Category Archives: Sectarian

Arab Revolutions, Jihadis, Sectarian, Syria

Syrian Islamist Rebels: ‘Have 12 Hostage Nuns, Will Trade for Concubines or Prisoners……..

      

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“A Syrian Islamist rebel group wants to trade 12 kidnapped nuns for 1,000 women prisoners held by the government, a pan-Arab newspaper has reported. A spokesman for the “Free Qalamoun” group told Asharq al-Awsat newspaper that the nuns were safe. He said they would not be freed until several demands were met. These include the release of 1,000 Syrian women held in regime prisons according to the spokesman. The reports have not yet been independently confirmed. An official at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Damascus said the nuns were safe but would not comment on which group had taken them. Islamist fighters who captured the Christian village of Maaloula north of Damascus moved the nuns from the Greek Orthodox monastery of Mar Thecla.………….”

My initial thoughts were: If this is true, it will mean that the flow of foreign females for Jihad sex from Tunisia and other venues has dried up. The Salafis now have to resort to grabbing nuns (probably considered old and not very sensuous) and trading them for younger females. There have been reports of chicks from other places, Chechnya and Bosnia (and let’s not forget Ingushetia) going to Syria to entertain the cutthroats and indirectly help liberate Syria. As a result, they can also contribute to the future Islamic State of Syria by populating the place with many new little Wahhabis.
I still don’t understand why the Wahhabi folks on the Persian Gulf who supply money and weapons and some of the volunteers can’t also supply the women. They can always impose some of their Salafi values by insisting that there be no cross-tribal or even cross-national fraternization or conjugation (or that other kind of “ation”).
PS: Initially they responded by saying they had the nuns in ‘protective custody’. Now apparently the kidnappers-liberators have changed their minds: they are now asking to exchange the captive nuns with some of the female prisoners. Otherwise…….. what?

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Politics, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Sectarian, Wahhabi

How All Arabs Elected Celebrity Prince Al-Waleed as their Media Spokesman………

      

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“If the negotiations don’t succeed — and clearly, Alwaleed sees no chance of success — then what? Anti-proliferation by force? I asked him if he thought the Arab states would actually back an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, if this terrible option should come to pass. “Publicly, they would be against it,” he said. “Privately, they would love it.” What about at the level of the so-called Arab street? “The Sunnis will love it,” he said, referring to the dominant branch of Islam, to which most Arab Muslims adhere. “The Sunni Muslim is very much anti-Shiite, and very much anti-, anti-, anti-Iran,” he said. You’re sure they loathe Iran more than they loathe Israel?……………..”

That other celebrity, that Kardashian celebrity chick could not have put it better than this celebrity prince. Or maybe she could. The Mufti Shaikh Al Al Shaikh himself could not have put it any better.
That is the problem with Western media: they like answers that they ‘like’ to hear. That is why they assume Wahhabi tribal Saudi princes speak for all Arabs, especially for all Sunni Arabs. That fits nicely with what they believe Arabs are, which most Arabs are not. Ask any Arab on the street (outside Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and their suburbs), ask from Baghdad to Cairo to Casablanca where the threat comes from, ask them what they think of Netanyahu (plus the Saudi princes) on one side and Rouhani on the other and the answer would shock any card-carrying AIPAC groupie member of the U.S. Congress (both chambers, both parties).
Saudi Arabia does not represent the Arabs, not even the Sunni Arabs, maybe just Wahhabi Arabs: it has only about 19 million citizens plus 9 million temporary foreign laborer and housemaids.
Al-Waleed is the prince who famously claimed that US support for Israel was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks and prompted Mayor Rudi Giuliani (NYC) to return his check. That was in 2011, and I suspect if the check was made out to Giuliani personally he would not have returned it).

Prince Al-Waleed is always listed on the Forbes Magazine list of the richest people in the world. Forbes lists the source of his wealth as “self-made”. That is exactly what the enemies of Ali Baba, the forty men of the famous cave, thought of the source of their wealth and they were actually right. A few months ago Al-Waleed was reportedly suing Forbes Magazine for publicly underestimating his wealth by a couple of billions (and thus insulting all Arabs by downgrading the wealth of their betters and looters).

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Egypt, Sectarian

Lasting Sectarian Legacy of Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood……

      

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“When Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt, Ahmed Helal was locked up four times in Tora prison, officials’ favorite detention facility for perceived enemies of the state. Each time, he was arrested in the middle of the night and thrown in with scores of others whose only offense, they believed, was being Shiite Muslims…………. In the year that recently ousted President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood held power, the threats grew graver. Brotherhood officials denounced Shiite practices and declared that the sect had no place in Egypt. Lawmakers pushed through a new constitution that made Sunni religious doctrine the basis for most laws. One young preacher who converted to Shiism was jailed on charges of insulting Islam. The trouble culminated in a gruesome lynching in a village outside Cairo in June, when a mob dragged the bloodied bodies of a prominent Shiite cleric and three others through the streets while police officers stood by……………….”

I am afraid this sectarian legacy built during the years of both Hosni Mubarak and Morsi will continue no matter who rules in Cairo. Under Mubarak Shi’as were persecuted, prevented from practicing their rites and often imprisoned for who they were. That was the effect of thirty years of continued Wahhabi influence over the once tolerant and accepting Egyptian society.
The Islamist regime that was freely elected brought to power a coalition of Muslim Brothers and Salafis, which institutionalized the persecution of Shi’as (and the Christian Copts and other minorities). It made it halal and kosher to openly spout sectarian hatred. Even some of Egypt’s self-proclaimed liberals got into the habit of doing so.
I suspect that the treatment of Shi’as will not get much better under any regime in Egypt in the near future. There are institutional and political factors now that will push for its continuation: from the Mubarak bureaucracy to the Al-Azhar bureaucracy to the influential Salafis to the Persian Gulf princes and potentates. It took thirty one years for Egypt to reach the stage where people got lynched in public for their faith while the police watched. It may take at least another generation to return Egypt to its tolerant past. Maybe.

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Politics, Arab Revolutions, Sectarian

On the Evolution of Anti-Shi’ism…………

      

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“Sectarian tensions are not new, of course, but the vocabulary of anti-Shiism in the Middle East has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. Shiites who used to be accused of ethnic otherness are now being cast as outside the Muslim community itself. Exclusion on doctrinal grounds was a mostly Saudi exception in the framing of Shiism. It is now increasingly becoming the regional rule. Prior to 2003, anti-Shiism in Iraq was perhaps best encapsulated in the term ajam…………. In other words, prior to 2003, Middle Eastern Sunni-Shiite dynamics were more often manifestations of nationalistic and ethnic rather than religious expression. …………These pre-2003 niceties, superfluous as they might seem to most Shiites, have long since been discarded. While Shiites’ Arab pedigrees continue to be questioned, anti-Shiite discourse today is overwhelmingly concerned with religious otherness. It is the post-2003 sectarian landscape and the inflammation of a religiously inspired sectarian entrenchment that has shaped the sectarianization of Syria’s civil war in stark contrast to how the Hama massacre of 1982 was framed. Likewise, it is this new sectarian landscape that is facilitating Hezbollah’s unabashedly Shiite posture of late. Just as it is the post-2003 environment that has led to the spread of Sunni-Shiite tension beyond its usual geographic hotspots — who could have predicted the public lynching of Shiites in Egypt of all places? ……………………”

An interesting article in Foreign Policy magazine, but it compels me to add my own two cents.
Many sectarian events have racked the Muslim world in recent years, stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. One of these stands in my mind as the most shocking, as an indication of the degree of sectarian hatred that has eaten the social fabric of Muslim societies. That was a few months ago, when neighbors attacked and lynched their neighbors in a town in Egypt. When one of the previously most tolerant Arab countries witnessed thousands of Sunni Muslims converge on a house of Shi’a Muslims and basically rip them to pieces.
Saudi media, and some other Gulf media, often emphasize a sinister connection between Shi’ism and being pro-Iranian (sometimes these campaigns tend to be self-fulfilling to some extent). Other favorite terms for Shi’as once used by Baathists in Iraq and now used by despotic tribal ruling clans in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and by Persian Gulf Salafis are: Majouss (Magi, referring to Zoroastrianism, the pre-Islamic faith of the Persian Empire); and Safawi (referring to the Safavid Shi’a dynasty of Persia which fought with the Ottoman Turks for control of what is now Iraq). Both terms seek to deliberately emphasize some perceived Persian or Iranian connection or nature of Arab Shi’as and distinguish them from other Arabs.

Cheers
mhg

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Pakistan, Sectarian, Wahhabi

Pakistani Saga of Muhib Ullah: Loved by Allah, Hated by Others…………

      

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“The violence in Quetta started early Thursday when unidentified gunmen killed Muhib Ullah, a junior police official, and wounded his four children as he was on his way to a market. The assailants escaped. Hours later, as the senior leadership of the Quetta police gathered for the funeral at Police Lines, considered to be a relatively secure official neighborhood that houses the lodging and offices of the police force, the suicide bomber evaded security measures and detonated his bomb. The explosion ripped through the funeral service as police officers and relatives scrambled for cover. One of the fatalities included a deputy inspector in charge of field operations, Fayyaz Ahmed Sumbal, who died in the hospital from his wounds. A low level insurgency has simmered in Baluchistan as nationalists have taken up arms against the federal government. The provincial capital has also been hit by sectarian violence as extremist Sunni militants have targeted Hazaras, a minority community belonging to the Shiite sect……………..”

His name, Muhib Ullah is, was, a hopeful sign: it means “Loved by God”. Apparently that love was not enough to save his life, or to save his children from harm. Nor was it enough to allow him a dignified peaceful funeral. In some places, the hatred is strong enough to go against a wishful name, strong enough to defeat the deity, be it called God, Allah, Yahweh, or whatever.
Pakistan is one place where Salafi terrorism has taken deep root, where sectarian hatred is the norm in many regions. All courtesy of Wahhabi clerics and their ideology and the petro-money that helped spread it over the past few decades.

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Sectarian, Syria

Syrian Tunnel: What Two Years of War and Foreign Intervention Have Done………

      

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“The last time I came here, much of the rebel fury was reserved for Alawite Muslims, the minority offshoot of Shiite Islam from which the Assad family and many of the regime’s senior functionaries and paramilitaries are drawn. This year, however, the Shiites themselves are the enemy. A television in the corner is blaring footage of the daily sectarian violence in neighboring Iraq, most of it directed against Shiites, and I ask Aleh, a wiry young man sitting beside me, whether he really wants Syria to end up like that. “I want it and I don’t want it. I don’t want it because it will kill very many. But the Shiites must understand that they don’t own Syria or Iraq. A very bad war is coming.” But surely, I say, he’s only talking about the irregular paramilitaries of the shabiha and not an entire religious group? “We don’t like all the Shiites, because all of them are killing us,” he insists. “They say bad things about our Prophet. When I kill a man in the Syrian Army, I am sad. But I enjoy killing Shiites or Alawites.”……………….”

Before Iraq and before this so-called misnamed Arab Spring, our region has not heard or practiced such sectarian venom in more than a thousand years. Killing by identity was limited to brief spurts of civil strife in places like Lebanon. Slitting of throats and beheading by identity is almost like something new from the 21st century.
That is what foreign intervention, all foreign intervention, on both sides, has done to Syria.
That is what foreign money and fighters and ideology and hatred and weapons have done. And the end is not in sight. The Syrian tunnel is dark and it is growing longer as it twists until it becomes a dark regional tunnel.
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, GCC, Sectarian, Syria, US Foreign Policy

Obama Joins Middle East Sectarian Jihad: Muslim Brotherhood Elated, Salafis Hopeful, Shi’as Doubtful………..

      

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“HOOAH! Obama moves to deliver another country to Muslim Brotherhood. USA! USA!……..” Drudge Report, tweeting an understatement

“Syria’s president and his Shi’ite allies were denounced by leading Sunni Arab voices on Friday, including Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood, which had reached out across Islam’s sectarian divide but has now called for jihad. The Brotherhood accused Shi’ites of being at the root of sectarian conflicts throughout history and threw its weight behind holy war – just months after a high-profile rapprochement with Iran, which backs Bashar al-Assad and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. “Throughout history, Sunnis have never been involved in starting a sectarian war,” spokesman Ahmed Aref said, adding that Hezbollah provoked the new sectarian conflict in Syria………………..”

So Mr. Obama has been maneuvered into the Syrian sectarian war by some funny doubtful evidence produced by the French (oh so ethical in these matters) and the British (marginally better) in cooperation with Syrian “activists”, as well as some unrelenting badgering by Sen. John McCain and the taunting of Bill Clinton (who called him a “Wuss”) only two days earlier.
Now Syria is not Libya. This is not a domestic uprising anymore, it is a regional sectarian war instigated by some of the tribal absolute rulers of the Persian Gulf, mainly Saudis and Qataris, and the Salafist movement. None of the above three believe in freedom or democracy anymore than Mr. Al Assad does. The Syrian battle was joined, early on, by an influx of Jihadis as well as training and weapons from the West, Russia, Lebanon, and Iran. It has also been joined by supplies and some human assets from all the above places. So the Obama administration has now more firmly joined one side in this regional sectarian civil war. Nay, it has, by its intervention may have expanded the Syrian war from a regional proxy war in the Middle East to a worldwide sectarian war.

The Al Saud and their palace clerics and the Salafis and the Wahhabi liberals of the Gulf and Lebanon will be pleased. I imagine the tribal Salafis are praying that Allah would further guide the infidel heathens of the West toward supplying heavy weapons as well as a passel of no-fly zones, all for the glory of Allah and the Gulf potentates (not necessarily in that order).
In any case, the sectarian battle is joined and the result does not bode well for Syria or its neighboring countries.

Cheers
mhg

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Al-Qaeda, Sectarian, Terrorism, Wahhabi

Bin Laden as One-Eyed Jack and Former Muslim Brother, Busting Out of Najd……….

   

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                                Neck of the woods

“Slain al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was blind in one eye after an accident during his youth and was a one-time member of the Muslim Brotherhood, his successor has claimed in a new video tribute to the terror mastermind. Ayman al-Zawahiri, made the claim in an hour-long account . of the
life of bin Laden, who was killed in a US Navy Seal raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, last year ………… He also claimed that the terrorist mastermind was expelled from the Saudi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood for insisting on waging jihad, holy war, against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the Daily Mail reported. It is claimed that bin Laden travelled to the Pakistani city of Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, to deliver cash to the Taliban, but then defied the Brotherhood’s orders to join the armed struggle………….”

Many of these fundamentalists graduated from the Muslim Brotherhood. The MB was established sometime in the early 20th century, almost ninety years ago. At that time the Salafis, the Wahhabis, were contained in their own small area of Najd in Central Arabia. The Wahhabis gradually expanded their realm around the edges of the Arabian Peninsula in the next two decades. But the real outflow, the busting out of Wahhabism, started with the early 1970s. For the past forty years the Salafi/Wahhabi message has spread, financed by petro-money and pushed by Saudi clerics deep into the Arab world and beyond into south and east Asia. All oiled with oil money. That was also when this sectarian poison started to take hold, first among Arabs, then among all Muslims. Before that sectarianism was confined to Saudi Arabia.
As for Bin Laden. Maybe he was one-eyed, but he sure took care of his third eye, if you get my drift. The man was always busy, always with at least a couple of wives on hand, always a younger one added to the ‘herd’, in the Salafi Wahhabi tradition.
As “they” allegedly say: gotta keep one’s facilities busy and occupied.
Cheers
mhg
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