“You are from Europe? Ah, Hitler!” The young Islamist flashed two thumbs up at me with a smile.
Deep in Lebanon’s Shia country I have stumbled into unexpected company.
“You like Hitler?” I asked, taken aback. In his dark green fatigues and wispy facial hair he looked more like a Cuban revolutionary than a Hezbollah militant. His colleague beside him had the same face and moustache as Che Guevara.
“Yes of course. He killed the yahood.”
Through his Arabic accent I sensed flippancy. Or youthful bravado. He switched it to me.
“And you, you like Hitler?”
A question I’ve never been asked before.
Best not to reveal that the German Führer had killed a good portion of my family precisely because they were yahood. I was after all on this fellow’s turf. The Sayyida Khawla Shrine, Baalbek. A mosque baking in the upland sun of the Beqaa Valley. Twenty miles from the Syrian border. A Shia holy site adorned with portraits of the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
“Well Hitler tried to invade my country. I’m not so keen”
“Where are you from?” He asked, losing the smile and arching back his head as if to get a better look behind my eyes.
“England.”
A Renaissance style oil painting print of a crusader being killed by muslim armies hangs on the mosque wall.
He looked down at the cross around my neck.
“I’m a Christian” I confirmed.
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