Graduating Hezbollah Mahdi Scouts saluting during a graduation ceremony in August in Lebanon. Affiliations with Hezbollah can start young and touch all parts of daily life. (Bryan Denton for The New York Times)From International Herald Tribune:
RIYAQ, Lebanon: On a Bekaa Valley playing field gilded by late-afternoon sun, hundreds of young men wearing Boy Scout-like uniforms and kerchiefs stand rigidly at attention as a military band plays, its marchers bearing aloft the distinctive yellow banner of Hezbollah, the militant Shiite movement.
They are adolescents - 17- or 18-year-old - but they have the stern faces of adult men, lightly bearded, some of them with dark spots in the center of their foreheads from bowing down in prayer. Each wears a tiny picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Shiite cleric who led the Iranian revolution in 1979, on his chest.
"You are our leader!" the boys chant in unison, as a Hezbollah official walks to a podium and addresses them with a Koranic invocation. "We are your men!"
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My Comment: This reminds me of the Hitler Youth, and on how they were indoctrinated to obey and worship the Fuhrer and the Fatherland. This Hezbollah organization is nothing like the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts that exist in the U.S.