By Daniel Greenfield,
The Islamist resurgence was fed by the collapse of two world powers, the USSR and the US. The fall of the Soviet Union robbed the Arab Socialist dictatorships of their support. The last of these, Syria, is now under siege, by Sunni Islamist militias after becoming an Iranian Shiite puppet.
Egypt’s Sadat had made the move to the American camp early enough to avoid the fate of Syria or Iraq, but instead his successor, Mubarak, encountered the fate of the Shah of Iran. With the fall of Egypt, Syria is the last major Arab Socialist holdout, and if it falls, then the Middle East will have shifted decisively into the Salafi column.
Unlike the Soviet Union, the United States has not actually collapsed, but its international influence is completely gone. Bush was accused of many things, but impotence wasn’t one of them. Obama however gave the Taliban a premature victory with a pullout deadline, ineptly waffled over the Iranian and Arab protests, before eventually getting on board with the latter, and allowed the UK and French governments to drag him into a poorly conceived regime change operation in Libya.
The Palestine UN vote, China’s South China Sea aggression and Karzai’s growing belligerence were just more reminders that no one really cared what the United States thought anymore. America had ceased to matter internationally as a great power. It still dispensed money, but its government had become an inept tail being wagged by Europe and the United Nations.
The loss of American influence was felt most notably in the Middle East, where its former oil patrons took the opportunity to back a series of Salafi crusades, the political Islamist version of which was known as the Arab Spring. The rise of political Islamists in democratic elections was however only one component of a regional strategy that depended as much on armed militias as on the ballot box.
In Egypt, protests followed by elections were enough to allow the Salafis, a category that includes the Muslim Brotherhood, to take over. That was also true in Tunisia. In Libya, a new American client, the government put up a fight, little realizing that Obama wasn’t Putin, but a horrible mashup of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Henry Wallace. Instead of getting American backing, Gaddafi got American bombs, and the Islamist militias, armed and funded by Qatar with Obama’s blessing, got Libya. In Benghazi they repaid the help they received from Obama and Stevens by humiliating the former and murdering the latter.
In Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood’s militias are racing the Al-Qaeda linked militias to the finish line in Damascus, while Western pundits prattle reassuringly about a moderate and secular Syrian opposition, which is as moderate and secular as Egypt’s Morsi.
The regional snapshot of the Arab Spring isn’t reform, but a land rush as secular governments affiliated with Russia and the United States fall, to be replaced by believers in an emerging Islamist Caliphate. The Arab Spring isn’t 1848; it’s 638, the Mohamedan expansion at the expense of the ailing Byzantine Empire, a rampage that eventually ended in the Islamization of the Middle East. For Salafis, this is their opportunity to Re-Islamize the Middle East under the full force of Islamic law.
The Muslim world does not keep time by European progressive calendars. It isn’t out to recreate the republican revolutions that secularized and nationalized Europe; rather it is trying to undo the secondhand European effects of those revolutions on the Middle East. The left is celebrating this as a triumph for anti-imperialism, but it’s just a matter of replacing one empire with another.
Muslim imperialism and colonialism were far more brutal and ruthless, as the Indians could tell you, and if the Salafis have their way, and they are having their way for the moment, it will be the beginning of a new wave of global conquests, with old sheiks using oil money from the decadent West to outfit militias of young men with top quality American and Russian weapons before sending them off to die, while they wait for news of the new caliphate and bed down with their eight wife.
This isn’t an entirely new game. Bin Laden was playing it for decades and Salafi crusaders have been fighting the Ottoman Empire and massacring Shiites for centuries. The notion of them extending their power into Cairo would have been absurd, but for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the backlash from the efforts to modernize its former major cities which created a modernized Islamist movement inspired by Nazi politics and funded by Nazi money. A movement that we know as the Muslim Brotherhood. It took the Brotherhood a good 80 years, but they finally took Cairo.
The notion of the Salafis threatening the Middle East and the whole world would have been even more absurd if American oil companies hadn’t rewarded their tribal allies with inconceivable wealth while turning a blind eye to their ambitions. And the notion that the Salafi crusade would ever extend to Europe would have been even more absurd, if not for the jet plane and the liberal immigration policies of Socialist governments with aging populations looking for a tax base and a voting base.
The Salafis, despite their feigned obsession with the purity of the desert, have piggybacked their conquests entirely on Western technologies and policies, from the wire transfer to the jet plane to the cell phone to liberal political correctness and Third Worldism. The Salafi crusades were never any match for 19th Century policies and weapons, except in the occasional brief conflict. But they are a match for 21st Century policies and the accompanying unwillingness to use the full force of modern weaponry on people that a century ago would have been considered bloody savages, but today are considered potential peace partners.
Declining empires want stability without war and they are willing to cut a deal with anyone on the way up who has a large enough army and will promise to keep the peace. In that way, the imperialism of the Post-American politician is a good deal like Eisenhower’s foreign policy. The difference is that a British Prime Minister in the 1930s or an American President in the 1950s picked their battles, while their contemporary successors allow their battles to pick them and then surrender preemptively.
Carter’s Green Belt strategy hoped to build a wall of Islamist governments to keep the Soviet Union out of the Middle East. The Soviet Union is dead but the Green Belt strategy has been revived by Obama in the hopes of using political Salafis willing to run for office to hold down the Salafist militias willing to kill everything that moves. It’s hard to imagine a more decadent strategy than trying to outsource your defense policy to the least evil of your enemies, but variations on that theme have been the American defense strategy since the Salafi terror attacks of September 11.
After a decade of trying to divide the Islamist sheep from the Islamist goats, feeding billions to Pakistan to fight terror, extraditing Gitmo terrorists to revolving door rehabilitation programs run by Saudi Arabia, setting up a Palestinian state, making nice to Muslim Brotherhood front groups at home and then setting up the Muslim Brotherhood with a few choice countries of their own in the Middle East; the United States is less secure than ever for trying to appease its way out of the Salafi crusade.
Handing over Egypt and Tunisia to the Islamists earned us a new wave of attacks on September 11, 2012. What handing over Syria to the Muslim Brotherhood will get us, assuming that “our” Salafis will even be able to beat out the other Salafis who want to skip elections and move straight to the hand-and-head-chopping and Christian genocide, can only be imagined.
But Western leaders have a long history of misreading the Muslim world by assuming that Muslim leaders want what good European and American liberals do. Instead Muslim leaders want the sort of things that even few European right wingers want anymore.
Understanding the Salafi crusades means imagining a society where Anders Behring Breivik wasn’t a deluded madman fantasizing about an international network of knights waiting to carry out acts of terror in a war to seize control of Europe and murder millions, but where he and his ideas were mainstream enough that billionaires would fund them and tens of thousands of young men would go to carry them out while television shows and preachers cheered them as martyrs.
Europeans, of course, shudder at the idea, but they have brought those tens of thousands of Breiviks into their own societies through Muslim immigration and Saudi and Iranian mosques. And they have turned over the Middle East to the sort of men who make Breivik look like a schoolboy.
The Salafi crusades follow those rules and we saw them in action on September 11. We can see them in action in Nigeria where Boko Haram terrorists blow up churches and in Mali where Salafi fighters chop off the hands of thieves and give teenage girls 100 lashes for talking to boys on the street. We can see them in action in Aleppo where the bodies of tortured priests turn up and in Israel where their terrorists fire rockets from the shade of schools and hospitals.
The Salafi political victories, militia victories and terror attacks are all part of the same phenomenon, and it is about time that we confronted it for what it is. War is politics by other means and politics is war by other means. To the Salafis seizing power, by the bullet or the ballot, the one are one and the same so long as the road leads to the Islamic empire of the Caliphate. Obama’s forced decline of America has led to a new wave of Salafi conquests and the war for civilization has begun in earnest.
@ the phoenix:
That’s a legitimate perception and I empathize.
This article however,the way it is presented I regard as Terrorp0rn.
I am inventing a few new words appending that suffix.
EG:
I’m going to coin a new word “Obamap0rn”.
Sure Obama is toxic but Occam’s razor says he simply believes his policies are correct for reasons of stability etc IE he’s leftist and catering to the wealthy classes that back his party means simply that he finds it a convenient philosophy of life that he doesn’t think too deeply about because doing so would challenge his corporate backers in the power elite.
An example of Obamap0rn would be saying something like he lunches with Al Queda on Thursdays and they have fried Jewkid for the entrée.
I see a lot of hysterical Obamap0rn – like Bruce Lee said, sometimes a kick is just a kick, things are most likely what they seems to be. eg. The twin towers were taken down in a terrorist attack, it wasn’t a ‘Bushp0rn’ inside job.
from the article:
” what is an incomprehensible atrocity to the Western mind is an act of courage and bravery to the Muslim mind.”
…
indeed!
did not have to search too far for more ‘musloid bravery’:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/12/syrian-jihadist-rebels-make-child-behead-prisoner.html
no words are available to describe the disdain, raw hate i harbour towards these savages.
paretto principle at work: 20% of the world’s population cause 80%+++ of the world’s problems.
ArnoldHarris Said:
Perhaps when the wives are given the power or take the power to kick them out of the house. That’s happening all over Libya and Afghanistan, Pakistan where women are defying traditional culture.
You could have asked him what does his wife think of that viewpoint, and in today’s age you could cellphone viddy him and send it to his wives and his daughters. heh heh
wage cultural warfare!
The guy is exhibiting sexist empowerment – a part of Islam but it’s roots are in human psychology not Islam.
It’s the basic psychology of the hoodlum, the thug, the fascist – racism, sexism, unnecessary or artificial patriotism – it’s all the same – a means of empowering oneself by abusing and dis-empowering other groups.
Well, just offer them freedom on one hand and nuke Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on the other hand – they’ll come round. I sort of quote from the doctrine of General Yalom with regard to Gaza – peace in one hand and missile in the other.
“… we do have a culture that is capable of currupting Islamic Fundmentalism by offering freedom.”
Max, that’s an important tactic that we may not have to push too hard in order to make it work for us. When Stefi and I were preparing to leave Jerusalem as our graduate studies fellowship ran out in 1974, we started selling off our household goods. We had all kinds of takers — Jews, American diplomats working at the US Consulate in Jerusalem, and one of their Arab staffers. The latter fellow, whose name was Jamal but whom his employers called “Jimmy”, got downright uncomfortable haggling prices with my wife rather than me. In his culture, the men alone negotiate over such matters, even though their wives supposedly run their households. So Jamal acted pissed off when Stefi set a fixed price on an old-style hand-crank meet grinder and wouldn’t budge for his lower offers. Then he took me aside and said something along the following line of thought:
“This is one of the reasons we can’t make peace here with these Jews. The let their women run their affairs, and the bad example of the Jewish women is beginning to ruin our relationships with our own wives, sisters and daughters.” (I still remember that he he didn’t say “you Jews”, but instead said “these Jews”. I still don’t know if he gave much thought to someone being both Jewish and American.}
In any case, I wonder how many generations it would take to totally corrupt their relationships with their own wives, sisters and daughters. But I also wonder how many centuries it would take for such a major cultural change to rip apart the strangle-hold that Islam uses to enslave all of them.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
Sounds OK.
..
Some people say ‘Hey Saddam didn’t have any developed and ready WMD.
Well, who cares! Like Clint Eastwood said “He should have armed himself”.
The Republicans criticized Obama for dragging his feet in Libya and not getting the job done quickly enough. Obama is not fully in control of America’s foreign policy, necessity and other interests often override him.
I’m fully in favour of most intervention whether it is is bombs or creating alliances. Leaving Afghanistan is foolish – we need to stay there forever or until the war is won – it is a small price to pay. If only the American and Canadian public would realize we are at war and we need to fight til it is done. I’m dreading the future after America leaves there.
Things like condemning all Libyan Groups because a radical sect desecrated some graveyards is pretty dumb. Should we blame the Amazigh Berbers for that and bomb them? The Salafists also went after Muslin graveyards and historic sites. We do have friends and worthwhile alliances in the Arab world and we do have a culture that is capable of corrupting Islamic Fundamentalism by offering freedom.
So we should use it.
“Gaddafi got American bombs, and the Islamist militias, armed and funded by Qatar with Obama’s blessing, got Libya. In Benghazi they repaid the help they received from Obama and Stevens by humiliating the former and murdering the latter.”
What a crock! The ‘Islamists’ he is talking about are no more in charge of Libya than the Hell’s Angels are in charge of the USA. The leader of that Al Qaeda Benghazi attack was arrested in Cairo and the counter reaction to the embassy atack resulted in a mass cleanup and disbanding of of Islamist militias in Libya. There are still ongoing assassinations of Libyan officials by Islamist extremists. especially in Benghazi. They are terrorists to the new Libyan Government ,NOT representative of the new government.
And the Arab Spring is not a ‘Salafi st Crusade’ any more than the disenfranchised American Public who want prosperity and an end to corporate fascism are a ‘commie revolution’.
The foundation is an apolitical need for social reform. That is bound to happen in any population under mass corruption and abuse regardless of religious stripe.
Get real.
Deliberate misinformation and demagoguery.
Max, I don’t hate any Arabs or other Muslims. In fact, my wife and I had opportunities to meet quite a few Arabs when we were fellowship graduate students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1973-1974. The ones we met, we liked — more or less, taking into account the cultural differences.
Despite that, I want Israel and the Jewish nation to have improved opportunities to use their ingrained violence as an excuse to invade, conquer, annex and populate with Jews some of their extensive territories. Cheerfully, and with lots of smiles, but no apologies. Because I prefer robbing them in cold-blooded ruthlessness rather than in the heat of anger. Because to me, all this is strictly business in full support of what I think are the needs of my ancient tribe, the Jewish nation.
Moreover, I am looking forward to the day that Jews will treat all such people exactly as I preach. Will that day come about. You all had better hope so, if you want Israel and the Jewish nation to survive. Just in case haShem becomes bored with this 3400-year effort trying to get his perpetual losers to start playing the game like winners.
Maybe some of you readers think I’m joking about comments such as these that I frequently make on Israpundit and other blogsites. Guess again. If you knew me personally, it would give you a whole new perspective as to what serious take-no-prisoners authentic Zionism is all about. Besides, other than with personal relationships or life within a lawful society, which is what the USA has always pretended to be, rules of engagement work. But in international affairs, the biggest and best thieves always take what they want and their victims suffer what they must. I don’t like my tribe to be victims. The only other option is to acquire enough power to become one of the successful robbers. But if you don’t like that attitude, see just how far you get trying to change the cultures of the world. Which is about as achievable as teaching lions to nurse lambs, rather than eating them.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
But we are always told that it is Israel that drags us into war. Maybe Walt and Mearsheimer will follow up with a book about how the French and British lobby has undo influence and drags us into wars which go against our interests.
‘The last of these, Syria, is now under siege, by Sunni Islamist militias after becoming an Iranian Shiite puppet.’
That’s hysterical demagoguery it just renders the whole article invalid. The popular revolution in Syria was against corruption and oppression and not religiously oriented. There are all different groups there and Al Qaeda-in-Iraq has to be sure has taken advantage of the Syrian people being isolated to introject themselves.
But his kind of ‘paint everyone with the same brush’ is unrealistic and in doing so it blinds the sight to what is actually happening and blind the self to possible solution, interventions, manipulations and alliances.
‘to drag him into a poorly conceived regime change operation in Libya.”
An absurd conclusion. Libya is a Western victory, we got a lot of influence in there now, There are multiple and disparate groups in Libya,true democratic ides have taken hold and the MB lost in the democratic election there.
Anyone that blithely supports brutal dictatorships especially for apparently spurious reason based on blind hatred needs a crash course in Auschwitz – they are building their very own oven.
–>
Blind ‘hate them all’ is not accurate analysis or intellectualism. Such people need psychotherapy. I’s OK to hate, but not to be blind.