A Wahhabi Neocon Explanation for the Rise of ISIS and other Terrorists…………


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“There has never been any doubt in my mind that elements within Iran’s security services have facilitated ISIS,” Col. Derek Harvey told Foreign Policy, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, a terrorist network-cum-jihadist army that has now taken over territory in Syria and Iraq that, when combined, is roughly the size of Jordan. “When given opportunities to interdict, or have an effect, [the Iranians] have refrained.” Harvey, a retired Army intelligence officer and senior Central Command advisor, was emphatic that any solution for containing the rising threat of ISIS, an al Qaeda breakaway group, must foreclose on the possibility of U.S.-Iranian collusion. ………… Intelligence reporting during this period, Welch added, suggested that Iran was indeed funding “al Qaeda-type elements” in Iraq as well as Shiite militias such as Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Hezbollah, both of which are now said to be playing a major role in fortifying central Baghdad and Shiite-predominant cities and towns in southern Iraq. Iranian documents captured by U.S. forces in Iraq in 2007 did indeed state that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force (IRGC) was helping Sunni jihadists along with Shiite militias ……………”

This Neocon piece is closely following the Saudi Wahhabi marketed script on Iraq and Syria and the origins of the ISIS and al-Nusra Front. The Saudi strategy has been to divert attention from the fact that these terrorist groups and militias are Wahhabi movements with roots close to the power structure in Riyadh. The fact that they are the products of the triple alliance of: the Wahhabi religious doctrine which distorts Islam, the Saudi educational system, and Saudi oil money.

The extensive campaign to absolve Wahhabism from the modern rise of terrorism has been so audacious as to try and blame some of its primary victims. Some elements of American media and retired former officials and generals have been pushing this as well. Some Neocons are happy to adopt this even if it rewrites the history of Al Qaeda to blame anyone but their Arab allies.

Sectarian fault lines in the Arab world should exist, if they must, only in a few countries of the region from the eastern Mediterranean to the Gulf. That is where the populations are divided, that is where Iranians have made political and economic inroads into Arab territory. That is also where the Wahhabis have counterattacked with the only weapon they can rely on: the sowing of sectarian division and hatred. That is why the Wahhabi Salafis and their allies quickly took over the Syrian uprising in 2011 and made it into a sectarian civil war, drawing in Lebanese factions from both sides (and not only Hezbollah as is commonly misrepresented in Western media). That is also why the Wahhabis sent their mercenary forces to help crush the Bahrain uprising and worked hard to paint it as a sectarian movement inspired by Iran. That is also why the Wahhabi princes early on painted Iraqi politics as purely sectarian (they are sectarian but no more so than in most other Arab countries, and less than in some like Saudi Arabia for example). In doing so, and in sending their money and terrorists to commit mass murder in Iraq, they helped widen the Iraqi sectarian and political divide.

Even in the countries of North Africa, where the sectarian issue should be irrelevant, where there are few Shi’as and the population is mainly divided among Sunni Muslims and some recently converted to Wahhabism. In Egypt, now fully back under the Saudi sphere of influence, much of the political and religious classes occasionally tend to ignore their serious major problems and go sectarian: they profess that they are facing a Shi’a threat. That is the way to conform to this new Wahhabi Arab age. That same trend now extends west from Libya to Morocco.

Is this Wahhabi sectarianism spreading to Washington? Congressmen and senators and (mostly former) generals are eagerly taking sides. Will we soon hear senators discussing comparative Shi’a and Wahhabi theology like so many mullahs and shaikhs and imams?

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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The Islamic State: ISIS Morphs into a Caliphate, World Cup Goes On……


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Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (another tale mentions Islamic State of Sham or Levant instead of little Syria) is no more. A new state called The Islamic State was born. A nutjob of a Wahhabi cutthroat who calls himself Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi just interrupted the World Cup games to announce that he has become the new Muslim Caliph (Khalifa) of the new state. Thus he preempted the three other potential claimants who aspired to the job: Turkey’s Recip Erdogan, the King of Morocco, the King of Saudi Arabia. Most of the world did not pay immediate attention as they were in a state of shock at the garbage-time penalty the Mexico-Netherlands referee awarded the latter and the Costa Ricans completely frustrated and defeated the Greeks in Brazil.

A leader of the rival Wahhabi gang, Al Nusra Front, a guy named Abu Maria Al Qahtani, pooh-poohed this declaration by the interloper and pretender of ISIS (or ISIL). Apparently he was angling to declare himself the new Caliph, even with the handicap of a name like Abu Maria.

What should we make  of all this? To start with it is a clever move, not specifying fixed borders for the state. This Abu Bakr (or even Abu Maria) could be holed up in a cave and it would still be The Islamic State to his fans. He could be in jail awaiting execution and he would still be in The Islamic State.

Some tribal Wahhabi Salafis on the Persian Gulf, the usual suspects who funded and preached for the Syrian Jihadists, have already started a support group for this new Wahhabi state. They call it the “Popular Drive for the Nusra of the Iraqi People”.

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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An Independent Free-Thinker Wins the Greatest Prize on the Nile……

 


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Dr. Omar Hashim is a member of the Commission of Senior Ulema (Ulema could mean clerics or even scientists: as in chemistry, physics, biology, mumbojumbo, etc). He has recently received the biggest prize in Egypt in terms of professional esteem and money, the Nile Prize (formerly the Mubarak Prize, no doubt soon to be the Sisi Prize). Dr. Omar Hashim said that his heart is “dripping” sadness and pain because of the divisions in the nation (of Egypt).
He was quickly asked by the correspondent the question du jour from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco to the Persian Gulf: “Do you fear the danger of the spread of Sh’ism (Shi’a faith) in Egypt?” He rose to the occasion as expected, no doubt knowing what is expected of any ‘independent free-thinking’ Egyptian cleric (or scientist), and answered quickly, almost too quickly: “No doubt I fear it. When Al Azhar was established in Egypt the Fatimid Dynasty meant for it to be a Shi’a college , a place that would teach the Shi’a faith. But God meant from the beginning that Al Al Azhar would not be a Shi’a, but for the Sunna people”.


God bless all independent free thinkers of the Arab world who when they strictly follow the official line, it is strictly coincidental, (even when they lie to do it by coincidence). Truly.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Is Medical Pilgrimage in Egypt’s Future? the Army Says So about their Acne Cure……….

 


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Qatari daily Al-Quds Alarabi, published from London, and other Arab media have interesting medical news from Egypt. The Medical Services Authority of the Egyptian Army has announced an update on its magical machines that can cure HIV and Hepatitis-C. It announced at a press conference Saturday that it is postponing receiving any patients who are seeking to be cured from HIV (AIDS) and/or Hepatitis-C through the new machines the Egyptian Army had invented. The Army said the postponement will last six months, allowing for further experiments on a larger sample of those infected.

The Egyptian army had announced the new inventions with fanfare a few months ago, at a public event attended by the county’s leadership including Field Marshal Al Sisi. A General Dr. Al –Sairafy said they are looking into the best ways to apply the cures for the Hepatitis-C and HIV (AIDS)N viruses, using what he called the C-Fact and Complete-Cure machines invented by the Egyptian Armed Forces.

A medical professor of gastronomy and liver diseases at Ain Shams University at Cairo said the tow breakthrough inventions were developed over a period of 22 years. He added that “the cure starts with a patient taking one daily tablet for ten days, after which he sits on a machine that drwas out his blood the returns a pure form of the blood back into his body. This blood re-infusion is done one hour per day over 16 days………

With these great inventions, courtesy of the brains of the glorious armed forces of Egypt, the economy should quickly recover as millions from around the world make the pilgrimage to Cairo to get cured of their diseases.

(I must add here that this Complete-Cure sounds like a skin cream for zits, a.k.a. acne, rather than HIV (AIDS). The Fast-C sounds like a method of injecting a huge dosage of vitamin C into someone’s blood).

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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John Kerry of Arabia: Levantine Illusions of a Good Man………


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“The top US diplomat, who landed in the Red Sea city of Jeddah in the afternoon, also met Saudi King Abdullah a day after hosting urgent talks in Paris with the Saudi, Jordanian and UAE foreign ministers on the widening crisis in Iraq and Syria. King Abdullah has consistently called for greater US military support for the Syrian rebels, whom the Sunni Gulf kingdom has long backed. Following several signals in recent weeks by US President Barack Obama’s administration, the White House said Thursday it intends to “ramp up US support to the moderate Syrian opposition”……….. Ahmad Jarba, leader of the Syrian National Coalition, welcomed the huge US boost to his forces, battling to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “The situation is very grave and there are sectarian leaders ruling the country so we have to have greater efforts on the part of the US and regional powers to address the situation in Iraq,” Jarba said. Kerry said “the moderate opposition in Syria… has the ability to be a very important player in pushing back against (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) ISIL’s presence… not just in Syria, but also in Iraq………….”

Secretary Kerry’s statement about the role of the Syrian opposition in solving the Iraq crisis makes little sense here. It is like the advice about taking “a bit of the hair of the dog that bit you“. He is bent on going the old route he was warned off for the past year or two. He seems to have just bought some more of the Saudi snake oil about arming and further empowering the Syrian opposition militias.

The Wahhabi opposition in Syria got their start, their money and their ‘seed weapons’, from the same countries Mr. Kerry has been visiting this past week. The sources were on the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. Much of the weapons that got the Jihadists their “booty” in land and property and hostages and death is American and European. Weapons supplied by these same governments to the “Syrian opposition” seeking to “liberate” Syria: in one case for the tender mercies of the Wahhabi doctrine, in the other case for the dubious rule of the Muslim Brotherhood. Arming and funding the Syrian militias will not increase the chances of peace in either Syria or Iraq. It is an invitation, nay a recipe, to keep the Syrian civil war going and to increase the sectarian unrest inside Iraq.

Mr. Jarba is reported to be heading to the door: apparently he will soon be out of the Syrian National Coalition, according to media reports. Either he saw the futility of his position or he is being booted by the Saudi princes who will now have to appoint another man of their choosing to lead the “liberation” of Syria for the Wahhabi cause. Moreover, there are Arab reports that the “general” who heads the allegedly Free Syrian Salafi Army, the man appointed and anointed as the Napoleon of the Syrian-Turkish border, will be officially sacked.

Cheers

mhg

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No Pasaran! Political Holding Pattern over Iraq and Syria……

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Events are moving fast in this new combined war for Iraq and Syria. The Syrian theater has cooled down somewhat, relatively speaking, with the regime and its allies regaining the momentum. Now the Iraqi theater of this Wahhabi-inspired sectarian civil war is heating up. The Jihadists of ISIS, and now probably al-Nusra Front as well, have moved the front deep into Iraq, in alliance with the remnant Iraqi Baathists who never reconciled to the new electoral system. Things are moving fast now, as this summary shows:

  • Earlier there was a Wahhabi split in Syria: ISIS Split from AL Qaeda after giving Al Zawahri the middle finger. But that may not last (logically it should not).
  • Al Nusra Front was declared months ago the sole ‘legal’ and authorized halal and kosher al-Qaeda franchise in Syria. Remember only a year or two ago when the ‘moderate’ Syrian opposition and Persian Gulf Wahhabis swore al-Nusra was a moderate democratic liberal movement?
  • ISIS sweeps the Syria-Iraq border, creating facts on the ground, for now.
  • ISIS along with Wahhabi and Baathist allies sweep northern Iraq, creating new fronts with Iraq’s Shi’a heartland and with the Kurdish region.
  • American warplanes reported flying over Iraq again, apparently in a political holding pattern as Mr. Kerry sniffs up and around the Gulf princes and potentates. The Saudi princes no doubt will make a pitch for their own allies inside Iraq.
  • Just to further complicate things, and lest they be forgotten by the world, the Israelis decide to bomb inside Syria again. They seem to have some kind of UN mandate to bomb inside any Arab borders with impunity, and why not since everybody else in the world seems to reserve the right to bomb inside any Arab border.
  • Syrian warplanes are reported to be bombing inside Iraq now. And who would have thunk it only a few months ago when Mr. Assad was on his way to foreign exile as prognosticated by Saudi and hence American media and leaders.
  • Wahhabi terrorists seek to spread the sectarian war by speeding up their activities inside the cities of Lebanon, with several bombings this past week.
  • There are reports that the Wahhabi split may have been fixed by events on the Syrian-Iraqi border, that ISIS and al-Nusra may be re-uniting again.
  • Regardless, I can fatwa now that this ISIS business will not last. As the Spaniards facing the Fascist onslaught said seven decades ago: No Pasaran! And this time it will be true, they shall not pass, unlike the case of the unfortunate Spaniards who were betrayed by the European democracies.

Stay tuned for more…………

Cheers
mhg

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Middle East Focus: Asian Dreams and Labor Nightmares on an Asian Gulf………


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“He could hardly wait to leave Qatar. Ganesh has promised himself to never again set foot in the desert. On this spring evening, though, Ganesh’s trip back home still lies before him. He is sprawled out exhausted on his bed on the outskirts of Doha after finishing his shift. The room is just 16 square meters (172 square feet) — and provides shelter to 10 workers. With the fan broken and the window sealed shut with aluminum foil, the air is thick and stuffy…………. On the map, the area is simply labeled “industrial zone.” But it is home to the thousands of faceless workers, the place where they eat and sleep. In Ganesh’s building, 100 workers are housed on three floors, far away from the glittery hotels in the city center. They live on the edge of a dream that the sheikhs want to make reality……………….”

The same also applies to laborers from other places, like Egypt and the Sub-continent and East Africa. Temporary foreign laborers form about 90% of Qatar’s population: almost the same percentage that they form of the population of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). So you see why they are indispensable to these countries. Not only do these foreigners work on creating buildings and roads, on the supply side: they are also needed to create the demand for the goods and services. They are needed to buy much of the consumer goods the local merchants import, they are needed to transfer in remittances billions of dollars that keep the local banks operating, and foreigners are needed to fill these buildings that are owned by the princes and potentates and their business allies. Otherwise the newly erected towns between Doha and Abu Dhabi will look like ghost towns; they did not exist a couple of decades ago.

Cheers

mhg

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Middle East Focus: From Red Herrings and Axis of Evil to an Axis of Convenience………..


“There’s only one strategy with a decent chance of winning: forge a military and political coalition with the power to stifle the jihadis in both Iraq and Syria. This means partnering with Iran, Russia, and President Assad of Syria. This would be a very tricky arrangement among unfriendly and non-trusting partners, but the overriding point is that they all have common interests. All regard the jihadis as the overwhelming threat, and all would be willing to take tough joint action. And with this fighting arrangement in place, the “partners” could start seriously fixing the underlying political snake pits in Damascus and Baghdad. Now, don’t start firing rockets at me just yet. Hear me out. First, every state, even the United States, works with bad guys, adversaries and enemies whenever the need is great, whenever it suits reality. Don’t forget, Iran helped us protect the western border of Afghanistan for almost the first two years of America’s war effort there. Tehran didn’t like the Taliban and neither did we. The cooperation stopped when President George W. Bush threatened to overthrow the Ayatollah’s regime with his “axis of evil” speech………….”

That foolish “axis of evil” speech is already marked as one of the stupidest creations of the White House in the modern era. A soundbite that the media dutifully propagated. And it came just months after Wahhabi terrorists, all citizens of Arab countries allied with the Bush Administration, committed the worst act of terrorism in the United States history on September 11, 2001. It was as if the Neocons were using Iran and Iraq as a ‘red herring’ to distract from other ‘facts’ leading up to 9/11, facts that now stare us in the face from Syria through Iraq.

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Cheers

mhg

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War for Iraq: the Middle East as a Jealous Mistress……..

  


 Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter When it comes to American world attention the Middle East is a jealous wife. Or maybe just a high-maintenance mistress. Ukraine and Crimea barely had a few short weeks of attention before our region reasserted its place in the sun, in the limelight of misery and hatred and blood. Its supremacy as ‘the trouble spot’ of the world:

  • Pivot to Asia? Maybe so, but you would never know it from the headlines and media coverage. Hillary Clinton came close but fell way short of the Middle East in American media coverage this past week. But that was mainly because she has yet another book out explaining her positions over the past six years.
  • Benyamin Netanyahu? Who is he: we rarely saw his name this past week in U.S. media, and what little we saw was due to the disappearance of three young Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank (the shooting of several Palestinian Arabs got very little coverage: dead Arab youths are of no interest to the West).
  • Snowden and NSA and all that? No doubt the beat goes on on that one, but all is now kosher with Merkel and the Germans.
  • Obamacare, ACA, Benghazi, and Snowden? Maybe in 2016.
  • Pervasive Chinese cyber espionage? Don’t be so rude.

Iraq: the one country the American people, and many American pundits (but not the damaged war veterans), had thought they had left behind, has reared its head again. It was weird, like going back in history. Like going back to Vietnam after 1975. As if D-Day had left some loose ends that needed to be retied a couple of years later. Suddenly Iraq has become a major American concern again. 

Wahhabi Jihadists of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (or Levant), a.k.a. ISIS or ISIL or WTF and allies had blitzkrieged the Sunni parts of western Iraq, beginning with Mosul and through to Tikrit. Apparently they did it in cahoots with remnant Baathists: to the barely-concealed cheers of the former victims of the Baathists on the Gulf. Blitzkrieg is supposed to be un-Islamic, a heathen style of war only reserved for non-Muslims. Only Germans and Israelis are supposed to wage such heathen war. But the Salafi terrorists, flush with money from the Persian Gulf princes and oligarchs and volunteers from Arab and Western countries, went on a rampage. They took several Sunni towns and performed the obligatory mass killings, lining up thousands of Shi’a (and likely some Sunni) soldiers and employees of the Iraqi state, having them dig up their own mass graves, and mowing them down with very un-Islamic machine guns. In the best tradition of the German Nazi SS and their auxiliaries of World War II. 
We don’t know anymore of what else is happening now in Mosul and other places where the terrorists have taken over. There has been direct media silence for a few days since the early Wahhabi surge (not a pun). There is no first-hand media presence. Which might mean the new ghazis, the conquerors are taking the next logical step: ‘cleaning house, ethnically or otherwise’.
Cheers
mhg

Wahhabi-Israeli Axis: from Interfaith Economic Blockade to Interfaith Sectarian War………

      


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“The U.S. Defense Department plans to sell Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates $10.8 billion in advanced weaponry, including air-launched cruise missiles and precision munitions. Notice yesterday of the planned sales of advanced weapons made by Boeing Co. (BA) and Raytheon Co. (RTN) sends a message of support from the Obama administration to two close allies in the Middle East as the U.S. and five other nations are engaged in talks to curb Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program. The Saudi regime has pressed the U.S. to maintain tough economic sanctions on Iran……………….”


Given the charged sectarian situation in the region, this Saudi Israeli alliance can be translated for now in terms of interfaith relations. The Saudi princes always publicize and pay for, for propaganda purposes, that they favor interfaith dialog, although they always hold these dialogs in Europe, exclude Jews and others from them, and they never allow people of other faiths to practice their religion in their Wahhabi kingdom. You can go to prison for setting up a Christmas Tree in your living room (imagine what a Menorah will get you over there).

This Wahhabi-Zionist axis can be truly called an Interfaith Axis. Adding France and possibly other Western countries, so can we call it a Wahhabi-Jewish-Christian axis? Yes we can, for the sake of making a point.
Its immediate goal seems to be to maintain the Western economic blockade against the people of Iran. Inevitably, its longer term goal is to provoke a destructive war against Iran which, given the current sectarian terrorist provocations in the region, will most likely become a Western-Zionist-Wahhabi war on all Shi’as of the Middle East.
  Al-Qaeda, being a Wahhabi creation and an enemy of everyone and everything Shi’a, will join this axis and the war: actually it already has joined both.
The Wahhabis will not be doing the fighting, they are not good at that: they do the urging and the provoking and maybe the paying. The Wahhabis will be essentially pimping for war, for a new Western-Israeli war against another Muslim country.
Cheers
mhg

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