Crocodile tears in Tehran: Hezbollah's farewell to its creator

A Hezbollah delegation, including family members of assassinated former Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and slain top commander Imad Mughniyeh, travelled to Tehran Friday to attend the official ceremony paying homage to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, killed in an Israeli strike on February 28.

According to Al-Mayadeen - Hezbollah’s propaganda mouthpiece - the delegation included MPs Hassan Ezzeddine and Ali Fayad, Deputy Political Bureau Chief Mahmoud Comati and Executive Council head Mohammad Fneich. Several members were seen in tears as they gathered around Khamenei's coffin for a final farewell to the man who led Iran for nearly three decades.

Let us be clear about what we are watching. This is not mourning. This is performance, carefully choreographed propaganda designed by the mullah regime to project unity and resolve in the face of a crushing military and strategic defeat.

The tears of Hezbollah officials over Khamenei's coffin deserve to be seen in context. These are the same men who sent Lebanese Shia youth to die in Syria, Yemen and southern Lebanon in service of Iranian ambitions.

The same men who have held Lebanon hostage since 1982, when their organisation was created, armed, funded and trained by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the direct orders of the Iranian theocracy.

The Bill Lebanon Has Paid

Since its founding, Hezbollah has dragged Lebanon into repeated wars it never chose, systematically dismantled its state institutions, paralysed its political system, plundered its economy and, most catastrophically, triggered the regional conflict that has left thousands of Lebanese dead and hundreds of thousands displaced.

The families of Nasrallah and Mughniyeh were in Tehran Friday weeping over a man who bears direct responsibility for all of it. Nasrallah took his orders from Khamenei. Mughniyeh executed them. And the Lebanese people - Christian, Sunni, Druze and Shia alike - paid the price.

Hezbollah did not attend Khamenei's funeral out of grief. It attended out of obligation, the obligation of a wholly owned subsidiary to honour the founder of the corporation that created it, finances it and has directed its every strategic decision for 44 years.

"Iran has given everything to Hezbollah," Naïm Kassem declared last week. He was not wrong. Iran gave Hezbollah weapons, money, training, ideology and purpose, all in service of Tehran's regional hegemony, not Lebanon's national interest.

The tears in Tehran are real enough. But they are not tears for Lebanon. They never were.