RUTHFULLY YOURS

When the European Union decided on Monday to classify Hezbollah’s “military wing” as a terrorist organization, its chief, Hassan Nasrallah, got his turban in a twist. Though the EU move was pretty mild — imposing a vague freeze on funding; implementing fuzzy travel bans for some operatives; and continuing to engage in relations with the organization’s “political wing” — it was still too much for the Shiite sheikh to stomach.

Or so it appeared.

On Wednesday, from an undisclosed hiding place in Lebanon — where his party is heavily represented in parliament — Nasrallah made a scornful speech, broadcast via YouTube.

You’ve got to hand it to these guys who want to destroy the West and keep all Muslims in the Middle Ages. They may dress and act like cave-dwellers, but they sure are savvy when it comes to employing social media outlets on the Internet to get their message across.

“Why don’t you classify the State of Israel as a terror state?” Nasrallah bellowed for the benefit of the digital video cameras filled with Israeli computer technology. “Why don’t you classify Israel’s military wing, the IDF, as a terror organization…? Those who kill, commit massacres, occupy land, and prevent an entire nation from returning to its territory, aren’t they terrorists?”

As if this weren’t hilarious enough — coming from the Iran-sponsored perpetrator of guerrilla wars, suicide bombings, kidnappings and assassinations aimed at annihilating Israel — the über-terrorist who is currently helping Syrian President Bashar Assad commit mass murder went on to chastise Europe for “succumbing to Israeli and U.S. pressure,” and for “granting Israel legal legitimacy in all its future wars against Lebanon, because now Israel can claim it is fighting a war on terror.”

However, he scoffed, none of this would affect Hezbollah in the least. All it will do, he warned, is backfire.

His protestations were echoed on Thursday by Hezbollah’s head of international relations, Ammar Moussawi.

“Hezbollah considers this decision to be an insult, because it equates resistance with terrorism,” Moussawi stated, after meeting with EU Ambassador to Lebanon Angelina Eichhorst in his Beirut office. Though she assured him that he — as a member of Hezbollah’s “political wing” — had nothing to worry about, he was not assuaged.

“You cannot condemn with one hand and then extend the other to shake ours,” he responded.

His point was valid.

Unlike the EU, Hezbollah has never made a distinction between its military and political wings. Indeed, as its deputy chief, Naim Qassem, told the Los Angeles Times in 2009, “The same leadership that directs the parliamentary and government work also leads jihad actions in the struggle against Israel.”

Announcing and furthering a genocidal agenda, while at the same time forbidding others to forge their policies accordingly, is the stuff that radicalism is made of. It is a ploy so primitive that it ought to have become utterly ineffective by now. And its rhetoric should be a source of ridicule, rather than a force to be reckoned with.

But because it is always accompanied by death and destruction, it has to be combated, not appeased.

Nasrallah is well aware of this. He understands that Israel and the U.S. Congress (if no longer the White House and State Department) are paying attention — the former with weapons at the ready.

He also knows that the EU’s watered-down blacklist of Hezbollah’s “military wing” not only constitutes a classic case of weakness and fear, but comes on the heels of its official decision to boycott Israeli settlements.

Well-versed in the workings of Western moral equivalence, Nasrallah grasped the opportunity to grab a microphone and make a scene. His belief that Europe doesn’t need too much persuading about the evils of the Jewish state got his oratory — and jihadist — juices flowing.

Hezbollah’s true colors have been on full display since its inception in 1982. That its patsies in the EU have taken this long to take such flimsy notice after continually chastising Israel is cause for Nasrallah and his ilk to feel vindicated.