[whataretheysaying] Mary Madigan: Is it "terrorism, " "Islamofascism" or just plain vanilla fascism?
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Mon Oct 8 18:51:49 EDT 2007
Posted by Mary Madigan:
Is it "terrorism," "Islamofascism" or just plain vanilla fascism?
http://whataretheysaying.powerblogs.com/posts/1191883577.shtml
Seablogger Alan Sullivan links to [1]this study of the current
political supremacist movement in the Middle East, [2]saying:
Itâs hard to kill a religion â and Aryan supremacism was
consciously, if sometimes cynically contrived from pagan sources.
Crushed in Russia and the West, the Nazi movement seemed to be over
by the late Forties. A handful of escapees reached South America,
where Paraguay remains a little dodgy to this day. But the abiding
Nazification of the Middle East was not recognized. Now some
scholars have worked through German archives and found that the
"remarkable similarity between Nazi propaganda that was broadcast
into the Middle East and the treatises of todayâs terrorists is not
accidental."
According to [3]Mallmann and Cuppers' study:
With the defeat of El Alamein in November 1942, it was clear that
the German military invasion of the Middle East would not
materialize. The Nazi government therefore concentrated German
policy on mobilizing "the Arab resistance." In this way the advance
of the Allied armies could be hindered (though not stopped). The
connection of all this to the Jews, however, soon embodied itself
in the everyday consciousness of the masses. "What do the Americans
want? They want to help the Jews," was the type of propaganda the
Nazis were spreading at that point. "Take up weapons, where you
find them. Do damage to the cause to the enemy, wherever you can."
As Mallmann and Cuppers write, the "remarkable similarity between
Nazi propaganda that was broadcast into the Middle East and the
treatises of today's terrorists is not accidental;" the one is the
ancestor of the other. Mallmann and Cuppers show that virulent Arab
anti-Semitism is older than the founding of the state of Israel in
1948, and they demonstrate what part Nazi Germany had in its
propagation. Their work is based on investigations in German
archives.
Fascism is currently being kept alive in the Middle East and around
the world through [4]the continuing efforts of the Muslim Brotherhood:
Almost every major Islamist group can trace its roots to the Muslim
Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by the Hassan al-Banna, a
pan-Islamicist who opposed the secular tendencies in Islamic
nations. Hamas is a direct offshoot of the Brotherhood. Hassan
al-Turabi, who offered sanctuary in Sudan to Osama bin Laden and
his al Qaeda allies, is a leader of the Brotherhood. He also sat on
the boards of several of the most important Islamic financial
institutions, such as DMI.[4]
Bin Ladenâs mentor Abdullah Azzam was a stalwart of the Jordanian
Muslim Brotherhood. Ayman Zawahiri, al Qaedaâs chief strategist,
was arrested at age 15 in Egypt for belonging to the Brotherhood.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ayman al-Zawahiri, âBlind Sheikhâ Omar
Abdul-Rahman, and chief 9-11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, were members of
the Brotherhood.
There has been some understanding of the Brotherhoodâs relationship
to Islamist groups, and of those ties even in the United States. In
2003 Richard Clarke said âthe issue of terrorist financing in the
United States is a fundamental example of the shared infrastructure
levered by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda, all of which enjoy a
significant degree of cooperation and coordination within our
borders. The common link here is the extremist Muslim
Brotherhoodâall these organizations are descendants of the
membership and ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.â[5] However,
this understanding has not taken root in the intelligence, law
enforcement and policy communities, nor has the financial network
of the Brotherhood come under intense scrutiny.
The Muslim Brotherhood is mostly financed by petrodollars from our
allies in the Gulf, so it's no surprise that our scrutiny of them is
less than intense.
What we call Arab Nationalism, Islamofascism, terrorism, or "our Saudi
allies" is is really Naziism, strategically and tactically modified
for a militarily weak group of nations. Instead of pincer movements
and Blitzkrieg, they have:
"Take up weapons, where you find them. Do damage to the cause to
the enemy, wherever you can."
This new fascism uses Islam as a recruiting tool, just as the Nazis
used German culture (and European racism) as a recruiting tool. We can
look at Europe and Germany's history and folklore and we can find many
things that would incite people to violence. That doesn't mean that
trying to reform the culture would have had any effect on their goals
or on their extensive military infrastructure.
We didn't call the original fascism Aryan-o-fascism It was just plain
old vanilla fascism. This made objective analysis of the political and
military organization a lot easier.
Calling this new fascism something simple, like neo-fascism would
probably clear our heads too.
References
1. http://tinyurl.com/34uac6
2. http://www.seablogger.com/?p=8948
3. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=E985B271-A76A-4A9D-9AC9-ED5D84BDA37F
4. http://www.strategycenter.net/research/pubID.102/pub_detail.asp
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