A Love Letter For Terrorists By Anthony Shadid

The way Shadid writes in Hezbollah Fighters Emerge From the Rubble it's a wonder he hasn't signed up himself:

There was no gunfire in the air, no chants, no jubilant displays of celebration. There were, rather, the satisfied expressions of survival. Men embraced, kissing each other's cheeks, some emerging into sunlight for the first time in weeks. Cellphones, in almost everyone's hand, rang with queries of others' whereabouts, the fate of houses and the reality of a cease-fire that still seemed fragile. They smiled. "Thank God for your safety" was the refrain.

And Hussein Kalash, burly, hard and confident, offered three words that defined the war for Khiam's defenders, the Hezbollah fighters.

"We're still here," he said....

This is a movie trailer. I'm thinking Band of Brothers. Of course, that was about American soldiers fighting on behalf of liberty. One of its episodes brings Easy Company to a Nazi concentration camp where they liberate Jews. If Shadid's gritty protagonists had found the same camp, they would have murdered its prisoners. Put that aside--and Shadid comprehensively puts that aside--to paint a pretty picture:

More common among the fighters was the subdued demeanor of Abu Khafif, the heavyset, bearded commander, who drove through the town square in a black Mercedes, the rim of a flat tire on the car creaking across the street. Its windshield was cracked like a spider web, and a rifle sat in the front seat.

In black pants, a black Izod shirt and white Fila tennis shoes, he was friendly, smiling as he asked another fighter to change the tire. A black plastic bag with five AK-47 assault rifles sat next to the spare tire, and he casually stocked the trunk with canned luncheon meat and a 10-liter bottle of water. He was confident, grinning at questions. But he was professional, leery of saying anything too revealing.

"Are you going to bother me with talk?" he asked. "I'm not a spokesman, I'm a fighter."...

Shadid's confident and professional fighters tried to kill civilians while launching rockets from residential areas to deter Israeli attacks and benefit from the propaganda value of dead Lebanese women and children. Hezbollah is able to do that because of reporters like Shadid, who have normalized a movement that, in the words of its leader Nasrallah, will continue until elimination of Israel and the death of the last Jew on earth. Shadid will have none of that:

"This is our land," said Bilal Ali Saleh, a 42-year-old beekeeper. "Can we leave our land? Would you leave your land?"

Cue Fanfare for the Common Man.

Just don't tell Hezbollah that its composer was a Jew.

UPDATE: Tip of the hat to A Barbaric Yawp for the link; it's an honor to be included in the 83rd edition of Haveil Havlim. As I told Soccer Dad recently, I was actually thinking of recording some of Shadid's lines about Hezbollah "fighters" on an MP3 file over some chords from Fanfare. Then I realized it would be circulated in some quarters as an unsarcastic tribute.