Anyone else think it’s time our governments stopped colluding with radical Islam? Stopped arming, training and financing these crazed psychopaths? Imposed sanctions on their ideological sponsors, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? No? Ok, fuck it, its just me then!
According to Turkish journalist Abdullah Bozkurt Russia’s President Putin has started to name and shame those countries financing the rise of ISIS terror: “I provided examples based on our data on the financing of different #ISIL units by private individuals. This money, as we have established, comes from 40 countries and, there are some of the G20 members among them”, Putin says.
So where are the shrieks from the corporate media demanding economic sanctions on these 40 countries. Where are the masses, protesting in the streets, demanding our government crack down on financial support for terrorism? Are we really content to sit back and allow nations, including our own, to finance terror which inevitably, and all too predictably, returns to our own cities?
Of course, I’m forgetting these 40 countries make up our trading partners. Specifically, the despotic Middle Eastern regimes form the UK’s biggest arms market. We mustn’t jeopardize the lucrative arms trade, our number one manufacturing industry! Without the largess of some of the worst human rights abusers on the planet, how would BAE Systems continue to post record profits?
As reported by Daniel Margrain, this summer, Britain demonstrated its support for the Saudi government by delivering a consignment of 500lb Paveway IV bombs originally earmarked for the RAF. Saudi Arabia’s fleet of strike aircraft includes British Tornados, Eurofighter Typhoons and US F-15s. “The UK is digging into its own weapons supplies to replenish Saudi stocks,” Michael Stephens, of the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), told the BBC. Many of the weapons sold to the Saudi’s are being used in airstrikes ostensibly against Houthi rebels in Yemen but in fact are being targeted against civilian infrastructure which amounts to a violation of the laws of war. But we needn’t worry ourselves over such trivial matters. In fact, Britain has a long tradition of selling weapons to regimes we know will go on to use them against civilians… think Indonesia:
In October 1965, an internal Indonesian Army dispute resulted in a botched coup against Indonesian President Sukarno, which General Suharto quickly suppressed. Falsely claiming the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was behind it, Suharto initiated a six-month orgy of killing described by Amnesty as ranking “among the most massive violations of human rights since the Second World War”. The killings took the lives of at least half a million Indonesians (a conservative estimate) in six months. Suharto then set up a military dictatorship, ruling Indonesia until 1998; no other living (ex-)dictator on the planet has killed more people.
The UK and US welcomed the Suharto take-over and gave him considerable support throughout his thirty-two years in power. Despite full knowledge of Suharto’s mass murder of 1965-66 the UK moved quickly to cancel its arms embargo against Indonesia. In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor and occupied it until 1999, at the cost of over 200,000 lives. Despite this, in the following years, the UK sold Indonesia Hawk ground-attack aircraft, in 1978, 1981, 1982, and 1983.
It’s not just UK arms exports that are at stake. Earlier this year Qatar signed a deal worth €6.3 billion (US $7.1 billion) for the Rafale fighter jet and missiles, boosting French arms exports to more than €15 billion, the highest value France has ever reached in a single year. No wonder President Hollande can be seen here grinning like a fucking demented Cheshire cat. Oh, my apologies, that wasn’t the Qatar arms deal, that was for the official confirmation that France was gifting arms to the crazed psychopaths otherwise known as ISIS! See our report here.
The Islamic State for Iraq and the Levant is mostly funded through criminal activity, such as the theft of a potential $425 million from a central bank in Mosul and the selling of Syrian oil on the black market via another of our regional allies and bastion of human rights, Turkey and then onto our other close ally and oppressor, Israel. But ISIS is also receiving private donations from wealthy Sunnis in allied Gulf nations such as Kuwait, Qatar, and, Saudi Arabia. These wealthy donors are the same terrorist financiers Prince Charles of Arabia was dining with during the summer – dressed up like a fanatical be-header, scimitar in hand, DU-tipped missile contract in his back pocket. See this excellent article: The Royals Are Making a Killing.
ISIS is now thought to be the world’s richest terrorist organization, with an estimated $2 billion in funds. And lets face it they need to be well financed. How else are they supposed to overthrow the democratically elected government of Syria protected by the Syrian Arab Army, the most battle-hardened military force in the world? Regime change is what it’s all about folks, if you hadn’t guessed. Yes just like Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, our terrorism in Syria is called, as before, a plan to ‘bring democracy to the Middle East’.
For the big banks and international corporations, there are profits at stake; ‘we’ need to install a pro-Western puppet in Damascus, a government prepared to ignore the interests of its own people; one more amenable to the proposed natural gas pipeline between Qatar and Europe? Wait, the BBC never mentioned a gas pipeline! Surely this can’t be the reason. Well it’s not the reason but it is a reason. There are plenty of others.
The overarching rationale for the destruction of the Syrian state is the same as always – look back at the numerous attempts to eliminate Egypt’s former president Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein or Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi or Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Small independent nations offer the threat of a good example.
Add to this the fear that independent nations might, at some point, ask a fair price for the resources our corporations covet, especially middle eastern oil. This is why The West cannot tolerate secular Arab nationalism, especially in the form of a democracy. If foreign leaders are not willing to play the western game, providing our corporations with unfettered access to their resources and markets, and if our banks and financial institutions cannot in-debt the state and its citizens to the level of dependency, and if we cannot bribe and corrupt them or subvert their elections; if we cannot stir an insurrection, if we cannot ‘establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom’, and if the jackals cannot assassinate, then by god we will invent a pretext and go to war!
Mike Raddie is co-founder and co-editor of BSNews. He is a regular commentator on RT on all aspects of British foreign policy and other political issues. He is a long-term political activist.
