Tea with Hezbollah by Ted Dekker

Author:Ted Dekker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307588296
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-09T10:00:00+00:00

Hezbollah Sheik Nabil Qaouk

We left the coffee shop with firm handshakes and much more discussion. In another place and another time, not all might have been so congenial, but at that time and place, I felt no animosity from this feared fighter.

We drove farther south, into the deepest folds of Hezbollah-controlled lands. “In my younger days I used to come down here to debate imams in the mosques,” Carl said. “They called them ‘dialogues,’ in which we’d discuss Jesus, because I was seen as something of an expert on Jesus. It was crazy, thinking back on it. Two or three of them would say their piece, then I would stand and say mine while hundreds listened.”

“You mean like preaching?”

“No, nothing like that. I was just talking about his life. But not everyone rejoiced. The CIA claimed the threats to my life were linked in part to my activities in the south. I was talking to a blind man once—his name was Hussein, I remember that. Another man came up, pulled a gun out of his belt, and held it to my head.”

“Good night! How often does this happen to you?”

“I just stood there while he yelled and screamed. But I was watching his trigger finger, ’cause it was tight. Seriously, I thought that was it. Eventually it was Hussein, the blind man, who talked him down. Maybe that’s why I remember his name so clearly. He saved my life.”

One more story to calm my nerves.

The hour for our meeting with the leader of the south, Sheik Nabil Qaouk, had finally arrived. South Lebanon is the epicenter of all Hezbollah defense today. Two years earlier, munitions had pounded homes and caves and office buildings for weeks as the Israel Defense Forces sought to rout the resistance to their north once and for all. But it was not to be. Hezbollah was too strong in the south.

We would now sit down with the top man responsible for the south, second only to Nasrallah himself in the Hezbollah hierarchy.

Getting to such lofty leadership is a chore, even in the protected south, where large banners with pictures of Hezbollah martyrs are hung from nearly every building. We first met a trusted source, close to the sheik, at a restaurant where we shared some food. Then a change of cars. I was separated from Carl and was driven by a man who spoke no English. We wound through narrow, crowded streets in an old Toyota sedan. Naturally, all of our electronics were carefully inspected.

Another change of cars.

Now I sat in an old BMW. I remember looking into the eyes of dozens as we passed, trying to climb inside their minds. What would it be like to live here, in a strip of land torn by war for decades while the rest of the world had its eyes on the stock market, or the Iraq war, or the next presidential candidate?

We arrived at an office complex in the middle of a busy street, climbed out with hundreds of eyes on us, and slipped into a lobby, where Carl waited.

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