While battles continue unabated between the Syrian army and armed opposition groups across Syria, a parallel battle is taking place on the pages of Arab dailies over the crisis and Hizbullah's role in Syrian conflict. The division among Arab intellectuals over the conflict reflects the acute polarisation gripping Arab public opinion, further complicating an already difficult situation. Two camps have emerged from the ferocious debate — a third is sitting on the fence. The first camp is a mix of Arab nationalists and the Arab left who have been struggling hard to reframe the debate away from sectarian fault lines by emphasising the political motivations behind the conflict. The second camp is primarily represented in oil-funded dailies and composes mainly of right-wing writers whose commentaries are — often-times — no more than a rehash of US papers like The New York Post or The Sun of London. The war of words among Arab intellectuals prompted prominent writer and US-based academic Seif Daana to describe it as a “global war” against the resistance movement whose manifestations have been seen in oil-financed media outlets. “This campaign, which is well-planned and coordinated, reflects the state of utter hysteria and madness not just against Hizbullah and the notion of resistance, but also on our minds as readers,” Daana said. An Arab nationalist, Daana called on Arab intellectuals to break the monopoly of oil-funded media over the narrative of events at this historic juncture. As evidence, Daana referenced 30 op-eds written by Asharq Al-Awsat editor Tarek Al-Homeid in the past five months alone attacking Hizbullah, while his colleague, Abdel-Rahman Al-Rashed, wrote 15 articles for the same purpose, not to mention other junior and wanna-be commentators writing on the same subject in the same paper. But while some writings in the Saudi-financed press are no more than rehashes of Western and American right-wing papers, some intellectuals have posed serious questions on the issue. In a long op-ed in the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, Syrian writer Mohamed Deepo questioned Hizbullah's involvement in the Syrian crisis and what it meant for the resistance movement and for the conflict in Syria. He dealt with it from two angles: first, the relationship between the resistance and despotism, and whether or not a despotic regime can genuinely support a resistance movement or a resistance movement back a despotic regime against its own people under the pretext of protecting the resistance. Second, the relationship between the resistance and sectarianism and whether or not an essentially sectarian movement could claim to have a resistance project. Deepo does not offer answers to many of the questions. He nonetheless said that both opposing axes (the Syria-Russia-Iran axis and the Washington-Ankara-Gulf axis) target the Syrian Intifada to turn it into a sectarian war that would eventually destroy the Syrian state. Deepo, one of the few writers looking at both sides of the story, reserved harsh criticism both for the Syrian opposition and Hizbullah equally. The Syrian opposition, he said, by allowing the entry of Salafist groups onto the scene had lost its moral high ground against the regime and turned into a tool in the hands of Western powers. Hizbullah, on the other hand, was dragged into the Syrian conflict to confront Al-Nusra Front (a faction of fundamentalist jihadists that has pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda), but during the course of events lost “its credibility as a nationalistic, cross-sectarian party, and undermined the credibility of the resistance.” Al-Rashed of Asharq Al-Awsat stretched this argument further to say that the number of jihadists in Syria will surpass that witnessed during the past two decades in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. Al-Rashed holds Hizbullah solely responsible for the phenomenon, saying that the increase of jihadists — which might reach 30,000 during the coming months — would turn the civil war into a sectarian war. What Al-Rashed failed to mention — deliberately or not — was that jihadists have been flocking to Syria for the past two years in response to calls for jihad by Saudi and other Gulf men of religion under the pretext of supporting the Syrian people, long before Hizbullah declared it was fighting alongside regime forces. It gets worse. Echoing the same view, one Al-Hayat editorial pointed to Hizbullah's involvement in the fighting as the reason for the Obama administration deciding to arm the Syrian opposition. Following the fall of Qusair to the Syrian army, the war of words reached unprecedented levels, employing abhorrent sectarian language in news coverage and op-eds, some of which incited sectarian hatred outright. Sectarian factors were also highlighted to explain the conflict while political factors were negated altogether — particularly in Saudi financed press. That applied to news of Iran and Hizbullah being parties in the conflict. Several papers and commentators chose to see the entry of Hizbullah and Iran into the Syrian battlefield through the sectarian lens alone. Al-Hayat for example, quoting the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said that the Syrian army was making recent territorial gains thanks to backing and reinforcement from “Iranian and Hizbullah elements”. Writing about the issue in the paper, columnist Ragheda Dargham viewed what she said was Hizbullah-Iran participation in battles in Homs as a manifestation of a Sunni-Shia sectarian war taking place in Syria while low-level sectarian battles were taking place across the Arab region. Dargham made note of Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah declaring that Iran and Hizbullah were taking up the fight in Syria against extremist Islamists, or takfiri groups (those who declare non-Muslim and Muslims not embracing their doctrine as kafir, or apostate). Dargham sarcastically concluded by saying that the sectarian war had already begun in Syria and will continue “at the orders Ayatollah Khamenei”. Contrary to Dargham's views, Jordanian commentator Nahed Hattar responded in a recent commentary that Hizbullah's participation in the Syrian scene should be understood as “a defence of the unity of the orient and its collective ethnic and religious identity”. He said Arabs today have to choose between two schemes: the scheme of unity of Al-Mashreq Al-Arabi (the Arab Orient), or the Zionist scheme. Palestinian writer Hisham Nafaa, provoked by the high doses of sectarian lingo in press coverage, said that he viewed “Arab sectarians as equal to Zionists”, because the question is: What interest do they serve in dealing with the Arab people as blocs of sects and tribes? “It is essentially a colonial discourse and aims only to serve certain political ends; divide to rule or to loot national resources,” Nafaa said. “The mechanism of sectarian division has been employed by colonial powers in a systematic manner to impose hegemony over the region.” As-Safir reported how Friday sermons have become occasions for sectarian venom and inciting hatred against Shias. The report referenced statements by Saudi Arabia's grand mufti in which he demanded action against Hizbullah for its participation in fighting alongside Syrian regime forces, adding that Saudi suspicions about the party being a stooge of Iran have been right all along. Writer Ibrahim Bayram in the Lebanese daily Annahar concluded an op-ed about the fall of Qusair by posing questions about Hizbullah's calculations, particularly with regards to the relationship with its “Sunni” popular bases. Sunni-Shia sedition, wrote Bayram, has been on the party's list of serious concerns. Bayram said, however, that the party emphasises the political — as opposed to the sectarian — nature of the struggle, and that it has become all too clear that not all Syrian Sunnis were against the regime and that even some of those who fought the regime in the name of revolution were backing down. Hizbullah's endemic phobia of sedition (fitna), commented Bayram, disappeared. One writer, Sami Kleib, even suggested that a Syrian response to the Israeli strike against Republican Guard facilities in Damascus early May was the only solution to salvage the region from all-out sectarian-motivated confrontation.
