Turmoil in the Middle East
The situation in Lebanon is truly horrific. I was shocked that after hearing the smooth-talking Israeli Foreign Minister outline their plan on The 7:30 Report I almost thought it was a completely legitimate policy to bomb a country into oblivion and then open negotiations. Everything’s so messy over there that I can barely form an opinion either way, but there’s one particular, far less controversial, aspect which befuddles me.
How do you spell Hezbollah?
All the Australian news (i.e. ABC Online) seems agreed on the above spelling. But then I was reading TIME.com and found that they prefer “Hizballah”. Well, I thought, I’m sure we can clear this up. I’ll just google it. There’s bound to be a simple answer.
Ahem. Potential spellings of Hezbollah include:
- Hezbollah
- Hizballah
- Hisballah
- Hizbollah
- Hezballah
- Hizbullah
- Hisbollah
- Hizb’ALLAH
- Hizb Allah
I eventually found my way to Wikipedia (I would have gotten there straight away but I, er, spelled Hezbollah incorrectly). Those last ones there give an insight into the word: turns out translating from Arabic is tricky sometimes. “Hizb” means “party”, and you may remember “Allah” (God) from some of his previous work. Apparently the Lebanese dialect gets Hizb closer to Hezb, hence some of the confusion. Wikipedia claimed that Al Jazeera used the final spelling but a quick check reveals them to conform with the very common “Hezbollah”.
I hope I’ve cleared that up for everyone. I expect I’ve missed some vital piece of the puzzle where all the confusion was started as a plan to vaguely irritate the party into surrendering.