Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah condemned U.S. President George W Bush on Sunday for saying the militant group was as great a danger to his nation as al Qaeda. Addressing a large crowd in a religious ceremony in Beirut’s southern suburbs, Nasrallah said Bush’s comments did not arise from Shi’ite Muslim Hezbollah’s role in the latest political crisis in Lebanon. Nasrallah, in his first response to Bush’s State of the Union address last week, said Bush attacked Hezbollah because it stood by the Palestinian people and because it was fighting Israel. “What we did wrong is that we do not succumb to the United States of America, what we did wrong is that we stand and still stand by the Palestinian people That is what we did wrong,” he said in a live televised speech on his group’s Al Manar television.
Bush said the United States faced an “escalating danger from Shia (Shi’ite) extremists who are just as hostile to America, and are also determined to dominate the Middle East”. Hezbollah, whose guerrilla force withstood a 34-day war with Israel last year, remains the only group to have officially kept its arms after the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war.