Islamic State is the cancer of modern capitalism
Published on Intrepid Report, by Nafeez Ahmed, April 3, 2015.
Debate about the origins of the Islamic State (IS) has largely oscillated between two extreme perspectives. One blames the West. IS is nothing more than a predictable reaction to the occupation of Iraq, yet another result of Western foreign policy blowback. The other attributes IS’s emergence purely to the historic or cultural barbarism of the Muslim world, whose backward medieval beliefs and values are a natural incubator for such violent extremism … //
… Follow the money:
The foundations for al-Qaeda’s ideology were born in the 1970s. Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden‘s Palestinian mentor, formulated a new theory justifying continuous, low-intensity war by dispersed mujahideen cells for a pan-Islamist state. Azzam’s violent Islamist doctrines were popularised in the context of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
As is well-known, the Afghan mujahideen networks were trained and financed under the supervision of the CIA, MI6 and the Pentagon. The Gulf states provided huge sums of money, while Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) liaised on the ground with the militant networks being coordinated by Azzam, bin Laden, and others.
The Reagan administration, for instance, provided $2 billion to the Afghan mujahideen, which was matched by another $2 billion from Saudi Arabia.
In Afghanistan, USAID invested millions of dollars to supply schoolchildren with “textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings,” according to the Washington Post. Theology justifying violent jihad was interspersed with “drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines.” The textbooks even extolled the heavenly rewards if children were to “pluck out the eyes of the Soviet enemy and cut off his legs.”
The conventional wisdom is that this disastrous configuration of Western-Muslim world collaboration in financing Islamist extremists ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. As I said in congressional testimony a year after the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, the conventional wisdom is false.
Protection racket: … //
… Bosnia: … //
… Afghanistan: … //
… Kosovo: … //
… The Middle East redirection: … //
… Libya: … //
… Syria: … //
… Turkey: … //
… The US-led anti-IS coalition is funding IS:
The US and Britain have not only remained strangely silent about the complicity of their coalition partner in sponsoring the enemy. They have tightened up the partnership with Turkey, and are working avidly with the same state-sponsor of IS to train “moderate” rebels to fight IS.
It is not just Turkey. Last year, US Vice President Joe Biden told a White House press conference that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Turkey among others, were pouring “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons, of weapons” into “al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis” as part of a “proxy Sunni-Shia war.” He added that, for all intents and purposes, it is not possible to identify “moderate” rebels in Syria.
There is no indication that this funding has dried up. As late as September 2014, even as the US began coordinating airstrikes against IS, Pentagon officials revealed that they knew their own coalition allies were still funding IS.
That month, Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by Senator Lindsay Graham during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing whether he knew of “any major Arab ally that embraces Isil [IS]?” He said: “I know major Arab allies who fund them.”
Despite this knowledge, the US government has not merely refused to sanction these allies, but rewarded them by including them in the coalition that is supposed to fight the very extremist entity they are funding. Worse, the same allies continue to be granted ample leeway to select fighters to receive training.
Key members of our anti-IS coalition are bombing IS from the air while sponsoring them behind the scenes—with the knowledge of the Pentagon.
The arc of Muslim state-failure: … //
… Alienation in the West: … //
… Dehumanisation: … //
… (full long text).
(Nafeez Ahmed PhD is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls the ‘crisis of civilization.’ He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inques).
on en.wikipedia:
Websites:
Links:
‘Slave labor’: Migrants building Guggenheim, Louvre in UAE ‘treated like battery hens’, on Russia Today RT, April 5, 2015;
Proxy War in Yemen – Saudi Arabia and Iran Vie for Regional Supremacy, on Spiegel Online International, by Dieter Bednarz, Christoph Reuter and Bernhard Zand, April 3, 2015 (Photo Gallery): A Saudi Arabia-led coalition continues to bombard Yemen in an effort to stop the advance of an Iran-backed Shiite militia there. The conflict is becoming a proxy war for regional supremacy. The risks to the House of Saud are great;
How Ohio’s energy economy became a radioactive 19th century relic, on Intrepid Report, by Harvey Wasserman, April 3, 2015: Back in early 2010, Ohio stood at the cusp of a modern 21st century technological revolution …;
Phyllis Clarke Memorial Lecture: Lifting Up Low-Wage Work – Global Perspectives, on Socialist Project.ca, by Stephanie Luce, March 26, 2015;
2 books by Stephanie Luce: Fighting for a Living Wage, and Labor Movements, Global Perspectives;
Manning on torture in new Guardian op-ed, on Chelsea Manning.org, by Chelsea E Manning, March 9, 2015: “The CIA’s torturers and the leaders who approved their actions must face the law.” Even the most junior level intelligence officers know that torture is both unethical and illegal. So why didn’t our political leaders?