Hello and welcome to Spotlight. The Secretary General of Hezbollah says the Lebanese resistance will not lay down its weapons as long as the Israeli aggression and occupation continues. Sheikh Naim Qassem denounced the Lebanese government for its decision to disarm Hezbollah, saying no one can take away the legitimacy of the resistance. He believes the Lebanese government is implementing a U.S. order and is doing a favor to Israel, adding that the government will be responsible for any possible internal crisis, sedition and havoc. The movement argues that disarming the resistance strips Lebanon of its deterrence power against Israel, leaving the country vulnerable to further attacks.
Joining us on tonight’s edition of Spotlight to discuss these issues are… Military and strategic analyst Ali Hamie joining us from the Lebanese capital, Beirut. And also we have Editor of Veterans today, Kevin Barrett, joining us from Saidia, Morocco. Gentlemen, welcome to the program.
Let’s start off with Mr. Ali Hamie in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. The Hezbollah Secretary General, Sheikh Naim Qassem, has issued a defiant rejection of the Lebanese government’s plan to confine all weapons to state hands. Sheikh Qassem says Hezbollah will not give up its arms until Israel’s occupation ends. How do you view this response at this sensitive time?
Ali Hamie: Thanks for having me with you tonight. And greetings to you, to your guests, and to all the audience. Let’s start with: This speech is the most powerful speech I ever heard from Sheikh Naim Qassem. And it’s like putting poems on lines and borders about the outer end strategy. And they are talking about inside Lebanon and the outsiders also, the conditions and orders by the American and by the Israelis.
The (Lebanese) government is trying to implement UN Resolution 1701 according to Israeli wishes, not taking in consideration the Lebanese people and the protection of Lebanon and the sovereignty of Lebanon. So Sheikh Naim Qassem today put the points over the letters, as we say in Arabic. He reminded the Lebanese government of its best victory in 2006, that we deterred the Israeli enemy for 17 years not to attack Lebanon. This is one thing.
The other thing is that the Resistance is not only to protect the resistors. The resistance is to protect Lebanon from Israeli aggression against Lebanon. The resistance is the sovereignty of Lebanon and martyrdom. You cannot talk about the sovereignty of Lebanon without mentioning the resistance.
He mentioned also that we fought in 2006, and we won against the Israelis. We fought against ISIS in 2017, backing up the Lebanese army and fighting together against ISIS, and we also won. He mentioned also that Lebanon implemented the UN Resolution 1701, but the enemy did not. Since November 27 2024, more than 4,000 violations were committed by the Israelis, and we’re still patient.
The other thing he said is that we are at the line of relief. In case you want us to fight inside and outside, we are ready, but we will not be drugged into sedation inside Lebanon. In case such a thing happens, we will turn our weapon against the enemy.
He also addressed the Lebanese army, offering condolences for the martyrdom of the soldiers killed by the Israeli attack about a week ago. He trying to put everything in order and to say that Lebanon consists of the people’s resistance and army together.
Let’s bring in Kevin Barrett on the discussion. Mr. Barrett, referring to the latest decision made by the Lebanese cabinet, Sheikh Qassem said the government is implementing an American order and will serve the Israeli project. He added that this Lebanese government (is trying to) implement the U.S.-Israeli order to end the Resistance. The government should have extended its control and expelled the Israelis from Lebanon. This government is serving the Israeli scheme. Do you agree with him and why?
Kevin Barrett: Yes, Sheikh Naim Qassem is absolutely right. And now more than ever. This is precisely the wrong time to think about disarming the Resistance. It’s the opposite. This is the moment when the Resistance actually needs to be better armed. Netanyahu has just openly announced that he is fully on board with the Greater Israel Project, which is the attempt to steal all of the land between the Nile and Euphrates rivers. So, obviously, anybody who lives in that part of the world needs to join the Resistance.
The Lebanese official military has been bought off and infiltrated to the point that it’s unable to defend Lebanon, which means it isn’t the Lebanese military anymore, or at least it isn’t if it’s turning against the Resistance, which is the actual de facto real Lebanese military, which is capable of genuinely exercising sovereignty for the state of Lebanon and for the people of Lebanon, as the people and the state of Lebanon resist this attempt to invade and occupy them and ultimately take over their land, steal their land and resources, and murder and expel them, which is what the Zionists are already doing to the Palestinians. They’ve announced that they’re going to continue doing it to the Palestinians, and they’ve announced they’re going to do it to the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Iraqis, the Jordainians, some of the Saudis, and perhaps even some Turks who live between the Nile and the Euphrates rivers.
So this is really a no-brainer. Anyone in Lebanon who actually thinks that the Resistance should be disarmed needs to have their head examined.
Sheikh Qasim was right that this is being pushed by the United States, which is occupied by the State of Israel. which has a blackmailed rapist of a 13-year-old girl in the Oval Office doing the bidding of the most extreme genocidal forces in the so-called State of Israel. And this (attempt to disarm the Resistance) is absolutely against the letter and spirit of the American Constitution itself, which in the Second Amendment enshrines the right of the people to be the militia and to keep a kind of a balance or a dissuasive force against any abuses in which their own government could be taken over by a foreign tyranny. The United States was taken over or was run by an imperial tyranny in 1776, and the American people had the right to organize a resistance to gain their own sovereignty. So do the Lebanese people, and every American needs to support the Resistance in Lebanon.
Right. Mr. Hamie, experts have warned that this decision could have catastrophic repercussions for Lebanon. As you mentioned earlier, it has split the Lebanese people between opponents and supporters of this motion. Sheikh Qassem made his position clear as well. He said “the government made a dangerous decision that violated coexistence and exposed the country to a major crisis. The Lebanese government bears full responsibility for any internal strife and for abandoning its duty to defend the land of Lebanon.” What are the potential repercussions for Lebanon here?
Ali Hamie: Well, first, Sheikh Naim Qassem said that legitimacy is powered by the people. And most of the Lebanese people are with keeping the resistance armed and not to disarm Hezbollah, because we are living in very critical situation and time. (Disarming Hezbullah) would give Israel relief and make the Israelis relaxed. Get the enemy out first and then we will discuss the national security strategy.
Also, Sheikh Naim Qassem said that this Lebanese government is implementing Israeli conditions under American orders, and they are not taking into consideration the needs of Lebanon. His most powerful sentence was, “stand aside and we will protect you and the territory because we know that you are saving yourself personally and killing the homeland.” In the existing charter, there is no such thing as to go and disarm the Resistance or to take the weapons from the hands of the people. Their land is occupied by an aggressor and by a terrorist, by a criminal state: Israel. Every day there are raids. Every day there are aggressions against Lebanon.
They are killing. There is genocide in Gaza. And as your guest mentioned, they declared “greater Israel” from the river of the Nile to the river of Iraq. And they’re trying to implement their prophecies as coming true on our account. They are taking us accountable to determine their goal in taking the whole lands and declaring it as the land offered by their god. The resistance is trying to resolve that situation. If you take the weapons out the hand of Hezbollah, the whole land will be under the domination of the Israeli entity.
Sure. And over to Mr. Barrett, you were just mentioning earlier about how important it is at this time to further arm the Resistance and further enable the Resistance. Sheikh Qassem pointed out the important role that was played by the Resistance in preserving the sovereignty of the country in confronting Israel’s aggressions. It seems like the government is suffering from some form of amnesia. Need we not remind everyone of the 2006 victory that deterred the Israelis for 17 years and prevented them from launching an aggression in fear of the resistance? How can the current government be so oblivious to what is actually happening?
Kevin Barrett: I’m not an expert on Lebanon, but to the extent that I’ve been able to understand the thinking of the current Lebanese government, it seems to me that they’re just basically accepting the bribes and favors of the occupying powers. They find it more politically convenient to go ahead and essentially echo the talking points of the imperial powers that are ordering them to say this.
But do they really believe that they’re going to succeed in disarming the resistance? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t see how that would make any sense from the perspective of somebody who’s genuinely trying to preserve Lebanon’s sovereignty and has the best interests of the country at heart.
It’s conceivable that they understand that it’s not going to happen, but they also feel that the alternative to essentially doing what they’re told and saying what they’re told to say would be worse than if they just go ahead and pretend to be obeying orders, knowing that those orders are not going to be carried out, trying to sort of kick the can down the road, as we say, or trying to postpone the problem a little longer. And maybe that’s the right strategy here, because maybe we need to buy a little time for the Resistance to get better armed.
If the resistance succeeds in arming itself up to a certain point and is able to maintain a full and credible deterrence, then we won’t see any more of these attacks on Lebanon: this series of wars in which the Zionists have attacked and committed terrorism on a massive scale against Lebanon in preparation for their ultimate taking over greater Israel. But they’ve really only made incremental advances.
And this is a time when the resistance does need to get fully reorganized, fully rearmed, and rebuild that fully credible deterrent so that the Zionists will ultimately have to completely withdraw from their occupied territory in Lebanon and realize that they don’t have any more credible threat to hold over the official government in Beirut. And once that state has been reached, then it’s time to start talking about integrating the different branches of the Lebanese military: the real Lebanese military, which is Hezbollah, and the fake, occupied Lebanese military, which is the one that pretends it’s going to disarm Hezbollah. Well, good luck with that.
Sure. Mr. Hamie, just recently, as you pointed out, Benjamin Netanyahu told Israeli media that he feels a deep connection to the vision of greater Israel, referring to the highly controversial plan that includes Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, as well as parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. He described it as a historical and spiritual mission. I think it would be very naive to think that all of this is a coincidence: The full occupation of Gaza City, the disarming of Hezbollah, and of course the increased occupation of parts of Syria that we’re seeing.
Ali Hamie: We see what’s going on in southern Syria, and it was like a step ahead of the declaration. We see the domination of Israel over Jordan and part of Syria. Also Egypt. We see that the declaration issued by the Knesset a couple of weeks ago to annex the West Bank and the Jordan Valley as part of Greater Israel. They are trying to implement…let’s say, fake, illusional history. They’re trying to impose it on us and trying to show the West that their prophecies are correct, and they shouldn’t be afraid of their domination because as God promised them the land, he promised them to govern and to dominate the whole world at the same time. So they are trying to terrorize whole countries, West and East, trying to blackmail….starting from the president of United States by Epstein and other files. And this is what’s going on also in the Middle East with the state of normalization. The only obstacle now standing in front of the Israeli ambition in the region and Abraham Accords, the biggest obstacle and the most powerful one, among the surrounding countries and states, is the Islamic State of Iran.
There is also the big obstacle of the Resistance in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Because they cannot wage a land war against Hezbollah, they are trying to light a fire inside Lebanon and make the government feel defeated. This is not true. We are not defeated. The Israelis did not win. We’re still in the heart of the war and the battle.
And we see the contradictions inside Israel. Israel is collapsing from within. Israel is overwhelmed by the geography, and it’s taken a jump into the unknown, strategically.
Kevin Barrett, the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, who met with Hezbollah and Lebanese officials just recently in Beirut, described the Resistance as a great asset for the region and the Islamic world. Who benefits from a weak Resistance? What happens in the region if the resistance is watered down?
Kevin Barrett: Well, the extremist messianic millenarian fringe in occupied Palestine—Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and those people, who have apparently control over the Netanyahu regime—stand to benefit by imagining that they can fulfill their dream of greater Israel by exacerbating the genocide of Palestine and extending it to neighboring countries. And the American leadership, some part of it anyway, seems to think that it will somehow benefit by the perception of some kind of victory, the perception that the American influence in the region is increasing alongside the Zionist influence. And I think the people in the region who have sold out to these occupying powers imagine that their jobs will become more secure if the Resistance is weakened.
But the ordinary people of the region and of the whole world lose out to the extent that Resistance is weakened. Indeed, we need that kind of resistance everywhere. The United States is occupied by the Zionists in the same way that Palestine is. And they have their sights on the whole world. As the other guest mentioned correctly, they have these prophecies stating that when they commit these abominations in the Holy Land, the slaughter the descendants of the family of Jesus, peace upon him. and destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the oldest and greatest Islamic architectural monument on Earth, they will ultimately not only bring on their so-called messiah, who of course would be the Dajjal or the Antichrist to Christians and Muslims, but that then they will rule the world from a rebuilt blood sacrifice temple in the spot where the Al-Aqsa Mosque stands today.
That’s what these people believe. And they believe that once they rule the world, they will exterminate and enslave all non-Jewish people. This is the standard mainstream Jewish eschatology that’s been hijacked by Zionists: They’re doing all of this in rebellion against God. The normal eschatology used to be that God was going to make all this happen, but now they think they can make it happen by joining the forces of Satan in rebellion against God.
And so essentially, everybody who sells out to that project thinks they’re going to benefit. But ultimately, the world is not going to benefit by being exterminated and enslaved. The people of the region, the Palestinians, the Lebanese people, the people of West Asia are not going to benefit by ultimately being exterminated and enslaved by the soldiers of Dajjal in occupied Palestine.
So everyone needs to support the Resistance. Having the Resistance be as well armed as possible so it could have a deterrent against these insane messianic plans should be the top priority of everybody on Earth.
Ali Hamie, we’re going to wrap up this segment with this last question for you as well. Who benefits from a weak resistance in the region?
Ali Hamie: Surely Israel. And Israel is not going to win. I’m not talking only from sentiment. I’m talking strategically. Israel is a demographically and geographically small power. Without the support of the U.S. the Israeli entity is powerless. Economically, they are very weak. I think what’s going on now is that Benjamin Netanyahu is considering himself more important than King Solomon or Ben-Gurion. And he’s trying to bypass the “dilemma of the eight decades.” Because they know, according to the Torah prophecy, that Israel will vanish in 80 years from the date of its establishment. And maybe in a couple years, there will be no Israel.
And I can talk about what Henry Kassinger said in 2011, that quote, “I don’t see Israel in 2030.” So time is governing the situation, and whoever can be more patient will win.
