While CNN was busy firing senior editor for Middle East affairs Octavia Nasr for tweeting niceties about Hezbollah’s recently deceased spiritual leader, another effusive tribute to terrorist Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah seeped out into cyberspace — this one coming from, shockingly enough, the British Ambassador to Lebanon. Said Ambassador Frances Guy of Fadlallah:
The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints.
“Reach out across faiths?” That’s one way of putting it. As Daniel Halper noted Monday, Fadallah was the religious leader who interpreted the Koran to provide justification for suicide bombings. He was believed to be responsible for the deaths of 241 Marines and 58 French paratroopers in the 1983 Lebanon bombings, denied the Holocaust, and–with his venomous rhetoric–fueled a decades-long conflict that claimed the lives of countless Israeli lives.
To say that it’s deeply unprofessional and wholly inappropriate for a representative of the British government–a close ally of the U.S. and France, plus a supposed friend of Israel–to be publicly honoring Fadallah is a gross understatement.
