In my secondary school, few years after the July 2006 war, girls were charmed by Jawad Nasrallah when most of them were participating in “Education mobilization”.
“Education mobilization” is the primary means of ideological indoctrination of Shiite teenagers in Lebanese schools.
Girls used to talk about Jawad Nasrallah as a poet, and pass papers of his latest poems. I asked my friend who was involved in the mobilization process, what is Jawad’s job? She answered, “He works as a poet.”
Indeed, Jawad went from being a shy person who wrote a few lines of poetry, to becoming an established poet in Iran’s sphere. When Julia Boutros, the Lebanese singer, sang his poem “Moqawem”, it seemed that she had the honor of singing his words.
Probably, this poetic aspect of Jawad’s personality is the hidden part of the son of Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, which was not revealed before by reporters and analysts.
His Father’s Poet
Jawad, who is savvy about the techniques and power of social media, has played a significant role with his poems in creating a cult personality of his father Hassan Nasrallah among Hezbollah’s supporters.
The aura is the combined outcome worked out by both the father and son: Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches and Jawad’s lines about his father. His poems have been frequently turned into folklore. For example, his poem “Ya Abi” (My father) went viral in Hezbollah’s virtual community, and resurfaces repeatedly whenever the party’s “electronic flies” (the name of troll-like accounts in the Middle East) take to Facebook and Twitter to protect the image of Nasrallah, the father.
Jawad Nasrallah Tweeting…
As known to Lebanese and world media, Jawad is an avid user of his Twitter account which has about 80,000 followers.
Possessing such a double-edged weapon, Jawad never misses the opportunity to use his words to defame his opponents, whether they are individuals or groups.
Through his Twitter account and fully aware of the power and influence of words on people’s minds, he invokes his poetic capabilities. On social media, Jawad leads the narrative that targets his opponents, aided by fake and authentic accounts (electronic flies), to mobilize and troll against Hezbollah’s enemies whenever possible.
In addressing the poet’s muscle-flexing attitude, one can notice the media support he receives from the journalist Husein Mortada, who is well-known for his provocative words, which amounts to taking pride in the excessive military violence against the labeled enemies of Hezbollah.
Poetry has long played a role in Hezbollah’s art scene. The organization produces each year hundreds of songs and musical productions of high quality.
Serving as a public motivational tool, poetry helps shape the political, social, and religious identities of communities. It is also present in the Day of Ashura’s celebrations, which are specially organized by Hezbollah. In this event the group adopts a specific discourse, with a rhetoric of grand style.
Despite being a radical military and security group which uses religion and sectarianism to carry out its operations in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, Hezbollah understands the power of poetry and has admiration for poetry and verses so that it gives the literary form an extraordinary role - the party’s poets even set events to create resistance poetry.
In his screen appearances, Hassan Nasrallah never forget to mention the poet Hassan Abbas, whom he describes as “the son of Fatima”. We must also remember Abbas’s fist salute whenever Nasrallah’s name is mentioned.
Jawad, as a poet, performs a very sensitive role in the radical religious organization, as he creates content for a terrorist-designated military group in the U.S. and some European countries. For the Hezbollah, words are as potent in their struggle as bullets in a military fight. Speech is based on manipulation, distortion and diversion. After the assassination of Lokman Slim, Hezbollah’s Lebanese critic, Jawad tweeted “The loss of some is, in fact, an unexpected gain and kindness to others,” adding the hashtag #no-remorse.” Then he dismissed it as a pointless remark, in an attempt to put it in a poetic context and make it unconnected to the murder of Slim.
A Security Poet
Understandably, any street protest would only be fought back by a young group of people who would be authorized to maintain stability. Jawad is known to have a wide circle of young admirers and is regarded as a people’s person; he maintains contact with his real and virtual friends, most of whom are younger or of his age.
Notwithstanding his image as a poet and a scholarly master of words, Jawad has recently begun to live under a military and security umbrella. Coinciding with reports from the group’s close circles that the leader’s second eldest son, who is less than 40 years old, would be assigned new responsibilities, these measures solidify the rumour, given the groups recent security failures.
By the end of last year, local and international media disclosed that Jawad Nasrallah was the target of a failed assassination attempt while he was in Jadriyah in Iraq when he was assigned personally by his father to secretly meet Qasem Soleimani.
The meeting was held shortly after the breakout of October 17 protests, in which Hezbollah’s supporters clashed with the protesters. At that time, analysts said that Soleimani was meeting with leading figures in Iraq and Lebanon to extinguish the uprising which took to the streets that Iran has historically been influencing.
