Hezbollah’s genocidal chemicals ignite Lebanon

Hezbollah is known to use the Port of Beirut to receive weapons from Iran and to ship explosives to terrorist cells throughout the world.

By SHMULEY BOTEACH
Smoke rises after an explosion was heard in Beirut, Lebanon August 4, 2020 (photo credit: REUTERS/ISSAM ABDALLAH)
Smoke rises after an explosion was heard in Beirut, Lebanon August 4, 2020
(photo credit: REUTERS/ISSAM ABDALLAH)
Many of those watching Lebanon crumble knew it could explode, but no one could imagine it would be so literal.
Earlier this month a blast so large it looked nuclear – replete with a mushroom cloud – tore through Beirut with the force of 1.1 kilotons of TNT. It claimed more than 200 lives and wounded 7,000 more. The blast radius enveloped half of the city, overturning cars and crashing through government buildings and living rooms. Punching a crater 400 feet across and 140 feet deep, the explosion left half of Beirut’s residents without livable homes. The blast sparked rampant protests and derailed the country’s government. By Monday, the entire cabinet of the Lebanese government resigned en masse.
The evidence thus far implies that the explosion was unplanned and accidental, a fruit of the corruption and negligence for which Lebanese bureaucracy is known. For decades now Lebanon has become a worldwide symbol of a country sliding into the abyss. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a culprit.
The explosion began with a large fire that went on to ignite 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate being stored at a seaside port facility. It had been there for six years – an incredible amount of time considering the chemical has real use. In that quantity, its value rises to well over a million dollars. Considering Lebanon’s potential food shortages and faltering economy, the fact that it was never used or sold is especially strange.
Somebody, we must consider, wanted this chemical kept at the port in order to ship it overseas.
Who would want to do that? In Lebanon, it’s easy to know.
Hezbollah, the Iran-backed genocidal terrorist group and “the most formidable non-state actor in the world,” is known to use the Port of Beirut to receive weapons from Iran and to ship explosives to terrorist cells throughout the world. The most incriminating evidence lies in the fact that ammonium nitrate is Hezbollah’s chemical of choice when it comes to murdering Jews.
Just this past year, German police discovered hundreds of kilograms of ammonium nitrate hoarded throughout the country by Hezbollah to be used in terrorist attacks. The discovery pushed Germany to completely blacklist Hezbollah – crucially, even its political wing. The EU has not followed suit even as ammonium nitrate explosives were stored or used by Hezbollah in three other member-states: England, Cyprus and Bulgaria.
The Daily Telegraph disclosed that English police discovered three tons of ammonium nitrate being stored in London as far back as 2015 (amazingly, England kept this explosive discovery under wraps for four years). Soon after, Cyprus arrested a Hezbollah operative with 8.2 tons of it, too. That same year, Kuwait discovered two tons of ammonium nitrate, which investigators likewise attributed to Hezbollah.
While two tons of ammonium nitrate might not seem like a lot, that was the amount used in the Oklahoma City bombing of April 1995 that killed 155 people.
Tragically, Hezbollah doesn’t just store ammonium nitrate – it uses it, too.
In 1994, Hezbollah operatives drove a truck toward the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and detonated their load. It would be the greatest antisemitic attack since the Holocaust, leaving 85 people dead and hundreds more wounded. Two years before that, Hezbollah members set off a bomb at the Israeli Embassy in the same city, killing 29 and injuring 242.
The chemical ingredients of the two bombs were, according to the New York Times, exactly the same: ammonium nitrate.
THERE’S MORE: Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s genocidal aspirant leader, has mused in the past about blowing up the ammonium nitrate being stored at Israel’s Haifa Port. Nasrallah’s choice of words were eerily prescient for what would occur in Beirut: “A few missiles on a few ammonium plants equals the same amount of death as an atomic bomb.”
According to Israeli investigators, Hezbollah was using Cyprus as a “point of export” from which to move explosives throughout Europe to be used in a series of attacks. It makes sense that Beirut – much of which Hezbollah controls – would figure into the terrorist supply lines the organization uses to murder Jews. Now that a “labyrinth of tunnels” has been exposed by Australian journalists directly beside the blast site, Hezbollah’s involvement is impossible to deny, which is, of course, exactly the case.
This isn’t the first time the world failed to confront a terrorist organization targeting Israeli civilians while ransacking Lebanon in the process. That it straddled Israel’s northern border and was fundamentally unstable made Lebanon a prime destination for bands of terrorists obsessed with murdering Jews. As far back as 1968, PLO militants were crossing in from Lebanon to carry out attacks against Israelis such as the horrific school-bus massacre at Avivim of May 22, 1970. Eventually the PLO moved its headquarters to Lebanon, fielding its own army and running a state within a state. Yasser Arafat sparked a war that neither Israel nor Lebanon wanted and which neither will ever forget.
Disgracing global justice, the world community would guard and legitimize the man behind the bloodshed: Arafat.
Hezbollah would do a similar thing on a significantly larger scale. Funded, equipped and trained by Iran, Hezbollah has taken terrorism to the next level. In 1983, its members murdered 63 diplomats and workers at the American Embassy with a single bomb, and then 241 American Marines and 58 French military personnel with another.
In the year prior, they twice blew up Israel’s military headquarters, killing 103 IDF soldiers. All of this was inside Lebanon, but their activities would soon go global, forging rivers of Jewish blood from Buenos Aires to Burgas, Bulgaria. In 2006, Hezbollah lit the spark that plunged the country into yet another war with Israel.
Like the PLO, Hezbollah fields an army of its own, except far larger. Unlike the PLO, it isn’t content to control part of Lebanon – it want the whole thing. Already in control of the country’s south, Hezbollah capitalized on the $700 million it gets each year from Iran, offering social services and forming a political party – which is now one of Lebanon’s largest.
Hezbollah now controls much of parliament, the Port of Beirut, and Beirut’s international airport. It has transformed the country into the staging ground for Iran’s never-ending war against Israel, amassing an army tens of thousands strong while stockpiling rockets in the hundreds of thousands.
And yet, French President Immanuel Macron, who visited Beirut after the blast, still fights to maintain Hezbollah’s political legitimacy in the eyes of the European Union. His lobbying is working, too.
While 200 European politicians backed Germany’s call to ban Hezbollah as a whole, the EU still refuses to blacklist Hezbollah’s political wing – even as it plans attacks across the continent.
When Jews are targets, it’s hard to find allies who care. As Hezbollah now lays waste to Lebanon, we can only hope the world finally takes note of what terrorists like these actually cost our world.
The writer, ‘America’s Rabbi,’ will soon publish a modern Holocaust memoir, Holocaust Holiday: One Family’s Descent into Genocide Memory Hell. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @RabbiShmuley.


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