Veteran journalist Reese Erlich, author of The Iran Agenda, Dateline Havana, and the forthcoming Conversations with Terrorists, has a new piece up over at CommonDreams.org today about recently-deceased Lebanese ayatollah Sayyed Mohammed Fadlallah.

Fadlallah’s name, unfamiliar to the general public in the United States, is now making the rounds in the U.S. media in connection with the story of CNN firing its senior Middle Eastern editor, Octavia Nasr, over a Twitter post expressing sympathy for his passing.

Erlich interviewed Fadlallah personally for a chapter in Conversations with Terrorists, and sheds some light on the man for the rest of us:

Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammed Fadlallah, often characterized in western media as the “spiritual adviser to Hezbollah,” died of natural causes in Beirut this week at the age of 75. Many western leaders considered him a terrorist.

I’ve met Ayatollah Fadlallah, and he was no terrorist.

The CIA and other intelligence agencies tried to murder Fadlallah several times in the 1980s because they mistakenly thought he was responsible for the bombings of the US Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. But Fadlallah’s survival only enhanced his reputation.

Apparently his aura continues to haunt the West. On July 7 Octavia Nasr, CNN Senior Editor for Middle East Affairs, sent out a tweet that she had “respect” for him and was “sad” about his passing. That was enough to get her fired.

Fadlallah held views with which I strongly disagreed. But dismissing him and other Middle East leaders as terrorists only makes solving problems more difficult. So far President Obama continues the same wrong-headed policies as his predecessors.

I interviewed Ayatollah Fadlallah in Beirut at the end of 2008. I had traveled to the region with actor/writer Peter Coyote to research an article that appeared in Vanity Fair. Fadlallah welcomed us to his compound in west Beirut.

The entire article is well worth a read for its valuable clarifications of the complexities surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the numerous actors involved.