Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian last week met with the Iranian official behind the establishment of the Shiite terror group Hezbollah, Seyyed Eisa Tabatabai, whose “distinguished feature is his support and contribution to the promotion of the position of the resistance in Lebanon and the region and the Islamic world,” according to the FM.
The meeting followed the official news agency IRNA’s 5-part interview with Tabatabai, the representative of Iran’s current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Lebanon, who held the same job in the service of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In the interview, Tabatabai described his role, on instructions by Khomeini, in suicide operations against American agents and the US military contingency, as well as Israeli forces in Lebanon.
In the interview, translated by MEMRI, Tabatabai describes receiving Khomeini’s fatwa ordering attacks on American and Israeli targets in Lebanon. The interview was removed by IRNA from its website shortly after it had been posted, conceivably because it included the first statement by a high-ranking Iranian official of the Islamic Republic’s role in those attacks, which included the April 1983 attack on the US Embassy in Beirut in which 63 people, including 17 Americans; and the attack on the barracks in Tyre of the American and French Multinational Force in October 1983, in which 241 US service personnel, including 220 Marines, and 58 French soldiers were killed.
But, as you all know, the Internet doesn’t forget, and so, on the same day Iran’s FM sang the praises of the man behind so many murders, MEMRI posted a translation of the part of Tabatabai’s interview that was removed by IRNA, which was originally published under the headline, “I Received from Imam Khomeini the Fatwa on Martyrdom Operations Against the Americans.”
Catchy headline.
“I quickly went to Lebanon and provided what was needed to carry out martyrdom operations in the places where the Americans and Israelis were,” Tabatabai recalled. “The efforts to establish Hezbollah started in the area of Baalbek (a city located east of the Litani River in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, about 67 km northeast of Beirut), where members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) had arrived. I had no part in establishing the political party Hezbollah, but God made it possible for me to continue the military activity with the group that had cooperated with us before the Islamic Revolution’s victory.”
Tabatabai also noted that he received support from the PLO in establishing Hezbollah and training its fighters. “The military courses we had with the Palestinians prompted us to launch the struggle, and from Imam Khomeini I received approval for the struggle against Israel and even the fatwa ordering me to carry out martyrdom operations, and he confirmed this three times.”
Someone should include this interview in President Joe Biden’s next briefing on removing sanctions from Iran.
