A new low for terrorist apologists

There is a worthwhile article from today’s Jerusalem Post on Augustus Richard Norton’s new public relations campaign for Hezbollah. Norton is, of course, calling it a “book”, a word that looks great on a resume.

Norton is a professor of international relations and anthropology at Boston University who has just published “Hezbollah: A Short History”, a whopping 184-page epic about the “complex” nature of Iran’s proxy terror club, though one would think that this magnificent ode to the lighter side of murder — about the size of a feature story in The New Yorker magazine — would be evidence enough that Norton has looked in all the wrong places for “complexity.”

Either way, Jonathan Schanzer’s review in the Post, titled "Answering the call of jihad", exposes Norton as a fraud. I encourage everyone to read the review, so I won’t quote much of it here, but I will point out that according to Schanzer 24 of the 159 pages of written text in the book mention Hezbollah’s impressive record of killing innocent people — what most of us call terrorism, though Norton likes the word resistance.

But this book comes straight from the Leopard Doesn’t Change Its Spots Department. Norton was interviewed by Harper’s Magazine one year ago yesterday, during the Second Lebanon War, which was sparked by a Hezbollah cross-border raid in which three Israeli soldiers were murdered and two were kidnapped (Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, the captives, are still missing, and Hezbollah has provided no signs of life).

While Norton’s paid work is done for Boston University, it is his volunteer work that is truly spectacular. A long-time member of Hezbollah’s street team, Norton was called on by Harper’s to explain the war to the masses.

The magazine’s Ken Silverstein asked Norton six questions. The article was titled Six Questions for Augustus Richard Norton on Lebanon.

The first question was “Why did Hezbollah snatch the Israeli prisoners last week?”

In his answer, he showed just why he makes the big bucks as an educator.
“I believe Hezbollah acted autonomously,” he said, claiming that all Hezbollah and Iran share are “a worldview.”

I assume most readers couldn’t stomach the rest of the interview, but those that finished reading found out a whole lot about Norton’s own funhouse mirror-reflection worldview.

For example, Norton says that Israel struck back with force because Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wanted the Israeli defense establishment to hit Iran “indirectly.” But wait, don’t Iran and Hezbollah only share “a worldview”? I was confused, but not as confused as Norton, who said that Hezbollah’s rockets were an impediment to Israel’s coming attempt to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Norton then said that Israel’s reaction was “grossly excessive”, and proceeded to lie about how many Lebanese civilians had been killed and why.

And then Norton finally unmasked himself. After he made the following statement, I exhaled, relieved that he had finally put any credibility he could have possibly had as an academic, informed, sane intellectual. He said Israel had made a profound mistake in another example of “its vainglorious attempts to consolidate hegemony over its neighbors”.

Norton has become the Andromeda Strain of terrorist apologists: at first seemingly dangerous to the point of provoking overreaction, then morphing himself into something so ridiculously insignificant as to become unworthy of anyone’s time or attention.