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How Islamic Extremism Was Born
Submitted by Ben Norton via Salon.com,
President Ronald Reagan gestures while talking to Burhaneddin Rabbani, a spokesman for the Afghan Resistance Alliance, at the White House in Washington, June 16, 1986. (AP Photo/Dennis Cook)
History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolute lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today was borne out of the Western foreign policy of yesteryear.
Gore Vidal famously referred to the USA as the United States of Amnesia. The late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai put it a little more delicately, quipping, “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.”
In order to understand the rise of militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida; in order to wrap our minds around their heinous, abominable attacks on civilians in the U.S., France, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Nigeria, Turkey, Yemen, Afghanistan and many, many more countries, we must rekindle this historical memory.
Where did violent Islamic extremism come from? In the wake of the horrific Paris attacks on Friday, November the 13, this is the question no one is asking — yet it is the most important one of all. If one doesn’t know why a problem emerged, if one cannot find its root, one will never be able to solve and uproot it.
Where did militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida come from? The answer is not as complicated as many make it out to be — but, to understand, we must delve into the history of the Cold War, the historical period lied about in the West perhaps more than any other.
How the West cultivated Osama bin Laden
We needn’t reach back far into history, just a few decades.
A much-circulated photo of an article published in British newspaper the Independent in 1993 exemplifies the West’s twisted hypocrisy. Titled “Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace,” it features a large photo of Osama bin Laden, who, at the time, was a close Western ally.
The newspaper noted that bin Laden organized a militia of thousands of foreign fighters from throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and “supported them with weapons and his own construction equipment” in their fight against the USSR in the 1980s. “We beat the Soviet Union,” bin Laden boasted.
The mujahedin, this international Islamic extremist militia organized and headed by bin Laden, is what eventually morphed into both al-Qaida and the Taliban.
“When the history of the Afghan resistance movement is written,” the Independent wrote, “Mr Bin Laden’s own contribution to the mujahedin… may turn out to be a turning point in the recent history of militant fundamentalism.”
Portraying bin Laden in a positive light, less than eight years before he would help mastermind the largest terrorist attack on American soil in decades, the British publication claimed that the “Saudi businessman who recruited mujahedin now uses them for large-scale building projects in Sudan.” In reality, bin Laden was setting the stages for what would be become al-Qaida.
Unheeded warnings
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was blessed with the power of prophecy, but cursed in that no one would ever heed her warnings. Eqbal Ahmad, the late political scientist, historian and expert in the study of terrorism, was a modern-day Cassandra.
In a speech at the University of Colorado, Boulder in October 1998, Ahmad warnedthat the U.S. policy in Afghanistan would backfire:
“In Islamic history, jihad as an international violent phenomenon had disappeared in the last 400 years, for all practical purposes. It was revived suddenly with American help in the 1980s. When the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, Zia ul-Haq, the [U.S.-backed] military dictator of Pakistan, which borders on Afghanistan, saw an opportunity and launched a jihad there against godless communism. The U.S. saw a God-sent opportunity to mobilize one billion Muslims against what Reagan called the ‘Evil Empire.’
“Money started pouring in. CIA agents starting going all over the Muslim world recruiting people to fight in the great jihad. Bin Laden was one of the early prize recruits. He was not only an Arab. He was also a Saudi. He was not only a Saudi. He was also a multimillionaire, willing to put his own money into the matter. Bin Laden went around recruiting people for the jihad against communism.
“I first met him in 1986. He was recommended to me by an American official of whom I do not know whether he was or was not an agent. I was talking to him and said, ‘Who are the Arabs here who would be very interesting?’ By here I meant in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He said, ‘You must meet Osama.’ I went to see Osama. There he was, rich, bringing in recruits from Algeria, from Sudan, from Egypt, just like Sheikh Abdul Rahman. This fellow was an ally. He remained an ally.
“He turns at a particular moment. In 1990, the U.S. goes into Saudi Arabia with forces. Saudi Arabia is the holy place of Muslims, Mecca, and Medina. There had never been foreign troops there. In 1990, during the Gulf War, they went in, in the name of helping Saudi Arabia defeat Saddam Hussein. Osama Bin Laden remained quiet.
“Saddam was defeated, but the American troops stayed on in the land of the Ka’aba [the most sacred site of Islam, in Mecca], foreign troops. He wrote letter after letter saying, ‘Why are you here? Get out! You came to help but you have stayed on.’ Finally he started a jihad against the other occupiers. His mission is to get American troops out of Saudi Arabia. His earlier mission was to get Russian troops out of Afghanistan.”
For bin Laden, Ahmad added, “America has broken its word. The loyal friend has betrayed. The one to whom you swore blood loyalty has betrayed you.”
“They’re going to go for you. They’re going to do a lot more,” Ahmad warned, three years before the 9/11 attacks. “These are the chickens of the Afghanistan war coming home to roost.”
We now know that Ahmad was right. But, like Cassandra, the powerful ignored his sagacious admonition, and suffered the horrific consequences.
Extremist “freedom fighters”
In the 1950s and ’60s, Afghanistan was a somewhat secular country in which women were granted relatively equal rights. What turned Afghanistan into the hotbed for extremism it is today? Decades of Western meddling.
Throughout the 1980s, the U.S. government supported and armed bin Laden and his mujahedin in Afghanistan, in their fight against the Soviet Union. President RonaldReagan famously met with the mujahedin in the Oval Office in 1983. “To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom,” Reagan declared.
Those “freedom fighters” are the forefathers of ISIS and al-Qaida. When the last Soviet troops were withdrawn in 1989, the mujahedin did not simply leave; a civil war of sorts followed, with various Islamist militant groups fighting for control in the power vacuum. The Taliban came out on top, and established a medieval theocratic regime to replace the former “godless” socialist government.
There are extremists in every religion, but they tend to be few in number, weak and isolated. Salafism, in its modern militarized form, has its origins in the 1920s, and even before. For decades, this movement remained weak and isolated. Yet, in the 1970s and ’80s, Western capitalist governments, particularly the U.S., came up with a new Cold War strategy: supporting these fringe Islamic extremist groups as a bulwark against socialism.
The U.S. was by no means the only one to pursue such a strategy. Echoing the U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Israel in fact supported Hamas — now its sworn arch-enemy — when the Islamist group was first forming in the 1980s. Israel backed Hamas’ militant founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in order to undermine the secular socialist resistance of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” a former Israeli government official told the Wall Street Journal in a 2009 article titled “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas.”
This Cold War strategy ended up being successful: After the fall of the USSR, the secular socialist groups that dominated the resistance movements of the Middle East were replaced by Islamic extremists ones that had previously been supported by the West.
It is not a coincidence that most of the secular countries in the history of the Middle East have been socialist of some sort. In contrast, the most reactionary countries — the countries where women are not granted equal rights and where the rule of law is based on Sharia — have frequently tended to be close Western allies. Why? The West was much, much more interested in preserving capitalism than it was in allowing secularism, gender equality and relative economic equality to flourish under socialism.
Orientalist posturing
Many pundits, including liberals, have argued that the Middle East, North Africa and Muslim-majority parts of South Asia are presently going through their parallel to the West’s Dark Age, a bloody period of religious extremism. They blame the rise of extremist groups like ISIS and al-Qaida on Islam itself, or on the Middle East’s supposedly “backward” culture, yet conveniently gloss over their own countries’ sordid histories and policies.
There is much more than a tinge of racism in this orientalist idea that, for some reason, Muslims in the Middle East are centuries behind the englightened Christian West. This ludicrous claim does not stand up to even the most superficial historical scrutiny.
For one, never mentioned is the fact that, only decades ago, most Middle Eastern countries were Western colonies. Their civilian populations were terrorized and brutalized by Western colonial powers.
And, again, what were the most secular and modern governments in the history of the Middle East? It was almost always the Soviet-aligned or non-aligned leftist governments that were either enemies of the West or non-allies in the Cold War.
Regardless of the critiques of these governments’ many problems, which is a separate issue, the reality is the Middle East was significantly more progressive and secular during the height of the Cold War than it is today. That’s not a coincidence. The U.S. and its allies destroyed secularism as part of their larger Cold War strategy.
The Cold War bites back
This Cold War strategy continues to bite back today, and hard. Because of this policy, we have now ended up with capitalist dystopias like those in Saudi Arabia, Qatar or the UAE — filthy rich oil states where businessmen are drowning in money while the migrant modern-day slaves upon which their economies are built die in droves, and theocratic monarchies imprison or even behead anyone who challenges the regime.
The Gulf states remain some of the most reactionary and extremist countries on the planet, and they happen to be close Western allies. Saudi Arabia, in particular, is the fountainhead of militant Sunni Islamism — and yet the Obama administration has done more than $100 billion in arms deals with the Saudi monarchy in just five years. In fact, less than three days after the Paris attacks, the U.S. sold another $1.3 billion of bombs to Saudi Arabia — bombs it will likely use to drop on Yemen, where human rights organizations say it is committing egregious war crimes, and where the chaos created by the Saudi-led coalition is helping al-Qaida and ISIS expand into Yemen.
Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham has observed that modern Sunni extremist groups like ISIS and al-Qaida are “a product of Saudi ideals, Saudi money, and Saudi organizational support.” Government cables leaked by WikiLeaks demonstrate that the U.S. is well aware that al-Qaida and other Salafi groups are supported by rich Saudis.
Let us not forget that Osama bin Laden was a millionaire businessman from a fabulously wealthy and prominent Saudi family with close ties to the kingdom’s royalty. He used that wealth to finance an international network of Islamic extremists that coalesced into al-Qaida.
This doesn’t mean that the Saudi monarchy is pulling the strings above ISIS — which is now its enemy — but rather that its global proselytizing and funding of Wahhabi groups and institutions made these once fringe extremist groups much stronger and more mainstream.
Ideologies are not devoid from material reality. Yes, there are extremists in every religion, but why do they not have the same power in other faiths? There is no such thing as an ideology independent of the material conditions and social forces that assert that ideology materially — that is to say, politically — in reality. Islamic extremism was violently imposed upon the Middle East through a mixture of imperial machinations and individual radicalization under tyranny and extreme poverty.
Creating your enemies
Western imperialism has a tendency to create its own enemies.
Up until the 1990 Gulf War, throughout the Iran-Iraq War that consumed the 1980s, the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein — the very same dictator it would violently depose in 2003. Declassified CIA files show how the U.S. government helped Hussein when he was unleashing chemical weapons on Iranian civilians. The U.K. government allowed Hussein’s regime to create chemical weapons using agents that were sold to Iraq by British corporations. These Western-provided weapons were also used in Hussein’s campaign of genocide against the Kurds.
Fast-forwarding two decades later, it is now widely acknowledged that the illegal U.S.-led war in Iraq — a catastrophic occupation that led to the deaths of at least 1 million people — destabilized the entire Middle East, creating the extreme conditions in which militant groups like al-Qaida spread like wildfire, eventually leading to the emergence of ISIS. The former head of intelligence for the U.S. Central Command and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn,agrees. U.S. policies in Iraq “absolutely” strengthened Salafi militant groups like al-Qaida, Lt. Gen. Flynn conceded. “We definitely put fuel on a fire,” he lamented.
New York Rep. Chuck Schumer remarked in 1991 that Saddam Hussein was “created in the White House laboratory with a collection of government programs, banks, and private companies.”
Saddam Hussein was the first Frankenstein’s monster U.S. policy created in Iraq, al-Qaida was the second, and now ISIS is the third.
Blaming Islam is projection
The pundits in the West blaming Islam for the rise of extremism are projecting their own countries’ crimes onto the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.
The kinds of people who blame Islam and Muslims for the spread of extremism are the kinds of people who have utmost faith in Western empire. Even if they admit that it “sometimes” engages in problematic behavior, they, deep-down, believe Western empire to be fundamentally rooted in good will, in humanitarianism, in progress, in the proselytizing of civilization.
This is the same logic that justified genocidal European colonialism, Western expansionism and Manifest Destiny, and the White Man’s Burden. And it is this same logic that promotes militarist policies and anti-Muslim and anti-refugee bigotries in response to Islamist militants’ attacks — only serving to further fuel the fire of extremism.
These same pundits, the ones who blame Islam for the rise of ISIS and who have utmost faith in the putative good will of Western empire, would have wholeheartedly supported Osama bin Laden in the 1980s; these same pundits would have dubbed the father of al-Qaida a “freedom fighter” in his heroic battle against the evil Soviet Union.
In the aforementioned speech, Ahmad articulated five kinds of terrorism. He lamented, however, that of these types, the focus in the media and the political system is almost always on just one: “political terror of the private group, oppositional terror” — which he points out is “the least important in terms of cost to human lives and human property.” “The highest cost is state terror,” Ahmad explained. He roughly estimated that the ratio of people killed by state terror versus those killed by individual acts of terror is, conservatively, 100,000 to one.
If we truly want to end the abominable acts of violence perpetrated by extremist groups like ISIS and al-Qaida, we should take to heart the simple yet profoundcounsel of Noam Chomsky, another modern-day Cassandra: “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”
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You should read a book called The Bible. It's all about this fellow named God who told some people called the Hebrews that they could steal from and kill anyone they wanted because they are better than everyone else.
That's why those Christians beat their women, lop the hands off thieves, stone sorcerers, and practice a theocratic form of government that urges jihad against anyone who dares draw a caracature of Jesus.
The US government has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people every decade of my life.
That's an opinion that would not get you far in a courtroom.
Madeline Albright's confession is just that, a confession. It's not my opinion.
Billy, please do tell us of the Christian leaders praising the murders committed by avowed Christians. Christianity has evolved and virtually NO Christian church promotes or condones violence. Meanwhile peace loving Muslims in Turkey and Kosovo are praising Allah at soccer match tributes to victims of Islamic violence. While we see some Muslim leaders denounce this violence we see polls taken around the world of Muslim opinions and the majority of them express sympathy with jihad and nearly half of US Muslims state that they feel their own local religious leadership is not combatting or confronting extremism adequately. We can go back centuries and find your examples of universal violence, but it is the Muslims who have kept it all alive, and they will have to resolve to end it them selves, or the rest of the world will do it for them.
I see you feeding a fire that has already killed millions of innocent people. You are pure evil.
Billy the raghead, please whisper some sweet 'shariah' in my ear. Tell me you are going to lop my head off for sorcery, enslave me like a dirty little infidel.
We're talking about the killing of innocent people and it turns you on?
And you are pure stupid. The vast majority of the people of the world could give a shit about religion, and hold no animosity towards any. BUT, when those spouting radical jihad go into Paris killing indiscriminately ANYONE the see, then suddenly, and do to no fault but their own, they put not only themselves but their religion in the crosshairs. You may believe it unfair. You may believe it even just. But what you believe does not matter. It is what the vast majority of the population believes and Muslims had best understand this and start standing up to these idiot jihadists or they are going to take the whole damned world to a religious war that NOBODY wins. There is injustice EVERYWHERE and with it understandable desire for revenge. Is is the burden of civilized people to suppress this urge and try to find compromise and peace with it. When these urges flood out in large scale they will be met with power and it will get ugly. We need to do what we can to restrain our responses but with growing jihadism, it will become impossible.
Does that mean that you are in favor of the US policy of supporting radical Islamists or not? That's what the article is about.
The Pentagon said that "the West, the Gulf countries and Turkey" funded Al Qaeda in the hope that they would establish a "Salafist principality" or "Islamic State." I oppose that policy. Do you?
There is no doubt that the US has tried to manipulate and influence governments all over the world through the empowering of corrupt leaders, many of them evil men. And I will not suggest that many many people around the world do not have justifiable contempt, hatred, disgust or whatever negative feeling for us, but only one group....Muslims, has reacted with blind terrorism.....in the name of Islam, and we see even you attempting to justify it with your constant references to the horrors you feel they have suffered, as well as attempting to ineffectually equate it to Christianity......of a thousand years past. Jihadism violence will not win anything except a broader war, which they readily acknowledge and claim to desire, as it only advances to end of the world and their progression to Allah.
So it would be a darned good idea to stop funding Islamic radicals, right?
Absolutely. And it would also be a damned good idea to stop equivocating and justifying jihadism. These radicals will precipitate shit like never seen on earth if they keep it up, feeling justified or not. But given their theology of destroying the world for Allah, and "peaceful" Muslims largely SILENT or worse still praising Allah for these crazy fucks murderous actions, it doesn't look promising. Dirty deeds may have precipitated or accelerated this but at this point I doubt there is anything that could be done to stop this short of the rest of the world kneeling towards Mecca.
In your opinion when I say that Islamic radicals should not be supported I am justifying jihad. So when you agree that Muslim radicals should not be supported does that mean that you are justifying jihad as well?
and "peaceful" Muslims largely SILENT
We've covered that already and you continue to bear false witness against the many Muslims who do speak out against terrorism. But tell me this, how often have you spoken out against the crimes of the US? Do you publicly condemn the attack on Iraq for non-existent weapons? How about the Gulf of Tonkin lie that moved Vietnam to the front burner? What about the death squads in Central America? Do you preach against those murderous acts from the rooftops or are you SILENT about such matters?
*crickets*
No Billy, God (JEHOVAH) said to love your enemies and if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
Do you know how easy it is to hate and kill people you don't like, its the easist thing in the world. Loving people you don't like, now that takes a Christ like spirit.
No, BM. Jesus ordered you to attack your family with a sword.
Matthew 10
34Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. 35For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. 36And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
But if you wimp out and let your family live you can still make things right by cutting off your own body parts.
Matthew 5
30And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
Jesus explained why he spoke at times "figuratively" not literally..."Though I speak figuratively,a time is coming when I will no longer use this language but will tell you plainly about my father." John 16:25
But Jesus also used parables so his teachings wouldn't become a legalistic handbook, he wanted to teach the heart of God, not a bunch of laws.
But no one else is allowed to use figurative language in their religious texts. Jesus has the copyright.
All men are sinners, Adam (first man) had perfect conditions for living and only ONE law and he broke it. God not only demands perfection he absolutely deserves it. Sin is a debt that had to be paid. Jesus, God's son had the WORST conditions and he was sinless. Jesus took our place for judgement, he paid OUR debt. The Bible says God was pleased to see Jesus "bruised"...Can you imagine how much love God has for you that he was pleased to see his son suffer for each of our salvation!
If I could get to be master of the universe simply by suffering and dying, something I'm bound to do anyway, then I'd take the deal in a heartbeat.
Billy the Raghead, henceforth shall you be known. Paired up on this thread with Magnus the Chimpfucker.
Why keep typing when you've given up on even pretending to present a coherent argument?
What you mean to say is banking credit and the strength of empire. The model is the same that it ever was, the traditional European imperialist rape, pillage and kill methods. Now it is done with banks and bombs.
gov need...i think you are completely missing the one key component...the blacks in the usa hate their 'white masters'. the blacks have indoor toilets, hospitals, all the food they can eat..i.e. modern society yet they hate it. they want something 'else'. what that is they dont know but are promised by their leaders that it is better annd they desrve it.
when they get it they destroy it..........just because you are an educated personthat see reality doesnt mean that all the dregs can see how great they have it.
You folks truly do not know much history. As Rome fell, Byzantium and Iran and Arabia were the leading lights of civilization. After the Muslim conquest, that civilization continued and flowered. That persisted so long as the Silk trade continued, a long slow decline followed, after which colonialism.
People are people are people. No civilization has a permanent advantage over any other, no people are superior in many ways, much less all ways. Cultures have strengths and weaknesses, mixing generally selects the strongest stuff, the worst was annoying them also.
Cultures and genes associated with the culture cannot be static, change is continuous. You get to choose alternatives, be careful.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/11/18/you-who-allow-yourselves-t...
Thwart terrorists!
End this deception by omission now!
http://showrealhist.com/begun.gif
http://showrealhist.com
Non interventionism may have been the prevention, but what is the cure?
After decades of smoking cigarettes only to discover cancer in your lungs, is cessation of smoking the cure or a futile symbolic act? While im not against the changing of our ways, and God knows we must, but what do we do with potentially millions who want us dead....or is that made up stuff?
Take all those dollars we spend on the logistics of war in the Middle East and direct that investment back into US infrastructure, including stronger borders and REAL domestic intelligence that adheres to Constitutional law.
That may be the answer...in theory. But we can't even enforce voter ID, much less close borders, enhance border security and strengthen defenses. Aside from our standard political mess, they have destroyed any confidence that the citizens might have had to provide the trust required to actually do anything. I do not support immigration reform or any substantive legislation because I believe it is intended to fuck us.
We can, just not with the current zeitgeist.
About your conceptual oxymoron 'real domestic intelligence' :
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/07/18/signal-to-noise-in-real-li...
There are no good answers here, and it does appear that the chickens are probably going to come home to roost.
Don't be surprised if large swaths of the ME are turned into Trinitite when this is all said and done.
i have a hard time taking this article seriously. i skimmed a bit, and first saw some pandering p.c. adjective about the 'horrific' paris attacks.. ok.. i can get pas tthat.
then a bit more talking about how bin laden 'masterminded 9/11.
at this stage of the game, if someone isn't hep to the screamingly obvious fact that 9/11 was an inside job, it makes it near impossible for me to not think that person is incapable of meaningful global strategic thought and analysis.
Yes, 9/11 was the most significant thing in American life since JFK's assassination, and the fact that it is not remarked upon by our elites even more significant. Hard to get your mind around.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/166/
The active coverup continues :
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/3663/
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/lebowski-enlightenment-7/
"Portraying bin Laden in a positive light, less than eight years before he would help mastermind the largest terrorist attack on American soil in decades..."
...any actual evidence of that?
(rolling eyes....)
There is no "absolute lucidity" in "history." All "history" is an amalgam of cherry-picked facts, "analysis," opinions and suppositions filtered through the biases of the writer (or speaker). Quite often there is a preferred narrative, and the "history" is constructed to support it. Histories are just longer versions of the daily "news" story with all of the same flaws, complete with footnotes and references.
agreed, though some get a bt closer to truth that others... at least stripped of some of the control agenda.
i definitely recommend 'a people's history of the united states' by zinn. free online last i checked at historyisaweapon.com. i read it last year (i think at someone on these board's suggestion as a matter of fact.) fantastic perspective.
"How islamic extremist was born..."
Well, it started back in the seventh century with a guy named Muhammad.
Amen.
You forgot the part about how Israel and its puppet America have stuck their giant cocks up the Palestinians asses for 50+ years.
In our newly liberalized homosexual transgendered "fuck anything that walks or crawls" society, your statement confuses me as to if it is intended to invoke horror or titillation.
The Israelis have been trying to stir up hate between muslims and the west for decades. some examples from the past decades:
In July 1954, American and British interests in Cairo and Alexandria were hit by a series of bombs. These were originally thought to have been placed by militant Moslems. A couple of years prior to the eruption of the "Suez Crisis", negotiations were taking place between Egypt and Britain over control of the Suez Canal, and it was thought that militants were attempting to scupper any compromise by Colonel Nasser. In October 1954, Egypt announced that an Israeli spy ring of thirteen saboteurs had been broken up. The plot was uncovered when incendiary bombs went off prematurely in the pocket of one of the perpetrators, outside a British-owned Alexandria theatre.
There were claims of an "anti-Semitic frame-up". However, the result was humiliation for Israel when it was forced to admit its responsibility for the terrorist attacks. It had been Israel's head of Intelligence, Colonel Benyamin Givli, who had independently ordered the spies to strike. However, his boss, Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon who was oblivious of the operation, ended up having to resign, and the incident was dubbed the "Lavon Affair". Note that phosphorus, used in the 1954 attacks, was later used to sink an Egyptian ferry in 2006 with the loss of around 1,000 lives.
In November 1963, Israel's Mossad operatives assassinated US President John F Kennedy. The motive was that Kennedy opposed Israel's (i.e. the Zionist Mafia's) plans to develop nuclear weapons at its (their) Dimona facility in the Negev Desert. Naturally, an official version of events was concocted, denying any Israeli involvement, and claiming that Oswald, the patsy, was a "lone assassin".
In June 1967, the state of Israel carried out a sustained air and naval attack on the USS Liberty for over an hour, employing torpedoes, machine guns and napalm rockets. 34 men were killed and more than 170 wounded. According to Israel, the attack was a "tragic accident" due to "misidentification". The ancient Egyptian freighter that Israel claimed to have mistaken the Liberty for was of totally different appearance, and there is ample evidence that they knew full well that their target was an American ship, following two days of reconnaissance by Israeli planes.
Israel's plan was to sink the Liberty, kill any survivors (which it attempted by firing on the life rafts), frame Egypt for the attack, and provoke the US into attacking Egypt. After assassinating Kennedy, the Zionist Mafia crime lords had installed their stooge - Johnson - as US President. All US opposition to Israel's nuclear programme had, predictably, vanished. Johnson and McNamara were probably advised in advance of the plan to sink a US ship to provide the US with a pretext for attacking Egypt. When the Liberty failed to sink, two hours into the operation, Tel Aviv and Washington had to revert to Plan B - the claim of an 'accident'.
In April 1986, a bomb exploded in La Belle Discotheque in Berlin. Three were killed including two US soldiers, and over 200 injured. Ten days later, Ronald Reagan gave the order to bomb Libya. Around 37 people were killed including Colonel Gaddafi's adopted baby daughter, and over 200 wounded. This was the result of the Mossad's Operation Trojan - known by their agents as "the old Trojan dick trick" - that conned some countries into believing Libya was actually behind terrorism such as the Berlin disco bombing. It is true that there was a territorial dispute between the US and Libya, following some provocative US naval manoeuvres in the Gulf of Sidra. But Libya was innocent of many of the terrorist crimes it was alleged to have committed.
The very first people arrested on suspicion of involvement in the 9/11 attacks turned out to be five Israeli Jews: Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg (Sivan's brother), Oded Ellner, Yaron Shmuel and Omer Marmari. Their white Urban Moving Systems van was stopped and they were arrested within hours of the attacks, on the afternoon of 9/11/01. Sivan Kurzberg, Ellner and Shmuel had been observed by several eyewitnesses at the rear parking lot of the Doric apartment complex in Union City, New Jersey. They were seen atop the van with cameras, high-fiving, smiling, joking with cries of joy and mockery, hugging each other, and taking photographs and video of the Twin Towers within a few minutes of the first plane impact.
During 9/11 and confirmed; Israeli teams around NYC were being watched, and dancing Israelis were living in New Jersey, under investigation and being watched by an FBI Team headed by Special Agent Mike Dick. Mohamed Atta was seen meeting with them, the alleged 9/11 mastermind [imaginary box cutter]. Arrests were made; the only ones that were publicly held were the ‘dancing Israelis’ who were being investigated for smuggling nuclear weapons into the USA. Other groups were under investigation including Urban Moving Systems. One group was arrested on George Washington Bridge. They had planted explosives where the cables connect into the ground. They were arrested, and later released to an alleged FBI agent who was actually an Israeli Mossad agent ‘authorized’ to carry FBI identification. Arrest made by NJ State Troopers who released the 3 man Israeli team. Two more bombs were to be used on the Lincoln and Holland tunnels.
And, since the 'War on Terror' started in 2001, here are the stats:
6400 dead US Servicemen
50000 - disabled
est. 4,000,000 dead muslims - mostly civilians
Cost - ~$6,000,000,000,000 - owed by taxpayers to the zio bankers financing the mess
So the US was around when Mohammad started lopping of heads in the 7th century?
Wow, just like it all started in 1980. For the rest of the story, Google Blood and Oil. FDR meets the king of Saudi Arabia. Or for some more on Western Meddling look into British shenanigans in the region way before that.
If there was no oil in the middle eat, we would treat it like N. Korea. This is all about oil, profits and greater Israel.
While this article is great for pointing out the role of the US in arming extremists, the headline is deceptive. Islamic extremism has been around for a long, long time and was not born of the West. The West has its own problems, of course.
What is sad is that while America carries a huge burden for many of the world's problems and gets little credit for much of what is good, everyone is all too happy to use our failures as an excuse for theirs. I believe that we are ALL being used and manipulated at all times, and by acknowledging this we are also responsible for what we each do, head chopper or trader. If not, then all is hopeless, we are but simple pawns, helpless in a sea of communists, capitalists, religions, haters and racists, and lets not forget joos. If we are to surrender our responsibility for ourselves, even in the face of lies and manipulations, then we are nothing...pointless life forms as useful as tree moss. There is a useful moral to every story, but we can easily ignore them to satisfy our hate, fear, greed or revenge, almost always sourced from within ourselves. We fail to recognize our self hate and loathing as we do not see it pointed directly at ourselves but at everyone else who looks and acts exactly like us. We spend so much time in the mirror we become invisible.
It all started with Qutb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb
In my seven years of reading Zero Hedge, this is the most intelligent, trenchant post I have seen. It should be mandatory reading for all the Neo-Con Republicans and Hillary Clinton. If one goes back to WWI, the history of Western involvement is the Middle East has been one disaster after another. The terrorism we face today is the harverst of ill seeds sown for the past 100 years.
Our politicians understand the failures of their policies, only their take from their failings is in the fact that they just didn't go far enough....the shortcoming of all policies and the cause of much of our problems.
The problem with this article is not in its assessment of western policies of destruction, but in using those failures and criminal acts as an excuse for the Muslim madness we now see. Virtually the same as blaming someone for the violent acts of an insane person because they were needlessly provoked by another's insensitivities. This is not to minimize the crimes of the west but to suggest that many other nations and cultures and religions have suffered much worse with none of the "blowback" we see from Muslims. Two wrongs do not make a right. This person is a jihadism appologist.
The failure is that governments have polices.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/11/14/in-reality-everything-is-c...
Among the possible resistances to our government may be :
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/11/20/ghandis-terrorists/
I disagree. It's a very well written article and makes an excellent point that the US fueled its own enemy. But the fundamental point is wrong. One could use many analogies, but staying away from religious ones, imagine the US doing business with drug cartels in Mexico in order to achieve a specific objective. The drug dealers will happily take the money and will probably hold up their end of the bargain for a while. In the end, the bargain will be broken and the drug dealers will go back to doing what they do. Islam has a bloody history just like Christianity and Judaism. Most of the killing in the world over the last couple of thousand years has been associated with one of the three. Not that other human beings aren't evil too (Stalin is a good example of human beings killing each other for other reasons), but they don't tend to be as well organized. Religion is an extremely convenient way for sociopaths to organize others to kill for them. It's just a fact.
I fear I may be suffering a stroke when I find myself agreeing with you so closely. If I could only afford to go to the doctor!
Religion is one of the extremely convenient ways. The US has understood how to deal with Christianity, which used to cause us a lot of trouble. Europe controlled its Christians also. Bloodthirsty lot, if we can handle them, mere Muslims will be no problem.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/09/13/how-to-destroy-islam-in-eu...
You claim that 'most of the killing' has been done by one of those 3 religions. ?Ghenghis Khan? Christianity did't convert the last European tribe until after 1000, there was a ton of killing before that time. Most of the Roman wars were not against Christians. So I doubt it, even before adjusting for population sizes. There was a lot of history in the old days, I saw the fiture that only 5% max of the humans who have ever been alive are now alive.
People with a BIG IDEA in their heads often over-generalize, and commit conceptual fallacy as a result.
Or perhaps you were bragging?
Khan was a Tengrist, a religion. I made a point of mentioning Stalin because he is one of the few examples of mass murdering sociopaths who had no particular religious ideology. Kahn is not one. Read my post as you want, but I was clear that there are exceptions to my generalization.
US Government ARMED the Mexican Drug Cartels
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-government-and-the-sinaloa-cartel-...
between the years 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an arrangement with Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organization to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs while Sinaloa provided information on rival cartels.
Well that is bemusing. The Ottomans rampaged infrom Central Asia and took over the Middle East, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Greece, and then rotted over centuries as the Russians, Austrians and British worked out what to do with the bits falling off. The Treaty of Berlin 1878 avoided the War that broke out in 1914 buying 36 years of peace.
The Ottomans lined up with Germanyand fought the British and French and Russians so they lost Syria and The Hejaz and someone had to put the bits together into something coherent. The US was too busy stealing Hawaii and Gitmo and annexing huge areas of the Western US for the Federal Government - remember Nevada ?
While no doubt previous governments cultivated and facilitated this extremism, this has existed from the moment this religion was born.
"Modern Extremism" was born in the early 20th century, in 1928, as a reaction to the Colonial Powers after WW1.
The Brotherhood was active in WW2, attracted by NAZI Germany's anti-Jewish policies. They worked in Egypt for the Germans under the nose of the British Army in Egypt.
T E Lawrence, a British scholar, was recruited the Military; Lawrence, with an extensive history in the ME, supported Arab Independence after WW1 against the European powers, which ultimately led to his death (supposition).
I suppose the most current iteration of Extremism began after the Soviets left Afghanistan, when they had an army of Jihadists who wanted not just the Russians, but all Western Powers out of the Middle East.
But the MB has also been used, after WW2, by the British, then US Intelligence/CIA (after 1947).
It is true that Islam has been spread largely by conquest; the tenets of the Faith lead towards that goal. I think the Conquest in Europe was stopped at Vienna, but cannot remember the date. Charles Martel also fought them in what is now France, during the wave of expansion from Spain to the North.
It is simplistic to say the current form of "Islamic Extremism" really took off after the 1980s. It is a continuation of the wars going back to the foundation of the Faith by the Prophet.
Had the Colonial Powers not become involved with manipulating the Arab culture (due to Zionist influence), we could have simply traded for oil on a business basis. Lord knows Muslims like to trade.
Simply put, the Extremism we see today would likely not have happened if the Great Powers had not manipulated the Faithful for their own purposes. The early wars against Islam should have taught the West to keep a wary eye towards the Levant and their hands out of regional culture.
Coulda woulda shouda, we all know that did not happen.
Having lived in that part of the world myself, I would say it was quite the height of folly to arm a medieval culture with modern weapons. They get turned back on you too easily, as we now find out.
The current problems can only be solved by ending the money power the Zionists control and creating a mutual but wary respect towards these countries as they progress into the modern day (Iran). The stability we had after WW2 with the rise of secular states in the Middle East has been destroyed at the behest of the Israeli Zionists seeking protection from the enemies they created themselves and using the West to fight their wars.
Today the world is now in a terrible predicament; There will have to be great shifts into a new paradigm w/o the Money Power dominating and trying to destroy Nationalism for a Global State, a sordid fantasy of the Elites, which will only lead to servitude!
There is no easy way out: more and more people need to be educated against Globalism and its "Global Leaders," who are not leaders at all, just hungry sharks looking for an easy meal.
Lawrence was actually a British Archaeologist from Cambridge sent out PRE-WAR to draw up charts of The Holy Land for the War Office.
Thanks. I had forgotten he was already there. I wrote that at o-dark 30.
Watched BBC documentary Bitter Lake about this...amazing documentary. Goes way before Reagan try the 1940's Roosevelt and the deal he made with the Saudi king at this time that created the petrodollar.
Ken O'Keefe clip on Paris the the attempt to incite a mob mentality against ME citizens. 30 min dicussion on Press TV (11/16)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltV-zdKdpDA (Analysis by Ken O'Keefe begins at approximately 5 min in)
You mean as FDR travelled bavk from Yalta having sold out Central Europe he popped in on a British ally and wooed him away behind Churchill's back ?
yep that's the one. I think the cover story at the time was king Aziz didn't like churchills cigar smoking so he didn't want to meet with him...
yep that's the one. I think the cover story at the time was king Aziz didn't like churchills cigar smoking so he didn't want to meet with him...
In the UK, in the run up to the election to government of Labour in 1997, Tony Blair and his cronies made a big play of being whiter than white, they would be the most moral government the UK had seen. This was in the very recent aftermath of the Scott enquiry into the events surrounding the sale of the supergun to Iraq.
Within 6 months of being elected Prime Minister, Tony was having to deal with allegations that the British government was a party to arming rebels in Sierra Leone. Just before stepping into his ministerial car to attend a meeting, Blair gave his final word on the matter, "We got the right result." The end justifies the means. That was the high point for Tony, the gutter rat and spiv.
And that, succinctly, sums up these situations; be it Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the ruin of Syria and Ukraine, Afghanistan, the partition of Georgia, the creation of ISIS, the creation of Al Quiada etc. and all the attendant slaughter and blowback, the list is huge;
The end justifies the means.
After all, isn't the world a better place because Saddam isn't alive any more?
Just have to love the left wing propaganda that Salon peddles
Charlie Wilson's war was started by... Charlie Wilson. If that seems obvious to any of you reading this, then your IQ obviously exceeds your body temperature and you are over-qualified to write for "Salon".
Charlie Wilson was a Democratic congressman from Texas. And he first got the CIA involved in propping up the (then) Mujhadeen (aka al qaeda) during the Jimmy Carter administration.
So of course, Salon pushes photos of Reagan and completely omits that Reagan inherited the fiasco in Afghanistan from Carter, who in turn was busy cleaning up that "other" fiasco in Iran courtesy of JFK, LBJ and Nixon... who also got a free pass from Salon's left wing propaganda.
And anyone who attended a history course instead of a democratic party political rally knows the British had huge problems "controlling" Afghanistan decades before the US figured out where it was.
Since we know, with 100% certainty, that Salon does not make any effort to discern truth -- they just print whatever the DNC tells them to print -- why are we still pretending this is a valid news source?
Salon has no credibility, zero. Shame on ZH editors for publishing this crap. I don't see any posts citing National Enquirer, so why is this garbage here?
Left wing/Right wing - answers to the same master$$$$ who will make globalization a reality. Their goal is to rule the future while the dumb fucktards continue to fight each other.
"In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all."-- Strobe Talbott, Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State, Time Magazine, July 20th, l992.
"We cannot leap into world government in one quick step... The precondition for ... genuine globalization is progressive regionalization, because thereby we move toward larger, more stable, more cooperative units." Keynote speaker Zbigniew Brzezinski, former head of the Trilateral Commission [now a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama].
"We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order . . .. When we are successful, and we will be, we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U.N.'s founders." -- President George Herbert Walker Bush
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, don't wanna hear nothing but my ideology, no.
Noone controls Afghanistan because there is nothing to control. It is a transit station which Islamic invaders on their way to Northern India turned into a disaster zone
When you endlessly create war, creat coups and regeim changes, bomb the shit out of everything year after year, decade after decade on the same peoples you ought not be surprised if some form groups to fight back any way they can.
US, Saudi Arabia and Israel geopolitics in the Middle East has been one of constant chaos, killing, and destruction. And we wonder why we get terrorist groups who hate us and want to kill us all?
Religion is just an excuse and tool to gather groups together, as it ever was. These people are just serial killers who don't give a fuck if they live or die because their home land has been turned into a constant war zone. And now they have grown up with terror as being the norm and way of life.
There are 200 millioin+ muslims in Indonesia right next to Australia. Not one of them has come down into Australia to do any terrorist act whatsoever.
This nonsense and bigotry people love, to simply brand Muslim as terrorist makes groups like ISIS very happy as they want a black and white world where they can get 1 billion Muslims to fight the rest, because the West made them their enemy.
People who want to brand Muslim and Islam as terrorism are the greatest friends ISIS could ever find. ISIS loves the ignorant who put their brains away and just act on base emotion.
Good post Kina as always.
(we started ZH nearly same time.)
This article is a load of crap! The United States has become the sine qua non for the workers paradise on Earth under the Elites leadership of Barry Soetero. By the way, we are so progressive we even appointed an Indonesian citizen to be our President!
• We are so rich, 96 million working age people need not even participate in the workforce!
• Food is so abundant, 50 million people buy their food with government-provided ATM cards!
• The credit rating of the United States is solid as Gibraltar, we haven't bothered balancing the national checkbook for decades.
• The government literally awash in cash, it hasn't even bothered with making a budget since 2008!
I could cite more examples, but I think everyone gets the picture. /My View Off
A few more weeks.
Perhaps humans in general are in control of jack shit ...not even the modern king tuts we call the elites...
Perhaps humans in general are in control of jack shit ...not even the modern king tuts we call the elites...
Quoting bullshit salon articles doesn't give you much credibility. Islamic terror started long before the timeframes given in this utter hilarity. The leftist twat from salon sends to have forgotten the terror attacks going back many decades before the 80s and the destruction Jimmy Carter caused dosing the shah.
Islamofascist started attacking us because if or support of Israel. Carter, in his immense anti-Semit u sm turned Iran in Israel, and us. Until he destroyed Iran, the Israelis had substantial relationships across the middle east.
Talk about short memories(and this is what those wires were referring to, not bin Laden). Jesus, read a fucking book. While it's true it was American meddling that caused problems, it was leftists, not Graham, not the Bushes.
Or CIA, at the direction of Carter destabilized the middle east long before W had his tantrum.
Public education just ain't what it used to be....
If I want to read crap-BS from Salon.com , the wiseass 14 year old "anarchist" who wears Doc Martens and black tees and gets his mom to pick him up after chess club at school in her Honda minivan, I will f***ing go to Salon.com.
That ZH would showcase a Salon piece tells me that ZH is beginning a slide into buffonery.
Everything is allowed under the condition that it hates on the west or glorifies Putin.
or exposes your ignorance
"... the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today ..."
It's terrorism asshole!!!
Who gives a shit what happened 40 years ago.
Sadam Hussein was a US alliance and he and his family got whacked too.
Go fuck yourself Ben Norton at salon.com - fucking socialist.
The complete shambles that foreign policy of the US Empire has made of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and everywhere else it's got involved in follows exactly the same pattern that Britain made of the countries it was involved in during its heydays of British Empire: the US, India, M/E, Gulf Emirates etc.
Empires do not work, ever, but they satisfy the short-sighted maniacal craving for greed and power of those in power at the time.
Fast forward to 2015:
The world will be safer with a multi-polar power arrangement, not a uni-polar one. That means the West must find mutually acceptable solutions with Russia and China. The alternative is WWIII.
The current discord which is becoming v/dangerous is being driven by Washington/Westminster/NATO and their vassal states in Europe and elsewhere.
I do not recall any other religion asking for non blisters to be killed.
Accept it the route cause is islam
The reason we used them was because we recognizer that islam was ripe for extremism in the first place. Let me know when the CIA recruits loads of Buddhists to fight a war....
Yes - ripe for 1300 years. It's the religion of peace - don't cha know. Salon socialists...
If the goal was to get Muzzies to kill muzzies...Obama is doing a great job. LOL.
It goes back further than this. Sayyid Qutb was a big influence on bi Laden and al Zawahari.
The islamist movement has been building for more than a hundred years. This article is retarded.
The Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah in Sudan
Hey why not go back to Saladin and Richard the Lionheart?
Then we would have the whole picture of "Allah o Akbar" bullshit going toe to toe with its twin brother "God wills it"...
The Mahdi was reacting then against the Imperial take over of Africa; from the Cape to Cairo; of Rule Britannia's Empire. Kitchener embodied that very well even if Gordon got whacked by the Mahdi.
When "nationalism" is mixed with religious ideology that is what you get.
And nationalism WILL be mixed with ideology as that is human nature.
Watch out for the Frankensteins when that happens : Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Milosovic come to mind. If Europe implodes on the issue of "them" and "us" religious or ethnic ideologies then back we go to Sarajevo; it happened two times those Sarajevo chimes : 1914 and 1992 !
Do we need a third awakening?
Thank you for taking us down memory lane and nailing the cross on the mindset that spawned the US Oligarchy's total adhesion to using religion as an ideological arm against "the Soviet Evil Empire". Unintended consequences is History's timeline. Agamemnon and his Greeks found that out way back when legend begot History after their rape of Troy.
But in today's world, the man who started that diabolical manipulation--something that Rule Britannia had practiced very extensively to control the Persian cum Indian jewel in its crown during the "Great Game" againt Imperial Russia in the century before-- is the man who coined the WS supply side pumping we now know as "Reaganomics".
In its slide from Dear Henry's secular vision of US hegemony of world power domination, during the "shuttle diplomacy" phase of ME take over by Pax AMericana of OPEC's Oil patch, to the rabid instrumentalisation of Talibanism concocted by the CIA and ISI of surrogate Paki President Zia ul Huq (the Paki Pinochet who hung the populist President Bhutto just like Pinochet killed Allende; the Cia is a world wide thirsty bitch for the blood of its designated victims which include Mossadegh and all those others in the aim of installing its Deep State matrix).
PAx Americana has further shown its reversion to obscurantist ideology and militarst might in the Clash of Civilization zeal under Reagan's spiritual son GWB, who launched the new Crusade of Afghan and Iraq bashing in "shock and awe" unilateral mode now convoluting in awesome blowback from Syrac to Mali across the whole swathe of Islam's population.
Just like during the Middle Ages, as in today's world, this whole obscurantist tinsel curtain is a fight for wealth and natural resources which includes the slave labour of "outsourcing" mantra so prevalent today. Pax Americana is no different in its mindset to achieve the hegemonial aims of its ruling classes than any other empire before it.
But amongst the desperate and damned it creates an awesome momentum for revenge called Blowback.
We do reap what we sow. And we do weep like the House of Atreus when Nemesis pays us the inevitable visit in name of karma.
Please don't blame GWB for everything....he was only doing what Shadow President Cheney demanded
I like this account too.......
http://www.amazon.com/Mosque-Munich-Nazis-Muslim-Brotherhood/dp/05474231...
Richard the Lionheart slaughtered 2700 of Saladin's soldiers who had already surrendered after the battle of acre back in the 1100's
Saladin was a Kurd and his father was from Armenia. As for slaughtering prisoners it seems to be commonplace - Rheinwiesenlager are hardly to the credit of Dwight Eisenhower
What HORSESH!T!
Even THIS fable is more likely:
"Jihadist: “We did this because our holy texts exhort us to to do it.”
Leftist: “No you didn’t.”
Jihadist: “Wait, what? Yes we did…”
Leftist: “No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons.”
Jihadist: “WHAT!? Did you even read our official statement? We give explicit Quranic justification. This is jihad, a holy crusade against pagans, blasphemers, and disbelievers.”
Leftist: “No, this is definitely not a Muslim thing. You guys are not true Muslims, and you defame a great religion by saying so.”
Jihadist: “Huh!? Who are you to tell us we’re not true Muslims!? Islam is literally at the core of everything we do, and we have implemented the truest most literal and honest interpretation of its founding texts. It is our very reason for being.”
Leftist: “Nope. We created you. We installed a social and economic system that alienates and disenfranchises you, and that’s why you did this. We’re sorry.”
Jihadist: “What? Why are you apologizing? We just slaughtered you mercilessly in the streets. We targeted unwitting civilians – disenfranchisement doesn’t even enter into it!”
Leftist: “Listen, it’s our fault. We don’t blame you for feeling unwelcome and lashing out.”
Jihadist: “Seriously, stop taking credit for this! We worked really hard to pull this off, and we’re not going to let you take it away from us.”
Leftist: “No, we nourished your extremism. We accept full blame.”
Jihadist: “OMG, how many people do we have to kill around here to finally get our message across?”
Absolutely captures what we are watching.
Bravo!
yep the modern era caused muslim terror..LOL
"European legends about a murderous, drug-crazed sect called the Assassins grew up around the Nizaris, a group of Ismaili Shi'ite Muslims that held strongholds in Iran and Syria from the 11th to the 13th century. The Nizaris opposed the rule of the Seljuk dynasty and the Abbasid caliphs, who were Sunni and regarded the Nizaris as unorthodox outcasts. Sunni accounts of the Nizaris accused them of all sorts of irreligious practices, and one term of abuse applied to the Nizaris was the Arabic word ?ašš?š?n, meaning "hashish users." Reliable sources, however, offer no evidence of hashish use by Nizaris. The Nizaris mounted resistance to this persecution, and one of their most formidable weapons against the Seljuks was the threat of sudden execution by secret agents. Attacks on several leaders among the Crusaders were also attributed to Nizari agents. When the Crusaders returned to Europe, they embellished upon what they had heard about the Nizaris from the group's enemies and told sensational stories about the ?ašš?š?n or Assassins. Marco Polo spun a tale of how young Assassins were given a potion and made to yearn for paradise—their reward for dying in action—by being given a life of sensual pleasure before their secret missions. As the legends spread, the word ?ašš?š?n passed through Italian and French and appeared in English as assassin in the 1500s, already with meanings like "treacherous killer.""
European history does not have to finger point to the Assassins to understand what "treacherous killer" means. It has its own history of treacherous killers and the Shia Assassins of that sect were not a world monopoly in that art of asymmetric war against Seljuk Sunni Empire.
The whole history of 12th century Europe when the Guelf vs Ghibelline wars (Pope vs Emperor) begins in Europe is coloured with paid assassins to kill popes and vice versa. A whole breed of Condotierri "men of war", "hired guns", was created. The Norman kings of Sicily were formed to fight for pope against Byzantine encroachments of Emperor in 1075... when the Dictatus Papae doctrine challenged Roman Emperor Henry IV.
Even Henry II of Plantagenet England used hired killers to bump off Becket, Archbishop of Cantebury. Treacherous killers are as old as Cain of biblical fame.
That assassin's creed gets repeated when the French threaten the Pope in the attempt on his life at Agnani in 1307 which results in the Papal seat being transferred to Avignon in France under instructions of King Philip the Fair of France. Charles V uses paid assassins to sack Papal Rome in 1527. The list is too long of the Iagos of this world in European history.
So don't distort history to finger point to one aspect of human treachery.
damn falak, you got ghorius gene down pat. well done, and what i can add is: humanity has many failings and our islamic mad dogs seem to uphold them all. this from an american who tried to elect ron paul who's distaste for wild eyed military operations is as strong as mine. we agree more than not.
http://www.amazon.de/Söhne-Weltmacht-Terror-Aufstieg-Nationen/dp/3280060087
This book explains it. So much to do with Male Birth Rate which correlates with military expansionism. Germany fitted the bill until 1945 with rapid population replacement after 1871 and 1918. Now Germany is a pussy-whipped feminised society where noone wants to breed and boys are dominated by aggressive controlling females with half-baked delusions of self-importance, and the rest of Europe is enthralled by fetishism and deviancy; it is the Muslim male population explosion that will be their nemesis
germany is mini usa, with hillary in the white house..and women in the army rangers how do you spell "controlling females with half-baked delusions of self-importance, and the rest of Europe is enthralled by fetishism and deviancy" why you spell it USA.
I politely beg to differ, it appears Mr. Norton either doesn't really know his subject or has an agenda, islamic extremism started way before the last decades, with German Kaisers at the end of 1800s
http://tiborkrausz.com/html/book_review/the_kaisers_Jihad.html
Salon.com is laughable. It is a testament to the oversimplification and fanatical secularism of leftwing douchebag libtards who are incapable of seeing that they are every bit the knuckle dragging lower primates that they accuse anyone who disagrees with their viewpoint of being.
The birth (or more accurately re-birth) of modern Ismalmic fundamentalism does not have its its roots in American Imperialism, but rather British Imperialism. The Saudis have been fundamentalist head choppers since Ibn Saud created a pact with the Wahhab Clan of Najd in the 18th century and set out to purify Islam. The second Suadi kingdom (19th) was actually called the Emirate of Najd. In the 20th century, with the waning of the imperialist (as opposed to fundamentalist) Ottoman Empire that had advanced to Vienna in the 16th century, the third Saudi Kingdom was born under King Abdulazziz who formed an alliance with the British in WWI before the discovery of oil, meanwhile in Egypt- al Banna was busy forming the Muslim Brotherhood and calling for a purifying of Islam in response to British Imperialism in the Suez.
THEN OIL WAS DISCOVERED IN SAUDI ARABIA
THEN ISRAEL was birthed by the Zionists in London, and in short order had given common cause to the twin roots of modern Islamic fundamentalism.
It was Islamic Jihad and its desire to create a caliphate in Egypt that assassinated Sadat for signing a treaty with Israel... among the ranks of Islamic Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood are such contemporary personalities as Ayman al-Zawahiri of Al Queda and the Blind Sheikh of the first WTC bombing.
THEN THE RUSSIANS INVADED AFGHANISTAN, and the existing radicals who already shared common cause took up common real estate on the battlefield (and the secularists impossibly distill the conflict down to atheist USSA imperialism (and its fundamentalist allies) vs atheist USSR imperialism).
So could the editors of Salon.com be so ignorant as to have never read this history? Of course not, but they are fundamentalist secularists (or closet Jews) and they don't want to drag Israel into the discussion even though it is both a critical element and a valid topic of discussion (though not to the extent that some of the other fundamentalists claim it to be)... of course Salon.com has no problem taking one of the few statements in the New Testament that can even be misconstrued as condoning aggression.
On the Trinity of Money, Power and Religion I'll close with a translated excerpt from Letter VI of Voltaire's Lettres Philosophiques
Indeed, for decades, the US and its allies have bombed the Middle East back into the stone age, stolen their land, absconded with their wealth, killed their peoples, destroyed their infrastructure, droned innocent gatherings and left them in a power vacuum without any hope or prospects.
Libya is a great recent example. Gaddafi was a bad person but at least he provided healthcare, education, housing, infrastructure and order. Then the US and its allies (Hillary: "we came, we saw and he died") decided to overthrow him and the country has been in complete disarray ever since. Thousands of people have died, refugees have fled to Italy with many drowning on their way. Gaddafi was bad, the West is a lot worse
So, what do you expect these people to do in response, sit on their hands? What would you do if the lottery of life had you born in such environment?
Well, they joined ISIS, whose actions are based on brutal medieval religious traditions on the way to the “eventual apocalypse”. ISIS was an irrelevant organization until the US decided to support it in its failed attempt to defeat Bashar al-Assad.
My hart goes out to the victims of the Paris attacks but there will be more until we deal with the terrible devastation the West has caused over the many decades in the Middle East.
Indeed, for decades, the US and its allies have bombed the Middle East back into the stone age, stolen their land, absconded with their wealth, killed their peoples, destroyed their infrastructure, droned innocent gatherings and left them in a power vacuum without any hope or prospects.
Libya is a great recent example. Gaddafi was a bad person but at least he provided healthcare, education, housing, infrastructure and order. Then the US and its allies (Hillary: "we came, we saw and he died") decided to overthrow him and the country has been in complete disarray ever since. Thousands of people have died, refugees have fled to Italy with many drowning on their way. Gaddafi was bad, the West is a lot worse
So, what do you expect these people to do in response, sit on their hands? What would you do if the lottery of life had you born in such environment?
Well, they joined ISIS, whose actions are based on brutal medieval religious traditions on the way to the “eventual apocalypse”. ISIS was an irrelevant organization until the US decided to support it in its failed attempt to defeat Bashar al-Assad.
My hart goes out to the victims of the Paris attacks but there will be more until we deal with the terrible devastation the West has caused over the many decades in the Middle East.
I$I$...USSA's last bout of terror to stall the inevitable collapse of the blood-spattered Saudi Mercan petroscrip IOU toilet paper dollah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YZTzjKFyBw
Indeed, for decades, the US and its allies have bombed the Middle East back into the stone age, stolen their land, absconded with their wealth, killed their peoples, destroyed their infrastructure, droned innocent gatherings and left them in a power vacuum without any hope or prospects.
Libya is a great recent example. Gaddafi was a bad person but at least he provided healthcare, education, housing, infrastructure and order. Then the US and its allies (Hillary: "we came, we saw and he died") decided to overthrow him and the country has been in complete disarray ever since. Thousands of people have died, refugees have fled to Italy with many drowning on their way. Gaddafi was bad, the West is a lot worse
So, what do you expect these people to do in response, sit on their hands? What would you do if the lottery of life had you born in such environment?
Well, they joined ISIS, whose actions are based on brutal medieval religious traditions on the way to the “eventual apocalypse”. ISIS was an irrelevant organization until the US decided to support it in its failed attempt to defeat Bashar al-Assad.
My hart goes out to the victims of the Paris attacks but there will be more until we deal with the terrible devastation the West has caused over the many decades in the Middle East.
Very Short sighted view of real history. Let's take a look at the facts...http://bit.ly/1l9fsZ9
riiiight....we're to blame for islam, lol
we're do get such men, err idiots, i mean garbage peddlers
pull your head out tyler...too much time spent with the left
Blame Reagan, not the Dems! Anybody ever seen the 2007 Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts movie "Charlie Wilson's War," based on a book of the same name? Watch that movie---made by good, loyal Hollywood Dems, bragging about what the Dems of the 1980s accomplished. Charlie Wilson was a Democrat congressional representative from Texas who single handedly engineered the rise of Osama bin Laden and the mujahadeen, by arming them with the highest tech weapons, including hand held missiles for taking out aircraft (used later to down commercial civilian flights). Using his clout in Congress, representative Wilson surreptitiously attached---snuck through---10s of billions of dollars to nondescript congressional appropriations to arm the mujahadeen. The weapons were delivered through Pakistan via the CIA. The movie lauds Charlie Wilson as a national hero, and includes a secret awards ceremony wherein the CIA pinned their highest achievement medal onto Charlie Wilson. The point and theme of both movie and book was that the stupid, naive Reagan administration, preoccupied with Central America, DIDN'T EVEN KNOW this major operation was happening. Wilson and congressional Dems pulled off this SECRET major foreign policy operation right under the Reagan administration's noses, and they didn't suspect a thing! The Reagan rubes were totally in the dark!
I'm sure if G.W. Bush had not insulted Mohammad in 600 A.D. he and his successors would not have invaded and conquered the entire Middle East.
Simple minds need simple answers to complex problems
Good grief Charlie Brown, this article sucks. Has everyone here forgotten that 911 was an inside job? Go study some physics for a while.
It's always the same on all of the comment boards. It always slides into "you're an idiot"..."no, you're an idiot"..."history tells us"..."you didnt go back far enough"...then back to complete the circle..."you're an idiot"..."no, you're an idiot"
People are the same as they ever have been. Rule of law keeps most of us from killing each other over feels. Which rule of law works best? "you're an idiot"..."no, you're an idiot"
The same interests seek to and benefit from radicalizing both Islam and Christianity. Whether both religions were inherently violent is hard to say because we would have to find a historical point where states/interests were not manipulating the faiths for their benefit or one angle or another... which is never going to happen because that time cannot be found, it doesn't exist.
Remember the meeting in Texas?
Taliban didn't take the deal, and said they would bring poppy production to zero next year, and they nearly did. Then.... We came in and the poppy production was ramped back up.....
Afghan History: Al Qaeda, The Taliban and the Texas Oil Giants
According to French intelligence analyst Jean-Charles Brisard, President Bush Jr. blocked US Secret Service investigations into US-based al-Qaeda sleeper cells while he continued to negotiate secretly with Taliban officials. The last meeting was in August 2001 just five weeks before 911. Bush wanted the Taliban to deliver bin Laden in return for US and Saudi economic aid and support for the Taliban. [14]
Deputy FBI Director John O’Neill resigned his post in July 2001 to protest the Bush Administration’s cozying up to the Taliban. Brisard says O’Neill told him, “the main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism were US corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia.” O’Neill took a job as Chief of Security at the World Trade Center in New York and was killed during the 911 attacks. [15]
<snip>
According to the French newspaper Le Figaro, the CIA met with bin Laden several times during the months prior to 911. According to the Washington Post, the CIA met with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar’s envoy Rahmattullah Hashami in July 2001. Hashami offered to hold on to bin Laden until the CIA could capture him but, according to the Village Voice, the Bush Administration turned down the offer. That same month the CIA met with Jamiaat-i-Islami leader Qazi Hussein Ahmed.
The US government gave $43 million in aid to the Taliban in 2000 and $132 million in 2001. The Taliban were told by the Bush White House to hire a Washington PR firm to scrub up their image. The firm was headed by Laila Helms- niece of former CIA Director and BCCI crony Richard Helms. Big Oil representatives were present at the Bush-Taliban negotiations, where one official told the Taliban at that last August meeting, “You either accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”[16]
http://www.globalresearch.ca/afghan-history-al-qaeda-the-taliban-and-the-texas-oil-giants/24318
Context of 'December 4, 1997: Taliban Representatives Visit Unocal in Texas'
July-August 1999: Taliban Leaders Visit US
1996-September 11, 2001: Enron Gives Taliban Millions in Bribes in Effort to Get Afghan Pipeline Built
December 1997: Unocal Establishes Pipeline Training Facility Near Bin Laden’s Compound
December 4, 1997: Taliban Representatives Visit Unocal in Texas