Hassan Nasrallah: ‘Our Hostility to the Great Satan is Absolute’

“The evil that men do lives after them,” wrote William Shakespeare; “the good is oft interred with their bones.” If this has ever been true of anyone in the long history of the human race, it is true of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the jihad group Hizballah, who was killed in a bombing of his Beirut bunker on Friday. Nasrallah is dead and his group is decimated, but the evil men do does indeed live after them. The ill effects of the long career of Hassan Nasrallah will reverberate for a long, long time.

Nasrallah shared his Iranian masters’ hatred for the U.S., as he made abundantly clear as far back as 2002: “Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan [America] is absolute….  Regardless of how the world has changed after 11 September, ‘Death to America’ will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: ‘Death to America.’”

This was not just empty braggadocio. That same year, Salim Boughader Mucharrafille, a Mexican national of Lebanese descent, was sentenced by a Mexican court to sixty years in prison for smuggling people into the United States, including Hizballah operatives. Then on November 19, 2003, a Lebanese Muslim named Mahmoud Youssef Kourani, who lived in Dearborn, Michigan, was indicted for conspiring to “knowingly provide material support and resources” to Hizballah. The indictment identified Kourani as a “member, fighter, recruiter and fund raiser for Hizballah.” Kourani was, it said, “a dedicated member of Hizballah who received specialized training in radical Shiite fundamentalism, weaponry, spy craft, and counterintelligence in Lebanon and Iran.”

Investigators found audiotapes in Kourani’s Dearborn home containing statements such as “You alone are the sun of my lands, Nasrallah! Nasrallah!…your voice is nothing less than my jihad.” “We offer to you Hizballah, a pledge of loyalty,” said another tape. “Rise for Jihad!…I offer you, Hizballah, my blood in my hand.” Kourani had entered the United States illegally on February 4, 2001 by crossing the Mexican border hidden in the trunk of a car.

Kourani was not singular. In September 2007, Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw gave a speech to the North Texas Crime Commission in which he revealed that Hizballah operatives, as well as jihadis from Hamas and al-Qaeda, had been arrested crossing the Mexican border into Texas. This has continued. Much more recently, in March 2024, NBC News reported that “Border Patrol agents stopped a Lebanese migrant at the border near El Paso, Texas, earlier this month who claimed to be a member of Hezbollah and that he was going to New York and was going to try to make a bomb, a Customs and Border Protection official confirmed Monday.”

Hizballah operatives who made it into the U.S. have been patient. Thomas Fuentes, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the International Operations, said back in 2007: “they want to maintain a low profile by engaging in criminal activity [but] not direct attacks….They’ve not been enthusiastic about doing it on US soil because of the attention and reaction that would occur.”

However low profile they tried to be, some Hizballah operatives inside the United States could not keep their activities concealed. In July 2007, the Treasury Department shut down the Goodwill Charitable Organization (GCO) of Dearborn, Michigan, for funneling money to Hizballah. It called the GCO “a Hezbollah front organization that reports directly to the leadership of the Martyrs Foundation in Lebanon” and explained that “Hezbollah recruited GCO leaders and had maintained close contact with GCO representatives in the United States.”

2007 was a long time ago. Have all those Hizballah operatives left the U.S.? Will the killing of Nasrallah lead them to give up their activities and leave the organization. The answer to both of those questions is “Unlikely.” Hizballah operatives are still in the U.S., and will make themselves known when the time comes to do so.

Meanwhile, they are stepping up activities in South America. Oil Price News noted in August  2024 that “Hezbollah’s sizable but overlooked presence in Latin America poses significant risks. It gives the militants access to lucrative illicit economies along with the ability to strike soft targets in a region lacking robust counter-terrorism capabilities. In the wake of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s fraudulent electoral victory, Hezbollah will expand its South American presence as Iran ramps up support for the murderous regime to counter stricter U.S. sanctions.”

Hizballah is not in Venezuela because it is deeply interested in Venezuela. It is in Venezuela as a stepping stone to get to the United States. We will, unfortunately, quite likely be hearing from this group again.