Tarek gropes towards sanity.
Then again, Al Qaeda and the Taliban as CIA creations?
There's an old myth still circulating that says the U.S. created the Taliban to push the Soviets out of Afganistan.
That's not true. The U.S. supported the Northern Alliance (enemies of the Taliban) against the Russians, and it wasn't until after the defeat of the U.S.S.R. that the Taliban emerged.
Re: “Kuwaiti Islamist scholar Tareq Al Suwaidian told a Toronto crowd that "Western civilization is rotten from within and nearing collapse ... it (the West) will continue to grow until an outside force hits it and you will be surprised at how quickly it falls,"
Fascinating – then consider the following excerpt from a paper titled “The Impending collapse of Arab Civilization” published recently in The Naval Institute Proceedings. Subtract oil revenue from the economy of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc. and what will you have left. Talk about a rotten “civilization”
“Interestingly, on the Arab League's website there is a paper that details all of the contributions made by Arab civilization. It is a long and impressive list, which unfortunately marks 1406 as the last year a significant contribution was made. That makes next year the 600th anniversary of the beginning of a prolonged stagnation, which began a dive into the abyss with the end of the Ottoman Empire. Final collapse has been staved off only by the cash coming in from a sea of oil and because of a few bright spots of modernity that have resisted the general failure.”
“Statistics tell an ugly story about the state of Arab civilization. According to the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Report:”
“There are 18 computers per 1000 citizens compared to a global average of 78.3. “
“Only 1.6% of the population has Internet access.”
“Less than one book a year is translated into Arabic per million people, compared to over 1000 per million for developed countries. “
“Arabs publish only 1.1% of books globally, despite making up over 5% of global population, with religious books dominating the market.”
“Average R&D expenditures on a per capita basis is one-sixth of Cuba's and less than one-fifteenth of Japan's. “
“The Arab world is embarking upon the new century burdened by 60 million illiterate adults (the majority are women) and a declining education system, which is failing to properly prepare regional youth for the challenges of a globalized economy. Educational quality is also being eroded by the growing pervasiveness of religion at all levels of the system. In Saudi Arabia over a quarter of all university degrees are in Islamic studies. In many other nations primary education is accomplished through Saudi-financed madrassas, which have filled the void left by government's abdication of its duty to educate the young.”
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Of course, as their own civilization collapses around them, the audience of the Tareq Al Suwaidian’s of the Arab world want to emigrate to the west and impose the cult of Islam on the rest of us. Slam the door in their faces.
This is the kind of thing we're dealing with:
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John:
Thanks for the link. I like the Yassin character, it looks like little Ahmed acting in a Christmas pageant.
Now here are the adults in action. And they call themselves a civilization and the one true religion?
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Man, the sad thing is that this Tarek chap is about as good as it gets in the Islamic community and even he is shouted down by many other muslims as for being far far to liberal....
And even Tarek believes in your traditional Islamic paranoid fantasies about Jews and Americans!!!
Pathetic....
I haven't read the entire article, but I wonder if the bit about Al-Qaeda and the Taliban being a creation of the CIA doesn't have a grain of truth to it. Not in the usual conspirazoid BUSHITLERBURTON sense, but something else.
During the cold war, the west faced a specific identifiable foe, with specific identifiable "branches": USSR, KGB, East Germany, Red China, etc etc. In the war on Islamofascism, the foe is a lot harder to define. I am certainly open to the idea that Al-Qaeda etc, as the archetypal Terrorist Organizations Inc., are "creations" of the CIA--which is to say, their existence as some sort of Y2K version of the KGB is a fiction.
Regrettably I think these organizations exist as ill defined and amorphous blobs of hate. Where once we could have destroyed the KGB by assassinating all of its leadership, we will never be able to destroy Al Qaeda in the same way, because it doesn't have anything like the same structure. Every Islamofascist nutbar who hates the West is unofficially a "member" of Al Qaeda, without being in any formal way attached to any command structure. Sure, bin Laden and his "lieutenants" have a lot of influence on other putative terrorists, but they don't pull the strings the way Putin used to in the USSR.
All of which is a long way of saying: it's going to be considerably harder to beat Al Q than it was to defeat the USSR.
Anon: The US did support the Afghan mujahedin against the Soviets (though most of the aid went through the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence Directorate--ISID). However al Qaeda did not exist at the time of war against the Soviets. It was formed later by bin Laden (who was not helped by the US when he in Afstan during the anti-Soviet war which ended in 1989).
The Taliban moreover were not even formed until after the fall of the Afghan communist government itself in 1992. ISID was the backer of the Taliban--who originated in madrassas in Pakistan for Afghan refugees--not the CIA.
How short memories are.
Mark
Ottawa
Hmm... did the CIA also create:
Abu Nidal Organization
Abu Sayyaf Group
Al Jihad
Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya
Al-Ittihad Al-Islam
Ansar al-Islam
Armed Islamic Group
Asbat Al-Ansar
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
Harakat ul-Mudjahidin
Islamic Army of Aden
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
Jaish-e-Mohammed
Jemaah Islamiyyah
Salafist Group for Call and Combat
Vanguards of Conquest
??
Also of note -
Richard Miniter being interviewed about his book "Disinformation":
Yes, the CIA funded Afghans fighting for their country against the Soviets, but virtually all of that CIA money went through the ISI, Pakistan's feared intelligence service. The money was earmarked for seven different factions of the resistance — all of them Afghan. Meanwhile, the Saudis funded a separate and parallel program for Muslim radicals drawn from across the Muslim world. Bottom line: Bin Laden was funded by the Saudis, not by us. I interviewed all three of the CIA station chiefs responsible for managing the Afghan war. All denied that any CIA money went to any Arabs, let alone bin Laden. I also pored over every bin Laden interview conducted in any language from the 1980s to today. In every single instance bin Laden is asked about CIA money, he denies it.
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