In a rare public appearance Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah urged Arabs and Muslims to stay focused on opposing Israel despite bitter disagreements about the Syrian war.
His Shiite followers would not bend in the face of rising anti-Shiite sentiment among those who oppose his support for the Syrian government he said.
He also invoked the Palestinian cause to shore up his party's legitimacy inside Lebanon. The half-hour appearance, at a campus in southern Beirut, was the first time in nearly nine years that Sheikh Nasrallah had delivered a speech in public.
A day earlier, Lebanon's President Michel Suleiman for the first time urged the Lebanese state to rein in the ability of Hezbollah to act as an independent military organisation, a right it claims on the grounds that it is the only group able to defend Lebanon from Israel.
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Hezbollah's rivals say it has forfeited that right by unilaterally sending fighters not to Israel but to Syria to battle an uprising that many Lebanese support. While the government lacks the ability to challenge Hezbollah militarily, the controversy has threatened Hezbollah's political dominance, which helped to bring down the government and left the state paralysed under a caretaker prime minister.
Sheikh Nasrallah made his sharpest and most direct comments on the rising sectarian tone of the conflicts in and over Syria.
He has long said Hezbollah is fighting in Syria not to defend Shiite interests, but to fend off an extremist rebel movement. But in his latest speech he said to cheering: ''Many times I speak as a nationalist, as a Muslim, but I'm going to speak as a Shiite.'' He criticised the increasing attacks on Shiites in Iraq and Pakistan and the extreme anti-Shiite statements that have become common in some areas of the Syrian insurgency, a mostly Sunni movement.
New York Times
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