Hizbullah’s Shi’ite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah died Sunday after being hospitalized in Beirut for internal bleeding. Fadallah was reported Saturday to be struggling for his life.
The 75-year-old leader was the spiritual guide to Hizbullah, which is headed by Hassan Nasrallah, and backed the Iranian revolution against the Shah in 1979. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard helped establish the Hizbullah terrorist organization.
Fadlallah advocated suicide attacks against Israel and survived several assassination attempts against him. One of his former bodyguards was Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed in a car-bombing in Damascus two years ago. In 1985, a car bomb exploded near his Beirut house, but he and Mughniyeh survived the blast.
He wrote U.S. President Barack Obama last year, "The size of support and cover-up provided by your country for the Zionist entity has become known. This entity was established on the land whose people were uprooted by the power of iron and fire.”
He previously stated, "I say that America, in its policy that aspires to impose hegemony on the world is an evil with no good in it." He opposed the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, and urged economic boycotts against Israel and America.
Two years ago, he said on the Hizbullah Al-Manar satellite network, "Zionism has inflated the number of victims in this Holocaust beyond imagination. They say there were six million Jews – [but there were] not six million, not three million, or anything like that.”