Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Today's 'Islamic Fascists' Were Yesterday's Friends

Today's 'Islamic Fascists' Were Yesterday's Friends
by Brendan O'Neill
 
August 31, 2006 
Antiwar.com  
 Email this article to a friend
 Print this article 
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.
 
-- 
visitate 
http://www.comunisti-italiani.it/frames/index.htm
http://cubainforma.interfree.it/
il film sul 9/11 : 
http://www.loosechange911.com/
http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/Berlin.jpg
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
http://www.newsland.it/news
 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it

 Today's 'Islamic Fascists' Were Yesterday's Friends
Per qualcuno, invece, sono gli amici di oggi.
Vero, sergio?
Tb
-- 
 > [Tb] : Il dovere di un comunista sarebbe quello di formare un cordone
sanitario attorno alla feccia nazi
[.sergio.] : No
Il mio blog: 
www.tonibaruch.blogspot.com

 Per qualcuno, invece, sono gli amici di oggi.
per te e romanato ad esempio.

 Vero, sergio?
uè Toni: ma ti ha scopato la moglie o una familiare, sergio?
Sembra che tu non abbia nient'altro in testa, che succede?

uč Toni: ma ti ha scopato la moglie [cut]
Non sei sposato vero?
Senno' sarebbe riconoscente.
MMAX
-- 
E' in discussione su it.news.gruppi la RFD 
di it.politica.internazionale moderato

 Senno' sarebbe riconoscente.
minchia. MMAX, cosa vuoi dire? che la moglie e' piu' tafano di fiamma
nierestein o che tb è impotente ?

 uè Toni: ma /cut/
No, è esemplificativo.


.sergio. ha scritto:


Se erano amici nostri in passato, perché sono amici vostri adesso.
O il tuo segretario ha cambiato idea sul "partito legale e quasi normale"?
Mirco

 Se erano amici nostri in passato, 
lo siete anche oggi.

.sergio. ha scritto:

Allora perché il tuo segretario li frequenta?
Mirco

Mirco Romanato ha scritto:

che pasticchina ti sei fregato dai dottori e calato dentro l'Asl,
guerrafondaio vigliaccone ?


Non puoi negare che li frequenta?
Quindi la butti in vacca (della tu mamma?)
Non hai il coraggio ammettere che il tuo segretario ha incontrato i
rappresentati di un partito islamofascista e che li considera un
partito legale e quasi normale?
Evidentemente per Diliberto la legge islamica è accettabile.
Conoscendo gli smidollati come voi, vi convertireste alla prima
decapitazione.
Mirco