Much to their chagrin, Hizbullah's jihad culture is no longer giving them "divine victory", but sprouting Arab enemies.
Not far from where they once fought the Israeli occupiers, a pseudo Sheikh and Nasrallah wannabe declared it was the religious duty of every "Muslim" (read: every Sunni) to enter into Syria to wage jihad, and help them "defend" Syrians against Hizbullah's own jihad there.
Hizbullah might not think much of this challenger. But the irony should not be lost on anyone. "Defense" has always been the name of their game. They had branded themselves as a "resistance" engaged in "defending" against enemies from a different creed.
The events in Syria have reduced them into their essence: a militia taking orders from another state and selling them as "jihad".
One wonders if it had entered their calculations that one day, this "jihad" will backfire. That the very people they claimed to defend against the far enemy would rise against them, using the same method.
And one wonders if, when they lent a hand to al-Qaeda in the 1990s, to help them find their legs as they fought a common enemy, they thought that this very force will one day revert to seeing them as nothing but "rafidah".
As the Assad regime implodes, so is the concept of jihad. And as the Arab spring slowly shows Arabs in Egypt and Tunisia that theocracy is the way backward, not forward, the people of the Levant, with a little help from Jabhat al-Nusra, Hizbullah and their copycats, will begin to see jihad for what it's always been: a destructive force that catapults them backward.
In 2006, a singer called Julia Boutros turned a Nasrallah speech into a music video showing children morphing into fighters.
Those fighters are now dying in Syria, fighting other Arabs.
This must not have been the future Julia and Nasrallah had envisioned. But it is the result of the jihad and death culture they popularized.
That Hizbullah is getting a taste of its own medicine. That Iran is having to explain how it could both harbor al-Qaeda at home and fight them abroad. That the Assad regime, which spent decades cultivating and nourishing extremists to use as cards against their foes, is now having to hide in the very holes it once buried people in, for fear of getting blown up to pieces. That all this is happening is very, very ironic.
The other irony is Lebanon's role in all of this. The country, it seems, is turning from a stage for world conflicts, into a player in an inter-jihadist conflict, fielding fighters and weapons to feed warring parties.
It's a lose-lose situation for everyone involved. But, and in many ways, it's "jihad" blowing up in the faces of those who thought it could deliver them a better future.
Tough times are ahead. But as comedian Bassem Youssef said, "theocracy is like measles, you need to get it once to get immunity for life".
