War Marketing: Making Money off of Hezbollah August 8, 2006

The Bahraini Gulf Daily News reports:

Nasrallah has spawned a souvenir industry churning out everything from tapes and CDs of his speeches to posters, key rings and T-shirts in the wake of Israel’s offensive against Hizbollah in neighbouring Lebanon.

The tape of the 46-year old Shi’ite cleric, which includes combat music and Lebanese nationalist songs, has become a runaway bestseller. “I am out of CDs already and have only tapes left,” Otabshi said.

And perhaps the most ironic part of the article:

Nasrallah has become such an iconic figure in Syria that the Laterna night club has added Hizbollah songs to its staple diet of dance music.

“Yo, it’s the Hezbollah Mix! That’s my s**t!”
A more in depth article from the Washington Post details:

New products come out almost every time Hizbollah delivers what it calls surprise operations against Israel.

New announcements of new operations means new $.

One of the latest additions to Mohammad Ali’s souvenir shop is a poster of Hizbollah missiles hitting an Israeli warship off the Lebanese coast — an attack that badly damaged the vessel.

[…]

Another music shop, Ashtar in old Damascus, has placed a guest book outside its door for customers to write their thoughts about the Lebanese resistance. “When rifles speak, Arab rulers sink in silence,” read one inscription, signed by an unknown passer-by.

The New York Times reported on August 2:

At the P.L.O. Flag Shop, a local store that specializes in Palestinian souvenirs, the best-selling items for the past couple of weeks have been posters, T-shirts, buttons and coffee mugs featuring Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

Qatar’s Peninsula Daily even hears it on the playgrounds:

Nasrallah has become an iconic figure in Syria. Children raise their hands and shout “Nasrallah, Nasrallah” as they go down slides in a park in central Damascus. Hezbollah’s yellow flags fly and pictures of its charismatic leader are plastered all over the city—on cars, traffic police motorcycles, government buildings, homes and even hospital emergency rooms.

Did New Kids On the Block even have it like this in the 90s?

Public support this entrenched — to the point that little kids are singing about you as they slide down a sliding board — is going to be very hard to extricate. It is probably not going to be undone by outside forces. From within the Shia communities themselves in Southern Lebanon, there is going to have to be a feeling of pride which comes from non-terrorists. Social services taken care of by non-terrorists.

I would like to fault the Lebanese government for this, but it’s not that simple. One thing is for sure, no amount of ceasefire is going to stop Nasrallah CD’s from going platinum. That war is not fought with guns. That war — the war for the hearts and minds of Lebanon and the Arabic-speaking world — is going to have to be fought on more intellectual, and ethereal, planes.