Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: I nostri amici "Islamo-fascisti"

Che Bin Laden e Al Qaeda siano stati aiutati dalla CIA lo sanno anche i
sassi (cioe tutti.  A parte qualche decina di milioni di Americani,
specialmente negli stati Rossi  :-/   ).
Questa, pero', e' la punta dell'iceberg.   L'intero movimento Islamista
e' stato, ai suoi tempi, foraggiato dai colonialisti Inglesi e
Americani come contrappeso al nazionalismo laico Arabo.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/oneill.php?articleid=9615
 Today's 'Islamic Fascists' Were Yesterday's Friends
by Brendan O'Neill
According to President George W. Bush, America is at war with "Islamic
fascists." Commentators who support Bush's military interventions also
argue that the West faces new religious enemies who do not play by the
old rules of warfare. Hezbollah (which literally translates as "Party
of God") says its wants to obliterate Israel, and Hamas (an
abbreviation of "Islamic Resistance Movement") has taken the reins of
power in Gaza and the West Bank; meanwhile, al-Qaeda and its associates
continue to carry out sporadic, scrappy attacks designed to restore the
Islamic caliphate. All of this has led one British newspaper columnist
to argue that there is a new "World War being waged by clerical fascism
against free societies."
In a nutshell, the wars over state, territory, and politics that
defined the Cold War era have given way to cosmic battles between
"good" and "evil" - between a West apparently keen to defend secular,
democratic values and its twisted opponents who prefer the idea of
autocratic Islam.
This simplistic view of the new geopolitical landscape is deeply
problematic. It overlooks the key role that the West played in
nurturing radical Islamist groups, precisely as a means of isolating
and undermining secular movements that were judged by Western
governments to be too uppity or dangerous. Over the past 80 years and
more - from Egypt to Afghanistan to Palestine - powerful
governments in the West and their allies in the Middle East helped to
create radical Islamic sects as a bulwark against secular nationalist
parties or pan-Arabism. They gave the nod to, and in some instances
funded and armed, Islamist movements that might challenge the claims of
local anti-colonial, liberationist, or communistic outfits.
In other words, there is a deep and bitter irony in the West's current
claims to be standing up to evil religious sects in the name of
universal values. It was precisely the West's earlier disregard for
secularism and democracy in the Middle East, its elevation of its own
powerful interests over the needs and desires of local populations,
which helped to give rise to a layer of apparently "evil" radical
Islamism. What we have today is not a World War between a principled
West and psychotic groups from "over there," but rather the messy
residue of decades of Western meddling in the Middle East.
Duplicitous Western support for Islamist movements has a long and
dishonorable history. In the early and middle 20th century, both
British and U.S. intelligence supported the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood, the group from which so many of today's radical Islamic
sects - including Hamas and even al-Qaeda - have sprung. Indeed, in
the 1920s, the British, then the colonial rulers of Egypt, helped to
set up the Muslim Brotherhood as a means of keeping Egyptian
nationalism and anti-colonialism in check. The immediate precursor to
the Muslim Brotherhood was an organization called the Society of
Propaganda and Guidance, which was funded and backed by British
colonialists. In return, the Society provided Islamist backing to
British rule in Egypt. It published a journal called The Lighthouse,
which attacked Egyptian nationalists - who wanted British forces out
of Egypt - as "atheists and infidels." Under British patronage, the
Society set up the Institute of Propaganda and Guidance, which brought
Islamists from across the Muslim world to Egypt so they could be
trained in political agitation, and then take such
anti-anti-colonialism back to their own homelands.
One graduate of the Institute of Propaganda and Guidance was Hassan
al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. According to
Robert Dreyfuss, in his informative book Devil's Game: How the United
States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, the original Muslim
Brotherhood was an "unabashed British intelligence front." The mosque
that served as the first headquarters of the Brotherhood - in
Ismailia, Egypt - was built by the (British) Suez Canal Company. With
Britain's knowledge, and tacit approval, in the 1930s and '40s the
Brotherhood both challenged anti-colonial parties within Egypt and also
spread to other parts of the Near and Middle East, setting up branches
in Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.
Following the coming to power of the anti-colonialist and pan-Arabist
Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954, elements in the West continued to look upon
the Muslim Brotherhood as a weapon against secular nationalism and
communism. The British government of the time encouraged the
Brotherhood to challenge Nasser, and in 1954 there was open conflict
between the Brotherhood's and Nasser's forces. Many hundreds were
killed, and eventually the Brotherhood fled, taking refuge in Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, and other states in the Anglo-American camp. The
U.S.-friendly regime in Saudi Arabia, in particular, provided sanctuary
and financial backing to Brotherhood members during Nasser's crackdown
on the group.
Initially the U.S., in its interventionist policies of the postwar
period, adopted the British model of supporting radical Islamists in
order to undermine popular secular governments or communist-influenced
outfits in the Near and Middle East. This included supporting the
Brotherhood against Nasser. In his book Sleeping With the Devil, former
CIA officer Robert Baer said there was a "dirty little secret" in
Washington in the early 1950s:
"The White House looked on the Brothers as a silent ally, a secret
weapon against - what else? - communism. The covert action started
in the 1950s with the Dulles brothers - Allen at the CIA and John
Foster at the State Department - when they approved Saudi Arabia's
funding of Egypt's Brothers against Nasser. As far as Washington was
concerned, Nasser was a communist."
Baer said that the "logic of the Cold War" meant that the U.S. was
willing to support radical Islamists even if they carried out
activities such as assassinations or political agitation designed to
foment conflict. As Baer argues, "If Allah agreed to fight on our side,
fine. If Allah decided that political assassination was permissible,
that was fine too, as long as no one talked about it in polite
company." (There was, of course, a subsequent divergence between
British and American policy on Nasser. During the Suez crisis of 1956,
President Dwight Eisenhower put a stop to the British-French-Israeli
invasion of Suez and backed Nasser's regime, temporarily at least.)
The Muslim Brotherhood and its various branches across the Middle East
- which shared the aim of replacing secular democracy with Islamic
government - also gave rise to violent splinter groups. Hamas, which
today is discussed by Bush and his supporters as a great danger to
peace in Israel-Palestine, if not the entire world, is a local wing of
the Brotherhood, formed in the mid-1980s from various
Brotherhood-affiliated charities that had gained a foothold in
Palestinian territories. Al-Qaeda itself has been influenced primarily
by the thinking of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), a radical member of the
Brotherhood. Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian,
was first radicalized by the Muslim Brotherhood; he joined the group
when he was 14 years old, before moving on to the more radical Islamic
Jihad group in 1979 and subsequently fighting against the Soviets in
Afghanistan.
Indeed, during the Afghan-Soviet war from 1979 to 1992, American and
British intelligence once again supported radical Islamists against, in
this instance, secularist and communist forces. Where the Cold War
began with America and Britain supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and
other radical Islamists against popular secular movements, it ended
with America and Britain arming, financing, and propagandizing on
behalf of radical Islamists fighting the Soviet Union's last stand in
Afghanistan before its collapse in the early 1990s.
Throughout the 1980s, the CIA and the British intelligence organization
MI5 arranged for the arming and training of thousands of mujahedeen in
Afghanistan. American and British elements, together with Saudi Arabia
and the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, ensured that the mujahedeen
had everything they needed to wage war against the Soviets. As Phil
Gasper has argued,
"The CIA became the grand coordinator: purchasing or arranging the
manufacture of Soviet-style weapons from Egypt, China, Poland, Israel,
and elsewhere, or supplying their own; arranging for military training
by Americans, Egyptians, Chinese and Iranians; hitting up
Middle-Eastern countries for donations, notably Saudi Arabia, which
gave many hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year, totaling
probably more than a billion; pressuring and bribing Pakistan - with
whom recent American relations had been very poor - to rent out its
country as a military staging area and sanctuary; putting the Pakistan
Director of Military Operations, Brigadier Mian Mohammad Afzal, onto
the CIA payroll to ensure Pakistani cooperation."
Two beneficiaries of such widespread American support for the
mujahedeen's war against the Soviets were bin Laden and Zawahiri,
currently al-Qaeda's number 1 and number 2. Both traveled to
Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1980s to assist with the anti-Soviet
war effort. It should be noted that America and Britain did not only
fund and arm the mujahedeen; they also provided backing to mosques,
madrassa schools, and propagandistic publications and radio stations
that put the case for political Islam over communism or secularism.
Indeed, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - who would go on to devise the 9/11
attacks - was involved in a madrassa school that was funded by Saudi
and U.S. money. Once again, Western forces were not only
opportunistically supporting their enemy's enemy - they were also
fueling the idea that radical Islamism was preferable to "evil"
communism and even to secular government.
We could argue that al-Qaeda, both intellectually and practically, is a
product of Western meddling in Middle Eastern affairs. It takes its
inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood, that group supported by both
American and British intelligence in the early and middle 20th century,
and it was forged in the heat of the Afghan-Soviet war, that conflict
largely facilitated by U.S., British, and Saudi funds and arms. In
terms of both its political origins and its early and formative
fighting experiences, al-Qaeda owes a great deal to Western
interventionism.
Even Hamas is, in some ways, the product of a desire by the West and
its allies to use radical Islamism as a counterweight to popular
secular movements. It was formed, in 1987, from various charities with
links to the Muslim Brotherhood. These charities had been allowed by
Israel itself to gain strength and influence in Palestinian territories
in order to, as one account puts it, "counter the influence of the
secular Palestinian resistance movements." Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the
spiritual leader of Hamas, who was killed by an Israeli air strike in
2004, formed the military outfit in 1987 as the armed wing of his group
the Islamic Association. This organization had been licensed by Israel
10 years earlier, in the 1970s. In that period, Israeli officials gave
the nod to, and even indirectly funded, the setting-up of Islamic
societies in the West Bank and Gaza that might weaken and isolate
Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. Martha Kessler, a
senior analyst for the CIA, has said: "[W]e saw Israel cultivate Islam
as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism." The very Islamic groups
"cultivated" by Israel in the 1970s went on to become Hamas in the
1980s.
In funding Islamists against secularists, Israel was following in a
long tradition started by the British and Americans. As one former
senior CIA official has put it, Israel's tolerance, even support, of
Islamic groups that would later become Hamas "was a direct attempt to
divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a
competing religious alternative." There is no evidence that Israel ever
supported Hezbollah, but their interests have coincided over the past
two decades or more, since the founding of Hezbollah in Lebanon by
Iranian elements in 1982.
As Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, has argued, "Hezbollah
represented a militant, non-secular alternative to [Arafat's] Nassertie
Fatah, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other groups
that took their bearing from Pan-Arabism rather than Islam....
[Hezbollah] made a powerful claim that the Palestinian movement had no
future while it remained fundamentally secular." Israel and Hezbollah
are, of course, arch-rivals; Hezbollah was formed with the explicit aim
of expelling Israel from Lebanon by any means necessary. However, in
the early 1980s both Israel and Hezbollah had a shared aim of weakening
the more powerful and popular secularist Palestinian movements.
Over the past 80 years, Western governments and their allies have
supported radical Islamist groups. However, this was not merely
opportunism, a bad case of "my enemy's enemy is my friend." As part of
this process, Western governments seriously denigrated popular secular
and democratic movements. Indeed, from the founding of the Muslim
Brotherhood in the 1920s to Israel's role in the forging of Hamas in
the 1980s, the explicit aim of Western support for radical Islamism was
to isolate, weaken, and ultimately destroy popular political movements
that very often were based on Western ideas of democracy and progress.
Thus, many of these radical Islamist groups - the Muslim Brotherhood,
Hamas, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah - have a built-in suspicion of and
hostility toward secular democracy.
What we are faced with today is not a new World War being waged by any
kind of powerful Islamist conspiracy. Instead, as secular and
nationalist politics has fallen apart in the post-Cold War period, we
are left with fairly small, radical Islamist sects - in other words,
with those very groups that were forged as a bulwark against secular
democratic politics in the first place.

and U.S. money.
*ROTFL*
E magari e' stato pure in vacanza in UK o USA! :)
*LOL*
Taglio il resto delle stronzate altrimenti non si finisce piu' :)
-Stefano