| THE LIE Hezbollah was created to defend Lebanon against unprovoked Israeli invasions. |
| THE TRUTH Hezbollah was created by Iran to attack the West — primarily the United States — and bring Lebanon under Islamic rule. |
| BACKGROUND On June 19, 2026, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted that Hezbollah — the Iran-backed terror group — was created as a “defense force in response to vicious and bloody Israeli invasions of Lebanon.” (X)The implication was that Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 without provocation, and Hezbollah rose up to protect the country. |
| TRUTH EXPLAINED Hezbollah’s 1985 founding manifesto lists its actual goals: establishing an Islamic republic in Lebanon, expelling Western influence, destroying Israel, and pledging loyalty to Iran’s Supreme Leader. It’s not about protecting Lebanon. (CIA) The same manifesto identifies America — not Israel — as Hezbollah’s primary enemy. Israel is described as merely an extension of American power: the “Little Satan” to America’s “Great Satan.” This is Iranian revolutionary doctrine. (CIA) Hezbollah’s core was created by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard following the 1979 Islamic Revolution — years before Israel’s 1982 incursion into Lebanon. (FDD) In its early years, Hezbollah barely fought Israel at all. Only one of its early attacks targeted Israeli forces — a 1983 car bombing in Tyre. The actual armed resistance to Israel’s presence came from other groups: Amal, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, and the Communist Party. (FDD) Since its inception, Hezbollah has targeted Americans. In 1983, Hezbollah bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and suicide-bombed U.S. Marine barracks. In 1984 it assassinated Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut. In 1985 it hijacked TWA Flight 847, murdered an American passenger, and threw his body from the plane. Between 2006 and 2011, it attacked U.S. forces and coalition allies in Iraq. None of these attacks were related to Israel’s Lebanon incursion. (Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs) Israel’s Lebanon incursions were not unprovoked. After being expelled from Jordan in 1970, the PLO set up a de facto state in southern Lebanon — “Fatahland” — and spent years launching rocket attacks, cross-border raids, and terrorist operations against Israeli civilians in northern Galilee. (Britannica), (IDF) The 1978 Coastal Road Massacre, in which PLO operatives killed dozens of Israeli civilians, triggered Israel’s first incursion into Lebanon. (IDF) The 1982 invasion was triggered by an assassination attempt on Israel’s ambassador to the UK, following yet another wave of PLO attacks — the culmination of over a decade of sustained aggression. (IDF) Hezbollah has never protected Lebanon. It holds it hostage. Hezbollah seeks to overthrow Lebanon’s Christian government and abolish Lebanon’s constitutional system, which guarantees a Christian head of state. (Providence), (TOI) Hezbollah has assassinated Lebanese leaders who stood in its way, such as Prime Minister Rafic Hariri — the architect of Lebanon’s post-civil war recovery — killed by a suicide truck bomb in 2005. (UN News) Lebanon’s leaders view Hezbollah as an enemy, not a protector. They have filed formal complaints with the United Nations over Iranian interference, are conducting negotiations with Israel, and are demanding that Hezbollah be disarmed and placed under state authority. (Fox News), (Reuters) |
| QUOTES “The first root of vice is America. All the endeavors to drag us into marginal action will be futile when compared with the confrontation against the United States. Imam Khomeyni, the leader, has repeatedly stressed that America is the reason for all our catastrophes and the source of all malice. By fighting it, we are only exercising our legitimate right to defend our Islam and the dignity of our nation.” — Hezbollah manifesto |
| TAKEAWAY Glenn Greenwald is parroting Hezbollah propaganda—a myth so flimsy that Hezbollah’s own manifesto refutes it on page one.This information has been publicly available for decades. A man with a Pulitzer Prize and access to Google has no excuse for getting it wrong. What he does have is a pattern: an obsessive hatred for Israel that has led him to repeatedly side with Iran and its proxies against the Jewish state. He did it again here. And this time, he’s running interference for an organization that has American blood on its hands dating back to 1983. |
