Islamic Extremism is a Product of Western Imperialism

It is important that we understand the causes of such extremism. After all, Islamic extremism was virtually unknown fifty years ago and suicide bombings were inconceivable. And yet today it seems that we are confronted with both on a daily basis. 

So what happened to bring Islamic fundamentalism to the forefront of global politics? 

While there are many factors involved, undoubtedly one of the primary causes is Western imperialism. Western intervention in the Middle East over the past century to secure access to the region’s oil reserves established a perfect environment in which Islamic fundamentalists could exploit growing anti-Western sentiment throughout the Islamic world with some establishing violent extremist groups. The most recent consequence of this process is the terrorist group known as the Islamic State, which emerged out of the chaos caused by the US invasion of Iraq.

In order to understand the rise of the Islamic State we must first briefly review the history of Western intervention in not only the Middle East but throughout the world to reveal that Islamic extremism in not a unique phenomenon. For the past 500 years, peoples throughout the world have resorted to acts of violence that today would be classified as terrorism in efforts to resist Western imperialism. Indigenous peoples in the Americas often used violent tactics to defend themselves against the brutal European colonizers. There were also many violent slave revolts by Blacks who had been shipped from Africa to the Americas in the service of Western imperialism.

In Southeast Asia, the Filipino people first violently resisted the Spanish and then rose up again when the United States became the new colonial ruler of the Philippines in 1898. Apparently, Washington’s newest colonial subjects didn’t appreciate President William McKinley’s concern for their well-being when he arrogantly declared that since Filipinos “were unfit for self-government, … there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” Meanwhile, in South Africa, the Zulu people were resorting to violence in an effort to resist British attempts to “civilize” them in the late 1800s. Back then, those who violently resisted Western imperialism weren’t labelled “terrorists,” we just called them “savages.” These are just a few examples of the countless attempts throughout the global South to resist the violent and often brutal expansion of Western imperialism, which included not only the imposition of Western values and culture on people, but also Christianity.

One of the reasons that Islamic extremism has only come to the fore in recent decades is the fact that Western imperialism in the Middle East is a relatively recent occurrence. Western imperialism didn’t begin to make serious headway in the Middle East until the early 20th century. Consequently, we haven’t yet succeeded in our quest to violently subjugate the peoples of that region to the degree that we have peoples throughout most of the rest of the world. In american leech some Middle Eastern nations, Western imperialism initially took the form of traditional colonialism, which involved direct rule. In other countries, it has constituted a neo-colonial approach utilizing international institutions such as the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as well as direct US and European intervention in the forms of military coups and outright war.

While European nations, particularly Britain, had made some inroads into the Middle East in the late 1800s, it was the discovery of oil in Iran in 1908 that marked the arrival of Western imperialism. The London-based Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) gained the rights to Iran’s oil and, because its major shareholder was the British government, Britain effectively controlled Iran’s oil sector. During the ensuing decades there were major protests by the Iranian people who were unhappy with foreign ownership of the country’s oil and the fact that Iran was receiving only 16 percent of its own oil wealth. In 1950, the Iranian parliament finally responded to popular demands and voted to nationalize the country’s oil sector. The following year, Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh established the National Iranian Oil Company.

Unhappy with Iran’s decision to claim ownership of its own oil resources and to use them for the benefit of the Iranian people, the United States and Britain orchestrated a coup to oust the moderate, secular and democratically-elected Mosaddegh government. Shah Reza Pahlavi was installed in power and the new pro-Western dictator immediately re-opened the door for Western companies to return to Iran. And to ensure that the Shah maintained iron-clad control over the population, the United States provided him with military aid as well as training for his secret police force, which would brutalize the Iranian people for the next 26 years.

Under the Shah, Western oil workers flooded into Iran and the country’s capital Tehran became a decadent playground for high-paid foreign oil workers who engaged openly in un-Islamic activities including alcohol consumption, casino gambling and prostitution. And while the country’s oil wealth was flowing into the pockets of foreigners and the Shah and his cronies, most Iranians were struggling to survive in poverty. Not surprisingly, Islamic fundamentalists began pointing to Western imperialism and Western decadence as an affront both to Islam and to the Iranian people. It was a narrative that began to resonate with many impoverished Iranians who had traditionally been moderates. In 1979, under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, a popular revolution overthrew the Shah’s repressive regime and established an Islamic state.

Reflecting on the US role in Iran, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated, “In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The Eisenhower Administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”

The first significant success for Islamic fundamentalism directly resulted from the United States and Britain overthrowing a democratically-elected and secular government and their subsequent support for a brutal dictatorship, all in the name of securing access to oil. Today, we are not only still dealing with the consequences of this Western imperialism in our relations with Iran, but also with Iran’s support for other fundamentalist groups in the region such as Hezbollah.

The same year that Iran became an Islamic state, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to defend that country’s unpopular Soviet-backed regime from a growing insurgency. The mujahideen rebels, like the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran, were fighting against a Western-backed dictatorship. This time it was the atheist communists of the Soviet Union that were the imperialists. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan only boosted the strength of the mujahideen as recruits flocked from throughout the Islamic world to help liberate the country from the foreign infidels. Many of the tens of thousands of recruits came from Saudi Arabia, which contributed to the fundamentalist movement known as Wahhabism expanding from being a fringe sect of Islam that primarily existed in Saudi Arabia to a major religious force throughout the Sunni Islamic world.

The United States viewed the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan through a Cold War lens and began providing weapons and training to the Islamic fundamentalist mujahideen rebels. During the 1980s, Washington supplied the mujahideen with $4 billion in arms that significantly strengthened the fundamentalists and President Ronald Reagan publicly referred to them as “freedom fighters.” One of the mujihadeen beneficiaries of US aid was a Saudi named Osama bin Laden. The primary objective of the war for this particular “freedom fighter” was the removal of a Western military from Islamic lands. The mujahideen succeeded in their holy war in 1989 when the Soviet Union withdrew its forces. And then, in 1996, following a civil war between various factions of the mujahideen, the recently-formed Taliban emerged victorious and established a fundamentalist government.

As a 1993 article in the British daily Independent made clear, Osama bin Laden was viewed by the West as a warrior, not a terrorist, for his role in the mujahideen. The article, titled “Anti-Soviet Warrior Puts His Army on the Road to Peace,” described bin Laden’s work building roads in the impoverished nation of Sudan in the early 1990s. But bin Laden was not only building roads, he was also establishing a new organization with his mujahideen fighters that would eventually be called al-Qaeda. The mission of al-Qaeda essentially remained the same as that of the mujahideen in Afghanistan: to drive Western military forces out of Islamic lands. This time the target was US troops based in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait following the first Gulf War. Consequently, bin Laden went from being a “freedom fighter” to a “terrorist” virtually overnight even though his mission hadn’t changed, only the target.

From the perspective of Washington, bin Laden was a “freedom fighter” when he was fighting against the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan but was a “terrorist” when he fought against the presence of US military forces in the Islamic world. From the perspective of bin Laden and his Islamic extremist followers, however, nothing had really changed. Whether it was Soviet soldiers or US troops, both constituted Western military forces that had to be removed from Islamic soil.

Ultimately, Western intervention in the Islamic world gave birth to al-Qaeda. First, Soviet military support for a puppet regime in Afghanistan, then US backing of the Islamic fundamentalists who constituted the mujahideen rebels, and, finally, the establishment of US military bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during the first Gulf War. As a consequence of these imperialist actions, Islamic extremists in the form of the Taliban and al-Qaeda emerged as powerful forces with the latter feeding off the growing disenchantment among Muslims angry at Western militarism in the Islamic world, Western backing for corrupt governments in the Middle East, and US support for Israel and its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.

Following al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks against New York City and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001, the United States launched its war on terror and targeted the Islamic extremist group in Afghanistan. However, the Bush administration also sought to exploit the 9/11 attacks to justify ousting Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Top Bush administration officials launched a massive propaganda and misinformation campaign to convince the American people that Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks and linked to al-Qaeda, both of which were untrue. They also portrayed Hussein as a terrorist threat because he possessed weapons of mass destruction, which was another lie.

As the reports by UN weapons inspectors had made clear, Iraq no longer possessed any chemical or biological weapons; they had been destroyed in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions following the first Gulf War in 1991. Furthermore, the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign conveniently ignored the fact that the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq had possessed and used during the 1980s were supplied to it by the United States when Hussein was an ally against the fundamentalist regime that had come to power in Iran.

In March 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the US military to invade Iraq without authorization from the UN Security Council and in direct violation of international law. Four days before the invasion, Vice-President Dick Cheney declared, “From the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” But one year later an extensive nationwide poll in Iraq showed that 71 percent of Iraqis saw the US troops as “occupiers” rather than “liberators.” Such a response should not have been surprising given that some 100,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation.

The military occupation gave rise to an insurgency that sought to oust the foreign occupying troops. Prior to the US invasion there had been no Islamic extremist groups operating in the country. But the emergence of the broad-based insurgency and the post-invasion chaos opened the door for al-Qaeda to enter Iraq. And it was out of both the insurgency and al-Qaeda that the fundamentalist Islamic State (originally known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) emerged in 2006.

Following the invasion, the United States dismantled Saddam Hussein’s military and many of the unemployed former officers ended up joining the insurgency. Some of these military officers conspired with a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq to form the Islamic State. The new extremist group sought to establish an Islamic caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria. The Syrian civil war in 2011 allowed the Islamic State to cross into Syria where it grew dramatically stronger and began to consolidate control over territory. It then re-focused its efforts on Iraq and easily defeated the new US-trained Iraqi army and consolidated its control over northern parts of that country in 2014. Meanwhile, the West’s military intervention in Libya in 2011 helped turn that country into a failed state and opened the door for the Islamic State to establish a foothold in that part of North Africa.

The Islamic State has had significant success recruiting disenchanted Muslims from around the world to join its ranks and to carry out terrorist attacks in Western nations such as France and Belgium. Last year, even former British Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged “there are elements of truth” in claims that the invasion of Iraq led to the creation of the Islamic State. As Blair admitted, “Of course, you can’t say those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.”

Once again, Western imperialist actions in the Middle East had given rise to Islamic extremism. But the rise of the Islamic State should not have come as a surprise to anyone. That the Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq laid the foundation for the emergence of the Islamic State was entirely predictable. After all, the West’s ouster of the moderate and secular Mosaddegh and its backing of the Shah’s ruthless regime in Iran had given birth to that country’s Islamic fundamentalist revolution. And Washington’s military support of fundamentalist rebels in Afghanistan and its establishment of military bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait ensured the emergence of al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, Western imperialism in other parts of the Middle East over the past century has also contributed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. While most of the Arab states in the region gained independence following World War Two, the United States and Britain essentially handed over most of Palestine to European Jews so they could create the Jewish state of Israel. And, ever since, Israel has received unconditional US support to brutally repress the Palestinian people and to repeatedly violate international law, which has generated widespread anti-Western sentiment throughout the Middle East. It wasn’t until after almost 40 years of Israeli rule over Palestinian lands that Islamic fundamentalism and the tactic of suicide bombing finally made inroads among the traditionally moderate Palestinian population. This occurred when Hamas was formed in the Occupied Territories in the mid-1980s. Similarly, it was Israel’s US-supported invasion of Lebanon that gave birth to the fundamentalist group Hezbollah during the same decade.

Over the past one hundred years, the Middle East has been targeted by Western imperialism in the violent manner that the rest of the world has endured for centuries. Nowadays we use politically correct terms such as “democracy promotion” and “human rights” instead of “civilize” and “Christianize,” but they essentially mean the same thing because they are simply the latest justifications for stealing resources and imposing Western values on other cultures. Not surprisingly, as has been the case throughout the rest of the world over the past 500 years, there is widespread resentment and anger towards the West for its imperialist policies in the Middle East. And, also not surprisingly, some fundamentalist Muslim resisters to Western imperialism have resorted to extreme tactics.

Finally, perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of Western imperialism in the Islamic world is the fact that each consequence has been more extreme than the previous one. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were far more extremist than the Islamic government that came to power in Iran. And the Islamic State is even more extremist than al-Qaeda. Which begs the question: What new and even more extremist monstrosity are we currently creating with our ongoing military interventions and imperialist policies in the Islamic world?

By Garry Leech, an independent journalist and author of numerous books including How I Became an American Socialist (Misfit Books, 2016), Capitalism: A Structural Genocide (Zed Books, 2012); Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia (Beacon Press, 2009); and Crude Interventions: The United States Oil and the New World Disorder (Zed Books, 2006). ). He also teaches international politics at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, Canada and Javeriana University in Cali, Colombia. For more information about Garry’s work, visit garryleech.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/30/islamic-extremism-is-a-product-of-western-imperialism/

Related :

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ISIS claims about slavery in Islam debunked

Desperate plight of Yazidi woman sold into sex slavery by ISIS

► 3:04► 3:04

www.dailymail.co.uk/.../i-ve-raped-30-times-s-not-lun...

5 days ago

A young Yazidi woman forced into sex slavery by the Islamic State begged the West to bomb the brothel where ...

The Holy Qur’an does not even once use the words ‘Sab-i’ or ‘Riqq’ (Arabic for slavery). Instead, it uses derivatives of the word ‘asr’ which means taking someone captive. The Qur’an never says that the captives could be kept for ever as slaves (33:26, 76:8, 8:67, 8:70 and 2:85). In one of these verses, it offers solace to the captive by saying that God willing his condition will change for the better (8:70). In another verse, the Quran says that believers are those who though themselves hungry feed captives (76:8).

Various derivatives of the other word for slave (‘abd) have been used 275 times in the Qur’an but never in the context of ordering Muslims to enslave others. It is almost always used in the context of prayers or emphasizing that the faithfuls are slaves or servants of God.

It is correct that the Islamic Shariah (law) allows slavery but the only way someone may lose his/her natural freedom is if he is captured while physically and actually fighting in a battle against a Muslim army – in other words, he is a prisoner of war (PoW). There is no other way to deprive someone of his natural state of freedom. There is no instance where the Prophet (pbuh) or his immediate successors ever enslaved ordinary people who were not actually fighting a Muslim army. The Prophet used to give his armies clear instructions not to touch children, elderly men and women and people who are not involved in fighting.

While enslaving a person has been made extremely difficult in Islam, freeing a slave has been made extremely easy and is an act of piety. Once a non-Muslim combatant is taken captive, there are many ways in which he could secure his freedom. During the time of the Prophet (pbuh) one finds that such persons (always males) could be ransomed by their families or tribes or they themselves could secure their own freedom by teaching Muslims how to write or some other craft or by paying their masters an agreed amount of money. Islam has expressly forbidden taking free men as slaves.

While Islam makes it extremely difficult for someone to be enslaved, the door is wide open for faithfuls to free slaves. For example, a slave is to be freed as penance (kaffara) for some serious sins. Also, freeing slaves has been termed in Islam as one of the best deeds that please God.

We should keep in mind here that Islam allowed only a limited form of slavery to solve the issue of prisoners of wars. This took place during those pre-Medieval times when there was no international law and no UN or international treaties. In fact, even in those times, Islam followed reciprocity in such matters of international relations — i.e., if a non-Muslim nation followed a certain rule or norm in treatment of the residents of a Muslim country, its residents too were treated in the same way.

Today, in the presence of universally-accepted international laws and treaties, such laws will take precedence in international issues and in relations with foreign countries. And this is exactly what the 58 members-countries of Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) are doing today.

As such, ISIS by capturing ordinary residents of the territories it has overrun in Iraq and Syria is not only disobeying Islam, it is also violating the Islamic rule of reciprocity and respect of international laws. By flouting these clear norms, ISIS or any such group of thugs and self-proclaimed fighters will never be accepted in the comity of nations and will live their limited and short lives as pariahs and outcasts.

Zafarul-Islam Khan, senior Muslim scholar, who is an alumnus of Al-Azhar and Cairo universities and holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Manchester, said it is a lie to claim that Islam allows enslavement of ordinary men and women of conquered lands.
The Indian scholar, who is the head of the Delhi-based Institute of Islamic & Arab Studies and a core member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, said this lie has been concocted by ISIS propagandists whose knowledge of Islam is highly doubtful. Dr Khan is the current president of the Indian Muslims apex body, the All India Muslim Majlis-e Mushawarat.

http://www.milligazette.com/news/11152-indian-scholar-debunks-isis-claims-about-slavery-in-islam

Turkey’s balancing act in Kobani

IN August 1944, the Red Army was close to Warsaw after having pushed the invading German army back from Russia in a series of titanic battles. The Polish underground resistance, thinking help was at hand, rose against Nazi occupation forces. Some historians assert they had been encouraged by Polish Communists at the Kremlin’s behest.

But as the desperate fighting continued for weeks, and the partisans were crushed by vastly superior German forces, the Red Army remained outside Warsaw. Only after resistance had ceased did the Soviets engage with German forces and evict them. The reason for this callous indifference to Polish suffering was that the Soviets did not want nationalist freedom fighters to seize power in Warsaw, preferring to see them eliminated so that the Communists could take over.

Something similar happened to Iraqi Shias in the south and to the Kurds in the north of the country in 1990. After routing Saddam Hussein’s forces in the first Gulf War, American forces halted and encouraged Saddam’s non-Sunni opponents to rise. Even though the Americans imposed a no-fly zone, the Iraqi dictator sent in his troops to put down the rebellion ruthlessly. Against the Kurds, Saddam used poison gas, killing thousands.

Turkey is playing a similar waiting game while the Islamic State besieges the Syrian border town of Kobani. As the militants threaten a bloodbath, the Kurds are holding on heroically, vastly outgunned and outnumbered. Meanwhile, Turkish tanks and soldiers look on at the unequal battle from a couple of kilometres away.

Despite international pressure to intervene and prevent the massacre of tens of thousands of Kurdish fighters and civilians, Recep Teyyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, is equivocating in an attempt to use the plight of the Kurds to impose his agenda on the anti-IS coalition. Basically, he is demanding a buffer zone on Syrian soil to house refugees fleeing the fighting, as well as a commitment from the coalition to topple Bashar al-Assad.

The Kurds are not interested in these goals: all they are asking for is a corridor for their Iraqi cousins to send men and arms to help them fight off IS. They see the Syrian dictator as their ally in the fight against extremists, and fear that his fall would produce a vacuum in which the jihadi forces would be strengthened.

The Americans, meanwhile, are pressing the Turks to allow them to use their bases close to the border so their planes would have a shorter distance to fly to Kobani, and operate for longer over the besieged town. Erdogan is caught in the middle as he tries to push his own agenda in the face of international criticism and the growing anger of his own Kurdish citizens.

In the last few days, at least 24 people have been killed in riots in predominantly Kurdish towns in Turkey. Rampaging crowds have torched buses and attacked government buildings. Erdogan has criticised these violent protests as a plot to derail ongoing reconciliation talks between the government and the separatist PKK.

But the reality is that Turkish Kurds are understandably furious at what they see is Erdogan’s complicity with IS. This impression was reinforced when, talking to journalists about IS and the Kobani Kurds, he was quoted in the Guardian as saying: “It is wrong to view them differently, we need to deal with them jointly.”

Day after day, Kurds fleeing the jihadi fighters from in and around Kobani have crossed the border with gruesome stories of terrible atrocities. Reports of hundreds of women and young girls raped, and children slaughtered, have infuriated Kurds everywhere.

Another reason Erdogan is not anxious to save Kobani is that before the IS onslaught, Syrian Kurds had taken advantage of the civil war to establish a largely autonomous region. After decades of fighting Kurdish separatists in the east of the country, the Turkish government was inching towards a deal over the degree of independence that would be acceptable to both sides. Erdogan fears that the success of Syrian and Iraqi Kurds in securing self-rule will encourage their Turkish cousins to raise their demands.

Beyond his domestic political concerns, Erdogan would like to save what he can of Turkey’s ambitious foreign policy. In the first few years of his AK Party’s long stint in power, he successfully projected Turkey’s influence in the region. The West saw Turkey as a bridge to Central Asia and the Middle East. Dreams of an Ottoman sphere of influence were kindled in Ankara. But with the increasing bloodshed in Syria, Erdogan has been shaken by his inability to influence events there, or elsewhere in the region.

The Americans, while maintaining their anti-Assad rhetoric in public, have come around to accept that the Islamic State’s enemy is — if not a friend — at least an ally. In the same vein, Stalin was acceptable as an ally to Roosevelt and Churchill in the war against Nazi Germany. There is thus little enthusiasm in Washington, London and Paris for regime change in Damascus.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE — states that have sent a few aircraft to bomb IS targets — want to topple Assad at all cost. They see the civil war in Syria as a regional, Shia-Sunni conflict.

However, the West perceives the larger danger of allowing a rogue extremist state to emerge in a crucial part of the world. Apart from the permanent threat IS would pose to Western allies (and oil exporters) in the region, the state would also act as a magnet to zealous young Muslims in the West.

These, then, are some of the considerations and concerns shaping policies in Washington, Ankara and Riyadh. While politicians weigh up their gains and losses, the people of Kobani face terrible danger from some of the most ruthless militants on the face of the earth.
by Irfan Husain, dawn.com
Published in Dawn, October 13th, 2014

US fake terrorist attacks 9-11 to create justification for war

Operation Northwoods techniques on 9-11: US fake terrorist attacks to create war

Hello this is John Robles, I am speaking with Dr. Kevin Barret, he is a Doctor in Arabic and Islamic Studies, the owner and manager of TruthJihad.com and a member of Scientific Professionals Investigating 9-11. This is Part 1 of a longer interview.

Robles: Do you know Len Bracken? He wrote the book "The Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror". His conclusion was that it was a Saudi-Israeli-US joint operation, so ...

Barret: Yes, I would agree with that.

Robles: It looks like it was a US, maybe planned, and ...

Barret: Well I would credit the Zionists with a little more of it. I think that people who are kind of committed to Zionism have wormed their way into influential positions in all of these western intelligence agencies and apparatuses. I would imagine that people like Bernard Lewis who was the Dean of British Orientalism and the chief formulator of western Middle East policy.

As far as the responsibility for 9-11; I think it is pretty clear that it was in a sense a sort of US-Israeli-Saudi operation, and personally I would credit the Israelis and their helpers around the world with the prime impetus here.

People like Bernard Lewis, who is an ardent Zionist and is the Dean of Western Oriental Studies, as well as an advisor to the British and US governments on Middle East policy, would seem to me to be a prime suspect.

I think that the concept of 9-11 was probably worked out many decades in advance by people like Lewis whose doctoral dissertation was on the Ismaili Assassins, which was a radical sect that destabilized the Islamic world and allowed the Crusaders to succeed in moving into it during the Middle Ages.

Robles: Can I interrupt you for a second, regarding the roots going way back, do you think this goes back to Operation Northwoods?

Barret: Yes, I think Northwoods style techniques were employed in 9/11. Northwoods was a plan to set off all kinds of bombs in American cities, and sink American ships and blame all these deaths on Castro and launch a war against Cuba, and that follows with the kind of time honored path of these false flags war-trigger operations, which in one sense or another have launched every major US war since the Mexican war. And it is not just the US that does it, other countries have done it as well, going all the way back to Nero, burning Rome and blaming the Christians.

But as far as the more specifics of 9-11, which was a very, very large event that totally changed history, changed the form of government in the US, changed the direction of future foreign policy, I think that that was a product of neo-conservative thought, and two key figures should be the Bernard Lewis side which is the Orientalist who argued that radical destabilizing Muslim groups, like al-Qaeda, should be created in order to continue Zionist and western penetration of the Islamic world and hinder the Islamic Awakening.

This is a barely veiled argument that Lewis makes in, among other places, in an essay that was published in Netanyahu’s volume "Terrorism: How the West Can Win".

The double meaning of that title is quite illuminating, suggesting that terrorism is precisely how the west can win this struggle with the Islamic world, and then Bernard Lewis picks that up and runs with it and puts forward this argument that terrorism is not characteristic of Islamic societies, and the subtext being that the west needs to create artificial extremist terrorist groups, modeled after the medieval Ismaili Assassins, in order to destabilize the Islamic world and keep it open to penetration by Imperialism, especially, Zionism, which is of course the main concern of people like Bernard Lewis.

The neo-conservatives were the other wing of this, would be the people associated with Leo Strauss who founded neo-conservatism. Leo Strauss was also an ardent Zionist and his students at the University of Chicago spent the 1960s sitting around with him in after hours bull sessions, and these were handpicked, almost all Jewish, almost all extremely bright students, that he made his acolytes and sensibly had sexual relations with some of them too, he was quite a dubious character.

These guys would hang around after hours at the University of Chicago plotting a coup d’état in America, that is how could the Zionists take over in a representative democracy in a coup d’état. This turned into a book by a leading neo-conservative military strategist called "Coup D’état: a Practical Handbook" – the author’s name is escaping me briefly; it will come back to me in a moment.

But anyway, since the 60s the neo-cons have been plotting a 9-11 style coup d’état in the US designed to turn the US in a much more hard-line and much more permanent pro-Zionist hard-line imperialist direction in future Mid-East policy.

And so this was all set out. So that is why I think that when we say that it’s a US-Israeli-Saudi operation, it is really being done primarily by people whose first loyalty is to Israel and they are doing it in order to create a 100 years’ war by the west against the Islamic world and to keep the Islamic world destabilized and in chaos.

That is not really in the national interests of the US or even Saudi Arabia. And I think the US and Saudi Arabia have been pawns of these Zionist forces which are very strong in western politics and finance.

Robles: I just thought I would mention, I was doing research for an article I wrote not long ago on 9/11 and I went to the project for a new American century’s website, here from Moscow, and within 6 hours the site went offline. It’s been online since 1997. So, I don’t know if they are trying to cover their tracks or what is going on there.

Barret: Well PNAC shut down after they were exposed. I think they shut down in sort of around 2005 or 2006 officially. They might have had their website still.

Robles: Right, right. Yes, they had a skeleton crew keeping the site up.

Barret: Yes, well they shut down because they were exposed by David Ray Griffin’s book "The New Pearl Harbor", which really popularized that phrase and pointed straight at PNAC as the likely perpetrators of 9-11. And it is interesting that PNAC was actually … when they put out that "Rebuilding America’s Defenses" document calling for a new Pearl Harbor in order to get regime change across the Middle East and to militarize America.

They were actually just rewriting a document that many of the same guys had already written for Benjamin Netanyahu in the mid-1990s. And that was called the Clean Break Document and it argued for really the same things, only it was much more straightforward in pointing out that this was all being done in Israel’s interest. So they repackaged extensively for the American viewpoint in this rebuilding America’s defenses document but, again, all of these guys are Jewish hard-line extreme Zionists whose first loyalty is Israel.

Robles: Originally I had wanted to speak with you about other issues, but this is something that is not going to go away until the people that are responsible are forced to take responsibility for their actions. Regarding everything that’s going on right now, and there is a lot going on in the Muslim world, in the Middle East and in particular Iran, if we could, Libya, Syria.

What do you think now Iran’s nuclear threat, which I would say was never a threat to begin with, is now gone, NATO says now there are 30 other countries that pose a threat, so they have to continue surrounding Russia with their missile batteries. About Iran, if we could a little bit?

Barret: Yes, I think there is a struggle going on in the US policy-making apparatus between the sort of hardline neo-con Zionist faction that did 9-11 and a more realist faction led by people like Brzezinski and those people actually are much more concerned with going after Russia and China.

Robles: Sorry sir, you are saying that Brzezinski, he’s the more "realist faction"?

Barret: Yes, Brzezinski is a relative moderate. Which tells you how crazy American foreign policy is. Brzezinski used to be the ultimate extremist lunatic hawk who was out there arguing to create and fund al-Qaeda, radically anti-Russia, he is from Polish nobility and he never really liked Russia very much.

So, he used to be considered extreme radical hardliner. He has mellowed a bit but I think the problem is that these even more insane people have risen to the highest levels of power and so now he looks relatively moderate by comparison. That is what has happened across the board in American politics.

Nixon was proposing a national minimal income of what would now be $25,000 dollars a year. Nixon would be a radical leftist, civil libertarian communist by today’s standards. That is how terrible things have gotten.

But anyway these "realists" notice that the Zionist strategy of demonizing Islam and putting all of America’s energy into fighting pointless wars in the Middle East to destroy the enemies of Israel, which is what the whole Middle Eastern policy has been since 9-11 is really fruitless from a larger western US geopolitical perspective and people like Brzezinski who are kind of hawkish regarding the grand chessboard and who trying the rule of the world from North America, means that you have to grab the middle of Eurasia where the majority of the world’s population productivity is, the guys like that are noticing that this neo-con policy of demonizing Islam and smashing up the Middle East for no good reason is completely insane.

So, that is the conflict in the American policy-making circles and gradually the sort of relatively realist faction has been taking their power back since the 9-11 coup d’état by the Zionist faction.

The problem is that these realists are not moral or really offended by things like 9-11 or really interested in peace and stability. It is more that they are actually going to use the extra-state power, the extra military money, the surveillance capabilities that 9-11 generated and turn those away from Israel or Middle East where they have been focused until now and fight this rear-guard action to maintain the US-western empire in the face of the rising power of the BRICS axis and these other non-western countries, the collapse of the US dollar which has been underpinning the whole global system.

So, they are desperately trying to prop up this crumbling imperial power and I think they notice that this Middle Eastern stuff is not getting them very far. It is maybe helping Israel by smashing every independent country in the Middle East. That has enough independence to oppose Israel but it as for larger western geopolitical interests it doesn’t do any good.

So, they are now doing this pivot to Asia where they are concerned about the rise of China and all of that, trying to manage that and then they still have this insane policy of being so bellicose with Russia which doesn’t really make much sense. You’d think that geopolitically they would be better off dealing more diplomatically with Russia but they have to surround Russia with nuclear weapons and try to achieve a first strike capacity and they are risking World War III.

I don’t really know what is wrong with these people but if you tell me, I will be grateful.

Robles: I don’t know either. Some people I know say they are not even human, so that is why nobody can understand them.

Barret: I’ve had radio guests who make that argument in all seriousness. David Jacobs is a professor in Pennsylvania who was always considered the leading American scholarly expert on the UFO phenomena from a folkloristic perspective.

All the respectable academicians turned to his work to look at that phenomenon, and I studied him as part of my folklore minor for a PHD. But at the time I was studying him I hadn’t realized that just a few years before that he’d come out with his new book called "The Threat", which argues basically that there is this evil alien invasion of Earth going on and that they are kidnapping people and creating hybrids that will inherit the earth after some kind of massive destructive episode and of course it sounds completely paranoid and insane, especially when you get into the details of "oh these aliens can float people through solid walls and they can erase people’s memories" and all this stuff. It sounds just like the most outlandish paranoid hallucination, but Jacobs is a very well-spoken careful guy who never said anything like this until the mid-90s when he finally came out and said "I think I figured out what is going on".

More and more people are saying that there is some kind of ET aspect to things, but precisely what that is, is still fairly unclear but I do think that sensible people around the world should be supporting the disclosure movement which is pushing for a complete declassification of all UFO related information in all countries of the world and starting with the US, where it seems like there is the biggest and most nefarious cover-up.

I think that is a serious issue and maybe we will find there is really nothing there once we declassify all of this, but my guess is that there actually is something there and that would explain a fair bit of what is going on.

Robles: I’ve come to the conclusion that all the UFO-sightings and all that stuff, because it’s particularly going on in the US, it is all tied up with CIA kidnappings and sex slavery and children being sold, testing of secret aircraft, but I think it is foolish and I think it started incredibly arrogant and imbecilic to believe that we (If you want to call us as a human race "intelligent") are the only intelligence in the universe. If that is the case, it is a very sad, sad fact. But if you followed scientology, it would make sense, wouldn’t it? Some alien cold and calculating force that can come in and take over human bodies.

Barret: There are probably people like this who I deal with, like veterans today, which is a haven for folks from the US military intelligence services who have gotten fed up with the nonsense. It is full of people who really believe this stuff, who claim that they have had classified briefings and stuff that supports this.

I actually was on the phone with a fellow named Leo Wantas who claims to have single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union by some kind of currency scam.

The story goes that he discovered a loophole in the way that the Soviet currency was traded and so he was able to engineer this massive vacuum cleaner operation, suck all the value out of the ruble and supposedly pile up an excessive 10 trillion on dollars which then got embezzled by the Bush crime family. That is the story he tells.

That was the end of part one of an interview with Dr. Kevin Barret, he is a Doctor in Arabic and Islamic Studies, the owner and manager of TruthJihad.com and a member of Scientific Professionals Investigating 9-11.
By John Robles, voiceofrussia.com 

Related see Part-2: House of Saud, Zionists, Al Qaeda and CIA destroyed Middle East – Kevin Barrett: http://takfiritaliban.blogspot.com/2014/09/house-of-saud-zionists-al-qaeda-and-cia.html