ISIS has hit the French capital and killed over a hundred citizens with double that number injured. I know the West does the same and, in fact, kills tens of thousands, but this clash of fundamentalisms leads nowhere. The West is NOT morally superior to the jihadis. Why is a public execution with a sword worse than an indiscriminate drone attack? Neither can nor should be supported.
The point has often been made that both al Qaeda and ISIS are the result of imperial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and this is undoubtedly the case, but its not enough. The suicide of secular nationalism and the impotence of the tiny progressive groups as a result of both local repression and decline in mass support has to be taken into account. This process has pushed the Saudi regime to the fore and both al-Qaida and ISIS are under the strong influence of Wahhabiism which is a tiny minority within Sunni Islam.
There are three important pre-requisites to re-stabilising the region:
end of Western support to the extended Saudi royal family; end of all Western intervention in the region; a single Israeli/Palestinian state with equal rights for all its citizens. As long as this doesn’t happen, political freaks and monsters will continue to proliferate.
Nothing justifies the killing of innocents in Paris or in any city of the Arab East.
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I would add a fourth essential prerequisite: dismantle the Zionist State of Israel. The U.N.’s illegal and morally reprehensible establishment of a settler-colonist Zionist state in the homeland of the Palestinian people was a crime against humanity. As the Christians and Jews say, “Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.”
P.S. With Israel holding and willing to use some 200-400 nuclear bombs there will never be a single Israeli/Palestinian state with equal rights for all citizens. The only hope for Palestine is not recreating another nation State but in local autonomy based on the Rojava model.
I was listening in today’s early morning hours to a talk by Marilyn Young, the amazing historian and frequent commentator on the U.S. war against Viet Nam. She, too, said that when the Viet Nam invasion came to an end, she thought we had reached a turning point in the U.S. and that we had learned important lessons. The fact that I, too, thought this made me feel less the naïve fool for thinking there would be a great change in U.S. foreign policies and war ideology.
But I learned after that in my own historical studies that what we did in Viet Nam was a different place but not distinct from our continuous history of war-making be it against our own indigenous population right up to what we have done more recently in the Middle East. But the record extends into Africa and Latin America, as well.
In her talk, Marilyn was covering this issue and also speaking about more recent developments in our drone warfare. Along with Marilyn, Tariq, as usual, hits the nail on the head.