Libya

Why the Lying Hypocrite Moazzam Begg Should Keep the Great Libyan Omar al-Mukhtar Out of his Mouth

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The honourable Libyan anti-imperialist Omar al-Mukhtar is a hero in the Arab world and beyond for resisting Italian occupation, colonialism and imperialism during what is referred to as the inter-war period, that is between World War One and Two. al-Mukhtar was eventually captured and summarily executed by the Italian imperialists. This is a demonstrable fact. The former Guantanamo Bay inmate, the British-Pakistani cause celebre and political icon, Moazzam Begg is in possession of a tenuous relationship with the truth. This too, is a demonstrable fact. In the early part of this decade Begg felt morally qualified to give a lecture about the life of al-Mukhtar. In this essay I argue Begg has an artificial relationship with the truth and is morally unworthy to speak of Omar al-Mukhtar.

In an interview with journalist Dilly Hussain on the 5Pillars news site podcast, “Blood Brothers” Begg shared his thoughts about the regime change war on Syria in the 2010s. In the course of this interview Begg made two glaringly false claims about the regime change war on Libya in 2011 which had preceded the regime change war on Syria. Firstly, he claimed no votes were held to implement a No Fly Zone in Libya in 2011, or to “bomb Libya” as he says. This is false.  There were two votes, one in the United Nations which resulted in the UN resolution 1973 and another vote in the British parliament to implement the UN resolution. The NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) bombing campaign began in March 2011 and officially ended October 2011. This campaign in effect provided air-cover for a motley crew of treacherous, Islamically garbed, foot soldiers to overthrow the Libyan state.

Secondly, Begg makes the customary rape accusations, a standard western imperialist propaganda allegation, when manufacturing consent for regime change. Continue reading →

Concealing Truth: The NATO Regime Change that Unites 5Pillars, Cage UK and the Zionist Douglas Murray

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“Nay! We hurl Truth against falsehood, so that it smashes its head, and lo it vanishes; and woe to you for what you describe.” Qur’an 21:18

The genteel rantings of right-wing author Douglas Murray with regard to the presence of immigrants, their descendants and the increasing visibility of the Islamic religion in the West have achieved wide currency and established him as one of the leading international celebrity intellectuals for every shade of western white supremacist and bigot. Of course, the essence of his rantings is far from novel. No informed person living in the West could be so removed to note that Murray’s central thesis is an extrapolation of the proposition, that a specific minority population poses a threat to a given western nation. Therefore, the solution is, said minority needs to be challenged, confronted, presence curtailed in the given nation if the West is to survive!

Murray’s fulminations culminated in his bestselling book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity and Islam.  According to Murray, the principal driving force behind the ‘strange death of Europe’ is the policy of the German state during the leadership of Angela Merkal to allow migrants fleeing war into the European Union. Specifically, Merkal’s announcement in late August 2015 to allow a million refugees from war torn Syria and elsewhere into Europe proved to be the turning point and the bullhorn for all and sundry from the Global South to charge forth towards the European continent. Hence, the one way flow of migrants will, lo and behold, lead to Europe’s ‘strange death’.

Adrift at Sea

Yet even before August 2015, Murray acknowledges that more people were landing on the Italian island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean on their way to Europe because in “part this was because of the number of people fleeing changes of government and civil unrest.” He then alludes to another issue and observes the “first year of the Arab Spring was an especially bad time for the island.” The ‘Arab Spring’ in the 2010s witnessed the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. In 2011, NATO at the behest of then British leader David Cameron and French leader Nicolas Sarkozi assisted supposed ‘moderate rebels’ in Libya to overthrow not only the then Ghadhaffi government but literally destroy the Libyan state. It is no surprise then to non-ideological people that according to Murray in 2014, “…the year before the migrant crises ‘began’ – 170,000 people arrived [in Lampedusa, Malta or Sicily]. Officials talk of solving the problem by filling Libya’s recent government vacuum”. As expected Murray doesn’t discuss how “Libya’s recent government vacuum” arose. This is understandable as Murray has written a book endorsing neo-conservate military interventionism, the ideology which underpinned the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. It is simply not in his interest to state the obvious, that a foreign policy he had advocated – regime change – resulted in the beginning of the migration crisis across the Mediterranean Sea and into Europe. As George Orwell would say, the NATO Libyan military intervention is ‘memory-holed’, that is not spoken of anymore and especially the migratory consequences of that specific intervention.

Unsurprisingly Murray isn’t the only one to ignore, conceal the truth or memory hole the British led campaign for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) regime change war on Libya in 2011. Others who have de-emphasised or totally ignored the consequences of the Libya NATO military intervention are ironically on the face of it, those who claim to oppose Murray such as the British Muslim news website, 5Pillars which is a “Muslim community media platform” that “concentrates on British Muslim news but also looks to the wider Islamic world” and the Cage advocacy group which is an “organisation that aspires to a just world”.

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Woke vs anti-Woke: What Priyamvada Gopal and Douglas Murray have in Common

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A colourful Twitter beef that caught the eye this summer in the wake of the George Floyd murder at the hands of racist police officers, pitted the esteemed University of Cambridge Professor, Priyamvada Gopal against the right-wing Etonian author Douglas Murray. Gopal has positioned herself as the British liberal establishment’s leading connoisseur for all currents that oppose imperialism and require decolonisation. She published her tomb, Insurgent Empire to rave reviews. While Murray’s bestselling books on immigration and the culture wars has earned him millions of followers. His book, The Strange Death of Europe is one of the leading go-to books for right-wingers on contemporary immigration.

The pithy indictments they fired at each other on Twitter were standard schoolyard barbs. Murray sanctimoniously sneered at Gopal spending time on Twitter as compensation for her lack of academic repertoire, while Gopal predictably retorted that Murray finds it difficult a woman of colour lectures at Cambridge. Their adversarial tweets were not only aimed at each other but also clearly played to their on-line base. Gopal’s to the “woke” generation, Murray’s to the Trumpian/Brexit anti-woke masses. The ‘woke’ term emanated in the United States to help give expression to those who were historically marginalised and enslaved.

However, both authors have one essential thing in common. Continue reading →

Douglas Murray’s Libya Whitewash

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Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe identifies three waves of migration to western Europe in the post-war period. Initially, migration to Britain and France came from their former colonies, to assist in the reconstruction in the 1950s and 1960s. Other western European countries also invited people from elsewhere to assist with reconstruction. Secondly, a wave of east European citizens arrived in the late 1990s and 2000s due to the expansive reach of the European Union. Murray’s book was written in the wake of the third and most recent migration wave in the past decade which was exacerbated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s announcement on the last day of August 2015 welcoming refugees from the war in Syria.

In contrast to Merkel’s decision to allow Syrian refugees into Germany, Murray notes that countries who were fuelling the war in Syria were not as hospitable as European nations. As he writes,

“Throughout the Syrian portion of the refugee crises alone, next to nobody blamed the countries actually involved in that civil war – including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Russia – for the human cost of the conflict. There was no wide European call for Iran to take in the refugees from the conflict, anymore than there was any pressure to insist Qatar take its fair share proportion of refugees.”[i]

Let’s take Murray at his word and put aside that there were reports of British support for the so-called Syrian rebels as early as 2012. If one reads between the lines of this excerpt and unpacks what he refers to as the “Syrian portion”, then we come face to face to the other portion of the migration crises. Namely, the one spurred by the NATO led campaign to remove Colonel Ghadhaffi from power in Libya.  The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ which began with the relatively peaceful overthrow the governments of Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011 was followed by an uprising in Benghazi, in eastern Libya which quickly turned into an insurgency. Western media concocted scenarios on how Ghadhaffi was on the verge of carrying out massacre after massacre if the West didn’t intervene. Continue reading →

Was Malcolm X a political Islamist?

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As the legacy of Malcolm X became more mainstream, many people from different political backgrounds jumped out of their seats to claim he represented their political trend and their political trend alone. Among the most vocal to claim his legacy are political Islamists. The only way we can assess if Malcolm X became an Islamist or his political trajectory was heading towards that direction is to unpack what he said or did not say after his split with Elijah Muhammad’s ‘Nation of Islam’ (NOI). It goes without saying that for as long as he was a member of the NOI he was the leading advocate of its distinctive cultural, social, economic and political theology and/or ideology.

First of all what do we mean by Islamism and/or radical political Islam? According to the scholar Oliver Roy in a study for the United Nations, Islamism “is the brand of modern political Islamic fundamentalism which claims to recreate a true Islamic society, not simply by imposing sharia, or Islamic law, but by first establishing an Islamic state through political action.” Earlier in the study he had unpacked and defined ‘fundamentalism’ as “a call for the return of all Muslims to the true tenets of Islam (or what is perceived as such): this trend is usually called “salafism” (“the path of the ancestors”).” Individuals who uphold this ideology are referred to as Islamists of one variety or another.

Split with NOI

Malcolm X’s split with the NOI began with a suspension for ninety days following his now famous comment, “chickens coming home to roost” with regard to the  assassination of President Kennedy on the 2nd December 1963.[1] The NOI hierarchy had previously sent out instructions Continue reading →