“As an Ahmadi leader in his locality, Kahloun knew he was a target for hired assassins in the bustling but lawless metropolis of Karachi. General insecurity in Pakistan is multiplied manifold if you are, like Kahloun, an Ahmadi – a sect of Islam that many orthodox Muslims abhor as heretic. “I never thought they would target my family,” says Kahloun, 57, a successful businessman who left everything behind, obtained political asylum and moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and daughter. In 1974, under pressure from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s parliament declared Ahmadis as non-Muslim (similarly pressured, the newly independent Bangladesh refused). A decade later, a military dictator made it a criminal offence for them to “pretend” to be Muslims…………”
The influence of Wahhabi oil money and Wahhabi ideology and overseas teachings is now worldwide. This phenomenon is widespread, having seeped like Persian Gulf crude petroleum, like petro-money, across the globe. There is so much hatred where none existed before. There is active intolerance, violent discrimination and mass sectarian murder in Pakistan and Indonesia. There is now religious and sectarian discrimination in Malaysia, in once-tolerant Egypt and North Africa. In Iraq, thousands of civilians are killed on the street because of the suspicion they might be of the wrong sect or faith. In the Wahhabi-ized ‘liberated’ parts of Syria and Iraq, women and girls of other faiths and sects are captured, used, sold, and bought as sex slaves. In Western cities, they collect money, distribute money, enlist volunteers, inject them with hatred and send them back to our region to kill, maim, and enslave.
The Wahhabis carry their hatred with them into exile, creating new forms of discrimination and potential violence deep inside European cities. Against their hosts and against people of other faiths and sects, including Muslims.
We all know who is fighting and murdering in Syria and Iraq and Yemen and North Africa and other places. We also know who has the funds to finance them. It takes many millions to run a Caliphate, much more than the revenues from a few oil wells they control in Syria. Many of the Jihadi volunteers come from the West, fueled by Persian Gulf money and the Wahhabi ideology of hate from the cradle of sectarianism. Perhaps helped along by alienation in European society: but it must take a lot of alienation to mow down, mass murder, innocent civilians.
That ideology, most of the killers, and the money that sustains it mostly come from the absolute tribal princes and potentates. The same princes and potentates on whom the West is now pretending to rely for salvation in Syria and Iraq. The ones Mr. Obama “is proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with“.
Is it any wonder few have faith in the outcome of this war? Is it any wonder most Arabs who cannot express themselves in the vast controlled Saudi and Emirati and Qatari media are skeptical?
After the 9/11 attacks, George W Bush liked to speak of ‘draining the swamp‘. He was focusing on the wrong swamps: Taliban-controlled Wahhabi Afghanistan and secular Baathist Iraq. He may have misunderstood or was ill-advised. The genesis, the true swamp from whence Al-Qaeda launched its terrorism was not in Afghanistan or Iraq: it was, and still is, within the realm of some of his allies.
The bloody trails from the killing fields of Syria and Iraq and other places lead in that direction.
Cheers
MHG