BEIRUT: Future Movement leader Saad Hariri attacked Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah over his speech Friday, calling it ‘wailing and crying’ that would not impact Yemeni-Saudi ties.
“Saudi Arabia and Yemen's shared history and destiny is deeper and greater than the speeches of Iranian wailing and crying that we hear from Tehran to Beirut’s southern suburbs,” Hariri said on his twitter account shortly after the end of Nasrallah’s speech.
Beirut's southern suburbs, an area where Hezbollah enjoys wide-spread popularity, was the location for a ceremony held by the party Friday called “In Solidarity with Yemen.”
In his speech, Nasrallah waged another fierce attack on Saudi policies, blaming the country’s Wahhabi ideology for the rise of fundamentalism in the region and for funding ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Yemen.
“What we heard was a systematic ceremony of historical slander and an act of digging up the graves of hatred,” Hariri said of the speech. “It revealed what’s in [Nasrallah’s] heart, which is grudges against Saudi Arabia, its institutions and its leadership.”
Nasrallah said the only threat to the sacred Muslim sites in Saudi Arabia did not come from Yemen, but from inside Saudi Arabia itself, referring to when the Saud family was responsible of destroying most holy sites in 1926.
“Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is following in the footsteps of [Iranian Supreme Leader] Sayyed Khamenei: creativity in manipulation, delusion, show-off and sectarian incitement,” Hariri said.
He also said Hezbollah offered a model that was “imported from Iran and is far from Lebanon’s interests as Satan is far from heaven.”
Hariri added that Nasrallah does not miss an opportunity to reiterate that he can “put a whole sect in the Iranian basket.”
“But Arab Shiites are not Iranian expats in their countries. They are from the core of the nation and their countries’ life,” he said. “The Iranian project, which wants them to be mere tools, is meant to fall.”
