M Mizzi states that ISIS ‘is a concoction (sic) of the new Arab kids on the block, Qatar’ and goes on to indict ‘oil-rich Arab nations (who) are still playing their old duplicitous game’.
However, he omits to sheet home the responsibility for the rise of ISIS to the US, its Arab proxies and Israel, which is implicated through its support for the Muslim Brotherhood in its struggle against the PLO.
Noam Chomsky says, ‘Like Britain before it, the US has tended to support radical Islam and to oppose secular nationalism, which both imperial states have regarded as more threatening to their goals of domination and control. When secular options are crushed, religious extremism often fills the vacuum. Furthermore, the primary US ally over the years, Saudi Arabia, is the most radical Islamist state in the world and also a missionary state, which uses its vast oil resources to promulgate its extremist Wahabi/Salafi doctrines by establishing schools, mosques, and in other ways, and has also been the primary source for the funding of radical Islamist groups, along with Gulf Emirates – all US allies’. (Chomsky: US Spawned a Fundamentalist Frankenstein in the Mideast, (www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39899.htm).
On October 2, US vice-president Joe Biden was asked about US policy in Syria, and said, referring to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, ‘They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al Nusra and al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world’ (www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39878.htm).
Patrick Cockburn writes, ‘For America, Britain and the Western powers, the rise of ISIS and the Caliphate is the ultimate disaster. Whatever they intended by their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their efforts to get rid of Assad in Syria since 2011, it was not to see the creation of a jihadi state… a hundred times bigger and much better organised than the al-Qaida of Osama bin Laden… A new and terrifying state has been born’ ( London Review of Books,21 August 2014).
Gareth Smith, Palestine Liberation Centre, Byron Bay
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