Hezbollah Meets Dollywood
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 10.16.01 | 8:52 PM ET
In May 2000 the South Lebanese Army, Israel’s proxy, withdrew from the notorious Khiam prison. The new guardians, Hezbollah, liberated the prisoners and turned the facility into a museum. Recently, Negar Akhavi traveled the 100 miles south from Beirut to visit what he calls “Hezbollahland,” a discomforting mix of Islamic fundamentalist propaganda and kitschy souvenirs. “After 45 minutes or so we…headed for the Hezbollah gift shop - a must for any visitor,” he writes in an essay for Slate. “It was a long, narrow room, stocked with two wide aisles of Hezbollah keepsakes. They had yellow Hezbollah flags in every size and Hezbollah clothing—T-shirts, sweatshirts, baseball caps. Along one wall were display cases of various stickers, posters, lapel pins, and key chains, and pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader Musa al-Sadr, and the current Hezbollah secretary-general, Nasrallah. A few photos even caught these men cutting loose with smiles.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
