Western imperialism, ‘muslim extremism’, and zionism: A controversial and explosive triangle
Posted on 7 July, 2015 by CEO
Dr Nicolas Laos
Partner (Expert in Geopolitics and World Security,
R-Techno private intelligence company, Moscow)
Jihadism
The modern West has played a decisive role in the radicalization, distortion, and aggressive mutation of several Muslim communities. The following are characteristic facts that clarify the role that the West has played in the history of the Islamic world:
‒ In the 19th century, the West realized that, in order to promote its geostrategic interests in the Middle East and to integrate the Arabo-Islamic world into capitalism, it had to deconstruct the Caliphate and to deprive the Arabo-Islamic world of the ability to create a real Caliphate after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. For this reason, the West promoted the nationalist ideology throughout the Middle East, thus dividing the Arabo-Islamic world into several artificially created nation-states whose governments depended on Western Great Powers and were susceptible to manipulation by Western Great Powers. In the 1910s, Great Britain induced ‘Sharif’ Husain, the Ottoman-appointed Hashemite ‘Sharif’ (ruler) of Mecca, to rebel against the Ottoman caliph and to establish an autonomous authority over the Hejaz (i.e. the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina) under British protection. Indeed, in 1916, the Ottoman caliph lost control over Mecca and Jeddah, and, in 1919, he lost control over Medina, too. On 3 March 1924, the Ottoman Caliphate was abolished, and, on 7 March 1924, Sharif Husain, who had been exercising de facto local control over the Hejaz since 1916, claimed the Caliphate for himself.
When Great Britain became aware of the fact that Sharif Husain had a tendency to pursue an autonomous policy in the Arabian Peninsula and to revive the Caliphate, it assisted Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud to attack Sharif Husain and to wrest control of the Hejaz from him. Ibn Saud was a ‘puppet’ of the British Foreign Office. During Sharif Husain’s rebellion against the Ottoman caliph and during the imposition of Sharif Husain’s rule over the Hejaz, Ibn Saud was receiving a monthly sum of 5,000 pounds sterling from the British Treasury in return for his policy of neutrality, since then Sharif Husain’s policy was serving the interests of Great Britain (see: Sheikh I. N. Hosein, The Caliphate, the Hejaz, and the Saudi-Wahhabi Nation-State, New York: Masjid Darul Qur’an, 1996, p. 20). But when ‘Sharif’ Husain claimed the Caliphate for himself, Great Britain urged Ibn Saud to attack Sharif Husain. With British support, Ibn Saud conquered Mecca in 1924, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded by Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud in 1932.
In 1902, the Saudi tribe captured Riyadh as a result of an alliance that the Saudis’ chief forged with the religious leader of the Wahhabi religious sect. In the context of that alliance, the Najdi Saudis would be under the control of the Wahhabis and would seek to enforce Wahhabism in the ‘heartland’ of Islam, i.e. in the Hejaz. Wahhabism is founded on a modern Islamic reformer called Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792), and it is a puritanical, formalistic, and fanatical perception of the Sharia. The mentality of Wahhabism resembles that of Oliver Cromwell’s English Puritanism. Great Britain assisted Ibn Saud to impose a Saudi-Wahhabi regime on the ‘heartland’ of Islam because Wahhabism had little relevance outside Saudi Arabia, and, therefore, the Wahhabis could not claim the Caliphate.
‒ The Muslim Brotherhood is a creation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement (which was concluded on 16 May 1916 between Great Britain and France, defining their proposed spheres of influence and control in the Middle East), and it has been used as a political ‘multi-tool’ by the British intelligence, by Hitler’s Third Reich, and by the U.S. intelligence. The Muslim Brotherhood evolved, spread, and spawned a virulent network of radical jihadists, including the Al Qaeda.
‒ In the 1970s and 1980s, Bernhard Lewis, a renowned University of Princeton historian connected with the British intelligence and leading Zionist, advised successive U.S. administrations on how to play the ‘Islamic card’ as a tool in order to bring down the Soviet Union. For instance, the notorious “mujahideen” organization Hezb-e Islami was sponsored by the CIA in order to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. On 3 July 1979, U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul, and, that very day, his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote a note to the U.S. president in which he argued that the U.S. aid to Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan was going to induce a Soviet military intervention (see: Z. Brzezinski, “Interview”, Le Nouvel Observateur, 15-21 January 1998).
For a long period of time, in Afghanistan and the Soviet Muslim Republics, the dominant form of Islam had been local and mainly related to Sufism. But, during the Afghan War of the 1980s, British and U.S. intelligence agencies deepened their alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, and this spawned Al Qaeda and several groups of “mujahideen” trained and armed to fight the Soviets. The British politician Robin Cook, who served in the U.K. government as Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001, wrote that Al Qaeda, “literally ‘the database’, was originally the computer file of thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians” (see: R. Cook, “The Struggle Against Terrorism Cannot Be Won By Military Means”, The Guardian, 8 July 2005).
‒ In 1976, France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran (under the Shah) established the Safari Club, which was a coalition among various intelligence agencies in order to fight the Soviet Coalition and ideology. Under the encouragement and guidance of the then head of the CIA, George H. W. Bush, Saudi intelligence chief, Kamal Adham, transformed a small Pakistani merchant bank, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a huge, clandestine financial network through which the Safari Club was being financed (see: P. D. Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, pp. 62-63). The Safari Club was largely organized by the then head of French intelligence, Alexandre de Marenches (ibid, 62). Because of the political turmoil that was caused by the Watergate scandal and by Richard Nixon’s resignation as President, and also because of a Congressional investigation into covert CIA activities, George H. W. Bush realized that the CIA could not easily conduct a number of covert operations, and, therefore, under the U.S. President Gerald Ford, he decided to work closely with Kamal Adham in order to conduct important CIA covert operations through the Safari Club.
‒ Muslim inhabitants of the Caucasus region have been purposely radicalized by U.S. institutions in order to destabilize the Russian Federation. In general, the modern West sees manipulation of Muslim groups (particularly Wahhabism, Salafism, and the Muslim Brotherhood) as the vehicle to bring uncontrollable chaos to Russia and Central Asia and also as a vehicle to control the Middle East.
The Byzantine-Slavic Europe (which includes the Russian Federation, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, and Cyprus) should address the issue of the relations between Christianity and Islam in a way that is substantially different from (and stands against) the West’s peculiar Judeo-Christian theory and Neoconservative-Zionist policy. Commenting on the Surat Ar-Rum of the Qur’an, the internationally renowned Islamic scholar Sheikh Imran Nazar Hosein has emphasized that it is only Orthodox Christianity, described in the Qur’an as “Rum”, with whom an Islamic alliance may be forged. On the other hand, according to Sheikh Imran N. Hosein, Western Christianity, which is not Rum, has already forged a Zionist alliance with Jews, and it is to that Zionist Judeo-Christian alliance that the Qur’an, in Surat Al-Maidah, 5:51, refers when it prohibits Muslims from ever maintaining friendship and alliance with such Jews and such Christians who, themselves, are friends and allies of each other (see: Sheikh I. N. Hosein, Jerusalem in the Qur’an, New York: Masjid Dar-Al-Qur’an, 2003; for more details, see Sheikh Imran N. Hosein’s official website: http://www.imranhosein.org).
In the 20th and 21st centuries, several Islamic statesmen (e.g. in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc.) and even several jihadists forged an alliance with NATO and with the West’s imperialist elite in general; for instance, in 2011, members of the Al Qaeda and other jihadists, collaborating with NATO, overthrew and killed the Libyan President Muammar al-Qaddafi, and also, in 2011, members of the Al Qaeda and other jihadists, collaborating with NATO, initiated a civil war in Syria in order to overthrow the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Commenting on the previous events, Sheikh Imran N. Hosein brought to public attention Allah’s command in the Qur’an which sternly prohibited Muslims from entering into precisely that alliance with NATO with which misguided Muslims overthrew the Libyan President Muammar al-Qaddafi and rebelled against the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad:
{يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُواْ لاَ تَتَّخِذُواْ الْيَهُودَ وَالنَّصَارَى أَوْلِيَاء بَعْضُهُمْ أَوْلِيَاء بَعْضٍ وَمَن يَتَوَلَّهُم مِّنكُمْ فَإِنَّهُ مِنْهُمْ إِنَّ اللّهَ لاَ يَهْدِي الْقَوْمَ الظَّالِمِينَ}
“O you who have faith (in Allah) do not take (such) Jews and (such) Christians as your friends and allies who themselves are friends and allies of each other. And whoever from amongst you turns to them (for friendship and alliance) now belong to them (and not to us). Surely Allah does not guide a wicked people” (Qur’an, al-Maida, 5:51).
During his lecture entitled “Imam Al-Mahdi and The End Time”, held on 24 July 2011, the renowned Islamic scholar Sheikh Imran N. Hosein said: “Nabi Muhammad (SA) has prophesized that ‘You will make an alliance with Rum’. Indeed there is a Surah of the Qur’an which is entitled Surah Ar-Rum. And in that Surah, in the first Ayah, Allah speaks about Rum being defeated. If you believe that Allah (SWT) was referring to a city in Italy, then you should buy a one way ticket to Disneyland. […] Rum in the Qur’an is easy to identify. It is the ‘Eastern Orthodox Christian Church’; which had established the Byzantine Empire with Constantinople as its capital. Prophet (SA) said ‘You will make an alliance with Rum’. The Byzantine Empire has disappeared today, but the ‘Eastern Orthodox Christian Church’ has not. If we want to find Rum, where is the ‘Eastern Orthodox Christian Church’ today? Answer, the headquarters is now in Russia. […] And so when the Prophet (SA) said, ‘You will make an alliance with Rum’, my answer is it is going to be an alliance with Russia”. For the study of the Byzantine spirituality in the context of the history of philosophy and political theory, see: Nicolas Laos, The Metaphysics of World Order, Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications/Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2014;
http://wipfandstock.com/the-metaphysics-of-world-order.html
Zionism
The modern West has infiltrated and distorted Judaism through Zionism, which is substantially different from Orthodox Judaism.
In contradistinction to Zionism, Rabbi Yehoshua Leib Diskin (11818-1898), rabbi of Brisk, Lithuania, and later rabbi of Jerusalem, has pointed out that, according to Isaiah 11:9 and Zachariah 14:9, when the Almighty’s glory will be revealed, there will be a spiritual revolution in the entire world, and the Almighty will redeem all Peoples, as the Orthodox Jews say in their prayers: “All the nations will become one organization to do Your will with their whole heart”. Thus, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (11808-1888), rabbi of Frankfurt, Germany, has argued that “the greatest rabbis should gather immediately and excommunicate the Zionists” (Mara D‟ara Yisroel, v. 2, p. 43).
Zionism (e.g. Theodor Herzl’s movement, and the Revisionist Zionist Movement, which was founded in 1923 by Ze’ev Jabotinsky) is historically derived from and structurally associated with the political elites of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of the British Empire, and of the post-World War II United States of America. Moreover, Zionist politicians, following the example of their Western counterparts, do not hesitate to manipulate “Islamic fundamentalism”. For instance, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s extremist Islamic movement called “Mujama al-Islamiya” (which would become “Hamas”) was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and as an association, and it was sponsored by Israel’s military intelligence in order to subvert Yasser Arafat’s PLO. For more details, see: Ishaan Tharoor, “How Israel Helped Create Hamas”, The Washington Post, 30 July 2014;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/).
In addition, according to information disclosed in 2014 by the former NSA agent Edward Snowden and by the geopolitical analyst William Engdahl, the notorious leader of ISIL Takfiri group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has been trained by Israeli spy agency Mossad and has been sponsored by U.S. and British intelligence agencies and by radical Wahhabi Muslims. For more details, see also:
http://syrianfreepress.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/syria-sarin-false-flag-plans-revealed/
and
http://somdailynews.com/snowden-confirms-that-al-baghdadi-was-trained-by-mossad/
The ‘Islamic’ State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) and as the Islamic State (IS), is a product of Zionist think-tanks and Israel’s military establishment. In fact, the plan to have a group like ISIL rend apart the Arab nation-states of the Middle East is founded on the following essays: “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties” written in 1982 by former Israeli Foreign Ministry official Oded Yinon, and “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” which was mainly written by the American neoconservative war hawk Richard Perle for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and issued in 1996. The Yinon Plan states: “Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria […] Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, at least three states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north […] The entire Arabian Peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution due to internal and external pressures, and the matter is inevitable especially in Saudi Arabia”. In the same spirit, the “Clean Break” policy, crafted by Netanyahu’s neoconservative American Zionist intellectual ‘soldiers’, calls for cancelling the entire Palestinian peace process, and it promotes Netanyahu’s strategy to create a Greater Israel (“Eretz Israel”) dominating its Arab neighbors through fratricidal civil wars.
According to Orthodox Judaism (i.e. according to the Haredim and the Hasidic Jews), every person, independently of whether he/she is a Jew, can be saved if he/she adheres to the Seven Laws of Noah, which, according to the Babylonian Talmud, were given by God as a binding set of laws for the “children of Noah” (that is, all of humanity), and they are: (11) the prohibition of idolatry, (2) the prohibition of murder, (3) the prohibition of theft, (4) the prohibition of sexual immorality, (5) the prohibition of blasphemy, (6) the prohibition of eating flesh taken from an animal while it is still alive, and (7) the requirement of maintaining courts to provide legal recourse. But, according to Orthodox Judaism, being a Jew means that one adheres to all 613 Torah commandments (“Sinaitic Law”). Therefore, Orthodox Jews experience the Jewish religion as a spiritual path that is characterized by existential and moral heroism.
On the other hand, Reformed Judaism has subordinated the Sinaitic Law to historicity, it has compromised the Sinaitic Law with the spirit of Western Modernity, and it allows and encourages rabbis to pick and choose which of the Torah commandments to obey. Zionism is a sect of Reformed Judaism, and it is founded on nationalism. Whereas, for Orthodox Jews, the essence of ‘Jewishness’ consists in adhering to all 613 Torah commandments, Zionism understands and defines ‘Jewishness’ according to secular and particularly nationalist criteria. Thus, the Orthodox Jewish rabbis, such as the international organization Neturei Karta and the renowned Hasidic Rabbi Zalman Leib Teitelbaum, argue that Zionism is a major threat against genuine Judaism. Several informative texts about the history and the ethos of Orthodox Judaism have been published on the official website of the organization Neturei Karta, namely http://www.nkusa.org/
From the very outset, Zionism was characterized by an explosive combination of nationalism, imperialism, and geopolitical insecurity; a combination that has been proved to be dangerous even for the Western sponsors of Zionism, themselves. Indeed, in the 1940s, the governments of the United Kingdom and of the United States of America, pursuing a policy of “divide and conquer” in the Middle East, played a key role in the creation of the Zionist State of Israel, but, in March 2010, Gen. David Petraeus, the then head of the U.S. Central Command, gave testimony to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee which included the following observations: “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR [Area of Operations]. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas”.
Pan-Turanism and Neo-Ottomanism
As a result of its cynical pragmatism and complacent nihilism, the modern West has intellectually and politically nurtured Pan-Turanism and Neo-Ottomanism, in order to manipulate Turkic groups, to undermine Russia, Iran, and China, and to use the Republic of Turkey as a geopolitical counterbalance to Russia in the Black Sea and in the S.E. Mediterranean.
Pan-Turanism is an ideology that aims at creating a Turkic super-state stretching from the Balkans in Europe, eastwards across Turkey, Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia up to and including northwest China. Moreover, Hungarian Pan-Turanists, in particular, claim that the entire Eurasian landmass between Hungary and Norway in Europe to Japan and Korea was once an empire known as “Turania”.
The idea of a Turanian empire did not originate from the Ottoman Turks. In fact, the idea of a Turanian empire originated from Ármin (Hermann) Vámbéry (11832-1913), a Hungarian Turkolog and Professor of eastern languages at the University of Budapest who worked as an advisor to the Ottoman Sultan from 1857 until 1863. Vámbéry was employed by the British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston. Vámbéry’s expertise in languages and ethnology served the British Foreign Office, and especially Vámbéry’s racialist idea of a Turanian empire allowed for the European manipulation of Turkish populations throughout Eurasia for a very long time to come. Moreover, Pan-Turanism was further developed by the anti-Christian and racist German philologist Friedrich Max Müller, by the Turkish nationalist Mehmed Ziya Gökalp, and by the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross Party.
Pan-Turanism is based on a methodical operation of re-invention and distortion of history (see: Ph. Robins, Suits and Uniforms: Turkish Foreign Policy Since the Cold War, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003). As Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (11881-1938), the founder of the Turkish Republic, has argued, “writing history is as important as making history” (quoted in: Ph. Robins, ibid, p. 93). In this context, the nationalist elite of the Turkish Republic, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, has been founded on Pan-Turanism. In fact, the ideology of Kemalist Turkey consists of the following principles: (i) nation-building according to Western Europe’s theory of nationalism; (ii) rejecting Islam as the basis of ethnic and national identity and substituting Pan-Turanist neomythologies for Orientalism (since Western Europeans were treating Near Eastern “Orientals” as racially or culturally inferior to Europeans); (iii) using Pan-Turanist neomythologies in order to portray the Turks as heirs to almost all great civilizations.
Whereas Pan-Turanism’s imperialist agenda is focused on a racialist idea of a Turanian empire, Neo-Ottomanism’s imperialist agenda is focused on the Ottoman Empire. Neo-Ottomanism is founded on the thoughts of the U.S.-backed Turkish statesman and scholar Ahmet Davutoğlu and the U.S.-based Turkish Imam Fethullah Gülen. Gülen is the leader of an Islamic cult, and he has played a destabilizing anti-Russian role in the Caucasus through the International Dagestani-Turkish College, which was ultimately forced to close its doors in Dagestan. In addition, Gülen’s disciples are responsible for the religious training of the fighters of the Jihadist Kurdish organization “Katibat al-Taliban”.
On the other hand, the internationally renowned Muslim scholar Sheikh Imran N. Hosein has argued that the Ottoman conquest of Orthodox Christianity’s capital city of Constantinople in 1453, the disgraceful conduct of the Ottoman Sultan Muhammad Fatih in converting the greatest Orthodox Cathedral Hagia Sophia into a mosque, and the Ottoman sultans’ brutal policy towards their Orthodox Christian subjects caused enduring Greek and Orthodox Christian bitterness for Islam and proved to be the most formidable obstacle to the realization of the Muslim–Rum (Orthodox Christian) alliance that is prophesized in the Qur’an (Surat Ar-Rum).
Philip K. Hitti, in his book Islam: A Way of Life (University of Minnesota Press, 1971), describes the Seljuk Turks as an example of barbarian heathens who initially restrained the culturally advanced Arabo-Islamic world from without, then they adopted Islam, and finally they became fervent defenders of their new faith. By taking advantage of the rivalries among Arab emirs, of the fact that many Arab emirs were dependent on the services of Turkish mercenaries, and of the clash between Sunnis and Shias, Turks managed to conquer the Abbasid Caliphate from within. In 1055, the Turkish warlord Tughril, having previously united the Turkmen warriors of the Great Eurasian Steppes into a confederacy of tribes, established the Seljuk Sultanate (after conquering Persia and retaking the Abbasid capital of Baghdad from the Buyid dynasty), he relegated the Abbasid Caliphs to state figureheads, and he took command of the Caliphate’s armies in military offensives against the Eastern Roman Empire and the Fatimid Caliphate.
Even though the Ottoman Empire has left a legacy of embitterment between Orthodox Christians and Muslims, we must keep in mind that the Qur’an venerates Jesus Christ as the Messiah and the son of Virgin Mary (Qur’an, al-Nisa, 4:157-4:158), and the Arabo-Islamic civilization has been strongly influenced by ancient Greek philosophy and science. Furthermore, avoiding speculation about parallel development, there are similarities between the Hesychasts’ vision of God as uncreated Light and the Sufis’ notion of prophetic inspiration, where “God guides to His Light whom He will”, according to the Qur’an, Surah 24:35. In the Qur’an, Surah 24:35, spiritual realization is represented as a flash of illumination. Moreover, under the influence of Platonic ideas, of Neo-Platonism, and of the great Persian Muslim philosopher Avicenna (c. 980-1037), author of the Book of Healing, the Persian Sufi scholar Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi (11155-1191) developed a version of Islamic illuminism (ḥikmat al-ishrāq), which bears some similarities to the Hesychasts’ Orthodox Christian illuminism (for a methodical study of Hesychasm, see: Nicolas Laos, The Metaphysics of World Order, Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications/Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2014).
Copyright: Nicolas Laos. Dr Nicolas Laos (born in 1974, in Athens, Greece) is a researcher in philosophy and theology affiliated with the Academia Theológica de San Andrés, Mexico (Ukrainian Orthodox Church), and the CASEP at the Metropolitan University of London, while simultaneously consulting internationally in the fields of geopolitics and cultural diplomacy in association with several organizations such as R-Techno (Moscow), the Institute of Maritime and Economic Studies (London and Athens), etc. His most recent publication is the book The Metaphysics of World Order, Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications/Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2014.