In a recent op-ed for the Washington Examiner, US Representative Mark Meadows outlined his reasons for introducing the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act in Congress, which would target a financial network he refers to as “Hezbollah’s Achilles’ heel”.
A Republican representative of the state of North Carolina and a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Meadows introduced the legislation in collaboration with three colleagues, among them Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.).
Before delving into the content of the proposed bill in his article, Meadows provides a bit of counterfactual history:
“Hezbollah is responsible for the largest number of American deaths overseas by a terrorist organization second only to al-Qaeda. Its deadly global reach has included bombing US targets in Lebanon during the 1980s, Israeli and Jewish targets in Argentina in the 1990s, and recent attacks in Europe and Southeast Asia.”
This piece of pseudo-trivia about American deaths in Lebanon is one that is regularly invoked by fearmongering politicians and pundits with no regard for context. For starters, the October 1983 attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut - which killed 241 servicemen and was claimed by the Islamic Jihad Organisation, a precursor to Hezbollah - occurred in response to Washington’s decision to insert itself into the Lebanese civil war as a combatant. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.