CLASSICAL ESSAYS • THIS IS A REPOST
Originally published on 8 October 2017
Author’s Foreword:
The Islamic State and the Lost Hegemon
As I sit down to write these words, Western Europe is being overwhelmed with a cultural and social challenge unprecedented in her history. A brutal four-year long war in Syria has spread around the world. An organization calling itself ISIS or the Islamic State erupted violently onto the world stage in 2014 to claim the right to create what they termed The Global Caliphate. The conditions of war and terror in Syria had created more than two million refugees on the move for safety, more than one million of them coming to Europe seeking asylum during the final months of 2015 alone.
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On September 30, 2015 the Russian Federation accepted a call from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to help defeat ISIS in Syria. That call came despite bombing from the United States, allegedly against ISIS strongholds, for more than one year, a bombing that appeared only to have expanded the control of ISIS.
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The direct Russian involvement in military action far from her shores signaled a new era in global politics following the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter century before. The world seemed to be ineluctably moving towards a new world war, this one with religion at its core. Ultimately, Islamic terror was being instrumentalized as a weapon of war, one being aimed to defeat Russia, China and pre-empt emergence of a rival to the sole hegemony of the United States.
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On November 13, 2015 grotesque suicide bomber attacks across Paris signaled a new phase in the attack on civilization. Yet few asked who or what was actually behind the IS and its reign of terror. To answer that it would be necessary to go back to the early post-World War II period and the birth of a new American intelligence agency.
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For more than six decades, a faction in the US intelligence community used, and even trained, various Islamic political groups for their goal to extend an American hegemony in the world. The relationship between the CIA and certain specific groups of political Islamists began in the 1950s in postwar Munich and reached a new dimension in the 1980s, when the CIA, together with Saudi Arabian intelligence, brought a wealthy Saudi Islamist named Osama bin Laden to Pakistan to recruit Islamic Jihadists for a terrorist war against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan.
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The success of the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, to arm and train Afghani and other Mujahideen Islamic combatants, led Washington to deploy the same tactic after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Veterans of the Afghan Mujahideen war, many of them Saudi and other Arab nationals recruited by bin Laden’s organization, Al Qaeda, were brought on CIA private air transports into Azerbaijan, where British and US oil companies had their eye on the petroleum riches of the Caspian Sea. The CIA brought them into Yugoslavia to fan the flames of war there, from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Kosovo. They smuggled them into Chechnya and Dagestan to sabotage Russian oil pipeline routes.
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As evident success grew with each attempt, some in Washington became heady with their strategy. They were convinced they had discovered the ideal instrument for making terror anywhere in the world to advance their agenda of global hegemony now that the Soviet Union had collapsed, while blaming it on crazed “stirred up Muslims,” as Zbigniew Brzezinski once termed them.
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The CIA and Pentagon finally had their new “enemy image” to replace the old Soviet communism when they blamed the events of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington on Osama in Laden and his Al Qaeda network, whether true or not. Washington promptly declared a War on Terror and, under that banner, spread US military bases and its hegemony across the globe to places inconceivable just a decade before. Fear gripped an uncertain American population. They joined in the new war.
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US military forces had their excuse to invade oil-rich Iraq in 2003. There they proceeded to unleash an unholy military terror that pitted Sunni Muslim Iraqis against Shi’ite Muslim Iraqis. Out of the bloody US occupation new recruits for Al Qaeda in Iraq grew dramatically. At the same time, the CIA worked across the Turkic world, from Uzbekistan to Xinjiang in western China, the site of China’s major oil and gas activities. They trained new recruits to a Turkish Jihad, using the illusion of restoring an Ottoman empire to unleash terror and chaos across mineral-rich Central Asia to ultimately open it for penetration by Western multinationals in the power vacuum left with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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By December 2010 Washington was ready to unleash their most ambitious form of spreading radical political Islam. In Tunisia, using the event of the self-immolation of the young Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, the CIA, US State Department, George Soros’ Open Society foundation, Freedom House, NED, and other CIA-linked NGOs unleashed a wave of Arab world Color Revolutions. It was CIA- and US State Department-backed regime change using Twitter, Facebook, and deploying youthful activists Washington had trained months before.[1]
Self-immolation sparks the "Arab Spring". The kindling was provided by generations of Western-supported oppressive regimes.
Once millions of naïve, hopeful students and workers had poured into Tahrir Square in Cairo, in Tunis, and across the Islamic North Africa and Middle East, Washington and the CIA backed their “asset,” the Muslim Brotherhood, to establish new regimes they believed that they could control.
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The oil-rich Islamic world was becoming too independent of British and American banks and oil companies. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, and Libya’s Ghaddafi were combining to create an interest-free union of Islamic banks that potentially threatened the domination of Wall Street and the City of London. Moreover, China was moving in to the region for the first time, investing billions in Sudan, Iraq, Libya and beyond, in order to secure its oil supplies.
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However with the launch of their so-called Arab Spring, a nightmare began to unfold for Washington and her allies in NATO and Tel Aviv. Tectonic fault lines surfaced which were not anticipated. The Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship that the CIA backed under Mohammed Morsi in Egypt was toppled by a military coup backed by the Egyptian people and financed by a nervous the Saudi monarchy. Libya descended into tribal warfare and its oil flows dwindled to near extinction as civil war raged.
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However, the planners in Washington—the Pentagon, Langley CIA headquarters, the State Department and the Obama White House—had no Plan B. Unleashing CIA-financed and CIA-trained Jihadists and their terror in the name of Allah was Plan A. It was their only plan.
ISIS?
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ith a wave of shocking successes, an Islamic terror organization with the imposing name of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—otherwise known variously as Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), al-Qaeda in Iraq, Islamic State (IS), or, in Arabic, Da’ash—scored shocking military victories in the summer of 2014. Well-armed with the most modern weapons and vehicles, they overtook the strategic city of Mosul and key oil centers in Iraq, including Kirkuk, then swept over the border into Syria as far as the border to Turkey.
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The organization ISIS became a household word when YouTube videos—later forensically proven to have been faked using professional actors—of the alleged beheading of an American journalist, James Foley, created a groundswell for a US-led NATO military action in Iraq and Syria.
[2]
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ISIS, later calling itself IS, had been created as a joint project by the CIA and Israeli Mossad to combine psychotic mercenaries posing as Islamic Jihadists, gathered from around the world—Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, even China’s Turkic Xinjiang Province—in what the CIA called Operation Hornet’s Nest. When some Israeli journalist experts pointed out that the letters “I-S-I-S” stood for the English name of Mossad—Israeli Secret Intelligence Service—the Jihadis quickly proclaimed over YouTube a new name: Islamic State, or IS in what appeared to be a clumsy coverup attempt.
[3]ISIS’ self-appointed head, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self-proclaimed “direct descendant” of the Prophet Mohammed, announced he was the (again, self-proclaimed) Caliph of all Muslims worldwide. It was a claim disputed by Islamic scholars and religious leaders worldwide.
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Al Baghdadi, whose name meant simply, “the one from Baghdad,” and who declared he had directly descended from Mohammed, and his Caliphate were pure CIA and Mossad fabrication, with money from Qatar and other Sunni states including Erdogan’s Turkey, designed to terrify a gullible American public into going to war again in the Middle East.
A “trusted source” close to the Saudi multi-billionaire and former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri said, on condition of anonymity, that the final green light for the war on Iraq and Syria with ISIS was given behind closed doors at the Atlantic Council’s Energy Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, November 22–23, 2013. The Atlantic Council was one of the most influential US think tanks with regard to US and NATO foreign policy and geopolitics.
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The same source stated that the key coordinator of ISIS, or Da’ash, military actions was US Ambassador to Turkey Francis Riccardione. “As far as I know, nothing moves without Ambassador Riccardione,” the Hariri intimate declared.
[4]The origins of ISIS could be traced directly back to the Afghan Mujahideen project of the CIA in the 1980s, where CIA-trained assets and a Saudi named Osama bin Laden, along with his Jordanian associate, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, waged the largest CIA covert operation in history to drive the Soviet Army out of Afghanistan and humiliate Russia.
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After 1989, al-Zarqawi moved into Iraq, where he was commissioned by his CIA handlers to found Al-Qaeda in Iraq—the direct predecessor of ISIS—first against Saddam Hussein’s secular Baath Party rule, then, after 2003, as a Sunni terror force waging attacks on US occupation troops, as well as against Shi’ites, to justify a permanent US military occupation of Iraq. In that, they failed, when the Shi’ite government of Nouri al-Maliki ordered Washington to remove US troops from Iraq.
As a consequence, out of the Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Pentagon and CIA created a new, far larger Jihadist killing machine. Its purpose was to create the preconditions needed to bring US military troops back into Iraq, into Syria, Lebanon and beyond, and to remove Russia’s ally Assad in Damascus.
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The key fighters of ISIS were trained by CIA and US Special Forces Command at a secret camp in Jordan in 2012, according to informed Jordanian and other sources. US, Turkish, and Jordanian intelligence were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region, conveniently near the borders to both Syria and Iraq. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the two Gulf monarchies most involved in funding the war against Syria’s Assad, financed the Jordan ISIS training.
[5] Other reports claimed that a part of ISIS was also trained in secret camps in Libya as well as in NATO bases in Turkey near to the Syrian border.
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A geopolitical contest between the US against Russia and increasingly against China was the ultimate objective of leading neoconservatives in the CIA, Pentagon, and State Department. On November 7, 2015 US Defense Secretary Ash Carter delivered a major speech in which he singled out China and Russia. He stated, “Moscow’s nuclear saber-rattling raises questions about Russia’s leaders’ commitment to strategic stability…We do not seek to make Russia an enemy. But make no mistake; the United States will defend our interests, and our allies, the principled international order…” He added, “In the face of Russia’s provocations and China’s rise, we must embrace innovative approaches to protect the United States and strengthen that international order.”
[6] Clearly radical Islamic terrorism was one such “innovative approach.”
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In the early 1990s, during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the CIA transported hundreds of Mujahideen who were Saudi and other veterans of the 1980’s Afghanistan secret war against the Soviet Red Army. They were smuggled into Chechnya to disrupt the struggling new Russian Federation. They aimed particularly to sabotage the Russian oil pipeline running directly from Baku on the Caspian Sea into Russia. James Baker III and his friends in Anglo-American Big Oil had other plans. It was called the BTC pipeline, owned by a British-US oil consortium, running through Tbilisi into NATO-member Turkey, free of Russian territory.
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In 2014 after a bloody, failed attempt over three years to unseat Bashar al-Assad, the ISIS terrorist assaults in Syria and Iraq conveniently gave the US neoconservative war hawks the pretext for their proxy war against Russia, Iran, and China’s strategic Middle East ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The paranoid and obscenely rich Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia and Qatar—aided by deluded Turkish President Erdogan with his delusions of restoring Turkey to its lost Ottoman glory—did the dirty work for Washington and Tel Aviv in Syria.
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On one level, the IS war was about oil, gas, and pipelines to control the vast oil riches of the region, as well as to deny Russia the South Stream gas route to a Europe independent of Ukraine. On a deeper level, the IS war was part of a larger global strategy to defeat the only effective resistance to the creation of a new 21st century universal fascism, a return to the dark times of the Middle Ages but on a world scale, “one world” that would be controlled by very rich Western families whose agenda was total control over the world and reduction of global population through eugenics, wars and terrorism.
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The Washington war against Syria and the US-created war in Ukraine were two fronts in what, in reality, was one war. It was a war against Russia and, at the same time, a war against China. Those two Eurasian powers, the key nations of the BRICS and of the Eurasian Shanghai Cooperation Organization, represented the center of gravity for the only effective counterweight to a new global fascist barbarism, a barbarism the Pentagon called Full Spectrum Dominance and the American oligarch David Rockefeller called his New World Order.
Roots of Arab rage
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]o comprehend the psychopathic, murderous rage of the Jihadists and mercenaries of IS, it was necessary to search into their historical roots. The search led back to the First World War, to Sykes-Picot, and to the historical roots of Arab rage. It led back to Egypt in the 1920s and the creation of a Sunni-based Islamic death cult known as the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood under Hasan al-Banna. It led to the evolution of that Muslim Brotherhood and their profane alliances to various non-Muslim intelligence services, from the British MI6 to Heinrich Himmler and the Nazi SS to, finally, the CIA beginning in the 1950s.
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By the early days of 2015, it was becoming more and more clear that as a Washington war in Ukraine faltered, as a Washington war in Syria became an unspeakable debacle, and as their creation of a new Islamic Ottoman Empire in Turkey around Fethullah Gülen’s Cemaat organization faced existential threat in a confrontation with former ally, Turkish President Erdogan, the Washington tactic of using political fundamentalist Islam to secure a revitalized American global hegemony was failing everywhere.
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The American oligarchs who controlled Washington through their influential think tanks and ownership of mainstream media—names like Gates, Rockefeller, Soros, and Bush, the families who owned the American military–industrial complex—were becoming desperate. In their growing desperation, they threatened a new world war, using their old nemesis Russia as pretext. Literally, as the words of the ancient proverb attributed to Euripides expressed it, “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” By the early weeks of 2015 the Sole Superpower, the global Hegemon, the American Oligarchs were not only lost, but also going mad. The world was slipping from their grasp.
—F. William Engdahl, Frankfurt am Main, January 2016
Author's Introduction—
Brotherhood of Death—Organizing the “New Crusade”
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n September 16, 2001, five days after the shocking attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US President George W. Bush announced at a White House press conference, “This is a new kind of—a new kind of evil. . . And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while. . . It is time for us to win the first war of the 21st century decisively.”
[7].
Later, at the suggestion of various advisers, Bush dropped the reference to his War on Terror as a “new crusade.” Nonetheless, the War on Terror that George W. Bush announced after September 11 was the beginning of what—as of this writing more than twelve years later—became, in every sense of the historical term, a new “holy crusade.” It was to become a series of endless wars and conflicts, of mass killings, and brutality spreading from the mountains of Afghanistan through the valleys of Pakistan, into China and Russia, on to Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Jordan, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and across the Islamic world.
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Throughout recorded history one of the striking features of most religions was their sanctioning of the killing of other groups in the name of each with their own self-proclaimed “superior God.” President George W. Bush’s call to wage a new crusade in defense of American freedom, America’s national security, was masked as a crusade in defense of America’s “God-given Innocence.” The mobilization around the idea of a divine mission was so effective that it had been used by emperors, kings, prime ministers, and presidents to mobilize masses to wage wars since before Emperor Constantine. Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman Emperor, used it to build a world empire three hundred years after the birth of Jesus Christ.
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Christ’s Glory with bloodstained swords
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[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n 1146, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux wrote a letter to the Knights Templar, the most powerful and wealthiest military order during the era of the medieval Christian Crusades against “infidel” Islam. Bernard declared to the Templars, “The Christian who slays the unbeliever in the Holy War is sure of his reward, the more sure if he himself is slain. The Christian glories in the death of the pagan, because Christ is thereby glorified” (De Laude Novae Militiae, III—De Militibus Christi). Those words of death as glory were echoed or repeated in another context by leaders of the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood, of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, and of countless other Holy War sects.
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The charismatic French abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux, mobilized tens of thousands of poor, largely illiterate peasants from southern Germany and from France. His battle cry was, “Hasten to appease the anger of heaven. . . The din of arms, the danger, the labors, the fatigues of war, are the penances that God now imposes upon you. Hasten then to expiate your sins by victories over the Infidels, and let the deliverance of the Holy places be the reward of your repentance. . . Cursed be he who does not stain his sword with blood.”
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For Bernard of Clairvaux and the Christian Crusader Knights, all infidels, even non-Muslims, were creatures of Satan whose murders were justified as acts of atonement for the Holy Crusaders’ sins. The papal indulgence—forgiveness of all sins and eternal life—were promised to all soldiers of the Christian Cross who should die confessing their sins. The Crusades were marketed to the ignorant populations as wars to “seek after the Good” for the would-be redeemed Christians.
The Church, in the person of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, had deployed one of the most powerful psychological weapons of destruction yet discovered—wars in defense of innocence and to secure redemption in an afterlife. Dying by the sword in the name of Christianity was declared an atonement for the Christian crusader soldier’s Original Sin, one that was said by the Christian Church to trace back to the Garden of Eden.
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An Old, Ugly Story
George Bush’s new War on Terror was but a repeat of an old, ugly story. It once more fanned the flames of hatreds and animosities that went back at least to the 11th and 12th centuries, some thousand years before September 11, 2001.
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Like the new War on Terror crusade, the Holy Crusades of the Middle Ages had been wars of slaughter of innocents, of looting, wars of unspeakable destruction nominally organized by western Christendom to recover the holy land of Palestine from the Muslims and sanctioned by the Roman popes. However, the Crusades had little or nothing, at the highest levels, to do with religion. Rather they were about power, the power to destroy.
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As George W. Bush’s War on Terror, in true fact his Clash of Civilizations, fomenting a war between Christian and Muslim and wars within Islam, was to unleash the deepest hatreds and desire for revenge between the West and East—between Western Christendom and Eastern Islam—the template for which had been cast in those Holy Crusades.
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Hordes of illiterate peasants were recruited by European kings and noblemen, militarily guided by the Templar Knights, by recluse hermit priests and others, to slaughter perhaps as many as nine million Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Jews—”Infidels.” In the slaughter several million Roman Catholic Christians perished in the blood-stained orgy of redemption called the Holy Crusade as well.
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The papal armies looted their way from Europe to the Holy Lands of the Middle East. They raped and pillaged, in some documented cases even committing acts of cannibalism, with an utter lack of respect for human life. The crusaders knew that no matter how extreme their evil deeds, the pope in Rome had guaranteed them a papal indulgence for their deeds. Those Holy Wars called the Crusades lasted the better part of two centuries.
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In 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed what became the First Crusade, a Holy War to recapture the sacred Jerusalem and the Holy Sites deemed sacred from the time of Christ. The armies of the pope were led then by an “unwashed priest,” Peter the Hermit, whose “army” was mainly illiterate French and German peasants drawn to the fight by the Pope’s promise of indulgences, a license to commit any sin they liked with the guarantee of papal forgiveness. They had few inhibitions.
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On their way across Europe to the holy land, they massacred, tortured, and plundered the property of any Jew they could find. They stole and raped and destroyed. For towns of villages who tried to defend their homes against these “Holy hordes,” Peter’s answer was war. In one such battle, in the area of what later became Yugoslavia, Crusaders slaughtered more than four thousand local residents who dared to defend their homes. In all, a total of three hundred thousand Christians died during the march of the psychopathic Peter the Hermit.
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When a later Crusade finally captured Jerusalem in 1099, the Crusaders carried out such a slaughter of the Muslims and Jews living there that one eyewitness recorded the victorious Christian soldiers were
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killing and cutting them down as far as Solomon’s Temple, where there was such a massacre that our men were wading ankle deep in blood . . . Then the crusaders rushed around the whole city, seizing gold and silver, horses and mules, and looting the housing that were full of costly things. Then, rejoicing and weeping from excess of happiness, they all came to worship and give thanks at the sepulchre of our saviour Jesus. Next morning, they went cautiously up the temple roof and attacked the Saracens [Muslims—F.W.E.], both men and women [who had taken refuge there], cutting off their heads with drawn swords. . . Our leaders then gave orders that all the Saracen corpses should be thrown outside the city because of the stench, for almost the whole city was full of dead bodies . . . such a slaughter of pagans had never been seen or heard of.
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During the Crusade of 1147, a French abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux, close to the Pope in Rome and the patron of the newly formed Templar Knights, fired up the crusaders in a killing frenzy almost verbatim of what the Muslim Brotherhood founder, Egypt’s Hasan al-Banna, would demand of his followers in the 1920s and later with his “Death is Art” Jihad cult.
Bernard told his soldiers of Christ that the infidels, or pagans as he called them, deserved a merciless war: “It is better to massacre them so that their sword is no longer suspended over the heads of the just.” For Bernard, to kill an infidel constituted a holy act: “The Christian glorifies in the death of a pagan because thereby Christ himself is glorified.”
[11]The aim of the Crusades was no less than the conquest of the Holy Land and the defeat of Islam as the Crusaders and their financiers in Venice and elsewhere quested for a World Empire. Enthusiasm for Christ was a motivating driver for the soldiers, joined, of course, by other motives such as ambition, avarice, hope of earthly, and, above all, heavenly reward.
George W. Bush’s invocation of a new “Holy Crusade” in a War on Terror, and the response of radical Jihadists within Islam with their calls for Global Caliphate, marked a revival of ugly hatreds that went far back.
The leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, delivering a sermon at a mosque in Iraq. His true background —some claim he was a Mossad-trained agent—and even news about his demise remain uncertain.
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More than eight and a half centuries after St. Bernard’s invocation to shed blood for the glory of Christian redemption, an American president called on his fellow Americans to wage a new crusade, to shed their blood, against Islam in the name of “defending American democracy, her Christian values.” The formula was little changed from that of Bernard of Clairvaux.
President George W. Bush, a proclaimed born-again evangelical Christian, appealed to the tens of millions of Americans who, during the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, had embraced a black and white simplicity of a vengeful version of Christianity dubbed Christian Fundamentalism.
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In a meeting in 2003, President Bush told a group of senior Palestinian political leaders at Sharm el-Sheikh that he was on a mission from God when he launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the words of Nabil Shaath, Palestinian Foreign Minister who was present, “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I am driven with a mission from God.’ God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did.”
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The fundamentalist evangelical Christians, as they were known, concentrated their forces in a takeover during the 1980s of the Republican Party, Bush’s own party. They were trained to be militant, to hate, and to make war on infidel Muslims, whether they were the Taliban in Afghanistan or Sunni or Shi’ite Muslims in Iraq.
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By the time George W. Bush became US President in 2001, fundamentalist Christian Evangelicals had become the fastest-growing religious group in America, with churches costing tens of millions of dollars each and membership numbering over 90 million believers. Their organizations had consciously infiltrated the various branches of the US Armed Forces, of the US Congress, and of the Executive Branch of government, much as the Muslim Brotherhood had done in Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Qatar, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and numerous other Islamic countries.
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The turning of a highly vocal and well-organized minority of Christian churches and smaller sects into militant born-again fundamentalists was a radicalization which very well suited the effort of a US military-industrial complex and the US government’s intelligence community in their drive to create an imperial military force willing to sacrifice itself for global holy wars “in the name of Christ,” wars to be waged by those who believed that they were, thereby, seeking after the Good.
The fundamentalist churches had traditionally been strongest in the poorer US southern states, the so-called Bible Belt, an idiom for the largely rural region where the ultraconservative Southern Baptist Convention denomination was strongest. Many other church denominations or congregations, such as the Churches of Christ and the Assemblies of God, were represented, as well as Pentecostalists.
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The Bible Belt was a huge swath stretching across Virginia, Alabama, the Carolinas, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma. Conveniently, for Pentagon war planners and for neoconservative think tanks steering the War State after 2001, these were the very same regions where the overwhelming majority of recruits for the US Armed Forces’ all-volunteer army came from. Right-wing absolutist Christian sects and ultranationalist militarism went hand in hand in late-20th-century America.
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“My God Was bigger than his”
The infamous case of US Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, the United States Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Don Rumsfeld, was indicative of the new culture of US religious absolutism mixed with military conquest in the name of Christ—a very peculiar version of the Biblical Christ of love and forgiveness.
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General Boykin was a member of the elite Delta Force special unit, where he led the disastrous April 1980 Iranian hostage rescue attempt. During the 1990s, Boykin served at the Central Intelligence Agency as Deputy Director of Special Activities and was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General. He was later made Deputy Director for Operations, Readiness, and Mobilization and assigned to the Army Staff in the Pentagon. In June 2003, he was appointed Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, where he played a key role in fabricating the fraudulent intelligence alleging proof that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, the basis on which Congress voted to give the President authority to declare war on Iraq in 2003.
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Boykin, a radical born again Christian from North Carolina’s rural Bible Belt land, told CNN, after he had led the disastrous Mogadishu mission in the early 1990s against Muslim forces under Osman Atto, that the Muslim warlord had given an interview on CNN. Boykin related the remarks of Osman Otto: “He laughed at us, and he said, ‘They’ll never get me because Allah will protect me. Allah will protect me.’” “Well, you know what?” Boykin told CNN, “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”
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In June 2003, General Boykin declared to a journalist, “The enemy is a spiritual enemy. He’s called the principality of darkness. The enemy is a guy called Satan.” He later stated in words that almost verbatim echoed the words, in another context, of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna: “We will never walk away from Israel… Many of us are worried about heaven. Heaven is your reward. You are here as soldiers to take on the enemy.”
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Then, Boykin added, “But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. . . . If there is no God, there is no hope. Don’t let the media, the liberals, sway you in your faith. Pray for America, and we will be victorious.”
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His words bordered on violation of the US Constitutional concept of separation of church and state, but Boykin was openly defended by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, by President George W. Bush, and by the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
[16] It was an indication of how pervasive and useful the influence of the born-again Christian Right within the higher ranks of the US military had become.
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One analyst of the phenomenon of American Christian right politics noted that the true believers demanded “an American foreign policy based on militant nationalism as an almost holy virtue. They believe that the United States has been specially dedicated to Jesus Christ for His purposes. To question or resist militant nationalism is to be unpatriotic, and to be unpatriotic is to be un-Christian in the eyes of the religious right.”
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[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen George W. Bush declared a War on Terror after September 11, 2001, few doubted that he meant a War on Islam, what Samuel Huntington had earlier referred to as a Clash of Civilizations.
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In a private meeting with
French President Jacques Chirac in 2003 on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, Bush told the French President a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated. He added that in Genesis and Ezekiel, Gog and Magog were forces of the Apocalypse who were prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy: “And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle . . . and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”
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Logos of the Bushes’ Yale Secret Society Skull and Bones and SS Totenkopf.
Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac, “This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”
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What George W. Bush did not tell Chirac was that he, like his father, George H. W. Bush, had been inducted into an occult secret society at the elite Yale University, where they had studied. Known as Skull and Bones Club, its actual name was The Brotherhood of Death, much like the Nazi SS Totenkopf or the Muslim Brotherhood, as will become clear later in this book.
Each inductee in Skull and Bones was given a code name on joining and performing what were described as satanic rites of passage. George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush’s father, had the code name Magog.
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[dropcap]G[/dropcap]eorge W. Bush told Chirac only half of the story. America’s War on Islam, thinly disguised as its War on Terror, had been planned from the start to create a fundamentalist, radical, political Islam reaction that would sweep across the Muslim peoples of Eurasia and beyond.
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In Tunisia on December 18, 2010, what was to become the greatest wave of mass protests for regime change across the entirety of the Islamic world began. The Tunisian protests forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee with family and hordes of jewels to Saudi Arabia. Soon, demonstrators streamed into the streets of Cairo in neighboring Egypt, guided by Facebook, Twitter, and other social media messaging. With a fury that spread like a wildfire, protests broke out in Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, and the far away Xinjiang Province in China. They spread to Chechnya and Dagestan in Russia and to Myanmar, Indonesia, and Pakistan, demanding everything from reform to regime change to total revolution.
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When citizen protests failed to gain the desired results, NATO was forced to reveal its hidden role and impose a no-fly zone in Libya, complete with massive civilian bombings to oust Muammar Qaddafi from power.
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Yet rather than usher in a springtime across the Arab world of genuine democracy, as millions had hoped and demonstrated for, the mass protests soon gave way to seizure of power by a well-organized secret society across the Islamic world known as the Muslim Brotherhood. The fight for democracy by young students and others was rapidly being transformed into a seizure of power by a highly-organized spectrum of Islamic groups whose Sharia agenda was every bit as totalitarian or fascist as that of Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany.
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In 2007, in an interview with the Indian newspaper The Hindu, Ramsey Clark, a former US Attorney General and civil rights lawyer, stated,
The war on terrorism is really a war on Islam. Most of the politicians are putting it as Islamic terrorists but what they really mean is the threat of Islam. So the idea of the war on Islam is the idea of extermination of a proportion never seen in history at any time. . . . The U.S. government’s need for an enemy, its search for new enemies is really a way of uniting the country, covering its real motives and appealing for patriotism that is called the last refuge of the scoundrel. Patriotism is not the real motive. The real motive is domination and exploitation, and to get away with it you have to have a rallying ground, an enemy. That is where the military comes in.[22]
As that US War on Terror evolved over more than a decade after September 11, 2001, it became more and more evident that its main goal was not merely to control the oil of the Middle East, but it was ultimately to contain the threat of a rising Eurasian economic challenge to America’s declining power, a challenge which combined the economic colossus of an emerging China with the nuclear deterrence of Russia.
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The Pentagon and factions of the US intelligence community determined to increasingly cultivate political Islam as a weapon to weaken the emergence of an independent, self-sufficient China, a resource-rich Russia, and potentially much of the European states, especially Germany. With America’s global role in existential danger, Washington used its influence over various Islamic Jihadist groups to try to drive new wars and unrest globally “in defense of America’s innocence.” After September 2001, America’s elites had decided to launch a new great crusade, in effect, an American Jihad in a determined bid to hold that global hegemony.
—F. William Engdahl, Frankfurt am Main, April 2016
[2] Bill Gardner, Foley murder video “may have been staged,” August 25, 2014, The Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/bill-gardner/11054488/Foley-murder-video-may-have-been-staged.html. See also, James F. Tracy, Steven Sotloff Video Was Released by Intelligence Group linked to Homeland Security and Washington Think Tanks, Global Research.ca, September 04, 2014, http://www.globalresearch.ca/steven-sotloff-video-produced-by-intelligence-group-linked-to-homeland-security-and-washington-think-tanks/5399200.
[4] Christof Lehmann, US Embassy in Ankara Headquarter for ISIS War on Iraq Hariri Insider, nsnbc, June 22, 2014,
[12] Ewen MacAskill, George Bush: ‘God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq,’ The Guardian, October 7, 2005,
[15] Richard Cooper, General Casts War in Religious Terms, The Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2003.
[16] AP, Rumsfeld defends general who commented on war and Satan, www.CNN.com, October 17, 2003.
[18] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996.
[19] Revelation 20:7-9, Holy Bible, King James Version.
[20] Clive Hamilton, Bush’s Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to “Erase” Mid-East Enemies “Before a New Age Begins,” http://www.alternet.org/story/140221/bush%27s_shocking_biblical_prophecy_emerges%3A_god_wants_to_%22erase%22_mid-east_enemies_%22before_a_new_age_begins%22. See also, Alexandra Robbins, George W., Knight of Eulogia, The Atlantic Monthly, May, 2000. And, Marcus Dam, Consumerism and materialism deadlier than armed occupation, The Hindu, December 17, 2007, accessed in http://www.thehindu.com/2007/12/17/stories/2007121754781100.htm.
[21] Alexandra Robbins, Op cit.
FW 
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report