ISIS AS SUNNI ARAB NATIONALISM – CONFIRMED

by Colin Liddell

In my article The Uses and Abuses of Arab Nationalism I said:

“ISIS is a bastardized expression of the nationalist identity and interests of Sunni Arabs. In all its deformity, the movement is simply filling a gap that should more correctly be filled by a healthy form of Arab nationalism.”

This view is now being confirmed by the evidence coming out of Syria and Iraq. A recent article in The Independent, "How Saddam Hussein's former military officers and spies are controlling Isis," presents evidence from a number of Syrian sources, including Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, and makes the case that ISIS is little more than the old Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein hiding in a Muslim hijab:

TERRORISM FROM EAGLES

The worst act of Islamic terrorism was committed by America

by Martin Blovnik

Sixteen years ago today, the worst Islamic terrorist attack in history began, when a series of bombs exploded across a Christian European nation, causing billions of dollars of damage and killing several thousand people (more than died on 9-11). What is surprising is that this Islamic terrorist atrocity came from the launchpads of NATO missiles and the bellies of US and allied bombers.

Yes, sixteen years ago, the attack on Yugoslavia began. 

The declared reason was to stop "genocide" in Kosovo, a part of the Yugoslav state, and a complete lie as it turns out. Also, it should not be forgotten that in places where genocide actually happens – Rwanda, Darfur, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tibet, Palestine, and indeed parts of the West itself – the West does nothing. No, the terrorist attack on Yugoslavia had other reasons.

VERMINOCRACY II: THE ISLAMIC CALIPHATE

The Islamic State: keeping ahead of the situation.

by Colin Liddell

Nature abhors a vacuum, and will often work overtime and at the weekends to fill one. In the Middle East it has pushed productivity to new heights with the creation of the Islamic Caliphate, a fully-fledged monstrosity that has leaped to life in a comparatively short time span, filling the vacuum left by the West's vetoing of the system that emerged in the post-Ottoman Islamic world as a tentative step from medievalism to modernity.

That system, typified by the likes of Kemal Ataturk, Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Gaddafi, and the Assads – and to a lesser extent by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Shah of Iran – was a secular-leaning, trans-tribal nationalism, often with a socialist tinge, overlaid – thanks to a brief period of Anglo-French control – on areas with badly drawn borders. In Iraq and Syria it went by the name of Ba'athism, but it could also be more generically (and oxymoronically) referred to as Secular Islamic Statism (SIS).

THE REAL PROBLEM WITH IRAQ

This article was originally published in Right Now in 2005. With Iraq now in a state of disintegration, many of the points made in the article shine with new relevance.

by Colin Liddell

Call me naïve, but when Iraq fell to the American-led and British-followed invasion of 2003, I thought the simplest solution to the problem posed by this country to the region and itself would also be the one most acceptable to its three main ethnic groups, the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, namely a messy but cathartic divorce that would allow each of the three groups to achieve separate nationhood and with it internal integrity and security.

Ethnic maps of Iraq revealed that the South and East of the country was and is overwhelmingly Shiite in population, while Sunnis were prevalent in the Centre and West, with the Kurds already semi-independent in the North. Given the centuries of bad blood between these three groups, exacerbated over the last few decades by Saddam's Baathist regime, it seemed a Sisyphean labor to try and force these three distinct groups to live harmoniously together.