Hezbollah "Hails" Obama

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/240393,lebanese-officials-and-hezbollah-hail-obamas-election.html

I would first like to begin with the slight bias of this article by the Earth Times. Let's begin with the very first sentence, "Lebanon's Shiite House speaker Nabih Berri, who is also close to the radical Shiite Hezbollah, hailed Thursday the election of Barack Obama as the next US president, urging him to push forward Middle East peace process". The author uses two code words, "close" when describing Berri's relationship with Hezbollah which is in fact misleading because Berri is often the negotiator between Hezbollah-led opposition and the pro-Government factions of the parliament, indeed he is Shi'i and leader of AMAL but by no means does he pose any real influence within the Hezbollah decision making process, "close" is code for the next word used, "radical" when describing Hezbollah. "Radical" is code for terrorist and fundamentalist.

However, moving forward, this article did pose an interesting situation, a situation in which all Lebanese factions seem to have agree with the notion that Obama's election was good for Lebanon, and the Middle East.

"Nawaf Moussawi, head of the international relations of Shiite group Hezbollah also welcomed Obama's victory, saying that "change will definitely come" in US policy".

I thought this was very telling of Hezbollah that they were welcoming of Obama's rise to primacy. It shows the underlying reason as to why Hezbollah was created, in the name of social justice., equality, welfare, and empowering the deprived. Obama represents the realization that the old racial barriers, agony, discrimination, that African-Americans have fought and died for since the creation of the United States of America can be overcome. That the "under-dog" can win, even against the greatest odds. Obama's movement was formulated at the grass roots level with a coalition of the workingmen, the poor, the disenfranchised, the college elites, women, and the general youth. This is in fact quite similar to Hezbollah's roots.

According to Lara Deeb Hezbollah was formed off the belief that Shiites must have their fair representation and can no longer be discriminated against and that Lebanese society must break down this Confessional System of power which artificially represents equality when in fact it mandates inequality. Deeb states, "Initially, this growing urban population of mostly Shi‘i poor in Lebanon was not mobilized along sectarian lines...Al-Sadr offered the “Movement of the Deprived,” dedicated to attaining political rights for the dispossessed within the Lebanese polity. A militia branch of this movement, Amal, was founded at the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. Alongside al-Sadr, there were also other activist Lebanese Shi‘i religious leaders, most of whom had also studied in Najaf, who worked to establish grassroots social and religious networks in the Shi‘i neighborhoods of Beirut".

The lines are parallel, it seems that the similarities lie within the parameters of how each movement built their social network.