Israel Matzav

Interview with Michael Totten

The Daily Caller interviews Michael Totten regarding his new book, The Road to Fatima Gate. Here are some highlights.

2. Tell us about your experience dealing with Hezbollah while you were in Lebanon.

Dealing with Hezbollah is surreal. When I first arrived in 2005, the media relations department was reaching out to Western journalists and academics. The party’s officials hoped to get some positive coverage in the U.S. and Europe, but the guy in charge threatened me with violence after I cracked a joke he didn’t like on my blog. I was also detained by Hezbollah security agents when they suspected an American photographer I was working with was Jewish because his middle name is Isaac. He and I were both blacklisted for life for no real reason at all, though by now I’ve done much more to cheese them off than cracking a joke at their expense.

Almost every journalist I know who has ventured into Hezbollah territory has been detained, screamed at, threatened, or all of the above. They used to kidnap American journalists and chain them to radiators. The party’s officials and security people seem oblivious to Totten’s First Rule of Media Relations: be nice to people who write about you for a living.

Yet some reporters nevertheless run off to Lebanon and romanticize these terror-guerrillas as the authentic Third World resistance. They write fanboy-style dispatches about them in various newspapers and magazines. Some pretend that’s not what they’re doing while others are utterly shameless. They’re the same kinds of people who were communists during the Cold War. Hezbollah’s obscurantist and violent behavior makes no more an impression on them than Stalin’s show trials did to true believers in the 1930s.

...

9. What country keeps you up at night in terms of being a threat to America?

I can fall asleep almost instantly (waking up is more complicated), so nothing keeps me up at night except a late cup of coffee. I can and do sleep soundly even in war zones. But the one country that troubles me most — for all the usual reasons, but also for some of my own — is Iran. What Iran has done to the parts of Lebanon it controls through Hezbollah is absolutely horrendous, and I watched with my own eyes the Iranian government try with all its might to do the same thing in Iraq through the militias it sponsored there.

I don’t believe Iran will use nuclear weapons against Israel, but at the same time we and the Israelis would be fools to think it can’t happen. I believe Iran won’t nuke Israel, but I don’t believe that in quite the same way that I believe France won’t nuke Israel.

If Iran and its Syrian, Hezbollah, and Hamas allies all decide to wage war at the same time — watch out. The entire region will burn, and the entire world’s energy source will be jeopardized to an extent few of us would be comfortable contemplating for long.

Read the whole thing.

I know what I would have asked. I've met Michael briefly, and I'm also friends with Noah Pollak, who spent time with Michael in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 (I actually thought it was 2007 when they were there and forgot that they were there during the war too). I recall that they lied about Noah being Jewish when they went to Hezbullahland. In response to one of the questions, Michael says that he was most scared when he and Noah were in a war zone on the Lebanese border with Israel. I wonder how much of that fear was fear of Hezbullah discovering that Noah is Jewish.

If either of you guys sees this and feels like answering, please do.

Labels: Hezbullah, Michael Totten, Southern Lebanon, The Road to Fatima Gate

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:58 PM