Britain and it’s Islamists

One of the most intriguing and secretive political relationships in the world over the last nine decades has been that between the British state and what today is called Islamism. Someone I know has briefly written on this relationship and how it began. It can be read here.

Robert Dreyfuss wrote a book on the relationship between the United States and Islamist groups and there is a chapter in there on Britain’s early relationship with Egyptian Islamists in the 1910’s and 1920’s. It was quite inevitable that a British author would soon appear to write a British version of this thesis and lo behold one has.

Mark Curtis is an independent British political writer. He is not one of these who simply regurgitates something that he has read in a Chomsky, Zinn or a Said book and then turns up at a meeting huffing, puffing and palming people off with terms such as “American Foreign Policy” and “Zionist Lobby” and then claims that he is a ‘revolutionary socialist’. Like all genuine political researchers and writers he has written about how his own establishments attempts to manipulate world affairs. He does his own research in that he analyses declassified governmental information.

His latest book is called, ‘Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam’. Curtis gives a brief outline of the relationship between Britain and Islamism in a recent interview:

“When Britain connived with the Muslim Brotherhood to kill Nasser in the 1950s, the Brotherhood at that time had a secret apparatus responsible for various assassinations and bomb attacks in Egypt...

... Radical Islamic forces have been seen as useful to Whitehall in five specific ways: as a global counter-force to the ideologies of secular nationalism and Soviet communism, in the cases of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the major champions of radical Islam; as ‘conservative muscle’ within countries to undermine secular nationalists and bolster pro-Western regimes; as ‘shock troops’ to destabilise or overthrow governments; as proxy military forces to fight wars; and as ‘political tools’ to leverage change from governments.”

The book is out in July and to be honest I can’t wait. By the way, the full interview can be read here.