Thursday, April 14, 2011

Bahrain and Libya: US-NATO Colludes with Islamic Extremism

Waves News
Bahrain and Libya: US-NATO Colludes with Islamic Extremism البحرين وليبيا: الولايات المتحدة والناتو يتواطأون مع...

5When thousands of Saudi armed forces and other contingencies from the Persian Gulf states poured into Bahrain on March 14 in tanks and armoured personnel carriers, the troops were invariably shown on state television news channels making V (victory) gestures.

Recent disturbing events during Bahrain’s brutal crackdown against pro-democracy civilians, in particular the Shia Muslim population, are beginning to reveal a macabre meaning to the “victory” sought by Saudi-led forces: an all-out war of persecution against Shia, involving assassination, kidnapping of doctors, academics, bloggers and human rights activists, torture of detainees, mass worker sackings and destruction of Shia mosques.

No matter that the Shia in Bahrain (70 per cent of the indigenous population) are unarmed civilians To appreciate the ruthlessness of the ongoing crackdown against the mainly Shia-led pro-democracy movement, we have to understand that the Bahrain security forces (army and police) are predominantly made up of often extremist Sunni expatriates from other Arab countries, such as Jordan, Syria and Yemen, and also Pakistan and Balochistan. These forces are now combining with troops from Gulf states, mainly Saudi Arabia, in military operations to quell the Bahraini pro-democracy uprising that began February 14. What gives this campaign of repression an altogether more sinister import is the intense sectarian hatred of extreme Sunni towards Shia. This sectarian antipathy is seen elsewhere in the Arab world. It has been a recurring engine of violence during the ongoing US-led occupation of Iraq where many Shia mosques have been bombed, with countless loss of lives, by Sunni extremists associated with Al Qaeda – and most likely manipulated by Saudi Arabian, American and British intelligence.

It is no secret that Wahhabism – an ultra-conservative offshoot of Sunni Islam and the official state religion of Saudi Arabia – has almost a fanatical loathing of Shia Muslims, seeing the latter as “idolaters” and worse than “infidels”. This Wahhabist virulent strain of Islam is central to the extremists of the Al Qaeda terror group that is strongly rooted in the Arabian Peninsula and indeed linked historically to the Saudi rulers. While Western governments are ostensibly in a “war on terror” with Al Qaeda, it is well documented that the governments of Saudi Arabia, the US and Britain, have at various times covertly supported and colluded with this network as a proxy for geopolitical goals, for example the destabilization of Iraq, and at other times as an enemy of convenience that has justified illegal wars of aggression against sovereign states in pursuit of natural resources. More recently, such shadowy liaison with Al Qaeda elements within the so-called Libyan rebel forces has been pointed out with regard to the ongoing US-NATO intervention in North Africa
.
Michel Chossudovsky writes: “The US-NATO coalition is arming the Jihadists. Weapons are being channeled to the LIFG [Libyan Islamic Fighting Group] from Saudi Arabia, which historically since the outset of the Soviet-Afghan war has covertly supported Al Qaeda. The Saudis are now providing the [Libyan] rebels, in liaison with Washington and Brussels, with anti-tank rockets and ground-to-air missiles.” [1]

Tweets containing