Middle East War & Radical Islam

By Ameer Ali –

US funded Israeli War in Gaza supported by a majority of Western governments on the premise of Israel’s right to defend its undefined borders and people from outside threats, has passed its fourth month since Hamas fired those deadly rockets on 7 October last year.  During this period the print and electronic media machine in the West had been waging a different type of war by systematic disinformation and sanitization of Israel’s genocidal horrors in Gaza while demonizing the bravery and sacrifices of Hamas fighters. So far Netanyahu’s IDF had proudly slaughtered nearly 30,000 “human animals” in Gaza and the West Bank including among others thousands of innocent women, children, medical personnel, teachers and journalists, and had pulverized every home and building in Gaza to make them uninhabitable.The war has now entered Rafah a gateway to Egypt and a destination where the Gazan refugees were originally encouraged to escape Israel’s bombing in Gaza. Now Rafah too has become a death trap for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who face annihilation. From Rafah the IDF may shift the theatre of savagery to Lebanon. Amidst all this carnage and destruction, the lunatic fringe of far-right Zionists in Israel and their supporter President Xavier Mile of Argentina are calling for the demolition of the third holiest mosque in Islam, al-Aqsa in Palestine.  That would be the apocalyptic act to destroy peace in the Middle East if not the world forever.    

All this tragedy is not taking place in some remote corner of the world to remain indifferent by the world of Islam or Muslims, which, according to Pew research, accounted for almost one-quarter of world population in 2017. Instead, they are happening in the very heart of Islam, and world Muslims are looking for an answer to the question why Muslim governments having spent billions of dollars in procuring weapons and training from the West and other countries remain so impotent to counter Israel’s bloody madness. Alas! instead of confronting Israel, countries like UAE, Bahrain, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are shamefully looking forward to normalize relations with that regime.  The so-called US sponsored Abraham Accord of 2015 signed by UAE, Bahrain and Israel and which is expected to include Saudi Arabia too is an act of treachery against Palestine and its people who are dying to liberate their land from Israel’s settler colonialism.     

However, the unwillingness or incompetence of Muslim regimes to defend Palestine and Palestinians has left the field open to the entry of non-state actors and armed Muslim militias.  Hamas itself is a militia nurtured by none other than Israel’s Mossad to counter the rise of Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu himself appealed to his Likud members to support Hamas financially and Hamas members were even allowed to work in Israel for higher wages.  But Hamas is not simply an armed militia. It has a political wing, religious wing and a diplomatic wing. Hamas soon realized the hidden agenda of Israel to keep Palestinians as virtual slaves in an Israeli occupied Gaza and the West Bank. That realization and allegations of corruption within the administration of Abbas’ Palestinian Authority made Hamas popular in Gaza, which enabled it to win the election in 2006. It soon turned it into a liberation force which finally led to the events of October 7. Now, along with Hamas, Houthis from Yemen and Hezbollah from Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, all of them backed by Iran, have entered the fray. Several more may enter the field as the war prolongs. The drone attacks by Houthis on commercial vessels carrying cargo to Israel has forced US and UK to respond in kind and their coordinated attacks on a number of targets in Yemen, Iraq and Syria have actually escalated the war although Joe Biden denies such escalation.               

But more than the war itself the entry of Muslim militias on behalf of Palestine has the potential to reintroduce the old debate between an Islamic World Order (IWO) and the post-Cold War New World Order (NWO) under American leadership. The latter was also reckoned by some scholars as marking the dawn of an American Age. But today’s Muslim militias are the products of an Islamic resurgence that caught world attention during the closing decades of the previous century.  It is useful to understand the political background of this resurgence.

Three events of epochal significance to the Muslim world took place almost simultaneously in one single year 1979, which in combination provided an unusual confidence and impetus to a new generation of Muslims who wanted to re-read the scriptures to understand their relevance to find solutions to the predicaments of the Muslim umma first and the world second. The victory of the Mullah led revolution in Iran and the successful role of Basij militia, the entry of Al-Qaeda and Taliban militias to along with US to force out the Soviet army from Afghanistan, and the failed attempt by the fanatical al-Jamaa al-Salafiya al-Mutasiba (JSM) group to bring down the Saudi regime by capturing Mecca, demonstrated to a religiously awakened generation of Muslims that the time had come for Islam to take centre stage and establish an IWO. Mountains of petrodollars pouring into the coffers of OAPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Arab Countries) members provided the economic and financial strength to this resurgence.  Samuel Huntington captured the potential problems between the two World Orders in his controversial book, Clash of Civilizations. In the end, after a plethora of conferences, intellectual colloquia and research publications that resurgence lost its vitality when it noticed that the very regimes which were expected to champion the Islamic cause found comfort and peace within America’s NWO. All that were achieved were todays so-called Islamic banks and a few international Islamic universities. But the thirst for IWO is not quenched. The burden of realizing that objective has unavoidably fallen on the shoulders of Muslim militias. The current war in the Middle East could reignite that fire via the entry of Muslim militias to join Hamas and broaden the Palestinian struggle into Islam’s struggle for an IWO.

Palestine is too sensitive a place to all Abrahamic faiths. But far-right Zionism has decided to make it a Jewish capital of a single state Israel with no room for any two-state solution. Israel knows too well that the two-state solution was only a trick to keep the critics quiet. According to the Zionist forefathers of Israel, Theodor Herzel and Ben Gurion, the moving borders of Israel would only stop after incorporating Palestine in its entirety into the suzerainty of Israel. US led NWO seems to have no qualms about it.That explains why there is no support from US and the West for an immediate cease fire and withdrawal of IDF from Gaza, West Bank and now Rafah. Instead, US Senate has passed $14 billion aid to Israel to continue fighting Hamas. When after attacking 85 targets and 7 facilities, 4 in Iraq and 3 in Syria, Joe Biden said that it was not the end and “our response … will continue at times and places of our choice”, Harakat Hezbollah Al-Nujaba, the 12^th brigade of a radical Shiite paramilitary group retorted in tit for tat manner “that the Islamic resistance will respond in the manner it deems appropriate, at the time and place of its choosing and that this is not the end”.  Defending Palestine has metamorphosed into defending Islam, a dangerous turn. No wonder the UN chief warned of an “age of chaos”.

If Netanyahu’s thirst for Palestinian blood is allowed to continue unchecked while Ukraine becoming the testing ground for Putin’s and NATO’s deadlier weapons world economy is bound to be hit with inflation, recession and even stagflation.  The American age has to end and an alternative paradigm has to replaced it. But where is it?     

The post Middle East War & Radical Islam appeared first on Colombo Telegraph.