generalspeaking

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

The Monumentality of Islamist Dysfunction

They are rivals in the Middle East, each claiming to be entitled to lead, that their commanding presence and importance in the geography fits them for leadership. Each has considerable influence, Saudi Arabia as a Sunni-majority Kingdom and custodian of the two most sacred sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina, has its assets for leadership. Iran, on the other hand, is responsible for the Islamic Revolution that swept the Middle East into its infatuation with fundamentalist Islam.

Both the Islamic Republic of Iran, however, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia practise and promote fundamentalist Salafist Islamism. Iran is on the cusp of achieving a nuclear breakthrough that will lead to its stockpiling nuclear weapons, to match their arms-industry-designed ballistic missiles. Both oil-exporting countries, Saudi Arabia is awash with oil riches, Iran less so, but will become more so as sanctions imposed by the West as a result of its unauthorized nuclear program are soon be lifted.

Bodies of hundreds of dead and injured pilgrims lie strewn across the floor after they were caught up in a horrific stampede in Saudi Arabia

There is also the issue of the exportation of the Saudi version of fundamentalist Islam, Wahhabism, which has stretched its tentacles all over the world, thanks to Saudi generosity in funding madrassas world-wide to teach Muslim children all about jihad. Simultaneously, Saudi Arabian wealth has funded and continues to fund Islamist terrorist groups of the Sunni variety, even while the Republic of Iran does the same with its proxy militias.

Basically, it comes down to Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Qatar funding al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, along with other Sunni terrorist groups, and Iran funding Hezbollah and also Hamas. The Muslim Brotherhood with its even wider tentacles appears to fund itself through the legions of its faithful. All of whom engage in criminal activities in drug and weapons trafficking for profit.

And then there is the trade in human slavery, the sale on the black market of looted archaeological treasures, of conflict-ridden oil installation conquests also sold in the black market for impressive gain, enabling conquest-imperative groups like Islamic State to get on with their atrocities. In the process attracting new recruits by the tens of thousands throughout the world, including the West.

The proxy war being fought by Yemeni Sunni forces and the Shiite Yemen Houthi rebels is just one more instance where the Middle East is roiled by sectarian and ethnic hatreds, tribal vengeance and the lust for power. While Iran supports Yemen's Shiites to widen its grip on the Shiite crescent inclusive of Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, Saudi Arabia has launched and led an air war against the Houthis.

The world witnesses the horribly gruesome spectacle of the Alawite Shiite regime in Syria led by President Bashar al-Assad mercilessly attacking his own Syrian Sunni civilian population. Those who are not slaughtered -- and they now count a quarter-million people who have perished -- are made homeless and terrified of impending death. Fully one-half of the Syrian population has fled.

They flee from Afghanistan, from Pakistan, from the Palestinian Territories, from Yemen and Libya and Eritrea and Somalia, not into the welcoming arms of their brothers in Islam, who will not give them citizenship, but toward Europe, for generous welcome and haven, bulldozing in their numbers the capacity of European nations to absorb the flood of refugees and migrants.

the-great-syrian-escape

The Middle East and Africa and Asia have become embroiled in civil conflict and blood-letting at an astonishing scale. Just as the Arab League has deplored Assad's vicious attacks on his own population, but have done nothing collectively to bring it to a halt, so too does the Organization of Islamic Cooperation confine its activities to condemning Western interference in Muslim affairs, appearing to have little interest in intervening when Muslims slaughter one another without mercy.

In the latest incident with tragic consequences through bombing civilian enclaves, Saudi Arabia now denies that it inadvertently bombed a wedding party in Yemen, killing no fewer than 131 people who died as two missiles tore through tents in the Red Sea village of Al-Wahijah, near the port of Al-Mokha, where a wedding reception was being held yesterday.

"The coalition did not conduct any air strikes in the area over the past three days," coalition spokesman Brigadier-General Ahmed al-Assiri said. "This is completely false." Although Muslims are fond of quoting from the Koran how precious human life is held, in reality the regimes that rule the Muslim world are little troubled at the vast spilling of human blood. As long as Muslims are not slaughtered at the hands of the imperialist West.