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Tony Blair didn't see the people, he saw the policies – which is why he chose war

Tony Blair’s at it again. He apologises – but not for the war, only for the “intelligence”. There are “elements of truth” – whatever that means – in the view that his and George W Bush’s 2003 Iraqi adventure might have caused the rise of Isis. There are some, I suppose, who might also say that this wretched man started a regional war that has totally obscured the tragedy of the Palestinians, who continue to endure the longest military occupation in modern history – one that Blair did nothing to end after he was sent outrageously as a “peace” envoy to Jerusalem. Perhaps he would agree that there are “elements of truth” in this suggestion, but I doubt it.
I have been infuriated by Blair’s failure to own up to the catastrophe. No doubt the dark shadow of the Chilcot report brought his midget apology, although Chilcot may well hide the truth and thus cast only sunlight on the man. What I found so appalling in his CNN interview, however, was the assumption that the Middle East is a place of inherent instability.

I am minded of this because of an article by the Palestinian Rami Khouri in which he comments on an article by Henry Kissinger. Khouri remarks that Kissinger’s view of the Middle East “seems to have no place for – or is simply blind to – the nearly half a million men and women, mostly Muslims, who live [there] and shape its societies and states … These people all seek the same thing that Kissinger presumably seeks for Americans: a stable, decent society where citizens can live in peace.”
Khouri acknowledges the “non-state actors and ethno-sectarian nationalisms” that have emerged. I would have said this in blunter language, but he rightly spots the US tendency to see the Middle East in terms of religious or ethnic groups (Shia, Sunnis, Maronites) waging existential wars “in an urban wasteland defined by armed gangs”.
Tony Blair said he apologised for the some of the mistakes that were made
I rather think that’s how Blair sees the Middle East. He sees territory, but he doesn’t see people. The mere fact that he could drag out the rotting corpse of Saddam Hussein shows what the problem is. Yes, Saddam did use gas “against his own people”. But when he was doing that, George Bush Snr was giving him military assistance in his war against Iran. And when we staged our 2003 adventure, most of those who were subsequently killed were not Saddamites or anti-Saddamites but “tens of thousands” (as CNN coyly states) of innocent civilians. By defining these people as Sunnis and Shia or Maronites, we demean them, forcing them into a box with labels – and very often into wooden boxes, too.
It does no good to ignore, as Khouri says, how American and other foreign powers’ policies contributed to the problems that shattered the superficial calm which, barring Arab-Israeli wars, defined the region for years after the Second World War. But we do not see the people, we see policies – which is why Blair chose war. That’s what wars were to Kissinger. That’s why he made peace between Iran and Iraq all those years ago, and sacrificed the Kurds.
That’s what the Americans did when they bombed Iraq again and again between 1991 and 2003, long after we had freed Kuwait from Saddam’s clutches. And that’s what we did when we invaded Iraq in 2003. And still it goes on. Did Isis start in Iraq or Syria?
I suspect that what we fail to do is take responsibility for our actions. We don’t plan, because we have no long-term plans. Churchill started planning the British occupation of a conquered Germany in 1941, even before the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. But when the first US tanks crossed the Tigris river in 2003, neither Blair nor Bush had thought ahead. They were too busy with intelligence reports with “elements of truth” in them.
Tony Blair didn't see the people, he saw the policies – which is why he chose war
by Robert Fisk, independent.co.uk
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/tony-blair-didnt-see-the-people-he-saw-the-policies-which-is-why-he-chose-war-a6708511.html

Tony Blair makes qualified apology for Iraq war ahead of Chilcot report

Tony Blair has moved to prepare the ground for the publication of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war by offering a qualified apology for the use of misleading intelligence and the failure to prepare for the aftermath of the invasion.

In an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN, the former British prime minister declined to apologise for the war itself and defended armed intervention in 2003, pointing to the current civil war in Syria to highlight the dangers of inaction.

Related: There is no doubt about it: Tony Blair was on the warpath from early 2002

Blair, who will be aware of what Sir John Chilcot is planning to say about him in the long-awaited report into the Iraq war, moved to pre-empt its criticisms in an interview with CNN. He told Zakaria: “I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong.

“I also apologise for some of the mistakes in planning and, certainly, our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you removed the regime.”

But Blair made clear that he still felt he made the right decision in backing the US invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein. He said: “I find it hard to apologise for removing Saddam.”

Blair also made light of the claims that he should stand trial on war crimes charges and defended his policy of what he used to describe as liberal interventionism. He contrasted what he described as “my ‘crime’” – the removal of Saddam – and the civil war in Syria.

“We have stood back and we, in the west, bear responsibility for this – Europe most of all. We’ve done nothing. That’s a judgment of history I’m prepared to have.”

Blair indicated that he saw merit in the argument that the Iraq war was to blame for the rise of Islamic State (Isis). “I think there are elements of truth in that,” he said when asked whether the Iraq invasion had been the “principal cause” of the rise of Isis.

He added: “Of course you can’t say those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.”

Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, responded by saying that the “Blair spin operation” had swung into action as Chilcot prepares to set out a timetable for the publication of his report.

— Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon)
The Blair spin operation begins but the country still awaits the truth. The delay to Chilcot report is a scandal. https://t.co/pPhRcZzGrc

Sturgeon tweeted: “The Blair spin operation begins but the country still awaits the truth. The delay to Chilcot report is a scandal.”

In his long-awaited report, Chilcot is expected to criticise the use of intelligence that suggested Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war. The former Northern Ireland Office permanent secretary is also expected to say that the UK and the US failed to make adequate preparations for the aftermath of the invasion.

Blair’s office sought to downplay the significance of the CNN interview, part of a programme called Long Road to Hell: America in Iraq, to be broadcast on the network on Monday.

A spokeswoman said: “Tony Blair has always apologised for the intelligence being wrong and for mistakes in planning. He has always also said, and says again here, that he does not however think it was wrong to remove Saddam.”

Related: There is no doubt about it: Tony Blair was on the warpath from early 2002

She added: “He did not say the decision to remove Saddam in 2003 ‘caused Isis’ and pointed out that Isis was barely heard of at the end of 2008, when al-Qaida was basically beaten. He went on to say in 2009, Iraq was relatively more stable.

“What then happened was a combination of two things: there was a sectarian policy pursued by the government of Iraq, which were mistaken policies. But also when the Arab spring began, Isis moved from Iraq into Syria, built themselves from Syria and then came back into Iraq. All of this he has said before.”

Chilcot is preparing to outline a timetable for the publication of his report in the next 10 days. Blair will be aware of what criticisms Chilcot is planning to make of him because the inquiry chair has written to all key participants as part of what is known as the Maxwellisation process. It allows them to respond to criticisms before publication.

Chilcot was a member of the Butler inquiry, which in 2004 raised concerns about the intelligence before the Iraq invasion. The inquiry also questioned the way in which senior intelligence officials and Downing Street stripped out caveats from intelligence assessments.

Tony Blair makes qualified apology for Iraq war ahead of Chilcot report
by Nicholas Watt Chief political, theguardian.com

Read more from The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/25/tony-blair-sorry-iraq-war-mistakes-admits-conflict-role-in-rise-of-isis

Kissinger: Let Russia defeat ISIS, its destruction more important than overthrow of Assad.


http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwnO7SqSg

Does the Muslim world need a scientific renaissance?

There are more than a billion Muslims in the world today. The economies of Muslim countries - like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Malaysia and Pakistan - have been growing steadily for a number of years.

And yet, when compared to the West, the Islamic world often seems disengaged from modern science.

Why is this?

One of the reasons is that many Muslims still see science as a secular, even atheist, Western construct.

But we shouldn't be too hasty in singling out Muslims for criticism. Even in the so-called 'enlightened' developed world, an alarmingly large fraction of the populace regards science with suspicion, and even fear.

The plain truth, however, is that science is playing an increasingly important role in our lives – in technology, medical advances and addressing global problems, such as climate change and water, food and energy supplies.

Of course, there was once a time when Islam and science were not at odds. But many Muslims have forgotten the wonderful contributions made by their ancestors.

Could reminding them help inspire the change we need in our time and allow science to flourish once again in the Muslim world?

One example of hope can be found in the Jordanian desert. SESAME will be the Middle East's first major international research centre. Standing for 'Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East', it is a cooperative venture by scientists and governments across the region.

Synchrotron radiation is a form of high energy light emitted by electrically charged subatomic particles when they are accelerated in a magnetic field. A number of synchrotron facilities have been built around the world and are being used for cutting edge research.

When, in 1997, Germany decided to decommission its synchrotron research facility, BESSY, it agreed to donate its components to the SESAME project, which was quickly developed under the auspices of UNESCO. It is now under construction.

The research to be carried out there will include material science, molecular biology, nanotechnology, x-ray imaging, archaeological analysis and clinical medical applications.

Its current membership, along with the hosts, Jordan, includes the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Bahrain and Cyprus, and this group is likely to expand as several other countries join.

The result is a degree of scientific collaboration that has not been seen in this part of the world for a millennium.

Forgotten achievements

One thousand years ago, the Islamic empire witnessed one of the greatest periods of sustained scientific advancement in history. In the medieval world’s great centres of learning - places like Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba and Samarkand - discoveries were made, ideas nurtured and methods developed.

In Baghdad, for example, we find the very first book on algebra. Called Kitab al-Jabr (from which we derive the word 'algebra'), it was written by the 9th century Persian mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi, and signified a significant paradigm shift from the work of the Ancient Greeks.

Also in the 9th century, the Abbasid caliph Al-Ma'mun created a new academy in Baghdad, called the House of Wisdom, and built observatories there and in Damascus. He sponsored science projects that made vast improvements in the fields of astronomy and geography, and which the Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars of the Baghdad academy had translated into Arabic.

Advances in medicine and anatomy also saw Arabic texts replace the works of Galen and Hippocrates in the libraries of medieval Europe. While the philosophers Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd influenced later European scholars, such as Roger Bacon and St Thomas Aquinas.

The Cordoban physician Al-Zahrawi invented more than 200 surgical instruments - many of which, like forceps and the surgical syringe, are still in use today.

Then there was the birth of industrial chemistry, with sophisticated scientific methods replacing the haphazard practice of alchemy, and advances in fields such as optics that would not be matched until Newton.

For a period spanning more than half a millennium, the international language of science was Arabic. And yet, all of these great achievements have been largely forgotten.

So, could a scientific renaissance be rekindled in the Islamic world?

Clearly, bigger budgets are not by themselves a panacea. Of course scientific research requires adequate financial resources, but to compete on the world stage needs more than just the latest, shiniest equipment.

The whole infrastructure of the research environment needs to be addressed - from laboratory technicians who understand how to use and maintain their equipment to the exercise of real intellectual freedom and a healthy degree of scepticism and courage in order to question experimental results. Such sentiments were found in abundance in Baghdad's House of Wisdom.

A fresh cultural and philosophical attitude must grow and spread if wider Muslim society is to embrace not only the bricks and mortar of modern research labs, along with the shiny particle accelerators and electron microscopes they house, but the spirit of curiosity that drives human beings to study nature, whether to marvel at divine creation or simply to understand how and why things are the way they are.

Source: Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera English:

http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIw9d_u9iY

THE MOST REMARKABLE REVELATORY LETTER EVER WRITTEN BY MALCOLM X

"If white Americans could accept the religion of Islam, if they could accept the Oneness of God (Allah) they too could then sincerely accept the Oneness of Men, and cease to measure others always in terms of their “difference in color”. And with racism now plaguing in America like an incurable cancer all thinking Americans should be more respective to Islam as an already proven solution to the race problem. "
MALCOLM X
-----------------------------------------
Mecca, Saudi Arabia – April 26th, 1964

I have just completed my pilgrimage (Hajj) here to the Holy City of Mecca, the hollyiest City on earth, which is absolutely forbidden for non-Muslims to even rest their eyes upon. This pilgrimage is the most important event in the life of all Muslims, and there are over 226,000 who are here right now from outside of Arabia. From Turkey came the largest contagion, around 50,000 in over 600 buses. This refutes Westerner propaganda that Turkey is turning away from Islam. I know of only 2 others who have made the actual Hajj to Mecca from America, and both of them are West Indians who also converts to Islam. Mr. Elijah Muhammad, 2 of his sons, and a couple of his followers visited Mecca outside the Hajj season, and their visit is known as the “Omra”, or Lesser Pilgrimage. It is con- (Page 2) -sidered a blessing in the Muslim World even to make the “Omra”. I very much doubt that 10 American citizens have ever visited Mecca, and I do believe that I might be the first American born Negro to make the actual Hajj itself. I’m not saying this to boast but only to point out what a wonderful accomplishment and blessing it is, and also to enable you to be in a better position intellectually to evaluate it in its proper light, and then your own intelligence can place it in its proper place. This pilgrimage to the Holliest of Cities as been a unique experience for me, but one which as made me the recipient of numerous unexpected blessings beyond my wildest dreams. Shortly after my arrival in Jeddah, I was met by Prince Muhammed Faisal who informed me that his illustrious father, his Excellency Crowned Prince Faisal had decret that I be that I The ruler of Arabia be his Guest. What has happened since then would take several books to described, but through the ***** of his Excellency I have since stayed in ***** hotels in Jeddah, Mecca, Mina – with a private car, a driver, a religious guide, and many servants at my disposal. (Page 3) Never have I been so highly honored and never had such honor and respect made me feel more humble and unworthy. Who would believe that such blessing could be heaped upon an American Negro!!! (But) in the Muslim World, when one accepts Islam and ceases to be white or Negro, Islam recognizes all men as Men because the people here in Arabia believe that God is One, they believe that all people are also One, and that all our brothers and sisters is One Human Family. I have never before witnessed such sincere hospitality and the practice of true brotherhood as I have seen it here in Arabia. In fact all I have seen and experienced on this pilgrimage as forced me to “re-arrange” much of thoughts pattern and to toss aside some (Page 4) of my previous conclusions. This “adjustment to reality” wasn’t to difficult for me to undergo, because despite my firm conviction in whatever I believe, I have always tried to keep an open mind, which is absolutely necessary to reflect the flexibility that must go hand in hand with anyone with intelligent quest for truth never comes to an end. There are Muslims here of all colors and from every part of this earth. During the past days here in Mecca (Jeddah, Mina, and Mustaliph) while understanding the rituals of the Hajj, I have eaten. From the same plate, drank from the same glass and slept on the same bed or rug – with Kings, potentates and other forms of rulers – ******* with fellow Muslims whose skin was the whitest of white, whose eyes was the bluest of blue, and whose hair was the blondest of blond – I could look into their blue eyes and see that they regarded me as the same (Brothers), because their faith in One God (Allah) had actually removed “white” from their mind, which automatically changed their attitude and their behavior (towards) people of other colors. Their beliefs in the Oneness as made them so different from American whites that their colors played no part in my mind in my dealing with them. Their sincere (Page 5) To One God and their acceptance of all people as equals makes them (so called “Whites”) also accepted as equals into the brotherhood of Islam along with the non-whites. If white Americans could accept the religion of Islam, if they could accept the Oneness of God (Allah) they too could then sincerely accept the Oneness of Men, and cease to measure others always in terms of their “difference in color”. And with racism now plaguing in America like an incurable cancer all thinking Americans should be more respective to Islam as an already proven solution to the race problem. The American Negro could never be blamed for his racial “animosities” because his are only reaction or defense mechanism which is subconscious intelligence has forced him to react (Page 6) against the conscious racism practiced (initiated against Negroes in America) by American Whites. But as America’s insane obsession with racism leads her up the suicidal path, nearer to the precipice that leads to the bottomless pits below, I do believe that Whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, through their own young, less hampered intellects will see the “Handwriting on the Wall” and turn for spiritual salvation to the religion of Islam, and force the older generation to turn with them— This is the only way white America can worn off the inevitable disaster that racism always leads to, and Hitler’s Nazi Germany was best proof of this. Now that have visited Mecca and gotten my own personal spiritual path adjusted to where I can better understand the depth of my religion (Islam), I shall be living in a couple days to continue my journey into our African Fatherland. Allah willing, by May 20th before my return to New York, I shall have visited Sudan, Kenya, Tanguanyika, Zanzibar, Nigeria, Ghana, and Algeria. You may use this letter in anyway you desire,

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbazz (Malcolm X)

THE MOST REMARKABLE REVELATORY LETTER EVER WRITTEN BY MALCOLM X
Read original :
http://momentsintime.com/the-most-remarkable-revelatory-letter-ever-written-by-malcolm-x/#.Vifij8scDqB

Partition & Muslim of India — Why Ramchandra Guha speaks too soon

In a recent newspaper article, historian Ramchandra Guha makes a case for not being "nostalgic about undivided India". He argues that, "Had there been an undivided India, the percentage of Muslims would have been closer to 33%, or one in three. The demographic balance would have been more delicate, and prone to being exploited by sectarians on either side."

Assuming that religious wars have been avoided by the percentage of Indian Muslims being reduced to "13% of the population, or one in seven", he concludes that, "the cold logic of history suggests that things would have been far worse for us if Partition had not occurred."

Since his is a counterfactual case, refuting his case is as futile as it is easy.

Nevertheless, it can be argued conversely that had the percentage of the largest religious minority - the Subcontinent's Muslims - remained at about one-third, there would have been an element of deterrence in the demographic balance. Guha's apprehension of a communal bloodbath would then not arise.

In any case, the precedent-setting Partition would not have occurred and eddies from it would not have persisted through time. The resulting peace could have been used, just as it has been in India as brought out by Guha, for democracy and development for all of South Asia.

Guha exaggerates the problem of integrating the 500 princely states posed. Sardar Patel dispatched them into history within a couple of years of independence. That would have been so even in case of undivided India, with the Nizam - possibly the only one to hold out - similarly packed off. Since contiguity would have decided the case for the rest, Kashmir would not have emerged as a bone of contention since. Keep reading 》》》》》》
http://www.milligazette.com/news/12973-partion-muslim-of-india-why-ramchandra-guha-speaks-too-soon

Violence against Muslims in India

Anti-Muslim violence is planned and executed to render Muslims economically and socially crippled and, as a final outcome of that economic and social backwardness, assimilating them into lower rungs of Hindu society.
》》》》》》
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_Muslims_in_India

America enabled radical Islam: How the CIA, George W. Bush and many others helped create ISIS

We have tried to harness the power of radical Islam for our own interests for decades. ISIS is partially on America.
Since 1980, the United States has intervened in the affairs of fourteen Muslim countries, at worst invading or bombing them. They are (in chronological order) Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Yemen, Pakistan, and now Syria. Latterly these efforts have been in the name of the War on Terror and the attempt to curb Islamic extremism.

Yet for centuries Western countries have sought to harness the power of radical Islam to serve the interests of their own foreign policy. In the case of Britain, this dates back to the days of the Ottoman Empire; in more recent times, the US/UK alliance first courted, then turned against, Islamists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. In my view, the policies of the United States and Britain—which see them supporting and arming a variety of groups for short-term military, political, or diplomatic advantage—have directly contributed to the rise of IS.

Supporting the Caliphate

The Turkish Ottoman Empire was, for centuries, the largest Muslim political entity the world has ever known, encompassing much of North Africa, southeastern Europe, and the Middle East. From the sixteenth century onwards, Britain not only championed the Ottoman Empire but also supported and endorsed the institution of the caliphate and the Sultan’s claim to be the caliph and leader of the ummah (the Muslim world).

Britain’s support for the Ottoman Caliph—a policy known as the Eastern Question—was entirely motivated by self-interest. Initially this was so the Ottoman lands would act as a buffer against its regional imperial rivals, France and Russia; subsequently, following the colonization of India, the Ottoman territories acted to protect Britain’s eastward trade routes. This support was not merely diplomatic; it translated into military action. In the Crimean War (1854–56), Britain fought with the Ottoman Empire against Russia and won.

It was only with the onset of the First World War in 1914 that this 400-year-old regional paradigm unraveled. When Mehmed V sided with the Germans, Britain was reluctantly excluded from dealing with the caliphate’s catchment of over 15 million Muslims, reasoning that “whoever controlled the person of the Caliph, controlled Sunni Islam.” London decided that an Arab uprising to unseat Mehmed would enable them to reassign the role of caliph to a trusted and more malleable ally: Hussein bin Ali Hussein, the sherif of Mecca and a direct descendant, it is claimed, of the Prophet Muhammad. The British employed racism to garner support for the uprising, appealing to the Arabs’ sense of ownership over Islam, which had originated in Mecca and Medina, not among the Turks of Constantinople. A 1914 British proclamation declared, “There is no nation among the Muslims which is now capable of upholding the Islamic Caliphate except the Arab nation.” A letter was dispatched to Sherif Hussein, fomenting his ambition and suggesting, “It may be that an Arab of true race will assume the Caliphate at Mecca or Medina” (Medina being the seat of the first caliphate after the death of the Prophet). Again, the British were prepared to defend the caliphate with the sword, promising to “guarantee the Holy Places against all external aggression.” It is a strange thought that, just 100 years ago, the prosecutors of today’s War on Terror were promising to restore the Islamic caliphate to the Arab world and defend it militarily.

The Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, fomented by the British, got underway in 1916, the same year that the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement was made in secret, carving up between the British and French the very lands Sherif Hussein had been promised. Betrayal, manipulation, and self-interest were, and remain, the name of the game when it comes to Western meddling in the Middle East. The revolt would last two years and was a major factor in the fall of the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the British Army and allied forces, including the Arab Irregulars, were fighting the Ottomans on the battlefields of the First World War. A key figure in these battles was T. E. Lawrence, who became known as Lawrence of Arabia because of the loyalty he engendered in the hearts of Sherif Hussein and his son, Emir Faisal. He was given the status of honorary son by the former, and he fought under the command of the latter in many battles, later becoming Faisal’s advisor. When the Ottomans put a £15,000 reward on Lawrence’s head, no Arab was tempted to betray him.

Sadly this honorable behavior and respect were not reciprocated. In a memo to British intelligence in 1916, Lawrence described the hidden agenda behind the Arab uprising: “The Arabs are even less stable than the Turks. If properly handled they would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous principalities, incapable of cohesion . . . incapable of co-ordinated action against us.” In a subsequent missive he explained, “When war broke out, an urgent need to divide Islam was added. . . . Hussein was ultimately chosen because of the rift he would create in Islam. In other words, divide and rule.”

Oil Security and Western Foreign Policy

Let us fast-forward to the 1950s and ’60s, by which time oil had become a major factor in the West’s foreign policy agenda. Again, the principle of “divide and rule” was put to work: a 1958 British cabinet memo noted, “Our interest lies . . . in keeping the four principal oil-producing areas [Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, and Iraq] under separate political control.” The results of this policy saw the West arming both sides in the Iran-Iraq war—which brought both powers to the brink of total destruction in the 1980s—and then intervening militarily with a force of almost 700,000 men in the First Gulf War (to prevent Iraq annexing Kuwait) in 1990–91.

The United States, UK, and European powers were also deeply troubled by the cohesive potential of Arab Nationalism, a hugely popular movement led by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and his (at that time) mighty allies in Iraq and Syria. The idea of these three huge, left-leaning regional powers becoming politically and militarily united was unacceptable in the Cold War context and remained so after the fall of the Soviet Empire because of the regional threat to Israel. To counteract the rise of pan-Arabism, the West began to support Islamist tendencies within each country—mostly branches of the Muslim Brotherhood—and also worked hard in the diplomatic field to create strong and binding relationships with Islamic, pro-Western monarchies in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Jordan. These relationships endure to this day.

The most extreme manifestation of radical Sunni Islam was Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism, which it had started to disseminate via a string of international organizations and its self-designated Global Islamic Mission. In 1962, Saudi Arabia oversaw the establishment of The Muslim World League, which was largely staffed by exiled members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood’s relationship with the West (and with the Gulf monarchies) has always been inconsistent and entirely selfish. In the run-up to, during, and after, the 2011 “Arab Spring” revolution against Hosni Mubarak, the United States and UK were actively supporting the Muslim Brotherhood as the most credible (or only) experienced political entity. In 2014, both countries came under pressure from the Saudis to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terror group: though neither has yet gone that far, the UK duly launched an official investigation into the group, headed by UK Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir John Jenkins, while in the United States a bill was introduced in Congress, the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2014.

The House of Saud itself feared an “Arab Spring” revolution and encouraged and applauded the June 2013 coup that deposed the Brotherhood’s legitimately elected President Morsi; Saudi King Abdullah phoned coup leader al-Sisi (now the Egyptian president) within hours to congratulate him on his success. Egypt under al-Sisi would prove a better friend to Israel and, like Saudi Arabia, would brutally extinguish any new uprisings, giving the kingdom moral support in its own battle for survival. Saudi political pragmatism (or, as some might frame it, hypocrisy) has been progressively informed by its close relationship with the United States and UK— and is now one of the most significant drivers of the Middle East’s present chaos, including the emergence of ISIS.

Communism: The First Public Enemy Number One

From the 1950s on, the Muslim Brotherhood was supported and funded by the CIA. When Nasser decided to stamp out the movement in Egypt, the CIA helped its leaders migrate to Saudi Arabia, where they were assimilated into the Wahhabi kingdom’s own particular brand of fundamentalism, many rising to positions of great influence. While Saudi Arabia actively prevented the formation of a home-grown branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, it encouraged and financed the movement abroad in other Arab countries. One of the most prominent leaders of the Western-backed Afghan Jihad (1979–89) was a Cairo-educated Muslim Brotherhood member: Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of Jamaat-i-Islami ( JI).

America and, to a lesser extent, Britain fretted about the rise of communism, which was perceived and portrayed as the “enemy of freedom”—a term that would later be applied to the Islamic extremists. In geopolitical terms, by the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union comprised one-sixth of the world’s land mass and was a superpower capable of mounting a devastating challenge to the United States. The White House was also concerned about the future alignment of China, where the Chinese Communist Party had seized power in 1949. Communism was enthusiastically embraced by millions of idealistic post-war Americans and Europeans, posing a perceived domestic political threat. Meanwhile the West observed with horror the increasing popularity of communism and socialism in the Middle East; revolutionary, pro-Soviet, Arab regimes would create an enormous strategic disadvantage and threaten oil security.

For the West, radical Islam represented the best way to counter the encroachment of Arab nationalism communism.

Following the Six-Day War in 1967, US and UK governmental planners noted with satisfaction that Arab unity and sense of a shared cause were finding expression in a revival of Islamic fundamentalism and widespread calls for the implementation of Sharia law. This revival continued through the 1970s and, by the end of the decade, produced the pan-Arab mujahideen that would battle the Soviet armies in Afghanistan for the next ten years.

As in Syria and Iraq, the Sunni jihadists were not alone in the insurgency. There were seven major Sunni groups, armed and funded (to the tune of $6 billion) by the United States and Saudi Arabia, as well as the UK, Pakistan, and China. Abdullah Azzam’s Maktab al-Khidamat (the Services Office), which included bin Laden and from which al Qaeda would emerge, was at this point only a sub-group of one of these, the Gulbuddin faction (founded in 1977 by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar). Often overlooked in retelling the story of this particular Afghan war is the fact that the insurgency was pan-Islamic: there were eight Shi‘i groups, trained and funded by Iran.

Of the Sunni entities it was backing, the CIA preferred the Afghan-Arabs (as the foreign fighters from Arab countries came to be known) because they found them “easier to read” than their indigenous counterparts. In 2003, Australian-British journalist John Pilger conducted research and concluded, “More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6, with the SAS training future al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia.” That Western interference in Afghanistan actually precedes the Soviet invasion by several months is rarely acknowledged. In the context of this book it is worth tracing the motives and methods employed by foreign powers to further their own ends in that territory, as these have been repeated and modified in Iraq and Syria.

Afghanistan’s location and long borders with Iran and Pakistan make it a strategic prize, and rival powers have often fought to control it. A coup in 1978 (the third in five years) brought the pro-Soviet Muhammad Taraki to power, setting off alarm bells in Islamabad, Washington, London, and Riyadh. The Pakistani ISI first tried to foment an Islamist uprising, but this failed owing to lack of popular support. Next, five months before the Soviet invasion, President Jimmy Carter sent covert aid to Islamist opposition groups with the help of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote in a memo to his boss that if the Islamists rose up it would “induce a Soviet military intervention, likely to fail, and give the USSR its own Vietnam.” Another coup in September 1979 brought Deputy Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin to power; Moscow invaded in December, killing Amin and replacing him with its own man, Babrak Karmal. Brzezinski then sent Carter a memo outlining his advised strategy: “We should concert with Islamic countries both a propaganda campaign and a covert action campaign to help the rebels.”

On December 18, 1979, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher enthusiastically endorsed Washington’s approach at a meeting of the Foreign Policy Association in New York, even praising the Iranian Revolution and concluding, “The Middle East is an area where we have much at stake. . . . It is in our own interest that they build on their own deep, religious traditions. We do not wish to see them succumb to the fraudulent appeal of imported Marxism.”

Because IS is a product of Western interference in Iraq and Syria, none of the powers that backed the Afghan mujahideen anticipated the emergence of alQaeda, with its vehemently anti-Western agenda and ambition to re-establish the caliphate. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf wrote in his autobiography, “Neither Pakistan nor the US realized what Osama bin Laden would do with the organization we had all allowed him to establish.”

Defining Extremism: The Western Dilemma

In the course of the 1990s, radical political Islam became more extremist—a shift that was encouraged and funded by Saudi Arabia. The star of the Muslim Brotherhood began to wane as its leaders were castigated for being too “moderate” and for participating in the democratic process in Egypt; standing as “independents” (since the Muslim Brotherhood was banned), its candidates fared well, becoming the main opposition force to President Hosni Mubarak. There was another reason for the Muslim Brotherhood falling out of favor with Riyadh—it had supported Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The House of Saud now linked its survival with the rise of the Salafi-jihadist tendency, which was consistent with its own custom-fit Wahhabi ideology.

The West viewed this shift into a more radical gear with some alarm as the Salafists’ battle became international: Arab jihadists traveled to Eastern Europe to fight with the Bosnian Muslims from 1992; New York’s World Trade Center was first bombed by radical Islamists in 1993; and in 1995, North African jihadists from the al Qaeda–linked GIA (Armed Islamic Group, Algeria) planted bombs on the Paris Metro, killing 8 and injuring more than 100.

The United States and UK adopted a remarkably laid-back approach to this new wave of radical Islam. The UK government and security services did not consider that the extremists presented a real danger, allowing the establishment of what the media labeled “Londonistan” through the 1990s. It could be argued that this was a successful arrangement in that, in return for being allowed to live in the British capital and go about their business in peace, the jihadists did not commit any act of violence on British streets. The Syrian jihadist Abu Musab al-Suri (aka Setmariam Nasar) was a leading light among the Londonistan jihadist community, which also included Osama bin Laden’s so-called ambassador to London, Khalid al-Fawwaz. Al-Suri confirmed to me that a tacit covenant was in place between M16 and the extremists.

Saudi entities and individuals funded al Qaeda and other violent Salafist groups to the tune of $300 million through the 1990s, and the United States and UK remained stalwartly supportive. A year after Margaret Thatcher left parliament for good, she told a 1993 meeting of the Chatham House international affairs think tank, “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a strong force for moderation and stability on the world stage.” When challenged on Riyadh’s appalling human rights record—which included (and still includes) public executions, floggings, stonings, oppression of women, the incarceration of peaceful dissidents, and violent dispersal of any kind of demonstration—she retorted, “I have no intention of meddling in its internal affairs.” Later, Tony Blair would talk of the Middle East’s Axis of Moderation, meaning Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Turkey, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel.

The First Gulf War brought two changes into play. The first was that Saudi Arabia now became completely dependent, militarily, on the United States for its survival. The second was that, in an attempt to weaken Saddam Hussein, the CIA encouraged Shi‘i groups in southern Iraq to rebel, resulting in thousands of Shi‘a being slaughtered by regime helicopter fire. George H. W. Bush spent $40 million on clandestine operations in Iraq, flying Shi‘i and Kurdish leaders to Saudi Arabia for training, and creating and funding two opposition groups: the Iraqi National Accord, led by Iyad Alawi (who would collaborate in a failed coup plotted by the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group in 1996) and the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi (who was close to Dick Cheney when he was Defense Secretary). And yet, for the next twelve years, Saddam Hussein remained in power despite the punitive sanctions regime.

Washington and London continued to believe that an alliance with “moderate” Islam was key to defeating the extremists. A 2004 Whitehall paper by former UK Ambassador to Damascus Basil Eastwood and Richard Murphy, who had been assistant secretary of state under Reagan, noted: “In the Arab Middle East, the awkward truth is that the most significant movements which enjoy popular support are those associated with political Islam.” For the first time, they identified two distinct groups within the political Islamists: those “who seek change but do not advocate violence to overthrow regimes, and the Jihadists . . . who do.”

This new paradigm gained traction. In 2006, Tony Blair made it clear that the coming fight in the Middle East would be between the moderate Islamists and the extremists. The West, he told an audience in the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles, should seek to “empower” the moderates. “We want moderate, mainstream Islam to triumph over reactionary Islam.” Blair enlarged on the economic benefits this would accrue to the large transnational enterprises and organizations he championed: “A victory for the moderates means an Islam that is open: open to globalization.”

The West continues to behave as if Saudi Arabia can deliver the world from the menace of extremism. Yet the kingdom has spent $50 billion promoting Wahhabism around the world, and most of the funding for al Qaeda—amounting to billions of dollars—still comes from private individuals and organizations in Saudi Arabia. The Sinjar Records (documents captured in Iraq by coalition forces in 2007) provided a clear picture of where foreign jihadists were coming from: Saudi nationals accounted for 45 percent of foreign fighters in Iraq. They swell the ranks of IS today.

The Arab revolutions muddied the waters even more, particularly in Libya and Syria, making it almost impossible to distinguish between moderates and extremists. In Libya the West’s intervention strengthened the radicals and liberated stockpiles of Gaddafi’s sophisticated weapons, which were immediately spirited away by the truckload to jihadist strongholds. In the light of that error, President Obama dithered in Syria, much to the fury of his Saudi allies, allowing the most radical of the extremists to prevail: Islamic State.

Excerpted from “Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate” by Abdel Bari Atwan. Published by the University of California Press.
America enabled radical Islam: How the CIA, George W. Bush and many others helped create ISIS
by Abdel Bari Atwan, salon.com
http://flip.it/4rcKa

You Can Call Me Pseudo-Sickular

So I am a beef-eating Hindu Brahmin, married to a South African of no religious affiliation. I am a trained Bharat Natyam dancer and I also love hip-hop, belly-dancing and jazz ballet. I studied Sanskrit and Tamil as second languages along with Hindi which I still struggle to speak with correct grammar and pronounciation, making English my first language. Tamil is my mother tongue. I love Yoga, I love chanting Sanskrit shlokas but over and above all of that, I am a woman and an Indian. My culture - and I mean mine personally - is one of lovely contradictions. No one can tell me I am not Hindu. No text can tell me how exactly to be one. No, the Ramayana is a story, not the "Word" like the Bible or the Quran. In fact, I prefer the Mahabharata any day. My mother is a pure vegetarian, my father is not. He taught me that the sunrise, a little bird song, a tall tree are all God. He taught me that the observer, me and the observed, the universe are intimately entwined. He taught me if we do not see ourselves in others, then there is no beauty to being human. So when dangerous nitwits try and circumscribe me into narrow boxes with their filtered jingoistic take on Hinduism, it makes me wonder what kind of people they are, and do they even see India the way I do? Let me say that I am not going to romanticize my view of India. I see the poverty, the helplessness, the garbage, the corruption, the violence. I wake up to stories of an old Muslim man killed by a mob on the suspicion he was eating beef. His younger son was also beaten badly. His older son is an engineer in the IAF. I wake up to news that a khap panchayat, that lovely bastion of patriarchal kangaroo court justice, ordered the rape of two sisters because their brother married outside his caste. Caste. Paint it whichever way you like, it's a sick degrading practice, as much an apartheid as the old system in South Africa, the country in which I now live. I have seen more racism in India than I have here in South Africa. I was called a "madrasi" casually by people who would be shocked if you told them they were parochial idiots. I have alternately been asked how I am not dark as all madrasis are and also been told by an acquaintance that her summer holidays made her as dark as me. On work for a shoot at the Taj Mahal, the ticket window guy argued that my camera person had to pay the foreigner rate because he was Korean. My camera person was from Manipur. I was flatly told we were lying as Indians did not look like him. It's not just North India but also South India that has all these issues. So, no, I have no romantic view of India. But I have also seen another India, travelled in it, lived in it, been told stories about it. In that India, I have been fed without having to ask, been welcomed without questions, seen unbelievable dignity in the face of all odds. I remembered a story of how the great Bismillah Khan was once on a train and when it stopped at a station, he heard a most haunting melody, a raga he could not identify. It was a young boy walking through the train playing the flute. He stopped near the ustad, and the ustad was mesmerized by the tune. And just as suddenly as the boy came, he left. The ustad was convinced he had been in the presence of divinity. He swore the young boy who played for him was none other than Lord Krishna. Ustad was on his way to the kumbh mela to perform, in a profoundly Hindu festival. When he did perform, he played the raga he heard the boy play and that raga was called Kanhaira by him. My Hinduism is simple. It is "aham brahmasmi" or "the core of my being is the ultimate reality, the root and ground of the universe, the source of all that exists." There is only one supreme being and it is the super consciousness, from which we all sprang and into which we will all be absorbed. Just as a seed carries the secret of a mighty tree within, we carry the supreme conciousness. When that is the central philosophy of Hinduism, where the microcosm and the macrocosm are linked in an infinite beautiful cycle, how can I ever accept what the extreme right wing would like to see as Hinduism? When Hinduism, a way of life, a philosophy that roots itself in a bedrock of tolerance, is twisted into narrow rules and regulations trapped by bars of hate, I cannot and will not accept it. When my Hinduism, asks me to believe in Athithi devo bavah, or "the guest is God", when it asks me to find God in myself because tatvamasi is the heart of the matter and therefore makes me find the divine in others, how can the rule makers separate us into individuals instead of humanity? My Hinduism is stories I danced to. When Bhakt Jayadeva wrote the Geeta Govindam while writing of the love between Radha and Krishna, he spontaneously composed a line, "dehi pada pallava mudharam" or "Krishna asked Radha to place her lotus-like feet on his head." Appalled by this thought that had come to his head, Jayadeva left the house to go bathe and clear his thoughts. A few minutes later, much to his wife's surprise, he came back and sat down and wrote and left again. A few minutes later he came back again. He sat down and then with great anger asked his wife how she could have written the words that were such an insult to God, his wife, most puzzled, said that he himself had just come back and written them and that's when Jayadeva knew it was Krishna himself who had done so. God was saying that in the presence of love, even God is the lesser. Yet, today, we hate, hate so much. That is not my Hinduism. In our culture we will ignore that Charvaka is an ancient Hindu philosophy that embraces philosophical skepticism and rejects the Vedas, Vedic ritualism and supernaturalism. It encourages questions and arguments. Established by Brihaspati, one of our most venerated sages. Yet we will murder professors and social workers who subscribe to it. Our Gayatri mantra, asks for the benevolent light of the sun, the life giver, to inspire our intelligence, to inspire our understanding and to banish ignorance and bathe us in enlightenment. Where is any of that now? In our culture, we will ignore that all meat was consumed by Hindus in the Vedic times and erase that part of history. Indeed that over 60% of India eats meat is rejected. I reject that Hinduism. That narrow confined box. You can call me a pseudo sickular liberal presstitute. I will just bow and say namaste, which means "I greet the divine in you". (Swati Thiyagarajan is an Environment Editor with NDTV)

Real Agenda of RSS Pracharak-Turned-PM

By Mani Shankar Aiyar
When I had my little spat with Shashi Tharoor over his praising the Modi government for its performance in its first few days of office, my main point was that the new establishment could not be assessed on the basis of its initial words and actions but in the longer perspective of the values and causes it stood for and where it wished to take the country. That view now stands vindicated. For our ever-loquacious Prime Minister, whose oratorical abilities reach their heights when he is abusing the Gandhi family has, but for one brief statement, kept his mouth firmly closed while outrage at what his ideological clan are saying and doing sweeps across the liberal, secular, open-minded, freedom-loving and democratic upholders of our true nationhood. On the solitary occasion he spoke, an "exercise at deflection" as literary critic Ziya us Salam has called it, all he had to say was that Hindus and Muslims should not be fighting against each other but together fighting poverty. Well, the one who was not fighting Hindus but fighting poverty all his life was poor Mohammed Akhlaq, as was his son, Danish, still fighting for his life after two brain surgeries. But where were Hindus and Muslims fighting each other? Nowhere. There had been the cold-blooded murder of three rationalist writers, followed by the lynching of one poor village blacksmith. It was not a communal riot; it was unilateral communalism. It had in it no element of mutual Hindu-Muslim rivalry. All it amounted to was one section of vicious militant Hindus, united in their ardent support of everything Hindutva stands for, targeting individuals they hate for not sharing their views to the point of killing them and then justifying the killing. It is that which the Prime Minister was called upon to condemn. He elided the question, deliberately choosing to approach the matter in broad, general terms, rather than frontally confronting his most impassioned supporters who had resorted to violence and bloodshed, and then found excuses for these gross excesses. Moreover, these impassioned supporters included several of his Ministers, his MPs and his MLAs, and assorted Hindutva activists. Not one of them has been sacked. Not one has been repudiated. No one has been reprimanded. Instead, an "advisory" has been addressed to the UP government. No advisories have been sent out to Nagpur. No pledge has been made that as far as the Sangh Parivar is concerned, this must stop. No action has been taken to signal "zero tolerance" of any such words or actions in future. In consequence, the entire establishment, ranging from government ministers to the lowliest cadres, has been reassured that they might continue their mayhem with little fear of being pulled up or thrown out. The real agenda of the RSS pracharak-turned-PM is being rolled out. What a contrast to Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru before and after Independence and Partition. One's memory lingers on Gandhiji at Noakhali protecting the Hindus, at Bihar protecting the Muslims, at Calcutta stopping the madness, at Delhi soothing tempers and bringing back good sense: a "One Man Boundary Force". One seems to hear today what Gandhiji cited at his prayer meeting in Birla House on 22 December 1947: "I always like to be with a minority, for a minority as a rule does not commit mistakes, and even if it does, it can be rectified. But a majority is drunk with power and it is difficult to reform it". The Modi majority is drunk with power. It mistakes majority rule for majoritarian rule. It believes it has the mandate to do as it likes, even up to and including condoning murder. One also recalls the immortal words of Jawaharlal Nehru at the Ram Lila grounds on Gandhi Jayanti 1951 after he had vanquished the forces of communalism within the Congress party: "If anyone raises his hand against another in the name of religion, I shall fight him till the last breath of my life, whether from within the government or outside". That is leading from the front, not hiding behind the words of the Rashtrapati in order to save himself the trouble of confronting head-on the forces of hatred and violence within his own ranks. Fortunately for all of us, the last of the Nehrus is still with us. Panditji's niece, Nayantara Sahgal, has spoken and acted, returning her Sahitya Akademi award because the Akademi "remains silent" even as the Prime Minister "dare not alienate evil-doers who support his ideology". That ideology is at variance with our Constitution, for, as Vice President Hamid Ansari whom she quotes has pointed out, our Constitution promises to all citizens "liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship". This is the Constitution that "We, the People of India" - that is the Argumentative Indian - have given ourselves, incorporating the precious right to dissent. The right to dissent, whether it is I from the RSS or the RSS from me, can only be exercised if, as Nayantara says, India's "culture of diversity" is celebrated, not subjected, as it has been in recent times, to "vicious assault". She has proved an exemplar with three other Sahitya Akademi award winners, Uday Prakash (who actually preceded her), Ashok Vajpeyi and Shashi Deshpande, and a host of regional Sahitya Akademi awardees - nine Kannada writers, Rahman Abbas the Urdu writer, Aman Sethi based in Delhi, GN Devy of Gujarat and three eminent Punjabi literati - following suit. Vajpeyi points to our trembling "on the brink of a tyranny of uniformity and parochialism (with) violence, murder, intolerance, bans creating a fearful ethos (in which) being in a minority is almost a crime", echoing Nayantara's warning that "anyone who questions any aspect of the ugly and dangerous distortion of Hinduism known as Hindutva - whether in the intellectual or artistic sphere, or whether in terms of food habits and lifestyle - are being marginalized, persecuted, or murdered". India's most renowned public intellectual, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, quoted by the Vice President, has said, "Indian democracy is a cacophony of voices. But if you scratch the surface, dissent in India labours under an immense maze of threats and interdictions". Shashi Deshpande aims straight at our conscience, individual and collective, when she points out that "silence is a form of abetment". She insists that now "is the right time for writers to reclaim their voices", to stand against "such acts of violence" and fight "the growing intolerance in our country". And Prof. Devy of Gujarat warns against the "increasing intolerance and shrinking space for dissent and free expression in the country." This then is the time to remember the immortal words of Pastor Niemoller, who initially welcomed Hitler and, having kept quiet while others were being persecuted, incarcerated and killed, spent seven years in Hitler's concentration camps: "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me." Before it comes to that in our much-valued secular democracy, it is, as Rahman Abbas has stressed while returning his award, "our duty to raise our voices against fascism, right-wing intolerant forces and lawlessness." Will we rise to the occasion - or "not speak out" NOW? (Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha.)
by NDTV

Islam under attack by modern time crusaders

Modern crusaders are using ISIS to not only harm Islam, but they are also fanning enmity against Muslim communities.
It is a fact that some Western circles wanting to finish off Islam are involved in an all-out campaign to not only harm Islam but to totally eradicate it. These are the modern day crusaders.

Today, Islam, a religion of peace, tranquility and security, is being portrayed as the cause of evil and terrorism.

You only have to look at the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) to see what this is all about. ISIS stands for everything that is un-Islamic. ISIS is trying to legitimize its atrocities and barbarism through Islam, which is simply a clear indicator of who ISIS is serving.

You only have to look at the bombing in Ankara last Saturday that killed about 100 people and wounded more than 200 to see what ISIS is capable of.

It is high time the Islamic scholars and wise men came together and started telling the world what true Islam is all about. Yet we see with sadness that Muslim scholars and men of wisdom are as bewildered as we are in the face of the assaults against Islam. We cannot see any meaningful dialogue among them. We do not see any form of meaningful cooperation among them. All we see is goodwill messages and well wishes.

You only have to look at the disasters that were suffered during the hajj in Mecca to see the Islamic world is still far from getting its act together. We need a concerted effort but the lack of spirit of solidarity during the hajj incidents show we still have a long way to go.

Islamophobia is not only threatening Islam but it is seriously harming Islamic communities in Western countries. The modern day crusaders are not only using ISIS to harm Islam but they are also fanning enmity against Islamic communities in Europe.

This is a wakeup call.

Turkey's DİB has been making an effort to get people to cooperate, force religious leaders of various countries to unite their forces and counter disgusting organizations like ISIS. But this needs a lot of effort and solidarity.

Mehmet Görmez, the head of the Presidency of Religious Affairs (DİB) inaugurated the Asia and Pacific Countries Muslim Religious Leaders Summit in Istanbul yesterday calling on the Muslims of the world to unite against the ongoing threats targeting Islam.
Let us hope the summit in Istanbul serves this purpose.

http://www.dailysabah.com/columns/ilnur-cevik/2015/10/14/islam-under-attack-by-modern-time-crusaders

'US exporting revolutions to assert imperialism

Many people are under the impression that unrest in the Middle East is somewhat of a political constant, and this lends itself to the idea that this region of the world simply cannot, and does not understand the delicacies of diplomacy and peace building. However, the truth is that most of today's crises in the region can be traced back to the corridors of the White House.
Obama says he was ‘skeptical’ of Syria rebel boondoggle from the start Although it would be unfair to pin all the blame on the United States, it remains nevertheless true that if not for America's military interventionism, the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) and the rest of the world for that matter, might have found itself standing on very different political legs indeed. ISIL, for example, the brain-child of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist clergy, could never have raised its ugly head. If not for America's political engineering and western capitals' silence, death and destruction would not have befallen the MENA the way it did. Hundreds of thousands of men and women would not have had to flee their homes, and their lands, if not for America's global ambitions.
As US President Barack Obama so eloquently put it in his address to the UN General Assembly on September 28: "We see the fears of ordinary people being exploited through appeals to sectarianism, or tribalism, or racism, or anti-Semitism." Yes indeed, Mr. President! The seeds of such evil were actually planted by one of your compatriots, the founding father of covert destabilization: Zbigniew Brzezinski, the senior US foreign policy strategist. And yet America has not been called into question; its war games it appears have not yet reached such Machiavellian proportions that the public cannot help but finally see through the smoking mirrors. As America's hawks continue to spill their poisons, arming and financing so-called "democratic revolutions" across the MENA, terror, violence and radicalism have gained exponential ground.
From Libya to Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain, the same narrative of hate and division has dominated; as if invisible hands were pulling strings, angling countries and people to follow pre-determined political formats. Ever since the CIA tried its hand at regime change back in 1953 in Iran against Mohammed Mossadegh, the US has not looked back once; instead, it has pushed for more control, more behind-the-curtains manipulations as its officials worked to create a world order they could claim control over. Today, this thirst for control has been compounded in this grand shadow foreign policy apparatus, you might also know as US-funded NGOs.
The National Endowment for Democracy for example, a central part of former US President Ronald Reagan’s propaganda war against the Soviet Union three decades ago, has evolved into a $100 million US government-financed slush fund that generally supports a neocon agenda - often at cross-purposes with the Obama administration’s foreign policy. Obama says he was ‘skeptical’ of #Syria rebel boondoggle from the start http://t.co/Jt1vlIReIc#ISISpic.twitter.com/scoryBaY9p — RT America (@RT_America) October 12, 2015

NED's most infamous, and recent footprint can be found in Ukraine, where it invested heavily in propping up neo-Nazi militants to depose former President Viktor Yanukovich, who Washington felt was too independent for its liking. In the Middle East, America has utilized the likes of USAID and NED in Lebanon, Yemen and Bahrain to help drive a narrative of division, and thus offset calls for popular mobilization against foreign meddling. God forbid if Arab nations should actually show the ambition to raise cohesive nation states!
God forbid if the MENA could actually be allowed to forge ahead under its own steam, without the overbearing diktat of America and its democratic fallacies! Joaquim Flores, a political analyst with the Center for Syncretic Studies noted the following: “While most NGO's are used to some extent to fulfill those charity/education/aid aims, and secondarily fulfill the common practice NGO needs (let's be real) of money laundering, racketeering, funds for political elections, bribes and so on they are also used to funnel or channel these funds and resources into other areas. These other areas are chiefly both radicalization through promotion of Wahhabism and moreover the direct funding of terrorist organizations connected to Saudi intelligence projects such as Al-Qaeda and its various rebranding such as ISIL.” In Yemen, America's game of NGOs has taken an even more sinister turn as many aid agencies were forced to profile their outreach program to better play into their patrons’ political visions, thus leaving entire segments of the population to starve on account of their religious affiliation. The perfect covert agents, NGOs have served as CIA sleeping cells. It is such networks which have propelled certain "personalities" into the public eye, offering them platforms which otherwise would have remained out of reach. Most CIA-backed rebels in Syria ‘anti-American, anti-Western and anti-democracy’ (Op-Edge) http://t.co/eUFqRdE1mJpic.twitter.com/fEbTylsWoz — RT (@RT_com) September 24, 2015

Take Tawakkul Karman for example, the self-proclaimed mother of Yemen's revolution, the glowing symbol of women empowerment before the diktat of radical Islam. Crowned the face of 2011 when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (one of three laureates) Western officials quickly glossed over the fact that this one activist, herself the president of an NGO: Women Journalists Without Chains, has long held links with Al Islah, Yemen's very own right-wing Islamic party. Let us remember that Al Islah hosts within its ranks the infamous Muslim Brotherhood, a group even Saudi Arabia felt was “too radical” for its liking; a pan-Arab group Washington was only too keen to support in Egypt, to later on abandon to the promises of military rule instead. There as well NGOs played an important destabilizing role. Karman, who shook hands with half the Western political hemisphere and benefited from America's financial largess, has been instrumental in fomenting sectarian hatred in her homeland, blasting the Houthi resistance for daring deny Riyadh's hegemonic ambitions. Pentagon funding bill on Obama’s desk: $600 mln to Syrian rebels, $300 mln to Kiev http://t.co/PPCc9TeM3ppic.twitter.com/c52BFRbp5u — RT America (@RT_America) October 9, 2015

"Brzezinski’s strategy has consisted of utilizing the CIA in place of the Pentagon, and creating instability and chaos to topple governments that defied Washington. As Russian President Putin recently noted, Brzezinski consciously worked to copy the rhetorical style and foreign policing messaging of the Soviet Union, and portray the United States, not as imperialist, but as ‘aiding revolutionaries’ who fought for ‘human rights,’” wrote Caleb Maupin for MintPress News earlier this October. Brzezinski's policies of mass destabilization, his encouragements to arm reactionary religious zealots and other political sociopaths in view of expanding America's reach in the world have become standard US policy. And still, we are to believe Washington is hugging the moral high ground. For a nation which proclaims its president, "the leader of the free world,” the US has done a great job at defeating budding democracies throughout the world - the Middle East of course stands testimony to Washington's madness. America's logic has become so perverted that its officials have rationalized their alliance with radicals to assert US hegemony, or as they profess: democracy building. In an interview with RT in 2014, Noam Chomsky, one of the most prominent intellectuals of our time blasted the US for being “the world’s leading terror state.” But here is where the US foreign policy monster could ironically turn against its own. If the CIA has been able for the past decades to siphon public funds to finance shadow political structures overseas; can we not envision that it will now turn inwards and rise a shadow government capable of deposing American institutions altogether? While NED's focus remains outwardly, what of the money it is now spending in Washington DC, funding those NGOs which pay those salaries of political operatives who, in turn, write American op-eds often from a neocon, interventionist perspective? Is night setting on Lady Liberty?

'US exporting revolutions to assert imperialism' rt.com

Enemy at the gates: ISIS, Daesh Terror

Renowned American scholar Jessica Stern along with J.M. Berger has tried to understand the evolution of the selfstyled Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS) in their recently published book, ISIS: The State of Terror. The book provides a comprehensive account of factors which have contributed to the genesis and transformation of the IS. Stern is a leading expert on terrorism and has authored many books on the subject.

Berger has similar credentials, but his focus has largely remained on the US. Their collaborative effort provides an analysis of the emerging threats in Iraq and Syria, where Islamist `jihadists`have not only captured certain territories but are also front runners on the social media. The IS has expanded the war from physical to virtual spaces, which has made the challenge of terrorism more complex.

The Jihadist movements have evolved to a level where establishing a state does not seem like an ambitious goal, at least for some of them. The IS is an advanced-level jihadist movement. The group has crossed all limits of brutality by using the act of beheading as a means of marketing, manipulation, and recruitment.

The initial chapters focus on the circum-stances which provided a favourable environment to jihadists in Iraq to form the terrorist group. The IS was the brainchild of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian thug-turned-terrorist.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq provided him the reason to establish the group. The book provides a background of the events which nurtured the character of Zarqawi and his movement. However, the US and its Western allies, who continued to downplay the role of the upstart jihadists for months, are also blamed.

According to the authors, this downplay came as most Americans and other Westerners were disillusioned and exhausted by more than 10 years of a costly `war on terror`.

Paul Bremer, the former head of the coalition provisional authority in Iraq, was the man behind the assessment of the Iraqi situation after the eruption of civil war and policy decisions complicated the scenario. The initiatives taken in the name of state-building proved fatal and widened the sectarian divide in Iraq, which was exploited by Zarqawi. The authors believe that Bremer`s decisions of disbanding the military and firing all members of Saddam Hussein`s ruling Ba`ath Party from civil service positions proved counter-productive. More than 100,000 Sunni Ba`athists were removedfrom the government and military, leaving them unemployed, angry, and in the case of military personnel, armed.

These policies triggered sectarian tensions, which were intensely mixed with local and regional politics. Post-war Iraq was a recipe for sectarian conflict and Zarqawi wasted little time in exploiting the situation and intensifying these tensions. Later, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi exploited the same tendencies in Syria.

The second factor which contributed to the f ormation of the IS was the growing ideological radicalisation in Iraqi prisons. The prisons facilitated radicalisation among the prisoners, many among whom were not jihadists but were unemployed citizens and were either paid or coerced into the resistance movement. The head of the IS, Baghdadi, exploited the situation when he was in Camp Bucca prison. The prison also proved to be a key transformative agent for Zarqawi.

The book also discusses the factors which contributed in developing the ideological perspective of Zarqawi: a Jordanian jihadist scholar, Abu Muhammad al-Magdisi, shaped the mindset of the terrorist. Magdisi was the `bookish fatwah monk, and Zarqawi was the man who tested his theories in real time and a real war`.

Apart from Magdisi, two other jihadist ideologues had contributed in developing the contours of the IS: Abu Bakr Naji and Abu Musab al-Suri.

Na ji`s book T he Management of Savagery: T he Most Critical Stage through Which the Umma Will Pass was a compilation of lessons learned from previous jihadist failures, as well as advancement in thinking about the movement`s future direction. Written in 2004, the book outlined the following stages of the jihadist struggle: `Disruption and exhaustion: in which terrorist attacks damage the economy of the enemy power and demoralise their population; Management of savagery: a phase of violent resistance with an emphasis on carrying out acts of highly visible violence, intended to send a message to both allies and enemies and; Empowerment: the establishment of regions controlled by jihadists that can subsequently grow and unite towards the goal of re-creation of the `Caliphate`.

The IS has adopted the same strategy for the future. Suri`s 1,600-page book The Call to a Global Islamic Resistance was the second book which influenced Zarqawi. In this book, Suri advocates leaderless jihad and strategies such as the use of the so-called lone-wolf attacks.

The book describes the background of the differences between Al Qaeda and Zarqawi, which later caused a permanent division between two camps. Al Qaeda top leaders were never happy with Zarqawi`s `ultra radical` views, but ironically, it was the invasion of Iraq that pushed Zarqawi into an alliance with Osama bin Laden and led to Al Qaeda`s enduring presence in Iraq. The alliance could not be converted into a long-term relationship and cracks appeared again when Zarqawi announced the establishment of the IS.

While describing the cognitive relationship between Al Qaeda and the IS, the authors see Al Qaeda as the intellectual side of the jihadist movement, which was the spark, and the IS provided gasoline to give the flame. The Al Qaeda model is based on a framework of attracting fighters first and radicalising them later, but the IS sought recruits and supporters who are further down the path toward ideological radicalisation or more inclined by personal disposition towards violence. `Al Qaeda`s vision is often explicitly nihilistic. The IS, for all its barbarity, is both more pragmatic and more utopian,` the book says. The authors see differences between the two jihadist movements as the conflict of visions and their assessment is that the winner of the war between Al Qaeda and the IS will wield tremendous influence over the tactics and goals of the next generation of jihadists.

In fact, Al Qaeda itself was the beneficiary of the resistance and separatist movements of Muslim countries and territories, from Philippines to Kashmir and Palestine to Bosnia. These movements were `Islamised` in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda had absorbed the human resources while connecting them in a brotherhood relationship. The IS has further transformed the jihadist movements and provided a new model, which is broad in ideological and political perspectives and diverse in its war and communication strategies and tactics. The authors argue that the IS`s accomplishments will have longterm ramifications for jihadists and other extremist movements that may learn from its tactics.

The most important part of the book is about the propaganda wars which the IS is fighting in virtual spaces, getting results in physical form. The IS has learned from the ineffective communication struggles of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups. Al Qaeda chapters and affiliates had very loose and unreliable communication networks and the group was following Suri`s strategy of leaderless resistance.

A few chapters of the book are devoted to analysing the communication and propaganda strategies of the IS. The chapter titled `From Vanguard to Smart Mob` describes how Al Qaeda affiliates were trying to convey their messages to their top leadership; successful attempts nurtured well-crafted communication strategies focused on the use of the social media.The authors say: `Of fline, ISIS followed the model of a functional-if-limited government. Online, it played a different game. It amassed and empowered a `smart mob` of thousands of individuals, which shared its ideology and cheered its success.

Since the war against the Soviets, jihadists have been using video and print media in sophisticated ways, but the IS has successfully managed to enter the burgeoning world of the social media. The writers say that killing civilians and destroying infrastructure are not typically a terrorist organisation`s end goals. Rather, they are a means to provoke a political reaction; the social media, too, help achieve that purpose. In this perspective, the book also refers to a study conducted by Google Ideas which estimated that at least 45,000 pro-IS accounts were online between September and November 2014, along with thousands more pro-IS bot and spam accounts.

A chapter is devoted to psychological warfare.

The authors state: `Terror can make us strike back at the wrong enemy, for the wrong reasons or both`.

The perceptions matter in risk assessments and the IS, through its brutal acts, has expanded the limits of risks. The authors raise the question: `Is ISIS deliberately trying to create a society with an appetite for violent aggression?` And they come up with the answer: `It is impossible to know ISIS`s conscious intentions in this regard, but either way, the result of its rule in Syria and Iraq will no doubt be a deeply traumatised generation and a host of new challenges from within.

There are some solutions and strategies suggested on developing counter-narratives. Most of these suggestions are already known. Different nations are trying to respond in their own way, but what is missing is a collective response. In this context, the book recommends a conference be dedicated to airing IS strategies publically, with participation from both the public and private sector, with an eye towards establishing some consistent, reasonable practices and clearly defined areas that require more study on the resolution of more complicated questions. The Summit on Countering Violent Extremism early this year in the White House was an attempt in this direction, but nothing concrete was achieved. It seems the international community is still underplaying the threat.

Overall the book provides a good narration and explanation of events from 2003 onwards to the inception of the IS. This is an essential read for those who deal with security issues; the book also has a lot to offer to students of religious studies and radical movements.
Review by M.Amir Rana . Dawn.com

The Grave Threats to World Peace

Image result for threat to world peace
One cannot quote just one factor as threat to the world peace. There are series of factors and reasons which has resulted to massive killings, displacement of people and destruction at unprecedented scale in modern history, with no end in sight. Here is a selection of articles which may help to understand some possible reasons of present turmoil:-
  1. Why America Is the Gravest Threat to World Peace: By Noam Chomsky
  2. Rise of Imperial USA
  3. Islamophobia has a long history in US
  4. Islamophobia
  5. US at war with an imaginary Islam: Lies, propaganda and the real story of America and the Muslim world

Image result for threat to world peace

  1. Bernard Lewis Plan to Carve up Middle East and Pakistan
  2. “Greater Israel”: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East The Infamous "Oded Yinon Plan"
  3. How One Man Laid the Groundwork for Today’s Crisis in the Middle East
  4. ISIS, Vanguard of the Global Elite & Plan to Redraw the Middle East 
  5. The Protocols of the elders of Zion  
  6. How to Counter Zionist Plans to divide Middle East: 
  7. America enters the ‘Old Middle East   
  8. Neo-colonialism, a Threat to World Peace
  9. Why Isis fights 
  10. The Refugee Crisis is a Crisis of Imperialism  
  11. World Caliphate: 
  12. Tribulation and Discord in Muslim World
  13. Religion cause wars
  14. Jihad, Extremism?
  15. Illiteracy, Greatest Threat to World Peace  
  16. Poverty As a Great Threat to the World Peace and Economy ...
  17. ISIS, Daesh, Boko Haram, Taliban - Illogical Logic of Terrorists to kill innocent people on name of Islam - Refuted  
  18. Is Pakistan the biggest threat to world peace? 
  19. Frankenstein the CIA created - From Mujahideen to Al-Qaida , Takfiri Taliban ...
  20. The Dreadful Doctrine of Terror : Takfeer عقيدة المروعة من الإرهاب: التكفير
  21. Refutation of Takfiris form Quran & Hadiths
  22. Who are the Khawarij in Pakistan? A critical note on TTP and their ideology
  23. EU poll: “Israel poses biggest threat to world peace”: Flash Eurobarometer survey carried out in October 2003 for the European Commission in the fifteen member states of the EU found that nearly 60 percent of European citizens believe Israel poses the biggest threat to world peace. Iran is considered the second biggest threat, North Korea the third and the United States the fourth. The survey was carried out by EOS Gallup Europe. 
  24. Apartheid's Threat to World Peace: World Conference for ... 
  25. Kashmir - Serious Threat to World Peace    
  26. Are Colonial Empires a Threat to World Peace?  
  27. The major reasons for which India is ranked 8th in the list of ... 

United States Greatest Threat to World Peace 09 ... - YouTube

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOekshZo3wM
Sep 22, 2015 - Uploaded by Separation of Corporation and State
Noam Chomsky discusses how the United States (not Iran) is the biggest threat to world peace, when people ...

Why is Russia a threat to world peace? - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puZZoKkv2Nk
Jul 22, 2015 - Uploaded by ANUchannel
Since Russia's invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine last year, President Putin has continued to have a ...

Poll: US seen as biggest threat to world peace - YouTube

www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5ddMn6Yows

Jan 2, 2014 - Uploaded by RT America
A Worldwide Independent Network/Gallup poll found that 24 percent of people around the world think the US ...

Why Israel Is A Threat To World Peace - YouTube

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fuIXc74Zn0

Jun 26, 2012 - Uploaded by Brother Nathanael
http://www.realjewnews.com/ http://brothernathanaelfoundation.org/ http://brovids.com/

Which Country Is the Biggest Threat To World Peace ...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VltLpcEYxY4
Sep 18, 2015 - Uploaded by ThinkTank
You might be surprised who a lot of countries see as the most threatening. John and Brett Erlich discuss. Don't ...

PressTV-US wages war on humanity: Author

www.presstv.com/.../US-war-on-humanity-Lendman-
Aug 2, 2015
The United States has waged war on humanity and has become the greatest threat to world peace and ...

Harvard students: US bigger threat to world peace than ISIS ...

video.foxnews.com/.../harvard-students-us-bigger-t...

Harvard students: US bigger threat to world peace than ISIS. Oct. 08, 2014 - 1:40 - Campus Reform interviews ...

'Radical Islam' threat to world peace - YouTube

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDXGLfUTBbA

Apr 24, 2014 - Uploaded by PressTV News Videos
Tony Blair, Britain's highly controversial former Prime Minister, is back in the spotlight once more, following a ...
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