Category: Archive

Duplicitous Western support for Islamist movements has a long and dishonorable history. In the early and middle 20th century, both British and U.S. intelligence supported the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the group from which so many of today’s radical Islamic sects – including Hamas and even al-Qaeda – have sprung. Indeed, in the 1920s, the British, then the colonial rulers of Egypt, helped to set up the Muslim Brotherhood as a means of keeping Egyptian nationalism and anti-colonialism in check. The immediate precursor to the Muslim Brotherhood was an organization called the Society of Propaganda and Guidance, which was funded and backed by British colonialists. In return, the Society provided Islamist backing to British rule in Egypt. It published a journal called The Lighthouse, which attacked Egyptian nationalists – who wanted British forces out of Egypt – as "atheists and infidels." Under British patronage, the Society set up the Institute of Propaganda and Guidance, which brought Islamists from across the Muslim world to Egypt so they could be trained in political agitation, and then take such anti-anti-colonialism back to their own homelands.

One graduate of the Institute of Propaganda and Guidance was Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. According to Robert Dreyfuss, in his informative book Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, the original Muslim Brotherhood was an "unabashed British intelligence front." The mosque that served as the first headquarters of the Brotherhood – in Ismailia, Egypt – was built by the (British) Suez Canal Company. With Britain’s knowledge, and tacit approval, in the 1930s and ’40s the Brotherhood both challenged anti-colonial parties within Egypt and also spread to other parts of the Near and Middle East, setting up branches in Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.

Following the coming to power of the anti-colonialist and pan-Arabist Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954, elements in the West continued to look upon the Muslim Brotherhood as a weapon against secular nationalism and communism. The British government of the time encouraged the Brotherhood to challenge Nasser, and in 1954 there was open conflict between the Brotherhood’s and Nasser’s forces. Many hundreds were killed, and eventually the Brotherhood fled, taking refuge in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other states in the Anglo-American camp. The U.S.-friendly regime in Saudi Arabia, in particular, provided sanctuary and financial backing to Brotherhood members during Nasser’s crackdown on the group.

Initially the U.S., in its interventionist policies of the postwar period, adopted the British model of supporting radical Islamists in order to undermine popular secular governments or communist-influenced outfits in the Near and Middle East. This included supporting the Brotherhood against Nasser. In his book Sleeping With the Devil, former CIA officer Robert Baer said there was a "dirty little secret" in Washington in the early 1950s:

"The White House looked on the Brothers as a silent ally, a secret weapon against – what else? – communism. The covert action started in the 1950s with the Dulles brothers – Allen at the CIA and John Foster at the State Department – when they approved Saudi Arabia’s funding of Egypt’s Brothers against Nasser. As far as Washington was concerned, Nasser was a communist."

Baer said that the "logic of the Cold War" meant that the U.S. was willing to support radical Islamists even if they carried out activities such as assassinations or political agitation designed to foment conflict. As Baer argues, "If Allah agreed to fight on our side, fine. If Allah decided that political assassination was permissible, that was fine too, as long as no one talked about it in polite company." (There was, of course, a subsequent divergence between British and American policy on Nasser. During the Suez crisis of 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower put a stop to the British-French-Israeli invasion of Suez and backed Nasser’s regime, temporarily at least.)

The Muslim Brotherhood and its various branches across the Middle East – which shared the aim of replacing secular democracy with Islamic government – also gave rise to violent splinter groups. Hamas, which today is discussed by Bush and his supporters as a great danger to peace in Israel-Palestine, if not the entire world, is a local wing of the Brotherhood, formed in the mid-1980s from various Brotherhood-affiliated charities that had gained a foothold in Palestinian territories. Al-Qaeda itself has been influenced primarily by the thinking of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), a radical member of the Brotherhood. Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian, was first radicalized by the Muslim Brotherhood; he joined the group when he was 14 years old, before moving on to the more radical Islamic Jihad group in 1979 and subsequently fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Indeed, during the Afghan-Soviet war from 1979 to 1992, American and British intelligence once again supported radical Islamists against, in this instance, secularist and communist forces. Where the Cold War began with America and Britain supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamists against popular secular movements, it ended with America and Britain arming, financing, and propagandizing on behalf of radical Islamists fighting the Soviet Union’s last stand in Afghanistan before its collapse in the early 1990s.

Throughout the 1980s, the CIA and the British intelligence organization MI5 arranged for the arming and training of thousands of mujahedeen in Afghanistan. American and British elements, together with Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, ensured that the mujahedeen had everything they needed to wage war against the Soviets. As Phil Gasper has argued,

"The CIA became the grand coordinator: purchasing or arranging the manufacture of Soviet-style weapons from Egypt, China, Poland, Israel, and elsewhere, or supplying their own; arranging for military training by Americans, Egyptians, Chinese and Iranians; hitting up Middle-Eastern countries for donations, notably Saudi Arabia, which gave many hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year, totaling probably more than a billion; pressuring and bribing Pakistan – with whom recent American relations had been very poor – to rent out its country as a military staging area and sanctuary; putting the Pakistan Director of Military Operations, Brigadier Mian Mohammad Afzal, onto the CIA payroll to ensure Pakistani cooperation."

Two beneficiaries of such widespread American support for the mujahedeen’s war against the Soviets were bin Laden and Zawahiri, currently al-Qaeda’s number 1 and number 2. Both traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1980s to assist with the anti-Soviet war effort. It should be noted that America and Britain did not only fund and arm the mujahedeen; they also provided backing to mosques, madrassa schools, and propagandistic publications and radio stations that put the case for political Islam over communism or secularism. Indeed, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – who would go on to devise the 9/11 attacks – was involved in a madrassa school that was funded by Saudi and U.S. money. Once again, Western forces were not only opportunistically supporting their enemy’s enemy – they were also fueling the idea that radical Islamism was preferable to "evil" communism and even to secular government.

We could argue that al-Qaeda, both intellectually and practically, is a product of Western meddling in Middle Eastern affairs. It takes its inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood, that group supported by both American and British intelligence in the early and middle 20th century, and it was forged in the heat of the Afghan-Soviet war, that conflict largely facilitated by U.S., British, and Saudi funds and arms. In terms of both its political origins and its early and formative fighting experiences, al-Qaeda owes a great deal to Western interventionism.

Even Hamas is, in some ways, the product of a desire by the West and its allies to use radical Islamism as a counterweight to popular secular movements. It was formed, in 1987, from various charities with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. These charities had been allowed by Israel itself to gain strength and influence in Palestinian territories in order to, as one account puts it, "counter the influence of the secular Palestinian resistance movements." Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, who was killed by an Israeli air strike in 2004, formed the military outfit in 1987 as the armed wing of his group the Islamic Association. This organization had been licensed by Israel 10 years earlier, in the 1970s. In that period, Israeli officials gave the nod to, and even indirectly funded, the setting-up of Islamic societies in the West Bank and Gaza that might weaken and isolate Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. Martha Kessler, a senior analyst for the CIA, has said: "[W]e saw Israel cultivate Islam as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism." The very Islamic groups "cultivated" by Israel in the 1970s went on to become Hamas in the 1980s.

In funding Islamists against secularists, Israel was following in a long tradition started by the British and Americans. As one former senior CIA official has put it, Israel’s tolerance, even support, of Islamic groups that would later become Hamas "was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative." There is no evidence that Israel ever supported Hezbollah, but their interests have coincided over the past two decades or more, since the founding of Hezbollah in Lebanon by Iranian elements in 1982.

As Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, has argued, "Hezbollah represented a militant, non-secular alternative to [Arafat’s] Nassertie Fatah, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other groups that took their bearing from Pan-Arabism rather than Islam…. [Hezbollah] made a powerful claim that the Palestinian movement had no future while it remained fundamentally secular." Israel and Hezbollah are, of course, arch-rivals; Hezbollah was formed with the explicit aim of expelling Israel from Lebanon by any means necessary. However, in the early 1980s both Israel and Hezbollah had a shared aim of weakening the more powerful and popular secularist Palestinian movements.

Over the past 80 years, Western governments and their allies have supported radical Islamist groups. However, this was not merely opportunism, a bad case of "my enemy’s enemy is my friend." As part of this process, Western governments seriously denigrated popular secular and democratic movements. Indeed, from the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s to Israel’s role in the forging of Hamas in the 1980s, the explicit aim of Western support for radical Islamism was to isolate, weaken, and ultimately destroy popular political movements that very often were based on Western ideas of democracy and progress. Thus, many of these radical Islamist groups – the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah – have a built-in suspicion of and hostility toward secular democracy.

What we are faced with today is not a new World War being waged by any kind of powerful Islamist conspiracy. Instead, as secular and nationalist politics has fallen apart in the post-Cold War period, we are left with fairly small, radical Islamist sects – in other words, with those very groups that were forged as a bulwark against secular democratic politics in the first place.
 
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/oneill.php?articleid=9615

You probably don’t even know it, but there’s a huge, blank space in your information data base.  So much has happened in this country about which you know absolutely nothing. So many lies have been told and so much has been kept secret that you are simply wandering in the dark. So much of what you should know and what you have a right to know has been denied you.  And yet you foolishly claim to know what is going on.

Not so.  You know almost nothing that is real about your own country or the world. Almost nothing.

Absent a specialized background, you would never dream of challenging your doctor’s diagnosis or outguessing your auto mechanic. You wouldn’t even claim to know more than someone who spent years developing a hobby you never had. If you wanted to learn to fish, you’d most probably listen to the instructions of an experienced angler.

So what in hell makes you such an expert on the crimes of the Bush administration?

You haven’t done the research. You haven’t even asked the questions. But most important, you haven’t taken a minute to listen to the people who have.  You haven’t checked out the evidence that has been unearthed and you refused to listen to those who unearthed it.  You have no basis for your own conclusions, and yet you ridicule anyone who seeks the truth. But for some unexplainable reason you believe everything your President and his cohorts tell you, even if everything they tell you is a lie.

You believe them even though you know that have lied to you over and over and over.

So just shut up and listen for a minute. For starters, take a look at what you DON’T know, even though you pretend you do.  Take a good close look and cringe at your lack of facts and real news and vital information.

Here is our SHORT LIST of things you DO NOT KNOW:

YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING IN LEBANON OR GAZA. You don’t know that Israel censors all news so that their own population is not even aware of how their military conducts itself. There is NO balanced reporting on the events that has led to the present conflagration in the region. Other than explanations by official Israeli representatives, there is never an open or accurate discussion from ALL sides of the conflict. There is never a voice given to the thousands of organized activists working around the globe for a just and lasting peace in the region. Any criticism of the Israeli government is perceived as a form of Anti-Semitism and Jew baiting.  Any defense of those who have lived under occupation for nearly forty years is perceived as aiding the war on terror.   There is NO public discussion of the Christian zealots in the US who support Israel for their own fanatical religious concerns about a Second Coming.  You do NOT know that the Karl Rove mantra of an imminent WWIII is being used by the media to revive the fear factor among Americans. And, you have NOT been told how the call to stop Iran and Syria from aiding ‘terrorists’ is part of the PNAC plan for domination of the region.  You just don’t know.

YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING IN IRAQ! You don’t know that the war in Iraq is getting less media coverage than any other conflict in American history.  You only know that the invasion of Iraq is supposedly part of a greater War on Terror. The connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda was a lie, but you still believe the claim. The insurgency is made up largely of Iraqis who oppose an invasion of their country, but they are constantly referred to as terrorists. No one tells you where the billions upon billions of your war dollars have gone; the Bush administration certainly has not rebuilt the country they bombed to smithereens. You don’t know what is happening because US reporters are not free to leave the safety of the Green Zone and they rely on official military reports for their information.  You hear what the Pentagon chooses to tell you. You hear that progress is being made, despite the ongoing, daily, non-stop death and mayhem and carnage.  You just don’t know.

YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW MANY SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN KILLED IN IRAQ! You don’t know the numbers because the totals are ignored until a major milestone is reached. Even then, there is no corroboration of the numbers you hear. None at all. Coalition deaths are never, ever reported by the media. Even though counting civilian casualties in Iraq was forbidden by the US government early on, George Bush guessed that roughly 30,000 Iraqis had died. Actually, the latest estimate by concerned agencies has placed civilian deaths at 175,000.  Deaths of contractors or other private workers are never tallied or reported.  The numbers and the nature of devastating injuries cause by this war are simply ignored by the Bush administrations and the media. Flag draped coffins may not be photographed.  Military funerals are not attended by government officials. You just don’t know.

YOU DO NOT KNOW THAT THE US CANNOT BE CHARGED WITH WAR CRIMES! You don’t know that in May of 2002, the US pulled out of the only treaty that could result in charges being brought against the US government for war crimes: the International Criminal Court of the United Nations This move made it impossible for any American to face charges for crimes such as waging a preventive war, using outlawed weapons such as depleted uranium or torturing detainees.  Months before pulling out of the treaty, the Bush administration had established with the ICC that US soldiers serving overseas would be immune from prosecution in the court, while politicians and US officials, including CIA operatives, could claim diplomatic immunity.  As a result, the US has put itself above the law and can commit war crimes with impunity. You just don’t know.

YOU DO NOT KNOW WHO AUTHORIZED THE USE OF TORTURE BY OUR MILITARY! You don’t know that the use of illegal torture methods was authorized at the highest levels of our government, including the President himself. You were told that such acts at Abu Ghraib and other prisons were the work of a few ‘bad apples’ in the military and you believed it. The story served to cover up the wide use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo that has been recorded in photos and video tapes that the Pentagon still refuses to turn over to the US Circuit Court.  The world learned of secret CIA flights that flew detainees to countries that permitted torture during interrogation. Still, George Bush and Condoleezza Rice publicly stated that the US does not tolerate torture. You just don’t know. YOU DO NOT KNOW
WHAT HAPPENED ON 9/11.  No one does.  There has been NO investigation into the events leading to the attacks of that day.  The Kean Commission looked only into the Intelligence failures. No independent agency has ever been appointed to look into the hundreds of unbelievable discrepancies, anomalies and inconsistencies of the official story created by the Bush administration.  There has been absolutely no evidence to support the official version of events; the public is simply expected to accept it without question.  Since 9/11, many highly credible people have come forward to challenge the government’s explanation with mounds of impressive evidence to support their claims.  They all have been ignored by the media and dismissed by you as conspiracy theorists. You just don’t know.

YOU DO NOT KNOW THAT THE IRAQ WAR WAS PLANNED LONG BEFORE 9/11! You probably never even heard of the Project for a New American Century and how many of its members, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld hold high positions in the Bush administration.  You DON’T know about PNAC because the media never exposed the plans they laid out in the late 1990’s for invading Iraq.  You DON’T know that they openly expressed the need for a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ in order to facilitate a war against Iraq.  How convenient for them that 9/11 provided them with just the ‘catastrophic and catalyzing event’ they needed. How convenient as well that they were able to lie to the people and the Congress to launch an illegal and immoral war. You just don’t know.

YOU DO NOT KNOW THAT YOUR GOVERNMENT SOLD YOU A WAR! You don’t know that Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove and seven other people were part of the White House Iraq Group that was designed to you a war. Their job was to develop talking points and mantras such as ‘mushroom cloud’ that would hype the administration’s planned war against Iraq. You have no clue that the WHIG group set a carefully constructed terror trap to convince you and other Americans that invading a sovereign nation that had never threatened them would keep them safe.  You also don’t know that the Downing Street Minutes revealed beyond any doubt that George Bush and Tony Blair planned the war in Iraq and ‘fixed’ the intelligence information to gain your support. They knew all along that the WMD’s and nuclear programs never existed. You just don’t know.

YOU DO NOT KNOW THAT THE 2004 ELECTION WAS AS GREAT A FRAUD AS THE ELECTION OF 2000. You never heard about Congressman John Conyers’ official report about What Went Wrong in Ohio. You don’t know about Mark Crispin Millers explosive book about the 2004 election called Fooled Again. You don’t know about the brilliant Rolling Stone article by Robert F Kennedy Jr. entitled, Was the 2004 Election Stolen? You don’t know that hackers can manipulate all of the new touch screen electronic voting machines with little difficulty.  You have no clue that 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S, both of which have strong ties to the GOP. You don’t know that the new electronic machines have no paper trail to verify the tabulations, even though both companies make ATM machines, checkout scanners and ticket machines that easily generate receipts.  You don’t know how many people were intentionally and fraudulently disenfranchised in every election since 2000.  You just don’t know.

YOU DO NOT KNOW WHO LEAKED THE SECRET IDENTITY OF VALERIE PLAME! You still don’t know because the cover up has been successful. You don’t know who did what because there is no one to demand that Bush and Cheney come clean about what happened in their White House on their watch. Understand that the recent stories of Richard Armitage as a prime source for outing Valerie Plame never got to the mainstream media, and never will. Remember that for three full months after Plame was outed George Bush refused to investigate this crime. It was only when the CIA demanded an inquiry into the leak of its operative that the President finally turned to case over to John Ashcroft, an insider and friend of the WH and ultimately the case went to Pat Fitzgerald.  You only know that Scooter Libby, National Security Assistant to Dick Cheney, was charged with lying to the FBI and obstructing justice. And you know for damn sure he’ll be pardoned before there is any trial. As for the Plame leak itself, you don’t know that the civil suit brought by the Wilsons against Cheney, Rove and Libby will be delayed until after the 2008 election.  You just don’t know.

YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW MANY AMERICANS HAVE BEEN SPIED ON WITHOUT WARRANTS! You don’t know because the warrantless surveillance was carried on in secret for years.  The NY Times broke the story after keeping it under wraps for a full year – and not reporting it before the 2004 election. You don’t know that the FISA court was specifically created after the Nixon era to facilitate spying that was deemed necessary by the government, and allows for warrants to be issued 72 hours after surveillance, should there be a need to carry it out quickly.  You simply don’t know who was spied upon or what was accomplished as a result of the spying.  What you should know is that Americans are protected from such spying by the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. And yet, the President insists he has the authority to spy on Americans without a warrant from any court. And you surely don’t know that this same President insists he has greater power than any American president in history, and that as a result your Constitutional rights are in terrible jeopardy. You just don’t know.

There is so much more you don’t know.  This is the tip of the iceberg, the very tip.  We didn’t list the still secret Cheney energy meetings, the destruction of the environment, the manipulated reports about global warming, the horrendous national debt, or the rampant cronyism and corruption in the WH, among so much else. The above is an extremely short list, but for the sake of readability, it will have to do.

Tragically, what you DO know has come from the very people who see to it that you know ONLY what they want you to know. What you DO know has come from the corporate media sources that get their talking points from the very same people who want to keep you uninformed. What you DO NOT KNOW helps them to manipulate your opinions and to influence your political views.  What a disaster that is.

If you find your ignorance of the issues acceptable, go for it. If you find it abhorrent and totally opposed to the democratic concept of an informed electorate, forgive the discourteous nature of our reprimand and please, just shut up and listen.

First, understand that there is hope for you.  But also understand that it’s too late for courtesy or good manners.  This nation is rapidly approaching a dangerous brink which may take us all into an abyss from which we will not recover.  So, please take us very seriously. The solution lies in your willingness to just shut up and listen.

Shut up about things you know nothing about and get informed.  Shut up about the ranting blather of right wing radio hosts who are just as uninformed as you, but whose agenda makes it unnecessary for them to know what they are talking about. They get their talking points from Karl Rove and his manipulation machinery and dish their nonsense out to you.  And most of all learn to say “I don’t know,” instead of repeating the distortions and lies and garbage you’ve been conned into believing. If you can’t do that, just shut up. Please, just shut up.

Once you’ve been able to stop spreading misinformation and to stop supporting policies about which you know nothing, go on to the next step.  For your own sake, LISTEN.  Listen to people who know because they’ve taken the time to research and validate the facts. Listen to people you refused to even acknowledge because they dared to question what you blindly accepted as truth. Listen with a discerning ear so you can filter out unsubstantiated and uncorroborated propaganda. Listen through the catch phrases such as ‘war on terror’ and ‘for national security.’ Try; really try to listen with an open and questioning mind.

The information is out there.  You are reading this on the Internet, the most incredible information source in history. The facts are at your fingertips.  Find them. 

Deal with the painful reality that you DO NOT KNOW what is happening around you, and understand that your stubborn resistance to new information will be your own downfall in the long haul. Until you make some attempt at rehabilitation, just stop.  We’ve had enough. You’ve done your damage, so just stop.

There is no other way to say it. If you can’t back up what you parrot so stupidly, just stop. If you can’t explain why you believe what you do without some substantive and meaningful backing, just stop.  Just stop. 

That’s all there is to say. All that remains is a last echo of the advice we offer, and the hope that it reaches even one of the many uninformed Americans among us:

Just shut up and listen. It’s time.