:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/thenational/WM4VTJVTT5G2NBHAVNY4AFST4I.jpg)
Beirut bombing victims and their families deserve support and justice. Congress must do the right thing
FOX NewsNov 25, 2022
The Facts
On Wednesday, a US federal judge ordered that Iran's central bank and a European intermediary must pay out $1.68B to the family members of soldiers killed in the 1983 bombing of a US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.
New York District Judge Loretta Preska said that a 2019 federal law denied Bank Markazi, Iran's central bank, sovereign immunity from the lawsuit. This is intended to enforce a ruling against Iran for providing material support to the bombing's perpetrators.
The Spin
Pro-establishment narrative
The victims of this terrible terrorist attack deserve every bit of compensation that can be legally granted to them. The US deployed to Lebanon to protect Lebanese citizens and Palestinian refugees in the country, but Iran cynically used the US presence to its advantage by attacking the Marine barracks via one of its proxy militias. The victims and their families deserve justice.
Establishment-critical narrative
Though the media often say that Hezbollah was behind the Marine barracks bombing, in reality, we may never know who exactly committed the attack. Lebanon was in a full-scale civil war with a myriad of different factions and armed groups fighting nationwide. Hezbollah didn't even exist in 1983 — the group was still forming in the wake of Israel's brutal occupation of the south.
