Western nations have backed fundamentalist forces at the expense of secular, nationalist Muslims. With western funding and support, the Islamic fringe has come to occupy the mainstream.…
How it all began.
“The British Empire had an overprotective attitude toward Islam,” writes Nu’man Abd Al-Wahid of the Lebanon-based Al-Akhbar.
Considering that Britain was one of the prime culprits in the destabilisation of Iran in the 1950s and is behind the devastation of Iraq, Libya and Syria in more recent times, one would be tempted to take the view the British are anti-Muslim. But in fact they are only opposed to nationalist Muslims and the moderate middle classes.
Al-Wahid explains: “When the Empire began to consolidate its lordship over the Arab world after World War I, it partnered with Saudi Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood. The trends these movements represented were not so much ‘invented’ by the British but favoured and promoted.
"Before the British allowed the Wahhabis to establish themselves in Riyadh in 1901, they were an isolated, exiled cult in the Basra region known as ‘Kuwait’. With further support from the Empire, the Wahhabis expanded into the western part of the Arabian peninsula in 1924 and 1925.”
The British advocated the Muslim Brotherhood brand of Islam rather than the traditional moderate Islam as practised by the oldest university in the Islamic world, Al-Azhar.
“The British Empire...heroically and selflessly defended Islam, even if al-Azhar, the traditional bastion of Islamic learning in the world, didn’t comprehend this urgency. By the time these two major trends of Islamism strategically coalesced in the 1950s to meet the challenge of third world independence and socialism, the Americans had embraced the British Empire’s imperialist strategy.”
“This embrace meant bringing British puppets, such as the al-Saud clan of Saudi Arabia and the Thani clan of Qatar, under its protective umbrella. This American appropriation of the puppets had initially gained doctrinal credibility through the Eisenhower doctrine and extended all the way until the 1980s to support the Islamist mercenaries, or mujahideen, against the Soviets in the 1980s.”
Downhill from there.
During the Carter administration, under the influence of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the US began to employ Wahhabi, Salafi, Takfiri mujahideen as "freedom fighters" and used them subsequently in proxy wars — until the mujahideen turned on them. But the mujahideen presented too good an opportunity to give up entirely so the US still incorporates them.
However, the desire to play cynical geopolitical games is too strong in the West. In most cases western politicians and generals are way over their heads in events they cannot begin to understand, let alone control. Meanwhile, the battle is spilling over into the streets of Europe and occasionally the United States. The West’s ‘Freudian Bargain’ is clearly coming unstuck.
Russia & India Report
How the West used radical Islam and unleashed global terror
Rakesh Krishnan Simha
