I’m sure many of those who followed Al-Zawahiri’s speech (broadcast yesterday) in Lebanon, Palestine and Syria felt how awfully irrelevent his remarks were.
Addessing Hizbullah in particular he strived to use common language that would seemingly cast historical Sunni/Shiit hostilities aside in an attempt to picture Lebanese and Palestinian resistance as part of a “global Islamic rise” against a “brutal western civilization led by the US”, but he missed an important fact: His target audience just cannot relate to this, not only because more than %40 of Lebanese people aren’t Muslims in the first place but because Al-Qaeda and its ideologies inherently don’t have any social foundation and public support in this part of the Arab world. In fact, Al-Qaeda doesn’t have any substantial social background on any spot not even in those areas where it seems to be more active, and that’s what puts it in a rather weak position and questions the validity of its “mission”.
Recent polls released by the Beirut Center for Research and Information don’t surprise anyone; currently %87 of Lebanese people support Hizbullah’s resistance, and of non-Shiite and non-Muslim communities in Lebanon %89 of Sunnis along with %80 of Christians and %80 of Druze voted support for Hizbullah.
