Tuesday, December 20th, 11 a.m. to noon Central (9-10 Pacific) on NoLiesRadio.org (archived here a few hours after broadcast).
Guest: Leading leftist sociologist and political analyst James Petras, who says the Empire is USING “moderate Islam.” He writes:
“Moderate” Islamists have become the Empire’s ‘contraceptive of choice’ against any chance the massive Arab peoples’ revolt might give birth to substantive egalitarian social changes and bring those brutal pro- western officials, responsible for so many crimes against humanity, to justice.
The West and their client officials in the military and police have agreed to a kind of “power-sharing’ with the moderate/respectable (read ‘reactionary’) Islamist parties. The Islamists would be responsible for imposing orthodox economic policies and re-establishing ‘order’ (i.e. bolstering the existing one) in partnership with pro-multinational bank economists and pro US-EU generals and security officials. In exchange the Islamists could take certain ministries, appoint their members, finance electoral clientele among the poor and push their ‘moderate’ religious, social and cultural agenda. Basically, the elected Islamists would replace the old corrupt dictatorial regimes in running the state and signing off on more free trade agreements with the EU. Their role would keep the leftists, nationalists and populists out of power and from gaining mass support. Their job would substitute spiritual solace and “inner worth” via Islam in place of redistributing land, income and power from the elite, including the foreign multi-nationals to the peasants, workers, unemployed and exploited low-paid employees.
Petras is right about the empire’s strategy. 9/11 accomplished many things for the Zionists and hard-line imperialists, and one of the most important was to demonize honest Islamic opposition. Today, any Muslim political leader who stands up against the Empire will be slandered as a “terrorist” or “extremist” and very possibly kidnapped, tortured, and/or assassinated.
Yet no real Muslim can do anything BUT stand up against the empire, for several reasons. First, Islam absolutely prohibits any form of lending at interest (usury) – yet the Empire, as John Perkins explains, is built on usury. According to Islamic precepts, usury is worse than the most horrific, unspeakable crimes imaginable. Therefore, every Muslim alive today has a duty to wage jihad, whether of the tongue or the sword, against that imperial abomination, the usurious bankster dictatorship that dominates most of the planet. (Even Robert Fisk, that famous “liberal” Mideast journalist, has recently admitted that the West is not even remotely democratic, but is a thinly-veiled bankster dictatorship.)
Additionally, Islam takes a hard-line stand against injustice, and demands that we work to make the earth as close an approximation to Paradise as possible. While the Christians believe in a “fallen world” and “original sin” and claim “the poor will always be with you,” thus excusing their acceptance of gross injustice (including the separation of religious ideals from social practice), Muslims enforce justice with their hands whenever possible, and with their tongues and hearts when their hands are tied.
And the Qur’an’s notion of justice does not include serious economic inequality. Surat at-Takathur makes it plain that piling up wealth is un-Islamic. The millionaires and billionaires who dominate the allegedly Islamic countries, and do so by cooperating with the bankster usurers, are disgusting hypocrites at best. Whether they should be considered Muslims at all is debatable.
Finally, Islam enshrines the Muslim community as the dominant community whose duty is to rule tolerantly and with righteousness and justice over those communities that are not fully in line with the final Divine revelation. Allowing usurers and other wealth-hoarders to dominate any society, much less a Muslim-majority society, is an obscenity to anyone who takes Islam seriously.
What, then, do the “moderate Muslims” that Petras excoriates think they are doing? Some, of course, are just corrupt, compromised souls. But others are honestly struggling to liberate the Muslim-majority countries and establish Islam. Since the bankster-dominated West will destroy any “terrorists” (i.e. real Muslims), these “moderates” are feigning cooperation with the Empire in order to better establish Islam. The end-game will be the gradual re-unification of the Muslim-majority countries; a move to establish Muslim control over Muslim energy resources; a demand for commodity currency in exchange for oil and gas exports; and the establishment of a non-usury-based currency system backed by those energy and commodity resources. A united Islamic nation (umma) will emerge to dominate the Middle World, the heart of Eurasia and North Africa; and it will likely re-emerge as the planet’s leading civilizational entity…insha’allah.
This likelihood of Islam (and China for that matter) eclipsing a decadent West helped drive a faction of the Western geopolitical elite to stage the false-flag attacks of 9/11, Madrid, Bali, 7/7, Mumbai, and so on. The phony “war on terror” is, as Jesuit professor James Schall says, a pre-emptive “war on an expanding Islam.” These strategists believe that a weak and disunited Islamic world will continue to allow its wealth to be robbed by the Western banksters, which will fuel at least a few more decades of Western (i.e. bankster) dominance.
What’s the best strategy of resistance? Petras champions leftism-nationalism. He seems stuck in the Cold War era when the Empire funded Islamic groups to resist the leftist nationalists who were then in the ascendancy.
Today, Islam is clearly the “social justice nationalism of choice” of the vast majority in the Muslim world. If you don’t believe this, look at the polling data showing that huge majorities want more shariah law, a united Islamic ummah/caliphate, and an Islamic anti-imperial revolution throwing the West and its bankster dictators out of the Muslim-majority lands.
That’s what the people want. That’s what they revolted for. That’s what they’re voting for. And that’s what the politicians in the increasingly democratic Middle Eastern countries are going to have to give them – sooner or later, whether directly and openly, or indirectly and gradually. It is this indirection and gradualism – not willingness to forever serve the Empire of Usury – that characterizes the better portion of those Petras calls the “moderate Muslims.”