Must-read article, one of the best rebuttals to date to the poisonous, ignorant anti-MB nonsense from London, Washington and various activists Must we dance to Saudi tune over Muslim Brotherhood? 30-10-2014: ...The ties are longstanding. Indeed the alliance between the House of Saud and the British can be traced back to Henry St John Philby, father of the traitor Kim Philby, and for many years adviser to the Wahhabi chieftain Ibn Saud, founder of the modern Saudi state. Britain all but created Saudi Arabia. Thereafter our alliance with the Saudis has been at the heart of our Middle Eastern policy. The Saudi alliance proved invaluable against Nasser of Egypt, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and later on Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The results in the short term have been effective. Over the long term Saudi Arabia has played an essential role in the rise of al-Qaeda and other terror groups. In the past few years it is pretty widely accepted that Saudi financed and supported ISIL, which is causing mayhem across much of Syria and Iraq. In an irony of history, ISIL may well, in due course, turn its fire on Saudi Arabia itself. ....It should not be forgotten that Qatar is hated across the Gulf not because it finances terror, but because it has stretched out the hand of friendship to the Muslim Brothers. The Brotherhood was founded in 1928 in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In many ways it is a spiritual movement, there to enable people to apply the principles and norms of Islam to their everyday lives, comparable in some ways to the Christian Democrats in Germany. There seems no real question that, like other anti-colonial movements, it was involved in violence in its early days. But the organisation now credibly maintains that it has turned its back on violence for several decades. It seeks power through normal political means. In sharp contrast with the autocratic model embraced by the Gulf states, today’s Muslim Brotherhood is at heart in almost all countries an attempt to reconcile Islam and democracy. It is detested by the Saudis and UAE for exactly this reason. Democratic Islam and the autocratic Saudi model are irreconcilable. For the past five years Saudi King Abdullah has been the Prince Metternich of the Arab spring, leader of the counter-revolution, helping to bring about the downfall of the Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere. I have often spoken to supporters of the Brotherhood about the long years of exile many of them spent in London. It is very moving to learn how profoundly they came to admire the institutions of the British state: parliament, democracy, the rule of law. They all mention their disappointment that British foreign policy has failed to live up to our values. One of the defining features of our modern foreign policy is the alliance with extreme Sunni Islam. Again and again we overlook its often murderous refusal to tolerate even the faintest intuitions of democracy and human rights, and tolerate its links to terror.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 18:57:14 +0000