Illiteracy Highest Among Hezbollah's Followers- We Ask Hassan: Where's the Beef?

The UN's latest report, "Lebanon's fourth National Human Development Report (NHDR): Towards a Citizen's State," highlights a discrepancy in adult reading rates between urban and rural regions, with the lowest illiteracy rates in Hezbollah's strongholds of the South and the Bekaa.

The report may be downloaded from:
http://arabstates.undp.org/NHDR%20Full%20Report_En_LR.pdf


For example, adult literacy (measured among those above 15 years of age) is highest in Beirut at 94%. In contrast, the illiteracy rate is 16.7% in the mostly Shiite South around the Hezbollah stronghold of Nabatieh, and 16.8% in the other Hezbollah Shiite stronghold of the Bekaa Valley.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Shiite community blamed the Lebanese State for the backwardness and poverty among the Shiites of Lebanon. The two Shiite organizations of Amal (backed by Syria) and Hezbollah (backed by Iran) proceeded to wage war - mostly through terrorism means - against the Lebanese State throughout the 1980s.

Today the Lebanese State has been entirely pushed out of the two areas under Hezbollah's control (Amal having superficially re-joined the "legitimate State institutions") where Hezbollah is "credited" by idiot liberals in the West for having provided the "poor", "disenfranchised" and "dispossessed" Shiites of Lebanon with unprecedented "social, educational, and health" services, thus justifying Hezbollah's attack against the Lebanese State and its supplanting it in those areas.

The fact is that the lies and fallacies of this proposition are everywhere to be seen, including the reported just published by the UN:
- Hezbollah has not provided the Shiite community the services claimed
- Hezbollah has only spent millions of dollars it receives from Iran on weapons and on its warmongering and terrorist activities.
- In fact, Hezbollah has resorted to all kinds of illegal activities (drugs, diamond trade, pirated movies, etc. as has been amply documented on this blog) to funnel money into its military activities, while forcing the Lebanese Shiite community into regressing on education, health, and general development. Women in particular have been forced to stay at home, shun education, and wear Islamic clothing in exchange for monthly payments doled out from Iranian funds.

This is not development. This is backward Islamic rule that is seen everywhere Islamic fundamentalists run the show (PAkistan, Afghanistan, Iran, etc...) and people are fed up with Moslem clergy from 8th century vintage trying to run the lives of young, modern, eager to grow people in those countries.

The fallacy of the "good" that Hezbollah has done to the Lebanese community is demonstrated by the UN Report. Hezbollah should be dismantled, disarmed, and the young LEbanese Shiites who continue to be forcibly recruited into the terror organization ought to benefit, like the rest of the Lebanese communities, from the educational and health resources that the Lebanese State can provide. If there are any failings by the Lebanese State, they are, first, not targeted at the Shiite community, and second, they are due to Lebanon's overall social-political diseases of feudalism, tribalism, religious authority and the like.

The salvation of all the LEbanese, Shiite or otherwise, lies in supporting a strong, modern, reformed Lebanese State, and in forever uncoupling Lebanon from the cesspool of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that only the Lebanese, among all the coward Arabs, have been forced to deal with.

Hanibaal