Young is probably right about that, but we’re wrong about Hezbollah being ‘closed’. I traveled to Beirut in Dec. 2006 (when Hezbollah was also threatening to take over the airport). I had never been to the Middle East before, and I looked every bit like the American soccer mom I am, but my taxi driver assumed I was a reporter, and he offered to take me on a tour of the Hezbollah-controlled areas in the south. When we drove past a poster of Nasrallah, the taxi driver said ‘there’s the man’, so I assumed he was working with, or at least friendly to,- Hezbollah.

From that offer, I’d guess that Hezbollah is about as ‘closed’ to westerners as the double decker busses are to tourists arriving in JFK.

“Writers and scholars, particularly Westerners, who lay claim to Hezbollah sources, are regarded as special for penetrating so closed a society. That’s why their writing is often edited with minimal rigor.”

That explanation had perpetually been on the tip of my mind’s tongue.