If somebody wishes to be a ghazi, I should much prefer them to do it in Tikrit rather than in Peterborough or Penicuik. To that extent I agree with Bob Quick. The periodic media scares about Sunni families going to Syria to “join ISIS” are very peculiar. We appear, with no public debate, to have adopted a de facto system of exit visas. Ronald Reagan famously said to Mikhail Gorbachev that we never had to lock our people in. It seems that now in the UK we do.
We have companies that recruit and control active armies of mercenaries, which are responsible for thousands of deaths overseas. I detest the violence of “ISIS” but it is not morally different from Executive Outcomes machine gunning villages from helicopters in Angola or from Aegis killing random vehicle occupants in Iraq who happened to be near their convoys. Yet Tony Buckingham and Tim Spicer became extremely rich after founding their careers on the latter killings, and now are respected figures in the London establishment. Apparently killing for money is good; only killing for religion is bad.
Nor is there any official objection to the young Britons who go to Israel to fight with the IDF, and were involved in the war crimes that last year killed hundreds upon hundreds of little Palestinian children.
Terrorism is appalling. The desire by some of the inhabitants of the Middle East to establish a Caliphate run on what they interpret as theological lines is a legitimate desire, if that is the kind of society people want. We devastated Iraq: we bombed Iraq into a failed state. We we were part of the nexus of interests that conspired to arm and facilitate armed insurrection in Syria. In the Blairite creed, we apparently believed that unleashing death, devastation and destruction of physical infrastructure and social institutions, would result in an embrace of democracy and western values by the people.
You would have to be mad to believe that, but it appears to remain the guiding principle of western foreign policy.
Even the remotest claim to wisdom would lead to the embrace of two principles. The first is that we cannot dictate how societies very different to our own ought to organise themselves. We can try to encourage a dialogue leading to respect of universal human rights, and hope for gradual improvement in that direction. But the second lesson is stop bombing. It is plainly counter-productive.
Today the BBC is wall to wall 7/7 commemoration. The coverage keeps focusing on military uniforms, even though the military were in no capacity whatsoever involved in 7/7. It is inappropriate militarism, just as we saw with the return of the bodies of the Tunisian victims.
There is an elephant in the room. Nobody is mentioning the starkly obvious truth. If we had not invaded Iraq, 7/7 would never have happened. Let me say it again, because it is not sayable within the corporate media and establishment consensus. If we had not invaded Iraq, 7/7 would never have happened.
Our response to “Isis” illustrates that we have become no more sophisticated than the Victorian portrayal of the “Mad Mahdi”. The difference is that, due to globalisation, we cannot just pound foreign lands into submission without provoking the blowback of terrorism elsewhere. I detest terrorism and do not believe random killing of civilians can ever be justified. But it is not an inexplicable manifestation of evil. We are causing it.
It is a fact that ISIS was never implicated in any terrorist activity in the UK before we started bombing ISIS in Iraq. We created the appalling mess in Iraq and Syria. By bombing we continually make it worse. It will take some time for the Middle East to recover from the profound effects of the Western wars against Muslim countries at the beginning of the 21st Century. Our response to the provocation of Bin Laden has been so stupid as to attain most of his goals for him. We have of course also attained most of the goals of the armaments and security state industries, which have sucked wealth from the rest of us. A spiral of despair for us has made billions for them. When a policy is as obviously counter-productive as our continual Middle Eastern wars, then ask cui bono?
I am not claiming that if we stop bombing then terrorism will stop instantly. There will be a lag effect. And in even the most benign scenario, Iraq and Syria will take decades to normalise. That is our fault, but we can best now help by staying well away.
Anon1,
The Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies noted that 77% of all attacks targeted US troops. The report warns of a failure to recognise the growth and character of the insurgency and accuses the US military of using “denial as a method of counter-insurgency warfare”
The Developing Iraqi Insurgency: Status at End-2004 (Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC).
Despite US claims, the report says, these were not regime diehards and foreign Jihadis, but a well entrenched national movement with widespread popular support.
Over to you, Anon1.
Anon1 : “The Iraq War showed that the only two options in Muslim countries are brutal state repression or Islamic fanaticism.”
Node : HOW did the Iraq war show this?
Anon1 : “It showed the deluded fiction of their being any other possible outcome for Muslim countries ….. That Iraq would lurch from violent secular dictatorship to violent religious fanaticism was entirely predictable.”
You CLAIM that the only two options in Muslim countries are brutal state repression or Islamic fanaticism. You haven’t explained HOW the Iraq war validates your claim. You might as well have claimed that the Iraq War showed that the only two options in Muslim countries are a modern health-care system with large Western-style hospitals or rubble.
I CLAIM that when foreign powers destroy the infrastructure and institutions of a country and have their special forces deliberately provoke sectarian violence, a situation is created which vested interests can misleadingly describe as Islamic fanaticism.
I am getting the Habbabkuk type interrogation.
I do not work at a hospital. If a pharmacy dispenses any GP’s prescription for me and I notice that the medication comes from an Israeli owned firm, I ask for it to be replaced with a non-Israeli product.
I would not touch Waitrose with a bargepole. See Taste of Israel protests. http://www.palestinecampaign.org/taste-apartheid-courtesy-waitrose/
Did you see all 4 Elbit premises were closed down? Cheering and clapping that one.
PS Are you speaking from Tel Aviv, or perhaps Baghdad as you profess to know so much about Iraq.
Yes Javid is a traitor for saying that. He is a minister in the supposedly BRITISH government ffs.
PPS Do you keep a file on me or is that CAMERA or HASBARA?
Ms Bruce gave heavy emphasis to the word MURDERED in the opening line of the BBC 6pm News.
Followed by Fergal Keane’s soothing tones in a commentary.
The propaganda is appalling.
‘I just can’t agree that a Capiphate (as promulgated by ISIS) can ever be characterised as “a legitimate desire”. If we go down that path, other historical crimes also become “legitimate”.
We shall have to agree to disagree about this’
John D Monkey- you were right to call out Craig on this point; otherwise this was a well argued & trenchant post.
Craig and Bob Quick are quite right to point out that if British Muslim men wish to go out and fight for ISIS, or Muslim schoolgirls wish to marry ISIS fighters, that is their lookout, and in some respects the least worse option in terms of minimising the likelihood of further terrorist outrages here (provided of course that robust steps are taken to prevent their subsequent return to the UK). Craig is also right to criticise the over the top commemoration of 7/7 today- with the military and Tony Blair both receiving undue prominence.
‘Our response to “Isis” illustrates that we have become no more sophisticated than the Victorian portrayal of the “Mad Mahdi”. The difference is that, due to globalisation, we cannot just pound foreign lands into submission without provoking the blowback of terrorism elsewhere.’
This part of Craig’s post is true only if one accepts that ‘globalisation’ here is a euphemism for large scale immigration from muslim lands. Japan, for example, could if it so wished bomb Iraq/Syria/Libya back into the stone age without any fear of ‘blowback’ on its own territory, as the number of muslim immigrants there is so small it would be quite feasible for it to keep them under intensive surveillance. (BTW I’m not advocating that Japan should do either of these things !)
That is the fundamentals of the fishwives modus operandi. The bigging up of the non threats, whilst down playing the real threats. However as Craig has pointed out, the death merchants have been pretty much on the gravy train, and the morons whom could barley spell their name have taken the podium and are busy telling us all how to be secure and avoid being a target of the terrorists!
All part of the charade that is playing out, and apparently is universally accepted.
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Node your logical and cogent arguments are no doubt the conspiracy theories that really don’t hold much sway!!! The specimen you have referred to has a feeling in his/her water and that is good enough to pontificate the unconscious drivel splattered on this thread so far. Fact that the racist overtones of the pontifications is somehow tolerated and deemed acceptable is a matter for another debate.
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KOWN Recollecting the song and dance and the huge march in Edinburgh, and the attendance of Saint Geldof and Bono (what do singers have to do with a meeting of the G6/7/8 (lost the damn count as who is hot and who is not hot is declared and invited or not) all pushing for the African countries debts to be written off. The air of expectation was so palpable that any none forgiveness of the debt would have been facing a massive backlash.
On Thursday afternoon calm was restored and the marchers went home, and Geldof and Bono got back to their mansions, and the African countries debts remained in place and intact, and Bu$h flow back to “liquidate” some more evildoers and bLiar got back on the phone to his bankster bosses telling them all was well and calm was restored.
As for all our troubles; we ended up throwing out our aftershaves and bottles of whiskey and water into the bins at the airport, and to waited to get fondled and irradiated for the sake of appearances to keep the evildoers off our sky rides. That is in the knowledge that our air force would be shooting our sky ride down if so much as a mayday is heard from the pilot flying the said ride.
What often seems to get overlooked in all this is the economic factor.
It should be remembered that the ‘Arab Spring’ started in 2011 largely because of economics (poor living standards).
The bunch of tossers who caused the 2008 economic crash (none of whom have ever been jailed) didn’t just subject people in the West to hardship: it was worldwide, and the Arabs were particularly badly hit.
ISIS came out of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by America and Britain. ISIS didn’t have much traction until the economic crash of 2008. In 2013 the US and Britain started arming and funding ISIS in an attempt to overthrow Assad in Syria.
Extremism and turmoil always arise when there’s not enough bread on the table.
Craig it very much suits the USA/ISRAEL/UK agenda Israel in particular no united threat to them just a whole bunch of fighters with different aims.You then have the military industrial complex raking it in,a total mess for most but not the bankers/financiers and producers of weaponry.As for 7/7 just another “Blair” inspired outrage.
Fedup : “Recollecting the song and dance and the huge march in Edinburgh, and the attendance of Saint Geldof and Bono ….”
I was at Gleneagles. I saw with my own eyes how they orchestrated violent scenes for the cameras. I described it on this blog once before. Geldof is one of them.
I agree with Craig’s post. I think Craig infers thatsince USA/UK policy is not logical, it must be disingenuous, i.e. its stated ends are not its real ends. Of course, what is new? He rightly alludes to C19th Sudan.
I’d like to add that we – USA/UK – helped to create Islamism/Jihadism as a military/political force. The catastrophic invasion and destruction of Iraq most certainly has been the catalyst for the recent “spiral of despair” to which Craig rightly alludes. But it’s only the most recent manifestation of an ongoing strategy in the region that goes back to WW1, or possibly longer if one includes divide-and-rule exercise in looting that was ‘The Raj’ and indeed as Craig suggests, the ‘Scramble for Africa’. The key point is, war is extremely and systemically profitable, both in and of itself and through the inevitable contracts for “reconstruction”.
The truth is, the USA/UK supports religious extremism in Muslim majority countries because religious extremism serves their perceived interests well. They – the lords of misrule in the USA/UK – I’m not talking about the average domestic law enforcement officer who is just another pawn operating in the dark, I’m talking about the ruling class who make a killing from killing – like and need a certain amount of ‘blowback’ because it justifies further “intervention” and confirms the necessary theatre of ‘a perpetual and irredeemable enemy’ in the public mind.
I repeat here some points I made on a recent thread (slightly adapted):
How should Britain combat (religious) extremism? Well, the question presupposes that it wants to, which I think is the elephant in the sitting-room. If it did want to, here might be a start (only a start, mind you):
1) Stop attacking and invading countries.
2) Stop supporting extremism (currently in Syria, Libya, Iran, Israel and also historically in Afghanistan and Pakistan) by covert means in pursuit of perceived strategic goals.
3) Stop supporting those who export extremism (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey).
4) Start supporting those who oppose extremism (trade unionists, activists for economic justice, civil and human rights activists, feminists, etc.) in the above countries and more widely and also in the UK. But truthfully, right now, no-one would trust the USA/UK et al supporting anyone, so probably best just to stop supporting those who oppose these progressive forces and butt out for a hundred years.
You cannot have an end to extremism as a significant force unless there is economic justice and an end to military overt and covert (spook, special forces, etc.) action.
Everything else is simply divide-and-rule by militarism, blaming immigrants, blah blah blah and basically a diversion from the ongoing pillage – domestically and internationally – of the people’s labour and the wealth we create.
Node at 1:21 is correct. There is a tendency to cast the tories as blundering oafs stumbling into results they never intended. What we see around us is not the unfortunate result of wrong- headed policies, it is all quite precisely calculated and unfolding exactly as it should.
RobG @6.22
Your assessment that extreme socioeconomic and political oppression often expresses itself through the prism of religious-based violence is a sound one.
Suicide bombing campaigns, for example, may be couched in Islamic terms. But that does not mean religious fundamentalism explains their goals. As Pape writing in 2005 in ‘Dying to Win’, (p.38) concludes:
“There is not the close connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism that many people think. Rather, what all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal—to compel democracies to withdraw forces from the terrorists’ national homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organisations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.”
The notion that religious belief is the root cause of Islamist terrorism has also been challenged by Stephen Holmes. Although he was writing in 2005 in response to the attacks on the twin towers, his analysis is still relevant a decade later. Holmes (correctly in my view), suggests that this action was motivated by a political cause but expressed in religious form:
“Does Osama Bin Laden want to eject the United States from Saudi Arabia because its troops were desecrating sacred soil, or is he aggrieved, like any anti-colonialist or nationalist insurgent, that the United States is plundering his country’s national resources? Does Ayman al-Zawahiri, the physician who founded Egyptian Islamic Jihad and who is usually considered Bin Laden’s closest associate, want to overthrow Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak because the latter is an apostate or because he is a tyrant?”
(Stephen Holmes, ‘Al-Qaeda, September 11, 2001’ in D Gambetta (ed), Making Sense of Suicide Missions.’ Oxford, 2005, p133).
Holmes continues:
“The vast majority of Bin Laden’s public statements provide secular, not religious, rationales for 9/11. The principal purpose of the attack was to punish the “unjust and tyrannical America”. The casus belli he invokes over and over again is injustice not impiety. True, he occasionally remarks that the United States has declared war on god, but such statements would carry little conviction if not seconded by claims that the United States is tyrannising and exploiting Muslim people… Bin Laden almost never justifies terrorism against the West as a means for subordinating Western unbelievers to the true faith. Instead, he almost always justifies terrorism against the West as a form of legitimate self-defence.”
(As above, p164, 165).
In other words, the goal of Al Qaida and Isis is no different from other national liberation movements—to achieve independence by forcing the imperialist power to retreat. They may express themselves in religious terms, but in essence they pursue the same aim as previous secular-nationalist movements in the Middle East—the defeat of US imperialism and its allies in the region.
Node your contemporaneous data further reinforces the fact that, all is not what it seems when it comes to that July’s events. Fact is banksters never let anyone to get away from their clutches. As Craig has already gone on record pencil pushing middlemen have come to own the world without having performed a hard days graft in their entire pampered life.
We divide so that they can rule, if only more people understood this concept?
“You cannot have an end to extremism as a significant force unless there is economic justice and an end to military overt and covert (spook, special forces, etc.) action.”
I know it’s a cliche, but I’ll repeat it anyway because it’s no less true today than it was when our war of terror began during this latest phase over a decade ago:
“No justice, no peace.”
I am never going to accept the meaning of “conspiracy theory” that the CIA dreamed up and tried to push on us to create social pressure for everybody to accept the lies put forward by the Warren Commission, and later used for their other lies.
I shall continue to insist that conspiracy theories can be true.
If this wasn’t a false flag terrorist operation perpetuated by Western and Israeli intelligence then it would be an exception to the rule. Many people know about Operation Gladio, Operation Northwoods, the King David Hotel bombing, attack on the USS Liberty, and Lavon Affair. There’s an obvious reason why false flag terrorism is a subject of history completely omitted from Western textbooks and never discussed by the state/controlled media. It is also very obvious in this day and age to spot gatekeepers and controlled opposition…….
Glen – ‘If the Muslim guys being blamed were indeed helpfully taking part in the rehearsal, weren’t they a little bit stupid to record videos explaining what they intended, and blaming it on our Iraq invasion?’
Making videos could well have been part of the package. I believe there are many documented links of the ‘terrorists’ to the intelligence services. Or the videos have been edited and may well be fakes. How many of Bin Laden were faked?
Problem solved: NATO and EU want to bomb ‘refugee terrorists’ they created;
http://www.niallbradley.net/2015/07/07/problem-solved-nato-and-eu-want-to-bomb-refugee-terrorists-they-created/
(very good article brought to you at great expense from a ferry boat just approaching the coast of Greece; support the Greeks by making Greece this year’s Summer holiday choice ! 🙂 )
“I shall continue to insist that conspiracy theories can be true.”
That’s a contradiction in terms. The point at which the said theories are exposed as truths is logically the point at which they are no longer theories.
Only if you accept the CIA’s propaganda about what “conspiracy theory” means.
Which I refuse to do.
There is proof 7/7 was a false flag operation … people paid for the mission to occur. The linked video is all the proof needed .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKvkhe3rqtc
False Flag Terrorism@ 7.24,
That doesn’t mean ‘cock up’ can, or should, be necessarily given credence over unsubstantiated conspiracies. I would suggest, for instance, that the USS Liberty, is an example of the former as opposed to the latter.
Mick, do you know the meaning of ‘coincidence’?
If you think the attack on the USS Liberty was just a mistake, read Peter Hounam’s Operation Cyanide and/or Philip Nelson’s LBJ: From Mastermind to Colossus. Or just read one of the accounts by survivors of the attack, like James Ennes’s Assault On The Liberty: The True Story Of The Israeli Attack On An American Intelligence Ship , Philip Tourney’s What I Saw That Day Israel’s June 8 1967 Holocaust of US Servicemen Aboard the USS LIBERTY and its Aftermath, or James Scott’s The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel’s Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship.
You will learn from any of these books that the first thing the Israelis did before they attacked the ship was to jam its communications, both the International Distress Frequency (jamming which is a war crime) and U.S. Navy radio frequencies. The attack then began with heat-seeking missiles launched from aircraft which knocked out the ship’s functioning radio antennas. The Liberty was only able to send out an SOS because they hastily repaired an antenna that had been turned off because it needed repair (and so had not been hit by the missiles). The Israelis knew it was a U.S. ship, and they meant to make sure that it could not send out an SOS.
Daniel : “That doesn’t mean ‘cock up’ can, or should, be necessarily given credence over unsubstantiated conspiracies. I would suggest, for instance, that the USS Liberty, is an example of the former as opposed to the latter.”
Are you suggesting that Israel attacked the USS Liberty by mistake?
Lysias, there are genuine conspiracies and mad as a hatter conspiracy theories. The two are completely distinct from one another. The claim that the moon landings was a fake, belongs firmly in the latter category. The Gulf of Tonkin incident belongs in the former.
Daniel, if you admit that a conspiracy theory about the Gulf of Tonkin incident is a conspiracy theory, we have no disagreement.
The truth of conspiracy theories about the Gulf of Tonkin has to my mind been proved by documents on the matter that the NSA has released.
“Are you suggesting that Israel attacked the USS Liberty by mistake?”
Friendly fire is extremely commonplace. I might as well ask you whether you believe the IDF is the most competent military organisation in the world?
USS Liberty certainly wasn’t false flag. The NSA don’t seem to believe it was a coincidence either. It is alleged to be the reason that they are determined no favors will be shown to Israel in the Pollard case.
. A communication to the Israeli Ambassador on 10 June, by Secretary Rusk stated, among other things: “At the time of the attack, the USS Liberty was flying the American flag and its identification was clearly indicated in large white letters and numerals on its hull. … Experience demonstrates that both the flag and the identification number of the vessel were readily visible from the air…. Accordingly, there is every reason to believe that the USS Liberty was identified, or at least her nationality determined, by Israeli aircraft approximately one hour before the attack. … The subsequent attack by the torpedo boats, substantially after the vessel was or should have been identified by Israeli military forces, manifests the same reckless disregard for human life.”