Changing perceptions of Islam, Part 4: “Hassan Nasrallah’s children: During His Final Days, Our Father Was Depressed”

ANJULI PANDAVAR | 23 Mar 2025

In happier times

Special series for Ramadan 1446

In this series, Murtadd to Human looks at perceptions of Islam after a year in which Muslims went from euphoria in the wake of their October 7 “moment of triumph” to silence, bewilderment and depression as their “freedom fighters,” Hamas and Hezbollah, cling on for dear life, Iran and the Houthis nervously watch the skies and it turns out the indefatigable George Galloway is not so indefatigable after all. Well, those were the headlines. We want look at what in the old days we used to call ‘the inside pages’, news that doesn’t make the front pages, specifically, at articles, podcasts or videos of ex-Muslim perceptions of Islam and Muslim defence of Islam in light of events over the last year.

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Hassan Nasrallah’s Son Jawad and Daughter Zaynab: During His Final Days, Our Father Was Depressed (Al-Manar TV, Lebanon, 28 February 2025)

MEMRI TV Videos, YouTube, 3 Mar 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhTDRfsGP5Q

Jawad: After the killing of Hajj Mohsen (Fuad Shukr), then the pager attack and until his final days, he was spiritless and sad. You could feel that he was depressed. He was not desperate, but you could see that he was hurt. You could see that he was slaughtered from his neck to his heart – cut in two.

What could he say? There were times that I did not like to hear his voice when he was like that. You listen to him, seeking encouragement, but once you hear his voice is like that, it hurts your heart.

Later, I learned that he was crying.

Zaynab: The pager attack made him cry—

Jawad: It’s not just that. I met people who would see him and talk to him. They said that he was one man before the pager attack and a different man after.

Zaynab: The men who were wounded in the pager attack, even the doctor’s who treated them said they had never seen such things. I knew it was painful for him, but I wanted to know what his reaction was, and my mother told me that he was crying.

Hezbollah Leader’s Son Admits: He Was in Tears After Israeli Pager Attack

Atheist Republic, YouTube, 15 Mar 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o6aDUEW2ok

Armin Navabi: This is what you get […] when you come for innocent people. I want to thank the IDF and I also want [you] to know how proud Israeli people are of their military and their intelligence operation.

You [Israeli people] destroyed this man before you killed him. The man that came for your safety and your security and the lives of your children, the man that supported the annihilation of all of you, all of you, and your entire country, your intelligence operations and your country’s army broke the man.

Let this be a lesson to all the enemies of Israel. This is what happens to you, if you try to harm Israel. This is the end for everybody who dares attack Israel. Your God didn’t save you. Your God didn’t even give you hope. This man was broken. This man that is supposed to be for martydom, for Afterlife, his God is supposed to keep him strong. He didn’t.

This was the best of you. He was supposed to stay strong until the very last moment and never be broken under this much pressure, and the best of you crumbled and he died before dying, and he died after dying. He died inside before dying, and then he really died, and now, because we all know this, his legacy died as well.

Susanna: There’s a verse in Genesis that says, “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse those who curse you,” and the IDF lives that out: I will curse you. Think about the Islamic Republic right now. Think about how cursed they are right now. This is no joke. But I want to hear more about how this interview has been reverberating in the Shi’a and Persian space, because I actually didn’t know that.

AN: Imagine the Iranian people constantly being lectured by the pro-regime people in Iran that [say], oh we’re still victorious. You who think Israel has won, you don’t understand the spirit of the people of God. You don’t understand us. You don’t know that this is exactly the position that we want to be in. The people of God, the Shi’a, they were always victorious, because they know that God is on their side. They know that and they always will be. This looks like a defeat, because you are off this world, so you don’t understand. That’s why we are the victorious ones.

Susanna: Why do you think they would say this?

AN: That’s what I’m trying to figure out, because this is such a huge blow to all the propaganda that we have been brought up with, that I am trying to understand who’s responsible for putting this out there?—

Susanna: On Hezbollah TV!

AN: Are the people who are in control so terrified that they’re trying to get people to just shut the […] up and douse down the intimidation and [say] look, we actually are […]. Can you please stop with this whole warmongering narrative, because there will be nothing left of us if we continue with this, “We’re still here; you didn’t do anything.”

Hamas in Gaza is constantly putting videos out there pretending like nothing happened to them, and they’re still standing and this was nothing but a scratch. All of these videos from Gaza are being shown in Israel and Israelis are saying, well, let’s just go […] these people up then, as soon as our hostages are released. They are saying, “We didn’t finish the job, so please, let’s go back in there.” There’s a lot of public anger. When you see Hamas coming with their guns and their uniforms, there’s going to be more demand in Israel to go in.

Maybe they’re trying to dial it down and some people within Hezbollah are saying, no, we actually have been defeated. This is real: we’ve been […]. Please stop.

Susanna: Psychologically, if your base thinks that you’re constantly winning or they have this demand, they’re going to ask more and expect more. And they’re saying, no, we can’t do that—

AN: Right! This is what the Islamic Republic is dealing with right now. The Islamic Republic has raised a radical [support] base in Iran that would not be satisfied if—Right now one of the main complaints of the radicals in Iran against the regime is, why are we not attacking Israel for the third time? You constantly told this base that we are so strong against Israel, that if they do anything to us—Khamenei, for example, on camera saying that if Israel does even the slightest thing against the Islamic Republic, he will turn the entirety of Tel Aviv and Haifa to rubble; he promised that. And so you raise a following and before you know—

Susanna: Your airspace is being violated and you didn’t notice until it was already over.

AN: Not only that, when Assad was falling, Khamenei said they closed down the sky, they closed down the ground and you couldn’t even go to Syria to save Assad, let alone Israel. So this is very humiliating, but you have to meet the expectations that you created. All of this [bravado] – and if you don’t deliver, then your base is going to [say], what the […] is happening? Why are we so pathetically weak? And you’re going to lose that base. That’s very dangerous for them.

[…]

What you’re witnessing here is the key to toppling the Islamic Republic in Tehran, because no amount of foreign military attack is actually going to be the final push for toppling the Islamic Republic, even though it might be an important factor. Also people coming onto the streets and protesting the government, that’s also an important factor. Because the people of Iran are not armed, but the Iranian regime is heavily armed, that also is important, but it’s not going to be enough.

The main last push that is going to throw this regime off the cliff, if that ever happens, is the people within the regime in Iran turning on themselves. … When Israel humiliates the Islamic Republic, that is one factor that helps the people turn on their own regime and when Iranian women take off their hijab and the regime is incapable of enforcing it, that is another [factor] that is going to make this radical base of the regime think that this is not the Islamic regime that we did the revolution for, and this is going to turn them against each other.

The Fall of Hassan Nasrallah: A Leader Reduced to Tears

The recent revelations about Hassan Nasrallah, the so-called “unbreakable” leader of Hezbollah, have exposed him not as the fearless resistance icon he claims to be, but as a man utterly broken by the might of his enemies. The image of Nasrallah, once revered as a symbol of Shia defiance, has been reduced to that of a weeping figure, shattered by Israel’s precision strike on his militant group. This is not just a humiliation for Nasrallah—it is a damning indictment of his leadership and the hollow ideology he represents.

Nasrallah’s son, Jawad, did not hold back in his description of his father’s emotional state following the Israeli attack. He spoke of a man “slaughtered from his neck to his heart, cut in two,” a man so devastated that his own son could not bear to hear his voice. This is the same Nasrallah who has spent decades posturing as the unyielding face of resistance, the man who promised his followers victory through martyrdom and divine favour. Yet, when faced with the reality of Israel’s military prowess, he crumbled like a house of cards. His tears are not just a sign of weakness—they are a testament to the futility of his cause.

Even Nasrallah’s daughter, Zaynab, confirmed his humiliation, recounting how their mother shared that Nasrallah wept over the attack. Imagine that: the man who once boasted of turning Tel Aviv into rubble, the man who promised his followers eternal glory, reduced to a sobbing figure in private. This is not the behaviour of a leader; it is the behaviour of a man who has been exposed as a fraud.

The Shia narrative, built on the idea of divine favour and inevitable victory, has been dealt a crushing blow by Nasrallah’s emotional collapse. For years, Hezbollah and its Iranian backers have peddled the myth of invincibility, claiming that their cause is blessed by God and that their enemies tremble before them. Yet, when Israel struck, Nasrallah did not stand tall like a martyr; he wept like a defeated man. His tears have exposed the lie at the heart of the Shia resistance narrative: it is not divine favour that sustains them, but propaganda and fear.

The fallout from this admission has been particularly damaging in Iran, where the regime has long used Hezbollah as a tool to project power and resist Western influence. Anti-regime Iranians have seized on Nasrallah’s humiliation, mocking the pro-regime factions who once celebrated him as a hero. The regime’s propaganda machine, which thrives on the perception of strength, has been left floundering. Nasrallah’s tears have not just humiliated him—they have humiliated the entire Shia resistance movement.

Nasrallah’s downfall is a lesson in hubris. For years, he has postured as the fearless leader of a movement that would never back down, never show weakness, and never admit defeat. Yet, when faced with the reality of Israel’s military superiority, he was exposed as a man who could not live up to his own rhetoric. His tears are a reminder that no amount of bluster can compensate for weakness, and no amount of propaganda can replace the truth. The Israeli strike on Hezbollah was not just a military victory; it was a psychological one. It showed that Nasrallah, for all his arrogance, is just a man—a man who can be broken, humiliated, and reduced to tears. This is the ultimate humiliation for a leader who has built his reputation on the myth of invincibility.

Congratulations, Nasrallah—you’ve shown the world that even the most fearsome resistance leaders can be reduced to weeping figures when faced with the might of their enemies. Bravo. Truly, a performance for the ages.

Jalal Tagreeb
Former imam

The triple-death of Hassan Nasrallah and the lessons for Israel

I find myself in agreement with Armin Navabi and Susanna of Atheist Republic on the significance of Nasrallah’s children’s dramatic revelation of their father’s state of mind after the string of humiliations Israel had inflicted on Hezbollah. Contrary to Navabi (and Tagreeb), however, I question the efficacy of holding up such humiliations to teach Muslims the error of their ways. Both Navabi and Tagreeb, each in his own way, show the futility of proving to Muslims determined to die killing, that “See? This is what happens when…”

Navabi, though, is onto something when he says:

1. Your God didn’t save you. Your God didn’t even give you hope. This man was broken,… his God is supposed to keep him strong. He didn’t.
2. He died inside before dying, and then he really died, and now, because we all know this, his legacy died as well.
3. This looks like a defeat, because you are off this world, so you don’t understand. That’s why we are the victorious ones.
4. What you’re witnessing here is the key to toppling the Islamic Republic in Tehran: …the people within the regime in Iran turning on themselves.

I would like to respond to each of these points in turn:

1. 1446 years and still only humiliation

As gods go, Allah is a serious loser, and it takes a particular kind of messed-up psyche to stick with a god like this for 1446 years. Gods impose order on chaos (leaving aside everything else). In most cases, gods impose order on a people at the expense of their own transgressors. Allah, though, imposes order on Muslims, initially at the expense of everyone else, and ultimately at the expense of Muslims themselves, all Muslims.

Whether they kill or cover for the killers, all Muslims are obligated to hate all non-Muslims with such a depth as to maintain the system of killing and plundering the unbelievers, or at the very least, identifying with doing so. The result, at the most visceral level, what would normally be empathy towards fellow humans becomes empathy towards Muslims only. This is the first way in which Allah stunts a Muslim’s humanity.

As he does to hate, so he does to love. Both these emotions a perverted in the Muslim. Allah obligates Muslims to love only “Allah and his messenger,” all other love, parental, sexual, fraternal, etc., is to be through love for Allah and his messenger. Ultimately, the Muslim must be ready to submit both his love of life, and his love of his own life, to his love of Allah and his messenger. The ideal Muslim is thus a miserable creature devoid of all spark, all joy, all adventure, unless these are for the sake of Allah, and everywhere they conquer is reduced to wastelands of violence, ignorance and ruin. And to top all that, Allah commands his already thoroughly-swindled ummah to have patience. 1446 years later, they still cling to being “the best of people”.

All this amounts to self-torture and the Shi’a demonstrate the most extreme form of this psychic decay, encapsulated in Navabi’s, “Your God didn’t save you. Your God didn’t even give you hope. This man was broken,… his God is supposed to keep him strong. He didn’t.” So much for Allahu-akbar.

2. When you love death, then something in life must be a fate worse than death

In the honour-shame culture of Muslims, that fate worse than death is humiliation. As Navabi points out, Hassan Nasrallah died three times over. Firstly, his humiliation was so extreme that it sucked all life out of him. He remained animate enough only to drown in his humiliation.

Secondly, and consequently, there was nothing glorious in the manner of his physical death. He died, as Tagreeb pointed out elsewhere, like a rat in the sewers, hiding underground, rather than facing the enemy in battle, as did Hussein. His followers were still able to cope with this by weeping at shrines, although the mosques and shrines were by then full of heroic fighters missing eyes, hands and I forget what else. The humiliation of the Shi’a after the death of Nasrallah was severe, their sense of self destroyed, given their being by definition, as Navabi explained, the people who can never lose.

Thirdly, through their sobs, the Shi’a would still have been able to convince themselves that their leader had resisted stoically to the end. None less than Nasrallah’s adult children themselves, people with impeccable credentials, disclosed not only to the Shi’a, but to the world, including the enemies who had killed him, that humiliation had killed him two months before his physical death, thereby denying them even the possibility of keeping Nasrallah alive in their hearts. The Shi’a are, indeed, the hardest Muslims to kill.

3. When your invincibility becomes your vulnerability

The fail-safe mechanism built into the Shi’a psyche, Navabi describes thus: “This looks like a defeat, because you are of this world, so you don’t understand. That’s why we are the victorious ones.” In other words, not be victorious is to become someone “of this world”, someone who “does not understand”, someone who is no longer Shi’a. This means that their enemy only has to avoid defeat for the Shi’a to to be thrown into crisis. Beyond this point, they can be defeated by psychological warfare alone. This is the state of the Shi’a since Nasrallah’s children spoke.

And in this context, one must ask, as do Susanna and Navabi, why did Nasrallah’s children disclose this information? It is implausible that they would have taken such a step on their own initiative. Not only “the higher-ups in Hezbollah,” but, we contend, the higher-ups in Iran would be behind this. The Iranians have just instructed the Houthis to de-escalate. The problem ones here is Hamas. Although they lack the Shi’a invincibility circuit, the Iranians have indulged them for too long. They cannot tell when the game is up.

The Iranian regime has been forced to accept that they lack the wherewithal to intimidate Israel, and an order for an invincible force to stand down has to be extremely carefully handled. The members of such a force, quite reasonably, would question the motives of a Supreme Leader who capitulates. Shari’a has very strict rules about such things.

The body language of the Nasrallah siblings is far too composed, and the forum far too public, for every detail not to have been cleared beforehand. The exchange between the siblings is far too coherent, cohesive and levelly delivered for it not to have been scripted and rehearsed. Yet they talked as if they were sharing such intimate family information between them for the first time. Had they been interviewed by a third person, it would not have seemed quite so contrived.

4. Topple the Shi’a, topple the regime

Unsurprisingly, Navabi’s instincts on Iran are sharp, but his perspective on Israel has room for development. As much thought and intuition as had gone into understanding the Shi’a, needs to go into understanding Israel. Certainly, support for Israel against her enemies would be the natural place for an ex-Muslim to start, but to be able to make sense of and significantly contribute required that the internal dynamics of Israel be understood.

Navabi’s sharp instinct for the Shi’a and Iran delivered, “What you’re witnessing here is the key to toppling the Islamic Republic in Tehran: …the people within the regime in Iran turning on themselves.” He might be surprised to learn how few Israelis appreciate this, and of those who do, how many would want to see this done. Granted, since October 7, many more Israelis are ready to go in there and do what needs to be done to defeat their enemies. But how many of them know their enemy well enough to know what will actually defeat their enemy, as opposed to what they imagine would defeat their enemy?

I would wager that barely a handful of Israelis would see in the Nasrallah siblings’ disclosure, “the key to toppling the Islamic Republic in Tehran.” There are people working very hard at changing the Jews’ perspective on their Muslim enemies, but this is hard work not infrequently meeting with rejection from Jews. It is a powerful society, yet racked with complex inner strains, including more than one that would see Israel destroyed sooner that Khamenei would.

Since Oslo, Israel’s military strategists have been one-dimensional technocrats with a political agenda—one dogmatic political agenda: the “two-state solution,” which they expected the government to carry out, whichever government it was. Military leaders deliberately degraded the IDF so it would be unable to defeat the Palestinians. This is why the statement, “your intelligence operations and your country’s army broke the man,” is an oversimplification, to say the least. The head of the army and the head of intelligence opposed the pager operation and much else besides that directly benefitted the war effort.

Although this sorry state is now changing, and not a moment too soon, we are far from Israelis not needing to be told that Nasrallah’s children doing what they did is “the key to toppling the Islamic Republic in Tehran,” and that the surest way of bringing that about is to psychologically manipulate “the people within the regime to turn on themselves.” One of several ways of doing that would be for Israel to formally annex South Lebanon, even if only a small part of it. That would immediately negate forty years of Hezbollah existence and turn the people within the regime on themselves.

Editor

Picture credit:

khamenei.ir

Thank you to Jalal Tagreeb for his commentary. The next that you are invited to write a commentary on is the article “After the Bibas mother and boys atrocity, who supports Hamas out loud?” by Steve Apfel. Deadline: Thursday 27 March. This will be the final part on our Ramadan 1446 series.