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The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 11, Nos. 1/2 (Winter-Summer 2015)
How the Transnational Elite created Islamic terrorism*
TAKIS FOTOPOULOS
(12.01.2015)
Abstract : The aim of this article is to show the extreme hypocrisy of the Transnational Elite in its lamenting of the actions of Islamic terrorism and its effects. Yet, it can easily be shown historically that it was the same elite and its client regimes, which effectively created Islamic terrorism by extinguishing the secular national liberation movements in the Arab world and by destroying, in the process, hundreds of thousands of lives, as well as the infra-structures of well-functioning social states.
Yesterday, Paris saw the “biggest” rally in France’s history, as the French Interior Ministry described it. This was of course hardly surprising, as the entire political part of the Transnational Elite (TE ― i.e. the elites which run the New World Order of neoliberal globalization, based mainly in the G7 countries), attended it. On top of this, it was a prominent country-member of the same elite that organized it. The main aim of the rally was ostensibly to condemn terrorism. Yet, as I will try to show, it was the same TE, which also created the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism, particularly during the period of the thirty years or so since the emergence of the NWO, which is defined by two parallel systemic events. First, the rise and mass expansion of the transnational corporations that today rule the world economy and the consequent phasing out of economic and national sovereignty that is replaced by a new form of transnational sovereignty shared mainly by the members of the TE and, second, the parallel collapse of “actually existing socialism” in the form of the Soviet bloc.
The concept of modern terrorism derives from the French revolution, where terrorism was only state terrorism, although this concept has been distorted in the NWO to fit its own needs, so that it is not defined anymore on the basis of who carries it out and why, as in the past, but almost exclusively on the basis of the methods and tactics used and, particularly, of targeting civilians.[1] This means that if a conquering army occupies your country, kills women and children in their thousands and then, in desperation, you kill women and children of the occupying country, wherever you find them, the crimes of the occupying army will be as a rule pardoned, as a kind of collateral damage or “error,” whereas your action will be characterized as crime and either you will be killed instantly in action, or you will rot in prison for the rest of your life. Needless to add that, on the basis of this convenient (for the TE) definition of terrorism, most of liberation or anticolonial movements would have been characterized as terrorist, including the ANC and the Algerian FLN. This is why Hamas, for instance, has been defined today as terrorist because it has killed a few hundred Israeli civilians in its history, while the thousands of Palestinian civilians and many children among them, killed by the Israeli security services, settlers and others, were just characterized as “collateral damage,” if not “human shields” used by their parents! No wonder that in yesterday’s mass rally the Israeli PM was a prominent guest and he did not even have any qualms about comparing the Paris attack at Charlie Hebdo with the “rocket” attacks on Israeli cities[2] (which had perhaps fewer victims than the former!) characterizing Palestinian resistance as “terrorist”!
The new “ideology” used to justify the present war on terrorism is expressed in terms of the “barbaric” methods used by the ISIS jihadist, despite the fact that the elites were fully aware of the fact that the same (mostly) jihadists, with the elites’ connivance, used exactly the same methods against the Libyan and Syrian peoples in the past few years to achieve “regime change” in the corresponding cases. It is therefore clear that the elites have simply adopted a convenient definition of terrorism, which, however, has nothing to do with the historical origin of the term and its traditional meaning.
On the basis of this distorted definition of terrorism, in retrospect, it is relatively easy to see who and how has created the phenomenon of modern terrorism, or what I would better call transnational terrorism. In fact, transnational terrorism is a new phenomenon, characterizing the New World Order of neoliberal globalization, namely, terrorism that is controlled by the TE and its client states. As I argued elsewhere,[3] transnational terrorism is, in effect, the form that state terrorism takes today against the victims of neoliberal globalization, and its main weapons are either economic violence (e.g. Greece, Portugal, Spain etc.), or physical violence (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine etc.).
Thus, it can be easily shown that a lot of today’s butchers of ISIS, Al Nusra etc. carried out similar (if not worse) massacres in the recent past. First, in Libya, in 2011 when they were playing the role of NATO infantry. Next, after finishing their “work” there, many of those jihadists moved to Syria, where they continued the same project. That time, the aim was the destruction of the Assad regime, which was based on the Ba’athist national liberation movement, and its replacement by a theocratic caliphate.[4] At least this is what the gullible followers of these organizations believed, not being usually conscious of the actual role they played as instruments of the TE and its client criminal regimes in the region, e.g. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which excelled in organizing crimes against the peoples of Libya and Syria. Finally, when these organizations began attacking the direct instruments of the TE in the area (e.g. the “Free Syrian Army”), which were earmarked to succeed Assad and transform the country into an informal protectorate of the NWO (something like Greece), then the TE decided that their time was up. In other words, ISIS simply functions at present as the pretext for the continuation of the “long war,” this time against Syria. That is, the main objective has always been to crush the national liberation movement in Syria today, and Iran tomorrow, whether this is achieved by a coup “from above” (the traditional military coup), or “from below,” (the “Maidan” model), or whether it is done by external intervention combined with a “coup from below” (the Libyan model).
So, as in the case of traditional state terrorism, in the pre-globalization era of nation-states its victims were mainly individuals or organizations resisting the concentration of power in the hands of national elites, in today’s transnational terrorism, the victims of it are mainly states that have not been fully integrated into the NWO, either because they are based on national liberation movements (e.g. the Ba’athist regimes in Iraq and Syria, or Jamahiriya in Libya) or because they are based on peoples who have a vivid memory of self-determination and are struggling to maintain their national and economic sovereignty in the globalization era (Russia).
However, to understand the nature of political Islamism, from which Islamic terrorism emerged, we have to go back to the former’s historical development, particularly in the post-1948 period. The earliest main expression of political Islamism, which was supported by the Western elites, was the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) but in the last few years, following its failure in Egypt, the TE shifted its sympathies from the MB to the Salafists and the jihadists supported by the Gulf regimes and particularly Saudi Arabia. Both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists have used violence in their clashes with Arab secularism and particularly the Arab regimes based on national liberation movements. No wonder that both the MB and the Salafists were supported at times by the Western elites and the TE today. This is how political Islam gave rise to Islamic terrorism. But let us see, in some more detail, this process.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which initially expressed the Islamist movement, was formed with the active support of the British colonialists and expressed “the most reactionary, antidemocratic and against social progress version of the newborn ‘political Islam’.”[5] Their main aim has always been the Islamization of Egypt’s political and cultural institutions and the promotion of sharia as the basis for legislation. This is summed up by its main slogan used worldwide: “Islam is the solution”. So, the old Islamic movement, i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which later expanded all over the Middle East, was a traditionally conservative movement mainly concerned with the cultural aspects of colonization and later of globalization. The Brotherhood has always made pragmatic alliances with regimes ― those of King Farouk from 1936; the Free Officers under Nasser (who ousted Farouk in 1952); and Sadat from 1970 (who used the Brothers against the Nasserites and the Left). The tactical alliance with the Free Officers, however, was inevitably short lived as they had divergent political goals: the Officers believed in a secularist national liberation movement whereas the “Brothers” in an Islamist regime. No wonder that a failed attempted assassination of Nasser in 1954 led to the brutal suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood and the imprisonment and sentencing to death of Sayyid Qutb, one of its leading ideologues, which led to the jihadist movement. In fact, a year after Qutb's death in 1966, Ayman al-Zawahiri, aged 16 at the time, set up a jihadist cell at his school and invited a few friends to join. In May 2011, Zawahiri became the leader of Al-Qaida, following the murder of Osama bin Laden by US Special Services. As Fawaz A Gerges pointed out, “the birth of the jihadist movement cannot be understood without reference to this great clash between the Muslim Brotherhood and Nasser's forces”.[6] This early clash developed later on into a clash between the Muslim Brotherhood and Ba’athists in Iraq and Syria and in the last couple of years into a clash between Salafists and the MB, which in 2014 was declared a terrorist organization by Saudi Arabia.
The Brotherhood’s relation to Western powers had started early on, and even during the Second World War, the British viewed the Brotherhood as a possible counterweight against the secular nationalist party, the Wafd, and the communists.[7] But it was in the post-Second World War period, and particularly since 1946-1948, when two crucial events took place, almost at the same time, which marked the post-war period in the Middle East and the entire world, i.e. the beginning of the Cold War in 1946 and the establishment of the Zionist Israeli state in 1948 on occupied Palestinian land. In the immediate post-war period, i.e. during the Cold War, the main division was between pro-Soviet and pro-Western Arab countries. Then, with the rise of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, on the one hand, a kind of front developed between the supporters of national liberation (Nasser’s Egypt, the Ba’athist regimes in Iraq and Syria, Libya’s Jamahiriya) and, on the other, the front of Western stooges emerged (i.e. the reactionary Gulf regimes, Jordan, Morocco etc.).
However, the NWO that was imposed on the Middle East, first through economic means and corruption in Egypt, and then through brutal military violence by the TE in Iraq and Libya, completely changed the balance of power within the Arab World. Particularly when the client Muslim Brotherhood regimes that emerged in Tunisia and Egypt during the Arab “Spring,” under the cover of “revolutionary movements,” played a leading (and dirty) role in the destruction both of Libya and of Syria. It was of course hardly surprising that the TE backed the MB when one takes into account its real nature, as Samir Amin stressed:
“The Muslim Brotherhood is committed to a market-based economic system of complete external dependence. They are in reality a component of the comprador bourgeoisie. They have taken their stand against large strikes by the working class and against the struggles of poor peasants to hold on to their lands. So the Muslim Brotherhood are “moderate” only in the double sense that they refuse to present any sort of economic and social program, thus in fact accepting without question reactionary neoliberal policies, and that they are submissive de facto to the enforcement of U.S, control over the region and the world. They thus are useful allies for Washington (and does the US have a better ally than their patron, the Saudis?), which now vouches for their “democratic credentials”.”[8]
On the other hand, Ba’athism was a synthesis of nationalism (initially in the form of pan-Arabism) and Arab socialism, in so far as it adopted socialist principles like the public ownership over the strategic sectors of the economy, the belief that socialism is the only way to develop an Arab society that is truly free and united, and secularism. In other words, Ba’athism was mainly a left-wing Arab-centric ideology, a kind of “socialism with Arab characteristics.” In fact, the most important characteristic of Ba’athism was its anti-imperialist nature. The Western hostility against it, in fact, began in the mid-seventies, as it did also in the Syrian case, when the Iraqi Ba’athists embarked on a program of Arab socialism that culminated in the nationalization of oil, seeking to achieve a form of economic independence to complement political independence. Then, they soon realized that they had to de-integrate Iraq’s economy from the capitalist market economy and minimize free enterprise on the means of production, with the ultimate objective to establish an Arab socialist society in which all citizens would enjoy the benefits of development. Clearly, therefore, the main economic aim of the campaign on Iraq was to return oil exploitation to the Western powers and reintegrate the Iraqi economy into the world capitalist market. This aim was confirmed by later reports according to which State Department blueprints, sent to Congress before the invasion began, laid out a vision for Iraq's reconstruction that would move the country aggressively toward “self-managed economic prosperity, with a market-based economy and privately owned enterprises that operate in an environment governed by the rule of law."[9]
This is why the Ba’athist regime in Syria as well as the Iraqi Ba’athist regime in Iraq had to be destroyed. Their secular, multi-ethnic and multi-faith societies, and, even more important, their historical foundation on national liberation movements, which by definition were enemies to the NWO, were obviously anathema not only to the TEs but also to the reactionary regimes belonging to the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) and Turkey ― the main client regimes (together with Jordan) in the area. The campaign to destroy Iraq began early on with the Gulf War, followed by heavy sanctions and frequent bombings, which culminated with the invasion and occupation of the country for a ten year period leading to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives being destroyed in the process. This was followed by similar processes in Libya and finally in Syria. Yet, although such huge crimes never led to any demonstrations in the West comparable to yesterday’s demonstration, the resentment created among the Arab populations was growing all the time and in the absence of any strong secular national liberation movements (which have been effectively destroyed by the TE) their only way to express their anger against the West was to join the various Islamic terrorist movements, mostly supported by the Gulf States and particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
It is of course not surprising that Saudi Arabia and its ideology was enthusiastically embraced in the West, both in the pre-globalization era and at present. In fact, Saudi Arabian Salafis seem to be even more reactionary than Muslim Brothers. As Benjamin Schett wrote in a significant recent article on Salafism/Wahhabism:
Wahhabi ideology serves U.S. interests for several reasons. Its followers’ archaic perception of society makes them reject any kind of progressive social change. Therefore they are well equipped to push back socialist, secular or nationalist movements, whose independence-oriented policies are a threat to America’s geopolitical agenda. Although Wahhabism certainly is not representative of the majority of Sunni Muslims, Wahhabi Muslims are Sunni extremists, which causes them to maintain an extremely hostile stance towards Shi’te Islam.[10]
So, Saudi Salafists were useful to the TE both in the pre-globalization era, because it was a useful tool in the hands of Western elites to fight Soviet influence and pan-Arabic socialism, as well as in the NWO because they were a valuable tool in the hands of the Transnational Elite to fight any nations resisting the abolition of their sovereignty within the New World Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization. This was clearly shown, for instance, when Saudi Arabia supported in every possible way the Salafi jihadis, who butchered the peoples of Libya and Syria. In fact, it was only very recently that they stopped supporting their offspring, ISIS, when they had become targeted by the Transnational Elite for attempting to follow their own line in building an Islamic State.[11] Unsurprisingly, the methods used by ISIS, like beheading, which were repeated ad nauseam by the TE media in order to terrorize Western middle classes and justify its “war on terrorism,” have in fact been practiced for years by its client Saudi regime, with nobody in the “civilized” West bothering much about it, as long as they were able to keep expanding their highly profitable business of arms selling to the regime.
In conclusion, it is the TE itself, which today pretends it suffers because of the activities of Islamic terrorists, that, in fact, bears the main responsibility for Islamic terrorism. Not just in the simple sense that it funded and supported jihadists fighting national liberation regimes in Iraq, Libya or Syria, as the degenerate Western Left argues but, even more important, because, historically, it did everything possible to assist the flourishing of Islamic terrorism. In other words, the massive support the TE provided over time to political Islamism and Islamic terrorism, in its campaign to destroy Arab national liberation movements, had led to the flourishing of an “army” of jihadists, lacking of any political ideology for national liberation and against globalization and relying instead on religious irrationalism. This was of course the desired by the TE aim, in order to prevent them from understanding who their real enemy is, so that they could organize accordingly to fight it. Yet, even if the aim of many (but by no means all) of these jihadists is irrational, i.e. to create a caliphate, this does not prevent them from understanding that, even achieving this aim, they have to fight against the TE, which, all these years, has destroyed their countries and/or their fellow believers.
*The article was also published simultaneously in Pravda.ru.
[1] See e.g. Seumas Milne, “Terror and tyranny,” The Guardian (25/10/2001).
[2] “Hezbollah leader on Charlie Hebdo: ‘Extremists more offensive to Islam than cartoons’,” RT (10/1/2015).
[3] see Takis Fotopoulos, The New World Order in Action: Integrating Eastern Europe and the Middle East (Published shortly by Progressive Press), ch. 9.
[4] ibid.
[5] Samir Amin, “2011: An Arab Springtime? Reflections from Egypt”, Europe solidaire sans frontiers (15/5/2011).
[6] Fawaz A Gerges: “This Brotherhood has a real sense of purpose,” Independent (7/2/2011).
[7] Jack Shenker & Brian Whitaker, “A rare glimpse into the world of the Muslim Brotherhood,” The Guardian (9/2/2011).
[8] Samir Amin, “2011: An Arab Springtime? Reflections from Egypt”,
[9] Jonathan Weisman and Mike Allen “Officials Argue for Fast U.S. Exit From Iraq,” Washington Post (21.04.2003).
[10] Benjamin Schett, “US Sponsored “Islamic Fundamentalism”: The Roots of the US-Wahhabi Alliance,” Global Research (7/9/2012).
[11] See Takis Fotopoulos, The New World Order in Action: Integrating Eastern Europe and the Middle East.