I was in Lebanon for a month last summer, tracking down some “long-lost” (more like long-ignored) relatives in the mountains near Bcharre, the stronghold of the right-wing militant Christian Phalange party.

A friend and I were hiking the Lebanon Mountain Trail, and Bcharre was a stop on the route. But it was so hot — 43 degrees every day — that after finding my old ancestral home (and getting a refreshingly cold shoulder from those weird suspicious people I’m supposed to call cousins), we decided to abandon the trail and cross the Lebanon into the Bekaa Valley to visit Baalbek, the ancient Roman temple site.

It’s an amazing thing: a vast ruin (vast), spectacularly well preserved, Rome’s late attempt to persuade the local pagans not to accept Christianity — before they caved in to it themselves. The Temple of Jupiter has the largest Roman columns in the world, and the Temple of Bacchus has barely decayed at all, and is huge and gorgeous and generally awesome. It’s a World Heritage Site, for obvious reasons, and it’s all stuck out in the desert, halfway to Syria, in a scrabbly, middle-of-nowhere spot peopled largely by grape-growers and guys who sell cheap sunglasses.

The Bekaa Valley is also unofficial HQ, we discovered, to Hezbollah. The Israelis bombed the shit out of it in 2006, apparently destroying 20 percent of the buildings in the town of Baalbek (though leaving the temple site untouched). It’s a predominantly Muslim town/area, with a fair number of Syrians and lots of billboards of Hassan Nasrallah smiling and shaking hands with Bashir Assad, the Syrian president (or as Christopher Hitchens calls him, da capo). Yellow-and-green Hezbollah flags line the roads. But my friend and I didn’t realize the extent of Hezbollah’s presence until we emerged from our tour of the Baalbek ruins.

Right next to the exit to the museum, across from the ticket booth, and directly abutting one of the ancient Roman temple walls, is what I can only think to describe as a kind of walk-through Hezbollah museum pavilion funfair. There’s a huge poster of Nasrallah holding a rocket launcher with the words “If you come back, we will come back” (you being Israel). Inside, Hezbollah museum attendants smile and point you in the right direction. You go through these simulated military tunnels, with life-size papier-mch soldiers holding rockets and guns and crouching behind barbed wire. Photos of martyrs line the tunnels, which are lit by strings of supermarket fairy lights. There’s a room with a huge papier-mch statue of a Hezbollah fighter and, along the walls, photos of Stars of David burning. There’s an “Islamic Resistance Command Centre”, according to a laser-printed sheet of A4 paper taped to a pillar, which consists of a desk, a chair, an old rotary phone, and a map of the Middle East tacked to the wall behind it. In a long gallery, some crack Hezbollah computer whiz has badly Photoshopped a series of images, such as an Israeli battleship with a crosshairs on it, or a gigantic bomb with a Star of David printed next to the words MADE IN USA. Everywhere are images of Lebanese dying and Stars of David on fire.

The whole thing takes a couple of minutes to walk through. There were a lot of tourists and families present, with parents encouraging their kids to climb over sandbags and pose next to mortars. At the end, there’s a gift shop. Hezbollah balloons and bumper stickers are free; it’s about 5,000LL (something like $3.50) to buy copies of Hezbollah CDs (music best described as emo-military) or a badly modified Hezbollah version of Counterstrike, which doesn’t work on my reasonably modern laptop and is overrun with viruses. In general, it’s a Lynchian mind-scramble, like Ikea if it sold hatred instead of Malm sidetables.

The thing that struck me afterward, in my entrenched cynicism, is how bad a PR move this is for Hezbollah. A lot of Lebanese of various faiths confided in me over the course of my month-long stay that they’d developed a newfound respect for Hezbollah’s stand in 2006 – not only for a band of dudes with handheld rocket launchers hiding in bushes to last a month against the American-equipped IDF, but to drive them back over the UN-demarcated border and prompt a wave of self-recrimination in Israel.

Hezbollah’s also done a lot of humanitarian work in southern Lebanon, a deprived area with no tourism or real economy to speak of, and a place that always takes the brunt when Israel invades. Hitchens isn’t the only one to have pointed out, of course, that Hezbollah bears some responsibility for provoking such invasions. Nevertheless, Hezbollah have built hospitals and schools while the government turns a blind eye, and helped a lot of poor Muslim families stay alive in hard times. International NGOs were starting to talk about Hezbollah in new, softened terms. Hezbollah MPs were functioning in Lebanese parliament without acting too insane. And because Israel hasn’t been making itself many friends with its policies in the West Bank since 2000, people were starting to think warmer, fuzzier thoughts about “the resistance”, as Hezbollah was starting to become known.

The Hezbollah pavilion undermines this image so thoroughly it’s scary to realize they think it’s a good idea. A lot of Americans and Europeans visit the Baalbek World Heritage site; even the most anti-Israel of them would have to conclude that what Hezbollah really wants to foster is blind rage. The museum feels like an anti-semitic propaganda revue put together by 11-year-olds. It’s an unthinking, uncaring display of vicious intolerance and shameless mythmaking, funded by Syria and/or Iran (it’s an expensive display, and Baalbek is a poor town) to further those countries’ own interests by destabilizing Israel. Rather than playing up their humanitarian work, which persuaded many global media outlets to downgrade them from terrorist nutjobs to resistance movement, Hezbollah has decided to re-brand themselves as war cry-screaming manboys who’ve learned their cherry bombs are real.

Maybe they know something I don’t. Maybe hatred of Israel is such an effective recruitment technique that there’s no point emphasizing anything else. Maybe they think they’re being canny, playing up their violent nature to scare their foes. My feeling is that by listening to Iran, their patrons, whose top priority is to make sure Lebanon is thorn in Israel’s side, Hezbollah has squandered an opportunity to put a human face on the plight of the impoverished south Lebanese, by building papier-mch faces contorted in rage instead.