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.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown speaking to truth to power?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on Blair at the Chilcot Enquiry:

“Blair has always been an imperialist and one reason he fell in so readily with the neo-cons was that they promised to fly him on winged horses back to those glory days again. In his victory speech to the Labour party conference in 1997 he expressed unseemly pride and undisguised longing for the British empire "that covered the world", an echo of his godmother Margaret Thatcher's intimations of colonial greatness in Bruges in 1992. And from his testimony he is still is profoundly a Western supremacist...

...The only "humans" in Blair's story are the Americans whose safety and sovereignty was violated on 9/11. We know all that – more clearly than ever before. Blair for sure would not accept China and India using his example to launch an attack on Iraq. That privilege is open only to white power.”

Complete article can be read by clicking here.

London Daily Telegraph to Obama: Britain is America’s No.1 European client and don’t you forget it or else...no joyous pomp!

The London Daily Telegraph is the highest selling daily newspaper in the UK. It is read by the upper echelons of British society including a good proportion of ex-high ranking army types. The paper is written for people with power, by people who were educated in the breeding schools of power.

Yet last week, on the morning after President Obama arrived in the UK for the G20 summit, it treated its readers to an inadvertent 1^st April fool day joke of an editorial in the print edition of the paper. It was such a verbose lark, albeit a posh one.

It first of all, commented on the near contemptuous disdain that the President Obama exhibited for the British Minister upon the latter’s recent visit to Washington or to put it in posh-boy Telegraph speak, it was “...perfunctory, bordering on the dismissive.” A sort of post facto – “how dare that wog of a President of America treat Great Britain in this manner!” But why should the President of “Change” treat the man who bankrolled the British end of the illegal war on Iraq – a war Obama called “dumb” and “not based on reason” - as anything else?

The fact also that Obama, as a person, has every reason under the sun to despise the UK totally eludes the silver spoon fed, has-been imperialist, of the average Telegraph editorial writer. Putting aside that his own grandfather was tortured by the British in Kenya, the entire Kenyan population, not just the Mau Mau, brutally suffered at the hands of the British in the 1950’s, a period, incidentally, when the current Queen of England was in the early years of her reign. This brutality included the forcible relocation of over 1.5 million Kenyans into concentration camps and no one in the UK and I mean no one, had the morality to bat an eyelid. Professor John Newsinger, a British historian, refers to the British public and media’s response British barbarism in Kenya as “muted”.

According to the academic, Dr.Laleh Khalili, the methods used to crush the Mau Mau were first employed by Britain to crush the Palestinian uprising against the British mandate between 1936-1939.

Returning to the Telegraph editorial, it goes on to warn Obama, not to make the mistake of some past Presidents (without mentioning who), that is “to treat the United Kingdom as simply another EU country.” You see, the United Kingdom is a lot more than say France and Germany, countries which did not unsolicitidly join and provide, “coalition of the willing” legitimacy for the Bush regime in its illegal invasion and brutal destruction of Iraq.

Obviously, there will be an immediate reward for Obama’s correct behaviour this time round. The land that gave America, inter alia, Willie Lynch, will allow Obama to return to the UK, “...in the near future for a proper state visit to enjoy the pomp and circumstance...”

Maybe President Obama could agree to this pompously empty and superficial state visit on the condition that the British Government will provide a full hearing to the Kenya Human Rights Commission campaign to claim reparations for the surviving Mau Mau for atrocities committed against them by Her Majesty’s Government in the 1950’s.

©yam-yam yemeni, April 2009.