The NY Times has a “glamor” article up today about Hezbollah, and get ready…..It’s hankie blowing time!

“Hezbollah paid for his wife‚Äôs Caesarean section. It brought olive oil, sugar and nuts when he lost his job and even covered the cost of an operation on his broken nose.

Like many poor Shiites across southern Lebanon, Ahmed Awali, 41, a security guard at an apartment building in this southern city, has received charity from Hezbollah for years. He says he is not a member. He does not even know the names of those who helped him.

Hezbollah fighters move like shadows across the mountains of southern Lebanon; its workers in towns and villages, equally as ghostly, have settled deeply into people’s lives.

They cover medical bills, offer health insurance, pay school fees and make seed money available for small businesses. They are invisible but omnipresent, providing essential services that the Lebanese government through years of war was incapable of offering.

Their work engenders a deep loyalty among Shiites, who for years were the country’s underclass and whose sense of pride and identity are closely intertwined with Hezbollah.

Their presence in southern Lebanon is so widespread that any Israeli military advance will do little to extricate the group, which is as much a part of society as its Shiite faith.

“The trees in the south say, ‘We are Hezbollah.’ The stones say, ‘We are Hezbollah,’ ” said Issam Jouhair, a car mechanic. “If the people cannot talk, the stones will say it.”

No doubt a popular tactic among these kinds of groups is to “massage” the populace and gain sympathy by random acts of kindness. This buys loyalty, friendship, and even people who will shoot Israelis for you:

‚ÄúJust because I‚Äôm sitting here in this caf?© doesn‚Äôt mean I‚Äôm not a resistance fighter,‚Äù said Haidar Fayadh, a cafe owner, who was smoking a water pipe as his patrons sipped tiny plastic cups of coffee near pictures of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.

“Everyone has a weapon in his house,” he said. “There are doctors, teachers and farmers. Hezbollah is people. People are Hezbollah.”

“Everyone has a weapon in his house”, which is something the Israelis understand as well thus the leveling of certain areas for they are far too “infested” with Hezbollah to pick and choose targets. Thus the warning that IAF would issue to residents saying in effect, “If you’re in the area when we come - you’re with Hezbollah”.

But let’s understand that just because you pick up a medical bill or someone’s electrical bill and play the Santa Claus to the people, doesn’t make you any less despicable or any less a terrorist.

The MSM likes to portray Hezbollah as a “in the eye of the beholder” organization. To some it is a terrorist organization, to others a “resistance movement”, so it it all “relative”. This isn’t new for the same comparisons were made of the IRA in Ireland. But blowing up school buses, or klling marines in their sleep, doesn’t make you a resistance fighter - it makes you are murdering terrorist.

Back in the days of Al Capone, a twenties gangster, he used the same random acts of kindness to win the “hearts and minds” of Chicago, but that’s the “code”, you were either with him and served him, or you came up missing. The acts of kindness came with a price, and if you violated the “principles”, you died. Exactly the way Hezbollah has conducted business in Lebonon.

Yet a thousand acts of kindness are worthless with one brutal act, and no matter how the NY Times tries the make over treatment, it doesn’t change the fact that Hezbollah are a bunch of murderous thugs.