[DEBATE] : Today's 'Islamic fascists' were yesterday's friends

[Russell]

Today's 'Islamic fascists' were yesterday's friends

>From the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas: how the West and its allies created a 
layer of anti-secular radical Islamism.

By Brendan O'Neill

08/29/06 "Antiwar" -- -

According to President George W. Bush, America is at war with "Islamic 
fascists." Commentators who support Bush's military interventions also argue 
that the West faces new religious enemies who do not play by the old rules 
of warfare. Hezbollah (which literally translates as "Party of God") says 
its wants to obliterate Israel, and Hamas (an abbreviation of "Islamic 
Resistance Movement") has taken the reins of power in Gaza and the West 
Bank; meanwhile, al-Qaeda and its associates continue to carry out sporadic, 
scrappy attacks designed to restore the Islamic caliphate. All of this has 
led one British newspaper columnist to argue that there is a new "World War 
being waged by clerical fascism against free societies."

In a nutshell, the wars over state, territory, and politics that defined the 
Cold War era have given way to cosmic battles between "good" and "evil" - 
between a West apparently keen to defend secular, democratic values and its 
twisted opponents who prefer the idea of autocratic Islam.

This simplistic view of the new geopolitical landscape is deeply 
problematic. It overlooks the key role that the West played in nurturing 
radical Islamist groups, precisely as a means of isolating and undermining 
secular movements that were judged by Western governments to be too uppity 
or dangerous. Over the past 80 years and more - from Egypt to Afghanistan to 
Palestine - powerful governments in the West and their allies in the Middle 
East helped to create radical Islamic sects as a bulwark against secular 
nationalist parties or pan-Arabism. They gave the nod to, and in some 
instances funded and armed, Islamist movements that might challenge the 
claims of local anti-colonial, liberationist, or communistic outfits.

In other words, there is a deep and bitter irony in the West's current 
claims to be standing up to evil religious sects in the name of universal 
values. It was precisely the West's earlier disregard for secularism and 
democracy in the Middle East, its elevation of its own powerful interests 
over the needs and desires of local populations, which helped to give rise 
to a layer of apparently "evil" radical Islamism. What we have today is not 
a World War between a principled West and psychotic groups from "over 
there," but rather the messy residue of decades of Western meddling in the 
Middle East.

Duplicitous Western support for Islamist movements has a long and 
dishonorable history. In the early and middle 20th century, both British and 
U.S. intelligence supported the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the group from 
which so many of today's radical Islamic sects - including Hamas and even 
al-Qaeda - have sprung. Indeed, in the 1920s, the British, then the colonial 
rulers of Egypt, helped to set up the Muslim Brotherhood as a means of 
keeping Egyptian nationalism and anti-colonialism in check. The immediate 
precursor to the Muslim Brotherhood was an organization called the Society 
of Propaganda and Guidance, which was funded and backed by British 
colonialists. In return, the Society provided Islamist backing to British 
rule in Egypt. It published a journal called The Lighthouse, which attacked 
Egyptian nationalists - who wanted British forces out of Egypt - as 
"atheists and infidels." Under British patronage, the Society set up the 
Institute of Propaganda and Guidance, which brought Islamists from across 
the Muslim world to Egypt so they could be trained in political agitation, 
and then take such anti-anti-colonialism back to their own homelands.

One graduate of the Institute of Propaganda and Guidance was Hassan 
al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. According to Robert 
Dreyfuss, in his informative book Devil's Game: How the United States Helped 
Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, the original Muslim Brotherhood was an 
"unabashed British intelligence front." The mosque that served as the first 
headquarters of the Brotherhood - in Ismailia, Egypt - was built by the 
(British) Suez Canal Company. With Britain's knowledge, and tacit approval, 
in the 1930s and '40s the Brotherhood both challenged anti-colonial parties 
within Egypt and also spread to other parts of the Near and Middle East, 
setting up branches in Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.

Following the coming to power of the anti-colonialist and pan-Arabist Gamal 
Abdel Nasser in 1954, elements in the West continued to look upon the Muslim 
Brotherhood as a weapon against secular nationalism and communism. The 
British government of the time encouraged the Brotherhood to challenge 
Nasser, and in 1954 there was open conflict between the Brotherhood's and 
Nasser's forces. Many hundreds were killed, and eventually the Brotherhood 
fled, taking refuge in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other states in the 
Anglo-American camp. The U.S.-friendly regime in Saudi Arabia, in 
particular, provided sanctuary and financial backing to Brotherhood members 
during Nasser's crackdown on the group.

Initially the U.S., in its interventionist policies of the postwar period, 
adopted the British model of supporting radical Islamists in order to 
undermine popular secular governments or communist-influenced outfits in the 
Near and Middle East. This included supporting the Brotherhood against 
Nasser. In his book Sleeping With the Devil, former CIA officer Robert Baer 
said there was a "dirty little secret" in Washington in the early 1950s:

"The White House looked on the Brothers as a silent ally, a secret weapon 
against - what else? - communism. The covert action started in the 1950s 
with the Dulles brothers - Allen at the CIA and John Foster at the State 
Department - when they approved Saudi Arabia's funding of Egypt's Brothers 
against Nasser. As far as Washington was concerned, Nasser was a communist."

Baer said that the "logic of the Cold War" meant that the U.S. was willing 
to support radical Islamists even if they carried out activities such as 
assassinations or political agitation designed to foment conflict. As Baer 
argues, "If Allah agreed to fight on our side, fine. If Allah decided that 
political assassination was permissible, that was fine too, as long as no 
one talked about it in polite company." (There was, of course, a subsequent 
divergence between British and American policy on Nasser. During the Suez 
crisis of 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower put a stop to the 
British-French-Israeli invasion of Suez and backed Nasser's regime, 
temporarily at least.)

The Muslim Brotherhood and its various branches across the Middle East - 
which shared the aim of replacing secular democracy with Islamic 
government - also gave rise to violent splinter groups. Hamas, which today 
is discussed by Bush and his supporters as a great danger to peace in 
Israel-Palestine, if not the entire world, is a local wing of the 
Brotherhood, formed in the mid-1980s from various Brotherhood-affiliated 
charities that had gained a foothold in Palestinian territories. Al-Qaeda 
itself has been influenced primarily by the thinking of Sayyid Qutb 
(1906-1966), a radical member of the Brotherhood. Osama bin Laden's deputy, 
Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian, was first radicalized by the Muslim 
Brotherhood; he joined the group when he was 14 years old, before moving on 
to the more radical Islamic Jihad group in 1979 and subsequently fighting 
against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Indeed, during the Afghan-Soviet war from 1979 to 1992, American and British 
intelligence once again supported radical Islamists against, in this 
instance, secularist and communist forces. Where the Cold War began with 
America and Britain supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical 
Islamists against popular secular movements, it ended with America and 
Britain arming, financing, and propagandizing on behalf of radical Islamists 
fighting the Soviet Union's last stand in Afghanistan before its collapse in 
the early 1990s.

Throughout the 1980s, the CIA and the British intelligence organization MI5 
arranged for the arming and training of thousands of mujahedeen in 
Afghanistan. American and British elements, together with Saudi Arabia and 
the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, ensured that the mujahedeen had 
everything they needed to wage war against the Soviets. As Phil Gasper has 
argued,

"The CIA became the grand coordinator: purchasing or arranging the 
manufacture of Soviet-style weapons from Egypt, China, Poland, Israel, and 
elsewhere, or supplying their own; arranging for military training by 
Americans, Egyptians, Chinese and Iranians; hitting up Middle-Eastern 
countries for donations, notably Saudi Arabia, which gave many hundreds of 
millions of dollars in aid each year, totaling probably more than a billion; 
pressuring and bribing Pakistan - with whom recent American relations had 
been very poor - to rent out its country as a military staging area and 
sanctuary; putting the Pakistan Director of Military Operations, Brigadier 
Mian Mohammad Afzal, onto the CIA payroll to ensure Pakistani cooperation."

Two beneficiaries of such widespread American support for the mujahedeen's 
war against the Soviets were bin Laden and Zawahiri, currently al-Qaeda's 
number 1 and number 2. Both traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 
1980s to assist with the anti-Soviet war effort. It should be noted that 
America and Britain did not only fund and arm the mujahedeen; they also 
provided backing to mosques, madrassa schools, and propagandistic 
publications and radio stations that put the case for political Islam over 
communism or secularism. Indeed, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - who would go on to 
devise the 9/11 attacks - was involved in a madrassa school that was funded 
by Saudi and U.S. money. Once again, Western forces were not only 
opportunistically supporting their enemy's enemy - they were also fueling 
the idea that radical Islamism was preferable to "evil" communism and even 
to secular government.

We could argue that al-Qaeda, both intellectually and practically, is a 
product of Western meddling in Middle Eastern affairs. It takes its 
inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood, that group supported by both 
American and British intelligence in the early and middle 20th century, and 
it was forged in the heat of the Afghan-Soviet war, that conflict largely 
facilitated by U.S., British, and Saudi funds and arms. In terms of both its 
political origins and its early and formative fighting experiences, al-Qaeda 
owes a great deal to Western interventionism.

Even Hamas is, in some ways, the product of a desire by the West and its 
allies to use radical Islamism as a counterweight to popular secular 
movements. It was formed, in 1987, from various charities with links to the 
Muslim Brotherhood. These charities had been allowed by Israel itself to 
gain strength and influence in Palestinian territories in order to, as one 
account puts it, "counter the influence of the secular Palestinian 
resistance movements." Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, 
who was killed by an Israeli air strike in 2004, formed the military outfit 
in 1987 as the armed wing of his group the Islamic Association. This 
organization had been licensed by Israel 10 years earlier, in the 1970s. In 
that period, Israeli officials gave the nod to, and even indirectly funded, 
the setting-up of Islamic societies in the West Bank and Gaza that might 
weaken and isolate Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. Martha 
Kessler, a senior analyst for the CIA, has said: "[W]e saw Israel cultivate 
Islam as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism." The very Islamic 
groups "cultivated" by Israel in the 1970s went on to become Hamas in the 
1980s.

In funding Islamists against secularists, Israel was following in a long 
tradition started by the British and Americans. As one former senior CIA 
official has put it, Israel's tolerance, even support, of Islamic groups 
that would later become Hamas "was a direct attempt to divide and dilute 
support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious 
alternative." There is no evidence that Israel ever supported Hezbollah, but 
their interests have coincided over the past two decades or more, since the 
founding of Hezbollah in Lebanon by Iranian elements in 1982.

As Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, has argued, "Hezbollah 
represented a militant, non-secular alternative to [Arafat's] Nassertie 
Fatah, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other groups that 
took their bearing from Pan-Arabism rather than Islam.... [Hezbollah] made a 
powerful claim that the Palestinian movement had no future while it remained 
fundamentally secular." Israel and Hezbollah are, of course, arch-rivals; 
Hezbollah was formed with the explicit aim of expelling Israel from Lebanon 
by any means necessary. However, in the early 1980s both Israel and 
Hezbollah had a shared aim of weakening the more powerful and popular 
secularist Palestinian movements.

Over the past 80 years, Western governments and their allies have supported 
radical Islamist groups. However, this was not merely opportunism, a bad 
case of "my enemy's enemy is my friend." As part of this process, Western 
governments seriously denigrated popular secular and democratic movements. 
Indeed, from the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s to Israel's 
role in the forging of Hamas in the 1980s, the explicit aim of Western 
support for radical Islamism was to isolate, weaken, and ultimately destroy 
popular political movements that very often were based on Western ideas of 
democracy and progress. Thus, many of these radical Islamist groups - the 
Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah - have a built-in suspicion 
of and hostility toward secular democracy.

What we are faced with today is not a new World War being waged by any kind 
of powerful Islamist conspiracy. Instead, as secular and nationalist 
politics has fallen apart in the post-Cold War period, we are left with 
fairly small, radical Islamist sects - in other words, with those very 
groups that were forged as a bulwark against secular democratic politics in 
the first place.

Brendan O'Neill, is the deputy editor of spiked, the online magazine with 
the modest ambition of making history as well as reporting it. Visit his 
blog http://www.brendanoneill.net/