SMOKERS' CORNER: FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER

Published May 28, 2017
Illustration by Abro
Illustration by Abro

Last week, the US President and heads of state and government from over 50 Muslim countries met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for a rather extraordinary conference. In it US President Donald Trump made an impassioned speech against the need to drive out Islamic militancy. The Muslim leaders who also spoke during the conference agreed with President Trump’s call, including his plea to also isolate alleged “sponsors of terrorism” such as Iran’s theocratic regime and the secular one being headed by Bashar Al-Asad in Syria. 

Basically, the seemingly well-meaning gentlemen at the event were looking for ways to exorcise certain self-claimed Islamic entities, who at least as a mindset, are the sum and culmination of the extremist tendencies that were once promoted by various US governments and European regimes. They were backed and encouraged by the many states and governments of those Muslim-majority countries whose leaders were also present at the conference. 

There is nothing hidden any more about this aspect of mid- and late- 20th century history. On various occasions, European leaders and even US presidents such as Barrack Obama and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have admitted how, from the late 1970s onwards, Western powers and their dictatorial allies in Muslim countries used the ever-willing services of radical Islamic groups. The groups were operating on the fringes of Muslim society to undermine Muslim regimes close to the Soviet Union, or those radically opposed to Israel or to oil-rich Arab monarchies. 

Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia adds a new twist to the potboiler politics of the Middle East

There is also nothing unique anymore in suggesting that most of these once obscure militant groups mutated and became the proverbial Frankenstein’s monsters after the collapse of the totalitarian Soviet empire. And despite the fact that the propped-up militants and extremist groups had begun to target their own patrons and creators after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it took almost a decade for the US to fully comprehend this irony.

After being constantly praised by their patrons and funders for defeating Godless communism, the militants began to believe this largely manufactured myth.

Objective history now points at the Soviet Union’s internal political and economic decay as the cancer that gradually ate away the roots of this once mighty communist empire.

In a 2011 article for the Foreign Policy magazine, Leon Aron, the director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research wrote that by 1985 the Soviet economy had come under great stress and eventually collapsed. He added that the fight between Soviet troops and US-backed militants in Afghanistan had ended in a stalemate.

But the militants, empowered by the myth of their giant-killing victory, now decided to destroy the other superpower: the ‘Judeo-Christian West’ led by the US. But it took the US almost a decade to comprehend this. Even till the mid-1990s,

US oil company Unocal was negotiating a deal with the extremist Taliban regime in Kabul to allow it to lay an oil pipeline across Afghanistan which was to run from the Caspian region and across Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Worst still were many Muslim countries who continued to exercise the whole idea of using extreme outfits for cynical ‘strategic’ purposes even till 2014. Even though all this has now become common knowledge, there’s another element in this context which has often gone missing. It has to do with Israel and how it was perhaps the first country to practice the idea of undermining foes by patronising and propping up radical Islamists. 

After defeating Egypt in 1967 and occupying the West Bank and Gaza, Israel released the radical Islamist Sheikh Yassin, who had been imprisoned by the anti-Israel and anti-Saudi Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, wrote Robert Dreyfus, American journalist and editor of US weekly The Nation in his explosive 2005 book The Devil’s Game.

Dreyfus quoted Martha Kessler, a senior analyst for the CIA, as saying that Israel cultivated ‘radical Islam’ as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism, which was then being shaped by the secular PLO. 

Dreyfus also stated that in 1973 Israeli military allowed Sheikh Yassin to establish an organisation called the Islamic Centre. With Israel’s support, Yassin’s organisation gained control of hundreds of mosques, charities, and schools which served as recruiting centres for Muslim militants opposed to the PLO. 

In a February 2001 feature, Richard Sale, the terrorism correspondent of the United Press International (UPI) wrote that Yassin created another organisation called the Islamic Association which formed hundreds of branches in Gaza. 

Sale then added: “In 1978 the Islamic Association was licensed by the Israeli government. Yassin also received funding from business leaders in Saudi Arabia who were also hostile towards the PLO.

Through sources in the shape of former CIA employees, Dreyfus in his book mentioned that in 1979 Israel (and Jordan) bankrolled training camps in Lebanon for militants belonging to the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

The trainees entered Syria and attempted to overthrow the Syrian regime through large scale assassinations. The ‘uprising’ was brutally quashed by the Syrian military. 

Richard Sale in his 2001 report for UPI quoted Charles Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, as saying that Israel started Hamas. Freeman told Sale that Israel believed that it could use Hamas against the PLO. Hamas was formed by Yassin as the militant wing of his Islamic Association that was founded in 1978 with the help of the Israeli government. 

Sale also quoted a former senior CIA official saying that the formation of Hamas was “a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative.” 

Israel faced its own Frankenstein’s Monster moment when Yassin, propped up and backed by Israeli military between 1967 and 1987, finally managed [through Hamas] to corner the PLO, and turned his guns on his creators.

In 2004, the man the Israelis had nourished to counter the PLO and then treated at Tel Aviv’s finest hospitals was assassinated by the Israeli intelligence agency with a Hellfire missile.

Published in Dawn, EOS, May 28th, 2017

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