Posted on 10/01/2005 10:53:20 PM PDT by Gengis Khan
In the months and years after 9/11, it has been conventional wisdom to blame the United States for planet Earth’s jihadi mess. As such, there is a long chargesheet against America for provoking Muslim passions.
Washington is accused of recklessly intervening in Muslim countries, backing Israel, patronising democracy-phobic sheikhdoms, arming the mujahideen in the 1980s. Indeed, in that surreal, Cold War atmosphere, Ronald Reagan compared Afghan militias to America’s Founding Fathers, the editor of the London Times likened Zia-ul-Haq to Oliver Cromwell.
Admittedly, there is some truth to the case against America. The history of US foreign policy is not perfect and the legacy of its ‘‘mistakes’’ is still with us.
Yet, there was another protagonist in the Cold War, one no longer around to blame and, therefore, by a process of inverted logic, seen as blameless. What role did the Soviet Union play in grandfathering Islamist terror?
It suits many intellectuals — wading in the swirling waters of anti-Americanism — to not ask the question. Yet, every now and then, disconcerting evidence shows up.
The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World provides clues as to the links between the Soviet Union and the vaguely left-wing fellow travellers who, eventually, became 21st century jihadis. It helps trace the growth curve from Comintern to, well, Momintern.
While the section on the Middle East in The Mitrokhin Archive II is instructive, it is not complete. Vasili Mitrokhin was, after all, just one man. To piece together a bigger picture, one has to turn to other accounts. Gaping holes still remain, but a trend emerges.
On page 2 itself, Christopher Andrew — co-author of both volumes of The Mitrokhin Archive — provides a tantalising sampler. He refers to the Congress of the Peoples of the East, convened in Baku in 1920 by Grigori Zinoviev, Comintern chairman: ‘‘Delegates excitedly waved swords, daggers and revolvers in the air when Zinoviev called on them to wage a jihad against imperialism and capitalism.’’
At the Baku conference — aimed to win the Bolsheviks allies from among the debris of the Ottoman Empire — Zinoviev used the terms ‘‘class war’’ and ‘‘jihad’’ synonymously. Jihad was presented as a legitimate political weapon against the West. The Comintern deserves Al Qaeda’s thanks.
A half-century later, the Soviet Union was waging what it claimed was an ideological conflict: the Cold War. In reality, it was driven by power and primordialism.
As the Mitrokhin Archive II points out, the KGB’s Middle Eastern foreign policy was, of course, aimed at neutralising the ‘‘Main Adversary’’ (America) but also guided by a high degree of anti-Semitism, an attribute inherited from the Tsarist ruling classes.
East German spymaster Markus Wolf ‘‘found the KGB... ‘fixated on Israel as an enemy’’’, the book says. It was fixation as paranoia. In 1982, the KGB ‘‘held a... conference in Leningrad devoted to ‘The main tendencies of the subversive activity of Zionist centres abroad and Jewish nationalists within the country’’’. It concluded: ‘‘Virtually no major negative incidents took place in the socialist countries of Europe without involvement of Zionists.’’ Hitler couldn’t have put it better.
The KGB decided ‘‘Zionists in league with Israel and ‘imperialist intelligence services’, especially the CIA’’ were out to destroy the Soviet Union. In response, it spent the 1970s and 1980s showering weapons on first generation Palestinian terror practitioners.
Chief among these was Wadi Haddad, deputy leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and, later, of its breakaway, Baghdad-based Special Operations Group.
As Mitrokhin records, on at least two occasions Haddad was given impressive arms shipments by the KGB. Transfers took place mid-sea, off the coast of South Yemen, a Soviet client state.
Haddad — ‘‘recruited by the KGB as Agent Natsionalist’’ — seemed to have pre-alerted the KGB to the hijacking of four New York-bound planes in September 1970. The planes were flown to Jordan, and the passengers exchanged for imprisoned terrorists.
The ‘‘KBG was almost certainly given advance notice’’, the book says, of the dramatic kidnapping of OPEC oil ministers in Vienna in 1975. That was the work of Haddad’s assistant, Illich Ramirez Sanchez or ‘‘Carlos the Jackal’’, the ‘‘spoiled son of a millionaire Venezuelan communist’’ and alumnus of Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University.
‘‘Moscow showed rather less interest in the PLO,’’ the Mitrokhin papers say, ‘‘... that (Yasser) Arafat had friendly relations with the deviant communist dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, strengthened Moscow’s suspicion of him.’’
Set this against ‘‘Yasser Arafat: The KGB’s Man’’, an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in September 2003. Written by Ion Mihai Pacepa, former Romanian foreign intelligence chief, it said: ‘‘In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat... high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services’ priority list, including mine. Bucharest’s role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this... Washington... believe(d) that Nicolae Ceausescu was... an ‘independent’ communist with a ‘moderate’ streak.’’
Pacepa relates how the KGB virtually ‘‘invented’’ Arafat, gave him ‘‘an ideology and an image’’, destroyed his birth records in Cairo to allow him to claim he was Jerusalem born, ‘‘trained him at a... special-ops school east of Moscow’’: ‘‘The KGB... also selected a ‘personal hero’ for him — the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini.’’
Who was al-Husseini? As mufti of Jerusalem, he masterminded anti-Jewish violence in the 1930s. Later, he travelled to Germany, met Hitler and visited Auschwitz. He raised a Bosnian Muslim Nazi army, finding mention at Nuremberg as ‘‘one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry’’.
He was also great-uncle of Yasser Arafat — helping complete that triad of doom: Nazism, communism and jihad.
Illich Ramirez Sanchez:
A convert to Islam since his imprisonment for three murders, Sanchez preaches "revolutionary Islam" - which is the title of his book - as the new, post-Communist answer to what he calls US "totalitarianism".
The book, excerpts of which have been published by Le Monde newspaper, has also raised questions over how it could have seen the light of day as the French prison system is supposed to strictly control all correspondence between inmates and the outside world.
The Venezuelan-born killer also talks about his religious conversion which began under an Iranian mullah, he says. In 2001 he married his own lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, with an Islamic rite.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3022358.stm
Ping for your lists!
You know who's behind all this anti-semitism? The Jews.
[rimshot!]
[joke alert! joke alert!]
Since the Arab and other Moslem despotates which have waged their genocidal war against the Jews (for which they're blessed by Stormfront, Noam Chomsky, and other Nazis) have generally used arms made in the USSR, or Warsaw Pact countries, or the knockoff versions made in China, I'd always figured everyone could figure out who was behind anti-Israel terrorism.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.