Ibrahim Mousawi

Who is Ibrahim Mousawi?

Ibrahim Mousawi is a Lebanese journalist and Hezbollah media relations officer.

He was born in 1965 to a family from Baalbek and grew up in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Mousawi is shiite. He has two BAs in Journalism and English literature from the Lebanese University and has worked as a head master at secondary schools. Mousawi is editor of the weekly Hezbollah newspaper al-Intiqad in Beirut. He has been quoted as a Hezbollah spokesman since at least 1998.

He joined the Hezbollah TV station Al Manar, which practices partisan journalism and does not include Israeli officials in its broadcasts. According to Mousawi because "It [Israel] is an enemy state," and "why would you put spokesmen for an enemy state on the air?" He hosted a political talk show and worked as editor-in-chief of foreign news at Al Manar. In an article for the Daily Star in 2002, Mousawi explained the religious basis for suicide attacks in a fatwa of Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in the New Yorker magazine that Mousawi had confided to him that "Jews are a lesion on the forehead of history." When Al-Manar was banned from French satellite TV for airing a 29-part Ramadan special Ash-Shatat during October–November 2003, which featured the "Blood libel against Jews" and quoted extensively from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mousawi said the ban resulted from "political pressure by the Jewish lobby". He earned his MA in Political Science from the American University of Beirut in 2003.