The UFO Phenomenon Part 3
After
Crowley had moved to California, in the words of Francis King, “for the next
ten years [until Crowley’s death in
1947] California was the main center of
OTO activity.”58 Parsons became obsessed with The Book of the Law, and
began a regular correspondence with
Crowley, referring to him as “Most Beloved Father” and himself as “Thy
son, John.” 59
Likewise,
Crowley claimed in 1919 to have contacted an extraterrestrial named Lam,
connected to the Sirius and Andromeda
star system, and the sketch he produced of it is a crude version of the iconic
“greys” that have now come to be associated with alien contact. Picknett and
Prince say that when the “ flying saucer” craze began in 1947, Parsons stated that the “discs” would “help to
convert the world to Crowley’s magic religion.”60
Parsons met L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology in 1945 and introduced him to
the OTO, though Hubbard claimed he joined the order as part
of an infiltration assignment on behalf of
the Office
of Naval Intelligence. 61 When Jack met
Hubbard, he described him to Crowley as “the most Thelemic person I have
ever met.” 62 Jack also noted about him to
Crowley, “although he has no formal training in Magick, he has an
extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in
the field.” 63 Together, beginning in
1946, they started the “Babalon Working,” a series of rituals designed to
manifest an individual incarnation of the archetypal divine feminine called Babalon,
in reference to the Babylonian goddess
Ishtar, related to the Canaanite
Astarte, and with the “Great Whore” of the Book of Revelation. During the ceremony, Hubbard
acted as a scribe. When rituals were complete, Parson met Marjorie Cameron whom he regarded as the creation of
the ritual and considered her his
“Scarlet
Woman.” They soon began the next stage of the series, an attempt to conceive a
child through sexual magic. Parsons wanted to create a Moonchild, as outlined
in Crowley’s occult novel by the same
name. 64 Although no child was conceived,
Parsons and Cameron soon married. By 1952, Parsons referred to himself as Belarion
Armiluss Al Dajjal Antichrist, “Al Dajjal” being the Islamic name for the
Antichrist.
As noted by Nikolas & Zeena Schreck,
authors of Demons of the Flesh, “in many ways
Scientology can be considered the most successful organizational offshoot
of the Great Beast’s work, having achieved a world standing and impact the
various OTOs and other Crowleyan derivatives have not been.” 65 Hubbard also
personally offered his Dianetics
training to the ubiquitous Aldous
Huxley. When Hubbard formulated
Dianetics, he described it as “a mix of Western technology and Oriental
philosophy.”66 According to Hubbard, Dianetics “forms a bridge between” Cybernetics and General Semantics, a set of ideas about
education originated by Alfred Korzybski,
which received much attention in the
science fiction world in the 1940s. 67
Scientology has been included among the list
of UFO religions in UFO Religions by Christopher Partridge, The
Encyclopedic Sourcebook of UFO Religions
by James R. Lewis, and UFO Religion:
Inside Flying Saucer Cults and Cultureby Gregory Reece. From the early 1950s
onwards, Hubbard, started describing what he called a “space opera.” 75 million
years ago in an event known as “Incident II,” Xenu, the dictator of the “Galactic
Confederacy,” brought billions of his people to Earth in a spacecraft, stacked
them around volcanoes and killed them using hydrogen bombs. The spirits of
these people were then captured by Xenu and mass implanted with numerous
suggestions and then “packaged” into clusters of spirits. Offi cial
Scientology scriptures hold that the essences of these many people remained,
and that they form around people in modern times, causing them spiritual harm.
Scientology also teaches that all humans have
experienced a great number of past lives, including one in ancient advanced extraterrestrial
societies, such as Helatrobus and the Marcabians. However, according to
Hubbard, when thetans (human beings) die they go to a “landing station” on the
planet Venus, where they are
re-implanted and are programmed to “forget” their previous lives. The Venusians
then “capsule” each thetan and send them back to Earth to be dropped into the
ocean off the coast of California, after which each thetan searches for a new
body to inhabit.
Within the Church of Scientology, the Xenu story is part of its
secret “Advanced Technology,” normally only shared with members who have contributed substantial sums of money. Officials of the Church of Scientology widely deny or try to hide the
Xenu story and have gone to great lengths to suppress it, including legal
action. Nevertheless, much material on Xenu has leaked to the public via court
documents, and copies of Hubbard’s notes.
In the late 1940s, with Jack Parsons was already corresponding with Anton Szandor
Lavey, who went on to found the Church of Satan on Walpurgisnacht, April 30,
1966. LaVey (originally Levy) first worked in the circus, carnival
and burlesque houses as a lion tamer and musician and became deeply interested
in the occult, and ordered several of
Crowley’s works from Jack
Parsons. LaVey ’s main ritual
imitated the Black Mass of seventeenth-century France, as a form of psychodrama involving a
nude female altar, black candles and polluted sacraments. The blasphemies of the Templar s were
glorifiedi“The Ceremony of Stifling Air.”
Another ritual “Das
Tierdrama” allegedly borrowed from the Illuminati, celebrated the animal nature of
man. LaVey also incorporated Influences from Nietzsche,
Ayn Rand, Crowley, H. L. Mencken,
and Jack London, and was also drawn to
the aura of evil around the Third Reich.
The Church of Satan’s “Law of the
Trapezoid” was prefaced by the Nazi
anthem Germany Awakewritten by Dietrich
Eckart, alongside references to the
Vril, Thule, and Ahnenerbe.
In 1975, Michael A. Aquino, a major in the US Army Reserve, took the
majority of the Church of Satan’s membership into his new religious organization
called the Temple of Set, dedicated to
Set, the ancient Egyptian god of darkness and chaos, sometimes interchangeable
with the dying-godOsiris, and regarded
by Crowley’s disciple, Kenneth Grant,
as Sirius. Crowley, relates Grant, “unequivocally identifies his Holy Guardian Angel with Sothis (Sirius), or Set- Isis.” 48 Grant claimed that
Lam was one of H. P. Lovecraft’s Great
Old One, who has the task of uniting the current that emanates from the Andromeda galaxy with the current that flows from
Sirius. Likewise, Aquino had also composed a “Call to Cthulhu” ritual before he
left the Church of Satan, and adopted aspects of Lovecraft’s
mythos. Aquino devised the “Ceremony of the Nine Angles,” which includes an
evocation of Lovecraft’s deities, Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep and
Shub-Niggurath.
Aquino’s cult offered a more occult form of Satanism than the theatrical posturing of
the Church of Satan. While
LaVey saw Satan as a symbol of rebellion
against Christian piety, Aquino believed
in the devil to be a real being. The theurgic rituals of the Temple of Set invoked the Prince of Darkness
and on 21 June, 1975, Aquino supposedly
received a direct revelation from Satan,
later published as The Book of Coming Forth by Night(1985). In the book, Satan identified himself as Set,
presented the twentieth
century as the beginning of a new
satanic dispensation and included Crowley’s
prophecy of a new Age of Horus, marked by power politics and mass destruction.
50 Impressed by the power and conquests of the
Third Reich, Aquino also dabbled
in Nazi occultism, regarding
Heinrich Himmler as a satanic initiate.
The New Religious Movements, by Eugene V. Gallagher,
relates that Aquino became embroiled in
several controversies starting in 1986. He and his wife Lilith were implicated
in suspicions of child molestation at the day care center at the Presidio Army
base in San Francisco, but were never charged. 54 In 1994, he sued Linda Blood,
a former member of the Temple of Set,
for libel in her book The New Satanist,
which made claims that the temple was part of the nationwide Satanic conspiracy
that was molesting children and committing murders. The book depicted Aquino and his followers as “pedophiles,
child abusers, murderers and the masterminds behind a nationwide satanic
conspiracy.”55 The case was settled
out of court, with details of the
settlement kept confidential.
Jihad & The New Left Part 1
Despite perceptions to the contrary, Islam is
not a revolutionary ideology. Nevertheless, Islam’s purported tendency to violence
has contributed to one of the major misconceptions which has led to popular
rejection of religion in the West, which is that it “has caused most of the
wars in history.” However, in their recently published book, Encyclopedia of
Wars, Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded
warfare, and from a list of 1763 wars, only 123 have been classified to involve religion, accounting for less
than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare.
While it is estimated that approximately one to three million people were
killed during the Crusades, and perhaps 3,000 in the Inquisition, nearly 35
million soldiers and civilians died in WWI alone. In WWII, a total of 60
million people lost their lives, representing a 2.5% of the
world’s population. In both cases, these secular conflicts were fought—for the most
part—for the sake of “democracy” against “despotism.”
These tragedies were compounded by the fact
that the twentieth century has introduced a new level of brutality introduced
to conventional warfare: the deliberate targeting of civilians, a strategy
known as Total War, with the intent of demoralizing the enemy population into overthrowing
their government. The reality is, most wars are fought for secular or even
atheistic purposes, but when religion is the cause, it is merely used as a disguise
to hide the true intent, which is often greed and lust for power.
Contrary to the unfair characterization that
violence—and therefore terrorism—is inherent to Islam, terrorism was a
completely novel introduction to Islamic civilization, adopted at the end of
the twentieth century, in imitation of
the barbarous practices first developed in the West. The wave of terrorism
that began to be perpetrated in the name of Islam beginning in the 60s and 70s was actually an extension of the radical
politics which has its roots in the existentialist movement of Western philosophy through the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche. Despite
perceptions to the contrary, Islam is not a revolutionary religion. Islam
aspires to reforming society, with the ideal goal of implementing the Shar iah, but through
proselytism, which seeks democratic support, not violent overthrow. Rather,
late twentieth century Islamic terrorism was part of the wave of political
violence associated with support for Third World liberation movements of the
New Left.
The
New Left was particularly
influenced by the
Frankfurt School. Following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Frankfurt School left Germany for Geneva
before moving to New York in 1935, where
it became affiliated with the
University in Exile of the New School. The New School had founded the
University in Exile in 1933, with financial contributions from
the Rockefeller Foundation, to
be a haven for scholars dismissed from teaching positions by the Italian
fascists or Nazi Germany. The New School
has followed a tradition of synthesizing leftist American intellectual thought
and critical European philosophy, particularly the teachings of Aristotle, Leibniz, Spinoza,
Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard,
Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl,
Heidegger, Arendt, Freud,
Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Foucault, and
Derrida. The Critical Theory of the
Frankfurt School holds
an especially strong influence on
all divisions of the school.
As Frankfurt School historian Martin Jay
explains, “And so the International Institute for Social Research [ Frankfurt
School], as revolutionary and Marxist as
it had appeared in Frankfurt in the twenties, came to settle in the center of
the capitalist world, New York City.” 1
The seeds of the New Left were planted in the de-Stalinization
of the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev’s
February 1956 speech “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” and the
subsequent Hungarian Revolution of 1956 divided traditional Marxists. It was
this disillusionment with Soviet policy that gave rise to the New Left’s rejection of doctrinal Marxism, to seek sources for social change in
other than the workers. Many New Left
thinkers argued that since the Soviet Union
could no longer be considered the world center for proletarian revolution, new
revolutionary Communist thinkers had to be substituted in its place, such as Mao
Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro,
and other Third World liberation movements,
as struggles against capitalist imperialism, including Algeria’s war for independence and the plight
of the Palestinians.
The
Frankfurt School’s Herbert
Marcuse’s critiques of capitalist society resonated with the student
movement in the 1960s, and because of his willingness to speak at student
protests, he soon became known as “the father of the New Left in the United States.” Marcuse was also heavily indebted to Martin Heidegger,
but distanced himself from him following
Heidegger’s endorsement of Nazism.
During WWII Marcuse
first worked for the US
Office of War Information (OWI) on anti- Nazi
propaganda projects. But in 1943 he transferred to the OSS to conduct psychological warfare against
the Axis Powers. After the war, Marcuse
worked for the CIA until 1952, when he
was employed by the US Department of State as head of the Central European
section.1 Marcuse then worked at the
Russian Institute of Columbia University
in New York, funded by Rockefeller,
before he became a professor first at Columbia, Harvard, then Brandeis
from 1958 to
1965, and finally at the
University of California, San
Diego. His work heavily
influenced intellectual discourse on
popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies.
The
New Left, explained former British intelligence officer John Coleman, was
a creation of the Tavistock Institute,
through the agency of the Institute for Policy Studies ( IPS). 2 IPS was funded
by James Warburg, the son of Paul Warburg
who had been Allen Dulles’ assistant in
the OSS. It was founded in 1963 by
Marcus Raskin, aide to McGeorge Bundy
and president of the Ford Foundation,
and Richard Barnet, aide to John J.
McCloy.3 McGeorge Bundy was National Security Advisor to Presidents Kennedy and
Johnson from 1961 through 1966, and president of the Ford Foundation
from 1966 through 1979. He was also a member of the notorious Skull and Bones secret society at Yale, where
he was nicknamed “ Odin.” Raskin and Barnet, both highly trained Tavistock
Institute graduates, according to Coleman, controlled such diverse elements as
the Black Panthers, Daniel Ellsberg, National Security Council staff member
Halprin, the Weather Underground, the
Venceramos and the campaign staff of candidate George McGovern. 4
The
New Left upheld students and alienated minorities as the agents of social
change, replacing the traditional Marxist
approach of support of the general masses and the labor movement. That included
support for the Black Power movement and the protests against the Vietnam War. The hero to many of the young
members of the New Left was Bertrand Russell, who in early 1963, became
increasingly vocal about what he argued were near-genocidal policies of the US government in Vietnam.
The plight of the Palestinians was also a
popular cause among the New Left, one they shared with Muslim terrorists.
Criticism of America’s unconditional support for the on-going and brutal
occupation of Palestine by the Zionists is one of two fundamental justifications offered by terrorists of
the Muslim Brotherhood for their
actions. The second unresolved factor offered as justification for Islamic terrorism’s violent attacks
are the numerous
puppet
regimes installed in the Middle East,
through the assistance of Western powers, that succeeded the more direct control
of Western colonialism.
However, the violent methods employed by Middle
Eastern terrorists have no precedent in Islam, but were derived from Western
methods, which have their origin in Bakunin’s “
Propaganda of the Deed.” It was the
IRA who inspired the Zionist
Irgun’s tactic of attacking Arab communities, including the bombing of a crowded Arab market, which is considered among the first
examples of terrorism directed against
civilians. 5 The Zionist Irgun, which fought against the British
mandate in Palestine, was based on Revisionist
Zionism founded by Zeev Jabotinsky. According to Howard Sachar, “The policy
of the new organization was based squarely on
Jabotinsky’s teachings: every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only
active retaliation would deter the Arabs; only Jewish armed force would ensure
the Jewish state.” 6 Founded in 1931, the
Irgun sought to end British rule by assassinating police, capturing
British government buildings and arms, and sabotaging British railways. Irgun’s most notorious attack was the 1946
bombing of the King David Hotel in
Jerusalem, parts of which housed the headquarters of the British civil
and military administrations. Ninety-one people were killed and forty-six
injured, marking it as one of the most deadly attacks of the Mandate era. After
the creation of Israel in 1948, Menachem
Begin, who had been the Irgun leader
from 1943 to 1948, transformed the group into the political party which later
became part of Likud.
From that point forward, acts of terrorism became
associated with struggles against colonialism. After World War II, largely successful
anti-colonial campaigns were launched against the collapsing European empires
as many World War II resistance groups became militantly anti-colonial. In the
1960s, inspired by Mao’s Chinese revolution of 1949 and Castro’s Cuban
revolution of 1959, national independence movements in formerly colonized
countries often fused nationalist and socialist platforms in the 1960s. Arguments
for anticolonialist struggle were often based on the existentialist
philosophies of men like Martin
Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, and
Frantz Fanon. Heidegger, despite his support of the Nazis, helped shape several generations of
European leftists and was the founder of
Postmodernism. Heidegger argued that, in order to escape the yoke of
Western capitalism and the “idle
chatter” of constitutional democracy, the “people” would have to return to
their primordial destiny through an act
of violent revolutionary “resolve.” 7 As Walter Newell described in
“Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left”:
Heidegger saw in the Nazis just this return to the blood-and-soil
heritage of the authentic German people. Paradoxically, the Nazis embraced technology at its most
advanced to shatter the iron cage of modernity and bring back the purity of the
distant past. And they embraced terror and violence to push beyond the modern
present—hence the term “postmodern”—and vault the people back before modernity,
with its individual liberties and market economy, to the imagined collective
austerity of the feudal age. 8
In
France, there is a very long and particular history of reading and interpreting Heidegger’s work, exemplifi ed by
Sartre and other existentialists, as well
as by thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Alexandre Kojève and
Georges Bataille. Jean-Paul
Sartre was one of the key figures in the rise of twentieth
century existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s mother,
Anne-Marie Schweitzer was the first cousin
of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer.
Sartre established a long-term romantic relationship with Simone de
Beauvoir, a noted philosopher, writer, and feminist, and together they
challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their
upbringings, which they considered “bourgeois.”
In 1939,
Sartre was drafted into the French army, but was captured by the Germans
in 1940. It was during this period of confinement that he read Heidegger’s Being
and Time, later to become a major influence on
his own Being and Nothingness. After being released for poor
health, he came back to Paris in May 1941, and participated in the founding of
the underground group Socialisme et Libertéwith de Beauvoir and others. After
1944 and the Liberation of Paris, he wrote Anti-Semite and Jew, in which he
tried to explain anti-Semitic hate.
Sartre became a very active contributor to Combat, a newspaper created
by Albert Camus who held similar beliefs.
Sartre and de Beauvoir remained friends with Camus until 1951, with the
publication of Camus’s The Rebel. Although
Sartre was criticized for lack of political commitment during the German
occupation, and his further struggles for liberty as an attempt to redeem
himself, according to Camus, Sartre was
a writer who resisted, not a resister who wrote.
Sartre was an important inspiration to the rise
of the New Left. Sartre embraced Marxism, but did not join the French
Communist Party (PCF), though he sympathized with their cause. A period of tension
followed between 1943 and 1952 as Sartre
disagreed with the PCF’s Stalinist interpretation of communism. It was during
that time that he established the fundamental principles of existentialism. Sartre then took a prominent role in the
struggle against French rule in Algeria.
He opposed the Vietnam War and, along
with Bertrand Russell and others, organized a tribunal intended to expose US
war crimes, which became known as the Russell Tribunal in 1967. Sartre went to Cuba in the 1960s to meet Fidel Castro and spoke with “Che” Guevara.
After Guevara’s death, Sartre would
declare him to be “not only an intellectual but also the most complete human
being of our age” and the “era’s most perfect man.”
Sartre chose to become a Marxist, not because he had any hope that the
revolution of the workers would succeed, but for the revolutionary cause itself. Sartre was influenced
by many aspects of Wester philosophy, adopting
ideas from Kant, Hegel,
Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger, among others. Perhaps the
most decisive influence on Sartre’s philosophical development was his
weekly attendance at Alexandre Kojève’s
seminars.9 Sartre is especially indebted to
Kojève’s innovative approach to
Heidegger’s philosophy of combining
Heideggerian and Marxist elements. As
Shadia Drury explains, “By reading Hegel through the lenses of Heidegger as well as Marx,
Kojève gave birth to that curious phenomenon known as existential Marxism, which is epitomized by the works of Sartre.” 10 Kojève inspired Sartre by placing particular
emphasis on terror as a necessary component of revolution. The fulfillment of
the End of History is “not possible without a Fight” he said.11 Building
on Hegel’s dialectic, Kojève perceived that the “slave,” to
overcome his “master,” must “introduce into himself the element of death” by
risking his life while being fully conscious of his mortality. As a result,
scholars describe Kojève as having a “terrorist conception of history.”12
As Kojève explains, philosophers are
less restrained by conventions and more capable of resorting to terror, and
other measures that may be deemed “criminal,” if such measures are effective in
accomplishing the desired end. 13
Sartre thought the best goals to pursue were
those that were unattainable. Man needs to constantly come to terms with his
existence by facing his own death and finality. That meant the acceptance of life without the existence of God. Every human encounter, he thought, is
an attempt by one party to affi rm one’s own humanity by dehumanizing the other
by subjugating him. Several of Sartre’s
writings dwell on the theme that “dirty hands” are necessary in politics, and
that a man with so-called “bourgeois” inhibitions about bloodshed cannot
usefully serve a revolutionary cause, and in some of his later writings suggested
that violence might even be a good thing in itself. Even though Sartre
joined Frantz Fanon in recommending socialist
revolution throughout the Third World,
it was merely because he believed that all-out struggle against the colonized
oppressors would be rewarding in itself because it would give the colonized a
taste of the humanity they lost. 14
Frantz
Fanon, the celebrated Martiniquo psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary, was Sartre’s friend and protégé. In The Wretched
of the Earth, published shortly before his death in 1961, Fanon defends the right for a colonized people
to use violence in their struggle for independence. Mirroring the thought
to Bakunin, Fanon from his perspective as a psychologist
believed that violence had a purgative power, where it was necessary for
colonized people to perpetrate acts of violence against the colonizers to free
themselves from their colonial mentality. He argued that since colonized people
have been dehumanized, they are not bound by humane principles towards their colonizers.
Both Fanon’s books established his fame
in much of the Third World, in
particular on Ali Shariati who inspired the
revolution in Iran, Steve Biko in South
Africa, Malcolm X in the US and Che Guevara in Cuba. His work was also a key
influence on the Black Panther Party. Barack Obama references Fanon
in his book, Dreams from My Father.
These Western revolutionary ideals were then
adapted by the ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood, and married to the religious
obligation of establishing a state based on
Shar iah, in other words, theocracy. Given the breadth of legal issues
covered by the Shar iah , there can be
no separation of “Church” and “State” in
Islam. Nevertheless, the Muslims’ desire to replace their corrupt
regimes with Islamic law as a system of government is presented by Western pundits
as a breach of Humanistic values, and an irrational pursuit contrary to the
more desirable adoption of Western-style secular democracy.
Bernard Lewis in his famous article “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” has
characterized the Muslims’ desire to establish Islamic states as merely the
result of a crisis of identity, arising from the collapse of Muslim institutions
in the face of Western dominance. The Muslims’ reaction is considered entirely
based on emotion and sentimentality for an abstract
idea of a glorious past. Lewis uses words like the Muslims finding their
decline of the Islamic world “incomprehensible,” or of contributing to a feeling
of “humiliation.” In other words, the Muslims’ desire to confront Western
imperialism is due to selfish feelings of hurt pride, not a sense of
altruism wherein they believe that Islam
can address the many problems their societies are facing.
In
other words, Muslims
are seen as responding
reflexively to external factors, instead of being sincerely
motivated. Criticisms such as these fail to account for the real possibility
that the Muslims’ resentment may in part be justified. As Robert Dreyfuss notes, “By blaming anti-Western
feeling in the Arab world on vast historical forces, Lewis absolved the West of
its neocolonial post- World War II oil
grab, its support for the creation of a
Zionist state on Arab territory,
and its ruthless backing of corrupt monarchies in Egypt , Iraq, Libya, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf.” 15 While Lewis
would tend to deny the validity of the
Islamists’ claims against the West, as noted by fellow neoconservative
Samuel Huntington in his controversial Clash of Civilizations, many of their
grievances are evidently legitimate:
Global political and security issues are
effectively settled by a directorate of
the United States, Britain and France,
world economic issues by a directorate of the United States, Germany and Japan,
all of which maintain extraordinarily close relations with each other to the
exclusion of lesser and largely non-Western countries. Decisions made at the UN
Security Council or in the
International Monetary Fund that reflect the interests of the West are presented to the world as
reflecting the desires of the world
community. The phrase “the world community” has become the euphemistic
collective noun (replacing “the Free World”) to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other Western powers. Through the IMF and other international economic
institutions, the West promotes its economic interests and imposes on other
nations the economic policies it thinks appropriate. In any poll of non-Western
peoples, the IMF undoubtedly would win the support of finance ministers and a few others,
but get an overwhelming unfavourable rating from just about everyone else, who
would agree with George Arbatov’s characterizations of IMF
officials as “neoBolsheviks who love expropriating
other people’s money, imposing undemocratic and alien rules of economic and
political conduct and Stifling economic freedom… The West in effect is using
international institutions, military power and economic resources to run the
world in ways that will maintain Western predominance, protect Western interests
and promote Western political and economic values… That at least is the way in
which non-Westerners see the new world, and there is a significant element of truth in their view. 16
Normally dismissed as “conspiracy theories,”
these are precisely the complaints that
Muslims are concerned about. Rightfully, Muslims regard themselves as
duty-bound to confront these injustices, and to suppress them through the
establishment of Islamic rule. And, by believing that Islam is the truth, a Muslim becomes
motivated to see its application, both in his own region, as well as throughout
the world. But while Bernard Lewis
suggests that it is due to a tendency within
Islam itself, the use of violence towards these ends is a novelty, not
found in the extensive legal history on the subject in Islam. The problem
confronting Muslims now, actually, is the question of how to bring about
societal reform in our time. In the absence of true leadership, both scholarly
and political, Muslims are faced with a unique challenge, for the
first time in
their 1300-year history. Regrettably,
instead of resorting to their
traditional legal heritage, terrorism
is the aberrant conclusion arrived at by the
Revivalists who reject that tradition, and who have instead improvised on
the breadth of the meaning of Jihadto
include violence against innocent civilians, failing to recognize that all such
acts are strictly proscribed by the Shariah. Rather, it is as historian Mansoor
Moaddel described, because Muslims have been distanced from their legal
tradition: it is not the lack of democratic theory, but the lack of procedural
rules in Islam that could be used to determine
when installing or rebelling against a ruler is justified and when consensus
can be used to settle a disputed matter of jurisprudence. 17
In other words, the problem is first the
British and then American support for
“reform” movements in the world of Islam
which have effectively distanced Muslims from their classical legal heritage, and
instead opened them up for deception by these newer, but unfounded, and often
aberrant, interpretations, which borrow from corruptive elements developed in the
West.
Essentially, by calling for the creation of an
Islamic state, the Muslim Brotherhood
has appealed to legitimate Muslim sentiments, but used them deceptively by
instead proposing they be sought through the adoption of Western methods
of terrorism. According to Gilles
Keppel:
To the vast numbers of malcontents in the Middle East, the West’s continued support for
authoritarian regimes in the region appeared clearly as bad faith. As an
alternative, Islamist ideology, presented as an indigenous political solution,
became increasingly appealing. Whatever its expression, whether moderate or
radical, conservative or revolutionary, peaceful or violent—even terrorist—Islamism
asserted its authenticity and altruism, its lack of concerns with anything but
the interests of the people from whom it had emerged, rather than those of
foreign powers or global oil producers. 18
Sayyed
Qutb was the primary architect of the militant philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood , and nearly all terrorism in the name of Islam, as a bastardization of the concept of
“ Jihad,” creating the pretext it employed to carry out acts of terror in the
service of Western imperial objectives.
Qutb was heavily influenced by
Ibn Taymiyyah and Abd al-Wahhab and thus reflected a
Salafi creed. 19 The two
most important ideas he proposed were Hakimiyya, which he adopted from Maududi,
and Jahiliyya. Like Abdul Wahhab, Qutb regarded the Ummahas having fallen into
Jahiliyya(paganism), which must be reconquered for Islam. Hakimiyyainvolved
regarding it a tenet of Islamic belief that God alone is the final legal authority, and
therefore that only Shariah can be adopted
as the basis of a state governing Muslims. Few Muslims would reject that
notion. But for Qutb, the adoption of any non-Islamic law represented an act of
apostasy, and therefore sanction the killing or overthrow of the errant leader.
Except,
Qutb’s “ Jihad” to bring about the implementation of the Shariah was closer to European ideas of
revolution and insurrection. In legal terminology, the legal pretext for terrorism against the state devised by Qutb was the pronouncement of Takfir , or
apostasy,against a ruler who fails to acknowledge the primacy of Hakimiyya . It
was therefore incumbent upon a Muslim to carry out “Jihad” against these apostate rulers.
And, because the Salafi tradition rejects classical Islamic scholarship, it was possible to
exploit the connotations
of the
word Jihadas armed struggle to justify
violence, sabotage, and other acts of subversion condoned by the European
fascists and misleadingly equated by the Islamofascists with “ Jihad.”
The legal precedents were found in Ibn
Taymiyyah who first proposed a Fatwa that sanctioned making
Takfir against “deviant” rulers. When the Mongols who ruled the Abbasid Empire
converted to Sunni Islam, it raised the difficult question of whether it was
still legitimate for Mamluk Muslim leaders of Egypt to wage Jihadagainst them. Ibn Taymiyyah ’s supposed
response was that the Mongols, by implementing “man made laws” (the Yasacode)
instead of Shariah , were in fact living
in a state of Jahiliyyah. Consequently
Jihadagainst such “Kuffar” (plural for Kafir) was not only allowed, but
obligatory, a ruling that went against the mainstream Sunni reluctance to
pronounce T a k fi ron other Muslims.
However, this purported Fatwaseems to derive
from a corruption of the text. It is known as the Mardin Fatwa, because it was issued in
Mardin, the region of Turkey where Ibn Taymiyyah was born. Two versions of the Fatwa
were recently discovered. One version of the wording states that the non-Muslim
rulers should be “killed,” while the other says “treated” as is due. This
change in meaning was the consequence of the substitution of two letters in a
single word, where the correct wording would be “Ya’mal” (treated) instead of
“Yaqa’tal” (killed). 20 The incorrect
version first makes its appearance in 1909, printed by Faraj Allah Zaki al Kurdi, a student who had
been expelled from Al Azhar at the insistence
of Rashid Rida for having converted to
the Bahai faith. 21 A subsequent edition by Sheikh Abdurahman al Qasima also replicated the error, after
which it attained widespread availability. Nevertheless, the Mardin Fatwawould continue to be used to justify
revolutionary violence in the name of
Islam.
Qutb’s idea of a revolutionary vanguard of militant
believers does not have an Islamic origin, but is referred to by Malise
Ruthven, in A Fury for God,as “a concept
imported from Europe, through a lineage that stretches back to the Jacobins,
through the Bolsheviks and latter-day Marxist guerrillas such as the Baader-Meinhof gang.” 22 As Gilles Keppel further
explains, “The political logic of the
9/11 masterminds carried on a tradition of military coups, through which many
Arab elites—first among
them Gamal Abdel Nasser and his comrades in Egypt in
1952—seized power. The Islamists simply substituted their religion-based
ideology for the socialism-tinged
nationalism that was in vogue in the
1950s and 1960s.” 23 As John Calvert explained in Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical
Islamism,“Although Qutb consciously
placed himself within the religious tradition that gave birth to the Sufi
oriented jihad of Ibn Yasin, his theorizing is close to Fanon’s and that of the international left.” 24
Military aggression is typically something that
is only used when Muslims have established themselves in a separate community,
and are in a position to protect themselves collectively, unlike the current
situation, when Muslims are living within non-Muslim communities, or Muslim
communities that do not apply Islamic law. Therefore, military Jihadis clearly not permitted against these
regimes, or people in general. And, in
Islam, when violence is used, it must be
confined solely to military action, and only to deflect the
aggression of the enemy, inflicting
the minimum degree of harm possible. As the
Quran stipulates, “Fight in the cause of God those who fi ght you, but do not
transgress limits; for God loves not
transgressors.” 25 A Muslim is no longer
allowed to fight or kill the
retreating enemy, let alone innocent civilians. In war in Islam, it is not permitted to harm women,
children or the elderly, nor even to destroy trees, crops, or religious
structures such as churches and synagogues. Moreover, as noted by Sheikh Mohammed
Afifi al-Akiti, a Shafi scholar and Fellow
in Islamic Studies at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, in “Defending the Transgressed
by Censuring the Reckless against the Killing of Civilians,” traditionally, the
ruling for the use of bombs (the medieval equivalent: Greek fire and catapults) as a weapon
is that it is discouraged (Makruh) because it kills or maims too
indiscriminately, as opposed to rifles. But the reality is, though the
Muslims’ aspirations are often legitimate, they
have been exploited by the CIA
towards supporting America’s designs for the
Middle East. Chief among the
CIA’s concerns in the region at the time was the popular Egyptian president, Gamal Abdun Nasser. As the
Psychological Strategy Board, headed by C. D. Jackson, was adopting the new program for the Middle East in early 1953, one of Eisenhower’s chief psychological warfare strategists,
Edward P. Lilly, produced a memorandum called “The Religious Factor,” which
called on the US to use religion more explicitly. The objectives were to “guide
and promote the Islamic Renaissance,”
referring to the Muslim Brotherhood . Lilly compared the so-called
revival to the great eighteenthcentury Christian revival of the Oxford Movement
in England.
A meeting between the White House and
the Muslim Brotherhood then took place
in 1953. Said Ramadan,
the Brotherhood’s leading
figure and son-in-law to founder
Hassan al Banna, was invited to attend a
conference sponsored by the USIA, the State Department’s International
Information Agency (IIA), Princeton and the Library of Congress. The “hoped-for
result,” wrote Washburn, deputy director of the US Information Agency in charge
of liaison with the White House, to C. D. Jackson, “is that the Muslims will be impressed
with the moral and spiritual strength of America.” 26 As outlined in a confidential memo by Allen Dulles’
brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, “on the surface,
the conference looks like an exercise in pure learning. This in effect is the
impression desired.” As he further explained, “IIA promoted the colloquium
along these lines and has given it financial and other assistance because we consider that
this psychological approach is an important contribution at this time to both
short term and long term United States political objectives in the Moslem
area.” 27
That led the US government to reach out to
US- Saudi oil conglomerate ARAMCO to underwrite the travel grants to the
Princeton program. The US Embassy in Cairo invited Ramadan and he and other
participants then traveled to Washington for a photo-op with President Eisenhower in the White House. The CIA subsequently conducted an analysis of
Ramadan and concluded that “Ramadan seems to be a fascist, interested in…
power. He did not display many ideas except for those of the Brotherhood.” 28
Despite this supposed skepticism, the Princeton colloquium nevertheless
encouraged the Eisenhower Administration during his second
term to provide support for the Muslim Brotherhood .
The
CIA therefore approached and began collaborating with the Brotherhood
against their ex-ally, the now pro-Soviet
Nasser, with the aim of exploiting
Jihadagainst communism. 29 As reported in a memo of a conversation between Eisenhower, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and
Frank Wisner: “The President said… we
should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect. Mr.
Dulles commented that if Arabs have a ‘holy war’ they would want it to
be against Israel. The President
recalled, however, that [King Ibn] Saud…
had called on all Arabs to oppose communism.” 30
Tensions had already grown between the Free Officers and
the Muslim Brotherhood. Nasser emerged
in 1954, naming himself Prime Minister of Egypt, and when his government moved
towards a confrontation with the British, the Brotherhood was directed to wage
war against him. To that effect, the Brotherhood received assistance from
Israeli intelligence, for which reason it was accused by Al Ahramand other
Egyptian press as being the tool of imperialists “and the Zionists.” 31
In 1954,
Said Ramadan was part of a Muslim
Brotherhood plot to assassinate Nasser, coordinated by the CIA and
Skorzeny’s former Nazis. The relationship
between Nasser and the Brotherhood had
already begun to fray after the 1949 assassination of Hassan al-Banna by
government agents. When, its new leader Sayyed Qutb demanded imposition of
the Shar iah , Nasser resisted and became an assassination
target. But when Brotherhood involvement in the 1954 plot was discovered, four
thousand of them were arrested, six were executed and thousands fled to Syria,
Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon.
Interrogations conducted by the Nasser
government revealed that the Muslim
Brotherhood continued to also function as a German Intelligence unit. As well,
as divulged by former CIA agent Miles Copeland in The Game of
Nations:
Nor was that all. Sound beatings of the
Moslem Brotherhood organizers who had
been arrested revealed that the organization had been thoroughly penetrated, at the top, by the
British, American, French and Soviet intelligence services, any one of which
could either make active use of it or blow it up, whichever best suited its
purposes. Important lesson: fanaticism is no insurance against corruption;
indeed, the two are highly compatible. 32
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