Amid Oil Price Drop, Hezbollah To Hold Bake Sale

The event will take place in the schoolyard of the Imad Mughniyah Primary School in the Dahiyeh neighborhood, between the hours of 4 and 6 pm.

Beirut, January 27 – A nearly 50-percent plunge in the price of crude oil over the course of three months now threatens the liberality with which Iran has showered support on its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, and the Shiite political party and militia plans to conduct a sale of homemade cookies and cakes to help offset the anticipated shortfall in funding.

Oil went from more than 80 US dollars per barrel in November to just over 45 this week, thanks in part to advanced oil-extraction technologies in the US that has allowed American production to overtake even the oil-rich OPEC states and break their near-monopoly and control of prices. Now that the cartel can no longer dictate global prices for the commodity, supply and demand play a much larger role in determining the per-barrel figure. As a result, nations that have long relied on exports of oil to fund their economies – and their foreign policy – must now contend with severe cuts to their revenue. Many analysts already see Iran becoming more austere in its support for Hezbollah, as the Persian economy suffers from the dual blows of plummeting oil revenues and the economic sanctions aimed at halting or impeding the country’s nuclear weapons program.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah told an assembly of followers yesterday that the movement would hold a bake sale on the fourth of February. The event will take place in the schoolyard of the Imad Mughniyah Primary School in the Dahiyeh neighborhood, between the hours of 4 and 6 pm. Nasrallah invited the wives, mothers, and daughters of school personnel and students to prepare at least four items each of baked goods to sell that day, with the proceeds going to help support the Resistance and its ongoing operations against the Islamic State, The Nusra Front, the Free Syrian Army, Israel, and the movement’s own rivals within Lebanon.

“Brothers and sisters, it is the sacred duty of all Muslims to raise funds for Allah’s own fight,” Nasrallah told his followers. “Allah needs your cakes, your biscuits, your cookies, your tortes, your pies, your chiffons, and your whatever those things are with the pastry dough rolled around a sweet filling. Rugelach? Something like that.”

The upcoming bake sale will be Hezbollah’s first. In 2006 the organization held a rummage sale to help clear space for an anticipated batch of rockets from Iran, but that event proved only a mixed success at best, since the storage depots were inconveniently scattered throughout Beirut in various residential buildings. This time, say the organizers, the single venue will make managing the sale easier, and bring in more potential customers.

Several details of the bake sale remain to be finalized. Among the unresolved questions is how much support from the movement itself is appropriate for the event. While one faction in the leadership thinks the community-building aspect of the sale should remain its primary focus, a small but powerful and vocal minority believes profit trumps those concerns. As such, they are arguing that the sale should also have a booth or two selling some of the drugs that the movement grows in the Bekaa Valley instead of allocating them directly for export.