20 November 2008
Hezbollah Boy Scouts
Posted by admin under: International .
Ick. Robert F. Worth in the New York Times has a story about how Hezbollah, the terrorist organization, in Lebanon is using Boy Scouts to directly recruit fighters for their army. While Iraq lost their association with the World Organization for the Scouting Movement because of Saddam’s perverting it to be his personal youth recruitment service, the WOSM official listing still recognizes the Lebanese Boy Scouts as a valid organization. I have a feeling this will change based on Robert’s article.
This is the vanguard of Hezbollah’s youth movement, the Mahdi Scouts. Some of the graduates gathered at this ceremony will go on to join Hezbollah’s guerrilla army, fighting Israel in the hills of southern Lebanon. Others will work in the party’s bureaucracy. The rest will likely join the fast-growing and passionately loyal base of support that has made Hezbollah the most powerful political, military and social force in Lebanon.
…
Munira Halawi, a slim, 23-year-old Hezbollah member with the direct gaze and passionate manner of an evangelist, was the master of ceremonies at a ritual known as a Takleef Shara’ee, or the holy responsibility, in which some 300 female Scouts ages 8 or 9 formally donned the hijab, or Islamic headscarf.
…
The two-and-a-half hour ceremony that followed — in which the girls performed a play about the meaning of the hijab and a bearded Hezbollah cleric delivered a long political speech — was a concentrated dose of Hezbollah ideology, seamlessly blending millenarian Shiite doctrine with furious diatribes against Israel. Again and again, the girls were told that the hijab is an all-important emblem of Islamic virtue and that it was the secret power that allowed Hezbollah to liberate southern Lebanon. The struggle with Israel, they were told, was the same as the struggle of Shiite Islam’s founding figures, Ali and Hussein, against unjust rulers in their time.
…
But the Mahdi Scouts are different. They are much larger; with an estimated 60,000 children and scout leaders, they are six times the size of any other Lebanese scout group. Even their marching movements are more militaristic than the others, according to Mustafa Muhammad Abdel Rasoul, the head of the Lebanese Scouts’ Union . While the Scouts fall under the umbrella of the Lebanese union, they have no direct affiliation with the international Scouting body based in Switzerland.
I have no direct affiliation with the WOSM, either, but the BSA does and the BSA charters my unit. I don’t know how they do things in Lebanon, but it sound like they’re recognizing these Mahdi Boy Scouts. The WOSM needs to give them some clear guidance.
- Kyoto Uno
- Sri Lanka Scouting Push
- In Africa, Scouting is Serious Business
- New Iraq Scouting Service Square Knot
- Victory Base Makes The News
