UPDATE: How the British Foreign Office arms and funds militant Islam
(I am updating this entry to alert readers to another very important piece on the subject of Britain’s failure to confront Islamic radicalism by Douglas Murray. See below)
If it sometimes seems perverse that the British Foreign Office should adopt such a positive stance on terror groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, it is nonetheless important to be reminded that the British government has a long and depressing history of outright support for Islamist terror groups throughout the world. Just such a reminder is provided today in a stunning piece of writing by Mark Curtis, whose book Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam was published last week.
Writing in the Guardian — an irony that I will come to in a moment — Curtis explains how an approach characterised by myopic short-termism has engendered a culture among policy makers in Whitehall — a shorthand term for the British government named after the central London street on which many ministries are located — whereby Britain has ended up supporting Islamist groups who subsequently bomb us:
“Two of the four London bombers [who struck London five years ago tomorrow],” he says, “were trained in Pakistani camps run by the Harkat ul-Mujahideen (HUM) terrorist group, which has long been sponsored by Pakistan to fight Indian forces in Kashmir. Britain not only arms and trains Pakistan but in the past provided covert aid benefiting the HUM.”
And, he adds:
“This dependence on militant Islamists to achieve foreign policy objectives is an echo of the past, when such collusion was aimed at controlling oil resources and overthrowing nationalist governments.”
In another must read piece today, this time in the Daily Telegraph by Douglas Murray, director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, the sense in which the British government and all the main parties are mired in denial is starkly explained:
“Our police and Security Service continue to do the hard work of preventing actual attacks, and have been remarkably successful. Yet for the past five years the major political parties have failed in their principal task, which should be to argue for British values. MPs who have spoken out frankly have been silenced or reprimanded by their parties. Outspoken critics of radical Islam have been sidelined or ignored.
“Senior counter-terrorism officials have made clear that it is a matter of “when” not “if” the next July 7 occurs. By engaging extremists and sidelining not just progressive Muslims but also the mainstream opinions of British society, government has done much to store up far more problems in the future. In the long run, is it better for Britain to Islamicise or for Islam to become more British? Any government worthy of governing Britain should be able to answer that clearly.”
But apparently, they cannot. Coming back to Curtis in the Guardian, the extent of collaboration with extremists emerges as breathtaking:
“Britain had first covertly funded the Muslim Brotherhood, a new radical force with a terrorist wing, in 1942, and further links were made with the organisation after Nasser’s revolution. By 1956, when Britain invaded Egypt, contacts were developed as part of plans to overthrow Nasser. Indeed, the invasion was undertaken in the knowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood might form the new regime. After Nasser died in 1970, and the pro-western president Anwar Sadat secretly sponsored militant Islamist cells to counter nationalists and communists, British officials were still describing the Brotherhood as “a potentially handy weapon” for the regime.”
Now, it is easy to be wise with hindsight. Prior to 9/11 most of us were blind to the threat posed by militant Islam, and it would be disingenuous to retrospectively lambast policy makers who did not have the knowledge that we possess today. But that is not Curtis’s point. The point he is making is that even today the British government shows little sign of having woken up to the dangers that radical Islam poses:
“In the occupation of southern Iraq, Britain’s weak position led to conniving with Shia militias. Liberal, secular forces were bypassed after the invasion, and when Britain withdrew its combat forces it in effect handed responsibility for “security” to these militias. The irony is that Britain’s favoured collaborator, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, has long been Iran’s favoured vehicle for its policy in Iraq. Britain also continues its deep alliance with a Pakistan that is the main protector of the Taliban, and does little to press Islamabad to end its support for the jihad in Kashmir. Thus, in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Whitehall has been in the bizarre situation of being allied to its enemy.”
The wider point here concerns the sheer futility of building a foreign policy on a “realist” agenda which turns out not to be realistic at all. Detaching our foreign relations from liberal democratic principles is actually dangerous, as I and others have been saying for years.
But, in pushing our arguments thus, we have been going right up against apologists for Islamism in the Guardian newspaper (mainly) and proponents of appeasement in the British Foreign Ofice who now control much of the country’s foreign policy establishment.
Both institutions were scathing about the democracy agenda of George W. Bush and turned the word “neo-con” into nothing less than a term of abuse to be thrown in the direction of anyone advocating a robust foreign policy approach which made democratisation and opposition to appeasement the centre-pieces of its agenda.
How ironic that it should be the Guardian newspaper that ends up giving space to an author whose research disproves all of that paper’s most treasured pieties and prejudices.
July 6th, 2010 at 3:56 pm
“Prior to 9/11 most of us were blind to the threat posed by militant Islam,…” They well damn shouldn’t have been! Crucial signals were there already. 1982 (if I am not mistaken, or +_ 1 year) Hezbollah muredered almost 300 American soliders in Beirut, 300!, then smaller individual terrorists stroke at different parts in the world and far from just being linked to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Then there was the mass-killings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam (Kenya and Tanzania, respectively) targeting the US Embassies, then USS cole with 17 muredered American Mariners in the Gulf.
Apart from bashing Britain, the US policy-makers and conuetr-terror agency potentates are hardly better. They are also foolish coneceited buffoons as well! I remember the Hadrtalk interview with a certain ex-CIA operative Mr. Baer (or Bär…) stating that Iran should outright be allowed to develop the bomb. No, this buffoonery seems to be enedmic in the West, or precisely in Anglo-Saxon circles.
And here will come the punch line to it all.
Both the Americans and the British are stupid amateurs and untalented idiots, I1m very sorry, compared to the often intelligent, albeit horribly and distaestefully cynical FRENCH who are better, much-much better than anything these two countries manage to produce in the field of avering Islamic counter-terrorism and even taking the very phenomenon itself seriously.
July 7th, 2010 at 1:59 am
How beautifully and inadvertently the first comment to that Guardian article demonstrates perfidious Albion still playing the Great Game:
——–
WeAreTheWorld
5 Jul 2010, 8:39PM
Declassified files reveal that planners recognised their Islamist collaborators as anti-western, but entered into marriages of convenience to achieve short-term objectives.
The real world dictates that it has to be done.
Stalin was repulsive, but nonetheless the more attractive alternative to Germany.
We need to act in our own interests. That’s it.
———-
Specially when there is oil involved, or when, by demonizing Israel, he can curry favor with the Moslem world
July 7th, 2010 at 10:43 pm
Melanie Philips took the lid of the British Government’s Covenant with the fundamentalists in her seminal book Londinistan years ago. Had her prophetic warnings been heeded, thousands of terrorist victims might be alive today.
July 9th, 2010 at 10:01 am
This FCO blog, by the UK’s ambassador to Jordan, might interest you, Robin:
‘“The origin of the problem – the arrival of the Zionists in
Palestine, with their commitment to avoiding any kind of integration
into existing society, and their policy of importing their
co-religionists from cultural and social backgrounds alien to
Palestine, changed everything.”
“Under the Ottomans it didn’t matter greatly, in the eyes of the
State, what your ethnic origin or your religion was. But since the
region was dragged brutally into 20th-century geopolitics by the First
World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, things have got
steadily worse for society as an organic whole. We can’t turn the
clock back. But can we take those days as a benchmark? ”
http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/watt/entry/the_one_state_solution
Spectacular British FO hypocrisy: the British closed Jordan to all
Jewish immigration, and any hope of integration, from 1920 or so.
Palestinian Arab Christian and Muslim nationalists wanted a cessation
of Jewish immigration period, and Jews as no more than a tiny
minority, against whom their forbears, at least, had practised
apartheid for centuries.
July 13th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
Thanks Robin, a great book about this subject is “Celsius 7/7″ by the current education secretary Michael Gove.
July 13th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Zkharya: I have written to the FCO to complain about Watt’s blog. Please do the same:
Foreign & Commonwealth Office,
King Charles Street,
London.
SW1A 2AH
Best wishes,
Matt