracks full time, several having dropped out of school. Here they learn to use firearms, practice hand-to-hand combat, and are taught Palestinian nationalist ideology. In these photos, blindfolded young fighters disassemble and re-assmble assault rifles (above), and make presentations about the specifications and capabilities of various common weapons, including rocket propelled grenades.
The two phases in the development of a Hizballah fighter are like Boy Scouts and Boot Camp. During the first phase, Hezbollah recruiters keep an eye out for young Shia Muslim students in both Hizballah-run schools and the national school system. They look for energetic kids, violent kids, and smart kids, from the age of seven into the late teens, and begin taking them on field trips and workshops where they are given a through ideological indoctrination, and then as they get older, a brief introduction to the AK-47 assault rifle.
Two important themes stick out: from the beginning, the training stresses the path to martyrdom, which is achieved through honesty, prayer, and combat. And from the start, Hezbollah organizes its child recruits into the basic cellular structure of the organization.
When they graduate from military training, the new fighters are broken up and sent off to join cells out in the field or overseas alongside veterans. Of all the fighters, about one in ten is chose to be a commander, and goes to Iran for a few months of special training. The number of Hezbollah fighters is a secret, but in a recent speech, the group's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, hinted that there are tens of thousands of them.
The war between Israel and its neighbors is not going to end without there first being a decisive victory one way or the other. That's how World War I ended and that's how World War II ended. Israel won a decisive victory in 1967, but did not take - or was prevented from taking (probably a more accurate description, but the leadership at the time was also complicit) - the opportunity to impose terms of surrender on the Arabs. Until that happens, we will never have peace here. There is no 'settlement' that can be reached until the Arabs understand that Israel and the Jews are here to stay and that there is no going back to the homes they abandoned in 1948 and 1967.
The Arabs are still fighting the 1948 war. And it's not just the 'Palestinian refugees' who are fighting. The whole reason that countries like Lebanon and Syria leave their 'Palestinians' in 'refugee camps' and refuse to grant them the most basic rights as citizens is to make sure that they keep harboring resentment against Israel and that they keep training their children for war against Israel (and the West) on behalf of the Arab (and Muslim) 'nation.' And Israel and the US and all of the other Western countries continue to blindly fund UNRWA and other international organizations that perpetuate the fomenting of war against themselves.
Don't expect anyone in a position of power to wake up to this reality anytime soon either.