British Colonial Strategy and the 9/11 Blowback.

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Osama bin Laden gained his reputation as a militant Islamist during the Western backed counter-insurgency – so-called “jihad” – against the Soviet Union’s invasion ofAfghanistanin the 1980’s

The main strategy employed by the West during this campaign to contain and repel the Soviet invasion was to recruit Islamists from around the world[1] in a war against ‘godless communism’.

Needless to say, this alliance or collusion between the West and Islamist did not originally arise with the invasion ofAfghanistanby Soviet troops. Its provenance can easily be traced back to the challenges faced by British Imperialism in the earlier part of the twentieth century. Continue reading →

Obama-bashing and the British urge to intervene in Libya

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The current war on Libya largely led by Britain and France once again highlights the shortcomings of the British anti-war movement.

In the run up to the war on Iraqin 2003 and many years afterwards, many of the leading individuals within this movement circumvented the fact that Britainwas invading Iraqfor its own interests. Instead they mischievously popularised the notion that Tony Blair was beholden to George W. Bush. The latter, they strongly claimed, was dragging the former along into this illegal venture.[1]

Blair, they inveterately argued, was not a co-partner, co-conspirator and co-leader in this military enterprise but a mere “poodle”.[2] The poor soul had his innate and natural sincerity taken advantage of by big bad George W. Bush; he was seduced by the power of a photo-op on the Oval office’s green lawn and at times he was even “stabbed in the back” for Continue reading →

From Balfour to Nakba: How Britain Denied Democracy so Palestinians could be Ethnically Cleansed

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“The British government have promised that what is called the Zionist movement shall have a fair chance in this country, and the British Government will do what is necessary to secure that fair chance…We cannot tolerate the expropriation of one set of people by another or the violent trampling down of one set of national ideals for the sake of erecting another…”

Winston S. Churchill to an Arab delegation, 30 March 1921.[1]

“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time…I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia…I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, ‘The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here’. They had not the right, nor had they the power.”

Winston S. Churchill to the Peel Commission on Palestine, 12th March 1937.[2]

***

By the end of the official British presence inPalestinein mid May 1948, four hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs Continue reading →

Unpacking Imperial Britain’s Islamists.

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Imperial Britain duplicitously completed its control of the Middle East during World War one with the famous ‘Arab Revolt’. Sharif Hussain, the leader of the north-western Hijaz region of Arabian peninsula, was given the strong impression that Britain would support an independent and unified Arab state in exchange for support against the Ottoman Caliphate, which had taken the side of Germany. This strong impression is mainly contained in the Hussain-Macmahon letters.[1] 

Imperial Britain, of course, literally had other ideas. Simultaneously and unbeknown to Sharif Hussain, Britain had also made a commitment with France and Tsarist Russia to jointly carve up the Ottoman Caliphate as well as a commitment to “facilitate” the creation of “Jewish National Home” to a small band of European Zionists in Palestine. Continue reading →

The Rise of North Yemeni Islamism in Birmingham, UK.

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One of the reasons generally given for the rise of extreme Islamism is the Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967 in the six day war.

It is theorised that, from this defeat (or Naksa as the Arabs refer to it), loomed the beginning of the end of Arab Nationalism and other, largely secular ideologies, which had hitherto led the struggle to liberate the Middle East from western domination and zionist colonialism. This defeat created the vacuum political Islamism has supposedly filled since.

This theory tends to be strongly insinuated at and espoused by British writers such as Seamus Milne, Jason Burke and the late Chris Harman.[1]

The theory overlooks one very important British initiated strategy[2] played out in the Middle East and South East Asia during the Cold War. Continue reading →