Nasrallah Talks People to Death

The following excerpts were recently posted on the Middle East Media Research Institute website. They are remarks made by Hizbullah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah in speeches delivered on February 18 and 19, 2005.

We consider it (America) to be an enemy because it wants to humiliate our governments, our regimes, and our peoples. Because it is the greatest plunderer of our treasures, our oil, and our resources, while millions in our nation suffer unemployment, poverty, hunger, unmarriagability, ignorance, darkness, and so on. America… This American administration is an enemy. Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: 'Death to America.'

And this

Some people may wonder and say: 'Is there no end to this hostility?' Yes, there is an an end. If the Zionists leave our lands and holy places and give them back to their owners, this conflict will come to an end. If America stops interfering in our ountries' and nation's affairs, stops its aggression, stops its occupation, stops it's plundering of our resources and treasures, we will have no problem with it. We don't want to go to Washington to fight America. We are defending our countries and our existence.

A few things really lept out at me when I read the these remarks. Foremost was the overuse of the figure of speech known as Anaphora, the "repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, or lines." Skilled orators use this rhetorical device quite frequently and to great effect. Perhaps because when it is used in just the right amount, Anaphora lends a sense of melody and rhythm to piece of writing that few other figures of speech can. Martin Luther King Jr was expert at this. On the down side, the sense of rhythm that is imparted can cause listeners to overlook of the underlying logic, to give it more credence than it deserves.

And like all good things, Anaphora can also be overdone. Too much Anaphora makes a speech sound monotonous and uninspired. And to my ear, Nasrallah overuses this figure of speech in both of the above excerpts. In the first case, it is the word our that is overused : our governments, our regimes, our peoples, our treasure, our oil, our resources, our nation, our motto... eight times! He might have been better served by ordering the nouns in each group of phrases in either ascending or descending order, i.e. by using the figures Anabasis or Catabasis


In the second excerpt, Nasrallah resorts to Anaphora again, but this time using three different words: stops, we, and our. Not quite as repetitive but no more imaginative. And this is the other thing that is so striking about Nasrallah's remarks: the apparent overuse of the word we (used 7 times) and its possessive, our (used 24 times). That's 31 times in a total of 610 words. That's a rate of just over 5% or every 20th word. In terms of elapsed time, he used we and our 31 times in 5.5 minutes, an average of every 10-11 seconds. When a speaker tries, with words, to associate himself with those to whom he speaks or addresses, the figure of speech is known as Association or Inclusion. To see that Nasrallah is trying to do this is obvious. The question is why?

Why was he trying so hard to tap into or to create a sense of community or group identity among his listeners? If the sense of community were there, I don't think he'd need to harp on the point this much. Reading the transcript, and watching the video, I really got the impression that he's trying to gin the crowd up, that he is trying way too hard. Is he worried about something? Does he have a reason to feel isolated or marginalized? Is his personal or Hizbullah's support eroding? If so, why? And all this just days after the assassination of Hariri.

A closer examination of the word frequency of Nasrallah's remarks gives a clue. When you remove the commonly-used articles, conjunctions, prepositions (a, an, and, of, the, etc.) from consideration, the second most used word in his remarks is "death". It appears 18 times. It comes from a few phrases. There are the usual suspects, of course, the chants "Death to America" and "Death to Israel". And then there is this, from the last paragraph of the transcript of his speech:

How can death become joyous? How can death become happiness? When Al-Hussein asked his nephew Al-Qassem, when he had not yet reached puberty: "How do you like the taste of death, son?" He answered that it was sweeter than honey. How can he foul taste of death become sweeter than honey? Only through conviction, ideology, and faith, through belief, and devotion. We do not want to live merely in order to eat, drink, and enjoy life's pleasures, and leave our homeland to Israel so it will slaughter it upon the altar of its aspirations, desires, hate, and historic vendettas. Therefore, we are not interested in our own personal security. On the contrary, each of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah. The most honorable death is to be killed, as the Leader Imam Al-Khamenei said when 'Abbas [Musawi] was martyred. He said: "Congratulations to 'Abbas, congratulations to 'Abbas." The most honorable death is death by killing, and the most honorable killing and the most glorious martyrdom is when a man is killed for the sake of Allah, by the enemies of Allah, the murderers of the prophets [i.e. the Jews].

Look what we have here: seven deaths, five kills, two martyrs, with a murder, a hate, a vendetta, and a slaughter thrown in for good measure. So its not just "death to Israel" and "death to America." It's also "death to us", to the speaker and his listeners. Nasrallah wants so badly to see the death of his enemies that he's willing to see the death of his associates, his fellow believers, and himself as part of the bargain. On second thought, I'm not so sure about that last part. I don't believe that he wants his own death. I don't believe he is quite so willing to die. His job, after all, is to talk other people to death, a job that requires that he stay alive whilst others do the dying. Still, I wouldn't doubt if he's sleeping with one eye open these days.