The clash of civilizations Part 1
Essentially, all the so-called Islamic
“terrorists” are the equivalent of George Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein character
in his dystopian novel, Nineteen EightyFour. Goldstein is the number one enemy
of the people according to Big Brother and the Party, who heads an elusive
organization called The Brotherhood. But Goldstein is only actually seen and
heard on telescreen, and may in fact be nothing more than a useful propaganda
fabrication of the Ministry of Truth. Goldstein is also supposedly responsible
for a subversive and highly illegal The Book, much like the Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion, which is deliberately but carefully distributed by the
state to lure dissidents astute enough to recognize The Book to be an accurate reflection of the
conspiratorial nature of Big Brother’s regime.
However, Goldstein’s persona as an enemy of the state serves
to distract and to focus the anger of the people of Oceania. Effectively,
Goldstein serves an important role as both a convenient scapegoat for the
totalitarian regime of Big Brother, and as a justifying reason for more
military buildup, surveillance and elimination of civil liberties. As Orwell
explains of Winston’s love interest, Julia, she was more acute than he and far
less susceptible to party propaganda. Julia realized that Goldstein and his
Brotherhood “were simply a lot of rubbish which the Party had invented for its
own purposes,” and that the bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the
Government itself, “just to keep people frightened.”
Similarly, the neoconservatives followed Leo Strauss in
thinking, “that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an
external threat,” as Drury wrote in her book, Leo Strauss and the American
Right, and that, “following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external
threat exists then one has to be manufactured.” 1 In the early
1990s, with the Soviet Union effectively defeated and communism discredited,
that new threat would become Islamic “fundamentalism,” or more specifically,
Wahhabism/Salafism and the Muslim Brotherhood. Therefore, after the Americans’
success in covertly defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan, the neoconservatives would
then exploit the attacks of 9/11, perpetrated by the same “terrorists”—formerly
called “freedom fighters”—they helped create.
This was in order to replace
their puppet regime of the Taliban by occupying the country themselves, and to
embark on a wholesale plan to reorganize
the Middle East through the spread of “ democracy.” In other words, according
to Drury, the neoconservatives “really have
no use for liberalism and democracy,
but they’re conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy.” 2
The neoconservatives’
new strategy would employ methods that date back to Albert Wohlstetter
(1913–1997), who was an influential though controversial nuclear
strategist of the Cold War. In response
to what was presented as the failures of prior American military campaigns,
Wohlstetter promoted a strategy of precise action. This became the basis of the
policies promoted by the
neoconservatives in Washington, including preemptive military action.
Wohlstetter was the dominant figure at the RAND Corporation,
the Tavistock-affiliated defense and
information think tank in the
Los Angeles area, before ending up at
the University of Chicago where he
joined Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss. As reported in a book review of Alex
Abella’s Soldiers of Reasonin the Washington Post, “It was not so much
Wohlstetter himself as his acolytes… who had a major impact in Washington.”
These included Richard Perle (who once dated Wohlstetter’s daughter), Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Andrew
Marshall, formerly a RAND economist in
Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department, who was dubbed the Pentagon’s “Yoda.” Titled
“Dr. Strangelove’s Workplace,” the review reported that, in the latter half of
the 1950s and the early 1960s, while Wohlstetter was with the RAND corporation
and also a professor at UCLA “those bright, eager and ambitious young men… had
sat cross-legged on the floor
with their mentor at his stylish house in [of all places!] Laurel Canyon.” 3
Philosophically,
Wolfowitz and his cabal were beholden to Leo Strauss. In 1996, Timemagazine
considered Strauss among the most
influential figures in Washington
DC. Strauss’ cult appeared in Saul
Bellow’s autobiographical novel Ravelstein, where Strauss is Davarr, Hebrew for “Word.” Jeffrey
Steinberg reported that Strauss allies
and protégés in the neoconservative movement have included Irving Kristol, Willmoore Kendall,
Norman Podhoretz, Samuel Huntington,
Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and James Q Wilson. In 1997, Drury listed the leading
Straussians in Washington who included in addition to Wolfowitz, Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas, Judge Robert Bork, William
Kristol the son of Irvin Kristol and Weekly Standard editor, William Bennett, William F. Buckley the former CIA operative and editor of the National
Review, Alan Keyes, Francis Fukuyama,
ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft, Ken Masugi, Michael Ledeen, Undersecretary of Defense for
Intelligence Stephen Cambone, Abram Shulsky and
Richard Perle of the Pentagon, Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council, George Will, Newt
Gingrich, Robert Kagan, and even Clinton advisor, William Galston, and fellow
Democrat, Elaine Kamark.
As Shadia
Drury explained, even though Strauss
“had a profound antipathy to both liberalism and democracy, his disciples have gone to great
lengths to conceal the fact.” 4But the neonservatives are afraid to
admit the fact, with the excuse, as expressed by the Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men,
that the rest of us “can’t handle the truth.” The truth, for Strauss and his followers, is that the ends
justify the means and the ultimate end is
the fulfillment of Zionist ambitions. In
February 2009, Andrew Sullivan, a former editor of The New Republic, wrote that
he no longer took neoconservatism seriously because its basic tenet was defense
of Israel:
The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that
neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist
elements in Israel and sustaining a
permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli
right. That’s the conclusion I’ve been forced to these last few years. And to
insist that America adopt exactly the same constant-waras-survival that
Israelis have been slowly forced into… But America is not Israel. And once that
distinction is made, much of the Neoconservative ideology collapses. 5
The majority of
neoconservatives hold dual citizenship in the US as well as Israel, which is a blatant conflict of interest, bringing into question to which nation they remain loyal in their service to American people.
And these are not Jews in the
traditional sense. A Jew is a follower of the religion of Judaism. When a follower of Judaism rejects or strays from the religion,
he would be excommunicated. The Jewish religion had also traditionally been
open to conversion. To suggest there is a Jewish “race” is as absurd as to
suggest there is a Christian or Muslim one. The notion of the possibility of
retaining Jewish identity while at the same time eschewing belief in the Bible was a contradiction contrived by the
secularism of the Sabbateans. The neoconservatives are not religious Jews. To them, religion is merely a convenience,
a “noble delusion.” Also inherited from Sabbateanism, is that they reject the
authority of the Torahand its numerous legal prescriptions and morality, but
nevertheless hold to the messianic aspirations of the future domination of the
world by God’s “Chosen People” and the restoration of Zion.
Those neoconservatives
with both American and Israeli citizenship include, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz,
David Frum, Douglas Feith, Michael Chertoff, Kenneth Adelman, Lewis
“Scooter” Libby, Elliot Abrams, Ari Fleischer, and many
others. Regrettably, the record shows that they have not remained objective,
but loyalty to Israel seems to have
overshadowed their devotion to American concerns, and they have consistently
used their positions to push right-wing
Zionist policies.
Speaking of the influence of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, as well as AEI and
PNAC, Ian Buruma wrote in 2003 in the
New York Times that:
It has indeed become an article of faith (literally in some
cases) in Washington that American and Israeli interests are identical, but
this was not always so, and ‘Jewish interests’ are not the main reason for it
now…
What we see, then,
is not a Jewish conspiracy, but a peculiar alliance of evangelical Christians,
foreign-policy hard-liners, lobbyists for the Israeli government and neoconservatives, a number of whom happen to
be Jewish. But the Jews among
them—Perle, Wolfowitz, William Kristol,
editor of The Weekly Standard, et al.—are more likely to speak about freedom and democracy than about Halakha(Jewish law). What
unites this alliance of convenience is a shared vision of American destiny and the conviction that American
force and a tough Israeli line on the
Arabs are the best ways to make the United States strong, Israel
safe and the world a better place. 6
Essentially,
neoconservatives combined a support for American Empire building with
unconditional support for the state of
Israel. As Robert Lind wrote in a 2003 article for Salon: “The major
link between the conservative think tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs ( JINSA), which co-opts many non Jewish defense
experts by sending them on trips to
Israel.” 7 JINSA is
among a number of prominent think-tanks and organizations which are closely
related to the neoconservatives, in addition to the American Enterprise
Institute ( AEI) and the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee ( PNAC). John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their
controversial bestseller, The Israel
Lobby and US Foreign Policy, list the
AEI as a principle aspect of America’s powerful Zionist lobby, which is dominated by American
Israel Public Affairs Committee ( AI PAC), the foremost pro- Israel lobbying
organization in the US. 8
The neoconservatives’
new strategy began to achieve dangerous proportions when in 1992 Wolfowitz, as Dick Cheney’s undersecretary of
defense for policy, authored a “Defense Planning Guidance Paper,” which
outlined the US’ strategic priorities in the post- Cold War era. Leaked to the
New York Times, the document prescribed securing global supremacy for the US
through military confrontation with various regimes, calling for America to
assert its interests wherever they existed, with particular emphasis on oil
supplies and the security of Israel.
Such ideas gained a foothold with the publication in the CFR’s Foreign Affair magazine of a 1996
article by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganist
Foreign Policy.” According to the authors, it was time for the US to achieve
unparalleled military superiority through a massive build up of the country’s
military capabilities. This same worldview was furthered with the creation of a
specifically designed think tank, headquartered in the same building that
housed Irving Kristol’s AEI, known as the Project for a New American
Century ( PNAC). The signatories to the project included Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, and leading neoconservatives, like Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams, who had been found guilty of
lying about his role in the Iran-Contra
operation, but was later pardoned by George H. W. Bush.
In particular, the
PNAC was concerned with the political situation in the Middle East, shaped largely by the new paradigm
articulated by Samuel Huntington and Francis
Fukuyama, that pitted Western secular
democracy against Islamic fundamentalism. Western liberal democracy, we are told by leading
neoconservative Francis Fukuyama, is the
“ End of History” in a Hegelian sense, representing the triumph of centuries of
intellectual progress. Fukuyama was strongly influenced by Alexandre Kojève who, as early as 1948, also believed
that the United States was the model of economic life at the end of history.
Long before the Cold War came to an
end, Kojève anticipated the triumph of
America over the Soviet Union, anticipating
that it would not be a military triumph, but an economic one. 9
Ultimately, Fukuyma’s claim borrows indirectly from
Isaac Luria’s Kabbalistic conception of the process of human
intellectual history. In other words, combined with the advent of liberal democracy, the supremacy of “Western”
civilization supposedly marks the culmination of human intellectual evolution.
In Fukuyama’s own words:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular
period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point
of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western
liberal democracy as the final form of
human government. 10
However, there is no real “ democracy” in the West. The sham
of the serial dictatorships, where the people are told who to vote for every
four years, is designed to hide that the West is composed of oligarchies.
Industrial interests use their influence
over the government, the media and the
educational system, to pursue
their shared globalist aspirations. Rather, both the notions of a Clash of Civilizations and the End of History derive their influence from the fascist ideology of maintaining perpetual war, and which is now focusing
on Islam as the new enemy, according
to Carl Schmitt’s notion of the
“political.” Though Fukuyama gained the
inspiration for his thesis from Alexandre
Kojève, as summarized by Bryan Turner, “The popular debate about
the Huntington thesis has obscured its
intellectual dependence on an academic tradition of political philosophy that
sought to define sovereignty in terms of
civilizational struggles between
friend and foe, namely the legacy of Carl
Schmitt and Leo Strauss.” 11
It was in response to
Fukuyama’s claim that Samuel
Huntington developed the notion of a “ Clash of Civilizations,”
originally formulated in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute (
AEI), which was then developed in a 1993 article of the CFR’s Foreign Affairs magazine. The phrase
itself was first put forward by Bernard
Lewis in a 1990 article in The Atlantic Monthly, titled “The Roots of Muslim
Rage.” Huntington began by surveying the
diverse theories about the nature of global politics in the post- Cold War era.
Some theorists argued that with the collapse of communism as an ideology, human rights, liberal democracy and capitalist free market economy
had become the only remaining ideological alternatives. Huntington, however, believed that while the
age of ideology had ended, the world had only reverted to a normal state
of affairs characterized by confl ict between cultural
blocs. In his thesis,
he argued that the primary axis of
conflict in the future will be along
cultural and religious lines. He suggests that it is different civilizations,
as the highest rank of cultural identity, that will become increasingly useful
to analyze the potential for conflict.
Huntington’s theory is partly useful. Many of the recent
nationalistic or ideological differences between nations or cultures were
largely fabricated, such as the case of Arab nationalism, or the Soviet Union, which precariously united
numerous different religions and peoples. There is some degree of truth to
recognize that there are earlier-established and more entrenched cultural differences that would finally emerge once these artificially imposed
ideologies and borders were removed. For example, Eastern European countries of
the former Soviet Union are reaffirming their collective identity within Orthodox Christianity . Likewise, without the conflicting choice of inclining towards
the East or West, the Islamic world is opened to rediscovering their common
identity as Muslims. Misleadingly, however,
Huntington argues that civilizational conflicts are “particularly prevalent
between Muslims and non-Muslims,”
identifying the “bloody borders” between Islamic and nonIslamic civilizations.
To suggest that, in the absence
of a unified leadership, or significant economic or military resources, that the Islamic
world could now pose a threat to the West is just fear mongering and a
dishonest refusal to acknowledge the West’s culpability in fabricating those
“bloody borders,” from Bosnia to
Afghanistan.
This fact was largely
acknowledged by Zbigniew Brzezinski himself. As to whether or not such a
phenomenon of “Islamic Fundamentalism” is a menace to the world today, in an
interview with Le Nouvel Observateuron Junuary 15, 1998, Brzezinski responded:
Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in
regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a
rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of
the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi
Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian
pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the
Christian countries.
Rather, the rise of this so-called militancy was deliberately
fabricated by the Americans, who grossly exaggerated the threat and then
brazenly exploited it to provide the necessary pretext to pursue their
imperialistic objectives. In the same interview, Brzezinski also conceded, when
asked if he regretted supporting Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan, which led to the rise of the
Taliban and al Qaeda:
Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It
had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to
regret it?… What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or
the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of
Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Nevertheless, by referring to the deplorable example of
the Taliban and contrasting them to
the neoconservatives’ abstract notion of
“ democracy,” the Muslims’ insistence that religion and politics are
inseparable, and their demand for the establishment of a “theocracy,” is presented
as an anachronism and resistance to the inevitable intellectual progress and
fate of mankind, and therefore ultimately contributing to a fundamental Clash of Civilizations. As Fukuyama wrote in
a 2008 Washington Postopinion piece, “Democracy’s only real competitor in the
realm of ideas today is radical Islamism.” 12 However, the fabrication
of the supposed threat of Islam obviously
disguised more nefarious political goals. As Gilles Keppel explained:
Huntington’s
Clash of Civilizations theory facilitated the transfer to the Muslim world of a
strategic hostility the West had inherited from decades of Cold War. The parallel drawn between the
dangers of communism and those of Islam
gave Washington’s strategic planners the illusion that they could dispense with
analyzing the nature of the Islamic “menace” and could simply transpose the
conceptual tools designed to apprehend one threat to the very different
realities of the other.
The neoconservative movement played a crucial
role in bringing about this rhetorical permutation. It placed a facile way of
thinking in the service of a precise political agenda, aimed at expanding the
American democratic model into the
Middle East—the only part of the world that it had not penetrated at the
end of the twentieth century—and at modifying US policy in the region to
give Israel’s security precedence over
an alliance with the Saudi
petro-monarchy. 13
However, because the Islamic world is in complete disarray,
and incapable to mobilizing a threat to the West, and because Islam is fundamentally opposed to terrorism, Islamic terrorism had to be deliberately fostered
from the ranks of the wayward Muslim
Brotherhood, and financed by Saudi petrodollars. After a Lugano,
Switzerland, conference in 1977, attended by Yusuf Qaradawi as well as Dr. Jamal Barzinji and Ahmed Tontonji, they created the International
Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), eventually headquartered in Fairfax
County, Virginia. Signing the incorporation papers for the opening of the IIIT
in the US in 1980 was Dr. Jamal
Barzinji. Another Brotherhood functionary was Dr. Hisham Altallib, who
became a voting member of the Munich
Islamic Center in 1978.
During that period,
Qaradawi and the other Muslim
Brotherhood members convening in Lugano formalized a long-term plan to use
their wealth to finance the “cultural invasion” of the West, in a treatise entitled Towards a Worldwide Strateg y for Islamic Policy, also
known as “ The Project.” The document was
recovered in a raid by Swiss authorities in 2001, two months after 9/11, that targeted Youssef Nada. Since then, information about
the document has been limited to Western intelligence communities, until the
Swiss journalist Sylvain Besson of Le Tempsand his book La conquête de
l’Occident: Le projet secret des Islamistes (The Conquest of the West: The
Islamists’ Secret Project), made it public.
Contrary to the conventional method of open proselytism
commanded in Islam, “the Project” prescribes furtive methods of infiltration. Al
Qaradawi wrote the explicit document which calls for the use of numerous
tactics, ranging from immigration, surveillance, propaganda, protest,
deception, political legitimacy and
terrorism.The points in the document mirror the expansion of Saudi-funded “Islamic” projects, and the
political life of Muslims as it has developed in the West ever since. Among the
points outlined in the 12-point plan are:
• Using deception to mask the intended
goals of Islamist actions, as long as it doesn’t
conflict with the Shariah ;
• Avoiding openalliances with known
terrorist organizations and individuals
to maintain the appearance of “moderation”;
• Infiltrating and taking over existing Muslim organizations to realign
them towards the Muslim Brotherhood ’s
collective goals;
• Establishing financial networks to fund the work of
conversion of the West, including
the support of full-time administrators and workers;
• Conducting surveillance, obtaining data,
and establishing collection and data storage capabilities;
• Putting into place a watchdog system
for monitoring Western media to warn Muslims of “international plots fomented
against them”;
• Cultivating an Islamist intellectual
community, including the establishment of think-tanks and advocacy groups, and
publishing “academic” studies, to legitimize Islamist positions and to
chronicle the history of Islamist movements;
• Building extensive social networks of
schools, hospitals and charitable organizations dedicated to Islamist ideals so
that contact with the movement for Muslims in the West is constant;
• Involving ideologically committed Muslims
in democratically-elected institutions on all levels in the West, including
government, NGOs, private organizations and labor unions;
• Instrumentally using existing Western institutions
until they can be converted and put into service of Islam;
• Instituting alliances with Western “progressive”
organizations that share similar goals;
• Inflaming violence and keeping
Muslims living in the West “in a jihad
frame of mind”;
• Making the Palestinian cause a global
wedge issue for Muslims;
• Adopting the total liberation of Palestine from Israel and the creation of an Islamic state
as a keystone in the plan for global Islamic domination;
• Instigating a constant campaign to incite
hatred by Muslims against Jews and rejecting any discussions of conciliation or
coexistence with them;
• Supporting jihadmovements across the
Muslim world through preaching, propaganda, personnel, funding, and technical
and operational support; 14
The trio of
Tontonji, Barzinji and Altallib were joined in the US by Youssef Nada, the close associate of the
notorious Yusuf al Qaradawi. Qaradawi, a longstanding member of the Muslim Brotherhood, having worked directly
with Hassan al Banna, twice declined
offers to lead the organization, but claims to be accepted by them as their
Mufti. In 1988, al Qaradawi and Youssef Nada had founded the Bank Al-Taqwa,
literally meaning “Fear of God.” Al
Taqwawas the Muslim Brotherhood’s
semi-official bank, whose international branch was long associated
with Said Ramadan. It was eventually
accused by the US Treasury Department during
the Bush administration of
financing al Qaeda. According to a former manager of a large Saudi bank that was closely tied with Al Taqwawho spoke with Labeviere on condition
of anonymity, Al Taqwais the “principal
financial tool of the Brothers,
particularly of the international organization of the Fraternity which is now
directed from Lugano and Milan.” 15
Nada is the key conduit for continuing ties between the Muslim Brotherhood and neo- Nazis. Nada was appointed president
to Al Taqwaby former Nazi Francois
Genoud, the principal
financial manager of the hidden assets
of the Nazis.16 Of his Nazi past,
Genoud said “My views have not changed since I was a young man. Hitler was a great leader, and if he had won
the war the world would be a better place today.”17 Nada has also
been associated with Muslim convert and
neo- Nazi Ahmed Huber, who served
on the board of Nada Management, a component of Al Taqwa. A former journalist who supposedly
converted to Islam, changing his name
from Albert, Huber is a
well-known figure in European neo-fascist
circles, and whose views were strongly influenced by
his meeting in 1965 with Mufti al Husseini. But Huber is also a
member of a group composed of former SS veterans calling itself Avalon, which
claims to be based on the “great Celtic tradition,” and at every solstice he meets
under the moon in a forest grove with a few hundred European Druids, with whom he is preparing the “end
of our decline.” And with the Thule
Society, he also works for the restoration
of “greater Germany.” 18 Essentially, Huber “sees himself as a
mediator between Islam and right-wing
groups,” according to Germany’s Office
for the Protection of the Constitution.19 He
was also influenced
as well by Johann von Leers, who had also become a Muslim and
produced anti-Semitic propaganda for
Nasser’s government. Huber also claimed to have met Hitler’s secretaries Traudl Junge and Christa
Schroeder, and Artur Axmann who had been a leader of the Hitler Youth, as well as several former SS
officers, including Belgian Waffen- SS
leader Léon Degrelle. Degrelle had been brought to Madrid by Skorzeny who made him his chief aide. It was reported
that Huber knew Dr. William Pierce, who
went on to become leader of the National Alliance.
The Bank Al Taqwa had been channeling funds to Muslim
extremist organizations around the world, which included Hamas in
Palestine. Hamas, another
important faction of the Muslim Brotherhood,
was created by the Mossad, the Israeli secret service. The Mossad, like many
other Western intelligence services, also maintained a long-standing
relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood. According to Robert Dreyfuss, in
Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam: “And beginning in 1967 through the
late 1980s, Israel helped the Muslim Brotherhood establish itself in the occupied
territories. It assisted Ahmed Yassin, the leader of the Brotherhood, in
creating Hamas, betting that its
Islamist character would weaken the
PLO.” 20
According to Charles Freeman, a veteran US diplomat and
former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, “
Israel started Hamas. It was a project
of Shin Bet [Isreali domestic intelligence agency], which had a feeling that
they could use it to hem in the PLO.”21
This was explained by Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad officer who left the agency and became a strong critic, and wrote
two well-known books about the service. In The Other Side of Deception, he
wrote:
Supporting the radical elements of Muslim fundamentalism sat
well with Mossad’s general plan for the region. An Arab world run by fundamentalists
would not be party to any negotiations with the West, thus leaving Israel again as the only democratic,
rational country in the region. And if the Mossad could arrange for Hamas… to take over the Palestinian streets
from the PLO, then the picture would be
complete. 22
Essentially, the Machiavellian purpose of supporting Hamas is
to maintain a level of apprehension among the Israeli population to justify
continued cruelty against the Palestinians, and the further colonization of
their lands. As analyst Ray Hannania pointed out in “Sharon and Hamas: How the Likud Bloc Mid-wifed the Birth of Hamas,” published in Counterpunch,
“Undermining the peace process has always been the real target of Hamas and has played into the political
ambitions of Likud. Every time Israeli
and Palestinian negotiators appeared ready to take a major step forward achieving
peace, an act of Hamas terrorism has
scuttled the peace process and pushed the two sides apart.” 23
Also in the service of fomenting the Clash of Civilizations
are the international terrorists who derived from a further split in the Salafi movement, known as Jihadi
Salafis. The Jihadi Salafis
represent a reaction against the moderate stance of the apolitical Salafis toward the Saudi regime, and emerged during
the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, adopting a program of
violent Jihad against the US and the
West. The most prominent of these is of course Osama bin Laden, when his rejection of bin Baz’
Fatwa,allowing the Americans to set up bases in the Gulf, led him to turn his
back on the Saudi regime, thus radicalizing al Qaeda, which then turned the
focus of its violence against their sponsors, the Americans.
But other Salafis eventually emerged who rejected the Musli
Brotherhood as doctrinally deviant, but agreed on the need to revolt against
those they consider apostate rulers, including the ruling family of Saudi
Arabia. Salafi jihadists distinguished themselves from
Salafis they called “sheikist,” because
according to the jihadists they had forsaken servitude to God for servitude to “the
oil sheiks of the Arabian peninsula, with the Al Saud family at their head.”
Its leaders included veterans of the “Jihad”in
Afghanistan, such as Abu Qatada and the Palestinian-Jordanian Isam ibn
Mohammed ibn Tahir alBarqawi, also known as Abu Mohammed al Maqdisi. Maqdisi, considered the founder
of Salafi –Jihadism , spent time in Pakistan and
Afghanistan in the 1980s, where his writings and speeches legitimizing
violence influenced Osama bin Laden and others. Originally influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, al Maqdisi began to
see the rulers of the Muslim world as apostates (Kafirs) who should be fought in
order to apply the Shar iah. Unsatisfied
with them, he attempted to combine
Salafism with the Brotherhood’s more radical teachings. According to Joas
Wagemakers, “Whereas Salafism had mostly
been a passive version of Islam whose adherents were subservient to
their rulers, al-Maqdisi used the tools that
Salafism offered him against those very same rulers. This way, he turned the seemingly
obedient Salafi ideology upside-down and revolutionized it.” 24
Abu Qatada, who had
studied under al Albani, is a
known M15 agent. A Palestinian militant
of Jordanian citizenship, Qatada is
under worldwide embargo by the UN for
his affiliation with al-Qaeda, and is considered to have acted as the ideologue for that organization
and as the leader of terrorist groups in
Algeria, the US, Belgium, Spain,
France, Germany, Italy, and
Jordan. Abu Qatada became infamous after 1994 when he supported the Fatwaof an
Algerian cleric that the killing of women and children by the militants in the
Algerian civil war was justified.
And, according to the indictment of the
Madrid al Qaeda cell, Abu Qatada was the organization’s spiritual
leader in Europe, as well as that of the
Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat
(GSPC), and the Tunisian Combat Group. In London, where he lived in the 1990s,
Abu Qatada became a spokesman of Jihadi
causes as imam at a mosque. He became also a leading member of the group,
Al-Muhajiroun, led by Omar Bakri Mohammed. However, in the mid-1990s Abu Qatada offered his services to MI5, boasting
of his wide influence, but
promising that he would not “bite the hand that fed him.” 25
Britain then ignored warnings from half a dozen governments
about Abu Qatada’s links with terrorist groups
and refused to arrest him.The true purpose of exploiting the boogeyman of
“Islamic fundamentalism,” in fomenting the so-called Clash of Civilization, is
to induce the United States into pursuing Israeli foreign policy by proxy. A
telling example of collusion between neoconservatives and Israel began with the publication of A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the
Realm(commonly known as the “ Clean Break” report), a policy document that was
prepared in 1996 by a study group led by
Richard Perle for Benjamin
Netanyahu, then Prime Minister of
Israel. The report explained a new approach to solving Israel’s security problems in the Middle East through an appeal to “western
values.” Instead of trading land for peace, the neocons advocated tossing aside
the Oslo agreements that established negotiations and demanding unconditional
Palestinian acceptance of Likud’s terms,
peace for peace. 26 Among the policies proposed was, “rather than
pursuing a “comprehensive peace” with the entire Arab world, Israel should work jointly with Jordan and
Turkey to “contain, destabilize, and roll-back” those entities that are threats
to all three.” On how to address these threats, it recommends, “ Israel’s new
agenda can signal a clean break by abandoning a policy which assumed exhaustion
and allowed strategic retreat by reestablishing the principle of preemption,
rather than retaliation alone and by ceasing to absorb blows to the nation
without response.”
The reason for preemption in
Lebanon was an agreement between
Israel and the US that Iranian nuclear plants would eventually have to
be bombed. If that were to happen, Iran
would use the Hezbollah in Lebanon to attack Israel. Thus Hezbollah would have to be disarmed and Israel would use force as soon as a pretext became available. 27
Similarly, because Iraq “could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly” Israel should back Jordan in its efforts to redefine Iraq, and by “supporting King Hussein, by providing him with some tangible
security measures to protect his regime against Syrian subversion; encouraging—through influence in the US
business community—investment in Jordan to structurally shift Jordan’s economy
away from dependence on Iraq; and diverting
Syria’s attention by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize
Syrian control of Lebanon.” In relation
to these objectives, in September 2000, the
PNAC drafted a plan for US global domination. Titled, “Rebuilding
America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” the PNAC report envisioned an expanded global
military role for the US by stipulating, “The United States has for decades
sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the
unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial
American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” A “core mission” for the US
military, according to the PNAC, is to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars.”
However, it added, “even should Saddam pass from the scene,” the plan states,
US military bases in Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait will remain, despite domestic opposition in the Gulf states to the permanent
stationing of US troops. Iran, it says,
“may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has.”
Ominously, the document stated: “the process of
transformation,” the plan further clarified,
“is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing
event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” 28
That event, of course, was the attack
of 9/11, orchestrated to provide
the neoconservatives with their needed pretext to expand their imperial objectives
into the Middle East and Central Asia. Much like the Warren Commission before it, the myth of 19
hijackers was then fabricated by the
9/11 Commission, denouncing as “conspiracy theorists” all who dared to
point to the mountains of evidence and simple common sense that undermined the official government version of events.
But while the purported culprits were al Qaeda, along with the Muslim
Brotherhood with the support of Saudi
Arabia, these groups had also been involved in bringing George W. Bush to the
White House. Not only had George W. Long
received the direct financial support
of the Saudis, but it was also
discovered in October 2001 that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Dr. Jamal Barzinji was at the time president of
the Safa Group, a secretive group of
prominent Muslim charities and businesses in Northern Virginia funneling
millions of dollars to foreign terrorists, and part of a suspicious agenda
designed to sway the Muslim vote in favor of
George W. Bush’s run at the presidency. The probe of the groups in
Herndon, Virginia, was the largest federal investigation of its kind in the
world. The network was centered around the SAAR Foundation, named after its
chief sponsor, Sulaiman Abdul Aziz al Rajhi, head of one of Saudi Arabia’s
wealthiest families. The treasurer of SAAR was Cherif Sedky, an American lawyer
for the Rahji family, and representative of
George W. Bush’s former business partner and head of BCCI, Khalid
bin Mahfouz. The Safa trust provided funds for a political group with a
name that is oxymoronic:
The Islamic
Free Market Institute. The nonprofit
Islamic Institute was started by Grover
Norquist in collaboration with Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief political adviser.
Norquist, who along with other institute leaders, courted Muslim voters for the
Bush 2000 presidential campaign, credits the “Muslim vote” of putting Bush in a
position to win the Florida contest. 29 It is a sad commentary on
the fatal ignorance of American Muslims, who voted in the President who incepted the War on Terror, a propagandistic
euphemism for what is actually the “War
on Islam.”
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