What martyrdom is greater than making yourself a human bomb detonating it among the enemy? What spiritualism is greater than this spiritualism in which a person loses all feeling of his body and life for the sake of his cause and mission?

-- Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, who died recently.

"Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah... One of Hezbollah's giants I respect[ed] a lot."

Look at how our discourse is completely distorted and dumbed-down by the same stunted, cartoonish neocon orthodoxies that have also destroyed our foreign policy. In our standard political discussions, the simplistic and false notion -- obviously accepted by CNN -- drives the discussion: Fadlallah is an Evil Hezbollah Terrorist!!, and Nasr probably is as well given the "respect" she expressed for him during his death. Thus: CNN got caught employing an Israel-hating Terrorist-lover, and once she revealed herself, she had to be fired immediately!!!! That really is the primitive level of agitprop churned out by neocon polemicists and then dutifully ingested and embraced by CNN.

The reality, though, is completely different. Fadlallah was a revered figure to a large chunk of the world, and was quite mainstream even in parts of the West. As the AP put it today, Fadlallah was "one of Shiite Islam's highest and most revered religious authorities with a following that stretched beyond Lebanon's borders to Iraq, the Gulf and as far away as central Asia."

But it's when he says that "Fadlallah's alleged ties to Hezbollah are dubious at best," that he not only makes a fool of himself, but shows what a pathetic figure he really is.

Come on Greenwald! Even Octavia Nasr called called Fadlallah "one of Hezbollah's giants." It's right there in your own post -- at the top of the page!

To be fair to Greenwald, perhaps he missed the Fadlallah funeral.

A pity, really. Because those sweethearts at Hezbollah just love gay Americans. Even if they only have alleged "ties."

As for the man Greenwald defends, Fadlallah specifically endorsed the death penalty for homosexuality, saying that it was one of only three crimes deserving of such punishment:

He ["Leading Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah"] listed the three crimes that merit the death penalty in Islam: First, in cases of premeditated murder, he said that the parents of the victim could ask the government to carry out the death penalty, but the method of punishment should be proportionate to the crime. This is explained in many verses of the Koran, he added.

"We read in the life of Imam Ali that before he died from an assassin's sword, he ordered his cousins to strike his killer with a sword once ­ for his killer had struck him once," he said.

The second case where the death penalty can be applied is when a criminal's activities threaten or corrupt his society and undermine its security, like highway robbers, Fadlallah said, adding that in Islam, these people are called the corruptors of the earth.

The third case is homosexuality, which has a "negative impact on the normal relationship between a man and a woman," he said.

Geez. I only hope he had such kind words for Jerry Falwell on his death.

No wonder Greenwald had nothing to say about Iranian executions of gays when he defended Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranian government against "hysteria" in another long tirade against "neocons."

Just who or what is Greenwald working for, anyway?

Seriously, the man makes me want to become a full time "neocon polemicist."

But I better not do that, because it only seems to make him happy:

I view the increasingly unhinged attacks by the worst neocon elements to be a vindication of what I'm doing. I see them as pernicious and destructive, and genuinely welcome their contempt.