Actually, terrorists don’t need nice obituaries - The Jewish Chronicle

It is over 2,500 years since Chilon of Sparta uttered the immortal words: “de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est” – which translates as "of the dead, nothing but good is to be said” – and it’s fair to say his words have stood the test of time. How often do we brush over the indiscretions of the deceased to save their memory?

When we mourn, we create a version of the dead that is somehow not quite who they were, but is airbrushed to fit the story we want to tell about them. If they were sometimes mean or didn’t settle their debts, we don’t hold them accountable at their funeral.

But, should this convention really apply to terrorist leaders? In many of the obituaries of Hassan Nasrallah, the deceased former leader of Hezbollah which were published in the British and American papers over the weekend, he received the same treatment.

In Saturday’s FT, it was noted that the ‘charismatic’ Nasrallah – who was eliminated on Friday by an Israeli strike on Hezbollah’s subterranean headquarters in Beirut – was described as ‘courteous, perceptive and funny’ by those who met him in recent years. For readers who are still unsure what to make of the man, the following paragraph rather charmingly reveals: ‘a life-long speech impediment, which left him unable to pronounce his Rs, was widely viewed as disarming.’ Cute. (And surely the perfect plotline for a follow up to 2010’s box office hit The King’s Speech. The Terrorist’s Tongue, anyone?)

Over in Sunday’s Observer, Nasrallah was remembered as ‘politically astute’ and ‘adored by supporters’. Later in the piece, he is praised for his ‘dignified response’ to the death of his son, Mohammed Hadi, who was killed fighting the IDF in 1997. Not mentioned is the fact that Nasrallah rejected the Israeli offer to return his son’s body in exchange for the body parts of Israelis killed by Hezbollah, stating: “Keep it. We have many more men like Hadi ready to offer themselves to the struggle.” So dignified! What a dad!

This insight was also strangely absent from the Washington Post’s farewell, where they tell readers that Nasrallah was seen as ‘a father figure, a moral compass and a political guide,’ by his followers. Adding: ‘He was lauded as the man who empowered Lebanon’s once downtrodden and impoverished Shiite community…’

Not to be outdone, the New York Times claims that he, ‘maintained that there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews and Christians’ – dizzyingly at odds with Hezbollah’s stated aims of destroying Israel, allegiance to Iran’s supreme leader and establishing Islamist supremacy across the middle east.

Despite being a founding member of Hezbollah – which has been designated a terrorist group by the UK and US among others – and its chief since 1992, the word terrorist is largely missing from Nasrallah’s memorials (the one use of the word in the Financial Times piece is found in the following, heavily caveated sentence: ‘His enemies will point out that he was the leader of what they consider a terrorist organisation.’)

But while his obituary writers seem to be unclear as to who and what he was, those who suffered at the hands of Nasrallah and his fundamentalist fighters over the last four decades will be in no confusion as to the fact that his death is a long-overdue win for humanity. From the people of Lebanon, whose country has been run into the ground, to the Israelis who have lived with the ever-looming threat of a terror army on their Northern border; the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who were murdered when Hezbollah backed the al-Assad regime, to the families of the 241 US military personnel killed by Hezbollah in the Beirut bombing in 1983 – thanks to Israel, his reign of terror is finally over.

Obviously simpering terrorist sympathising in the western media is nothing new, but in a sea of bad takes since Hamas’ atrocities of October 7, glowing obituaries for Nasrallah still stand out as a low point. While it’s true that everyone has some good in them, singing the praises of a man who was responsible for the subjugation and death of hundreds of thousands of people, is completely deranged, and shows a lack of moral backbone and understanding of the horrors he inspired, rather than a fair and thoughtful disposition. Worst of all, it is an insult to everyone who suffered at his hands – whose names have, and will, fade into obscurity, while his is praised, and his cruelty re-written to suit the tastes of contemporary, progressive paletes.

So often, less is more – and that is definitely the case when it comes to memorialising this monster. In fact, I think his obituary needed only seven words: yimakh shemo, may his memory be erased.

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Hassan Nasrallah

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