Melanie Phillips, writing for the Daily Mail, complains that British publishers would not touch her book, Londonistan. It might have something to with the fact the title is little more than a pejorative sobriquet, or it may be that the book is filled with alarmist nonsense, although I believe it is probably the former.
In the book, according to Phillips' own account, Muslims are portrayed as extremists and British Muslims are especially threatening. "Not only had Britain been allowed to become the hub of Al Qaeda in Europe, but the political and security establishment was still refusing to acknowledge the full dimensions of the threat," writes Phillips. "Of course, not all Muslims fit this pattern. Hundreds of thousands of British Muslims have no truck with Islamic extremism or terrorism, and across the world Muslims are numbered among its principal victims.... Nevertheless, the dismaying fact is that a horrifying number in Britain do harbor extremist views."
Naturally, Phillips does not tell us-because she either does not know or because her intention is to demonize all Muslims in Europe-that the British government has organized, financed, and unleashed Islamic extremists not only in Britain, but the world at large.
But don't believe me, believe Michael Meacher, Oldham MP and former cabinet minister. "The former Environment Secretary claims that Britain's 'overseas' security organization, M16, set about recruiting UK Muslims directing them to support US efforts to overthrow communist governments in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. He highlights a Delhi-based research foundation that estimates anything up to 200 UK Muslims could have undergone training in overseas terrorist camps under the protection of the Pakistani secret service, the ISI, who were backing the armed Islamic insurrection against the Afghan communist regime and its Soviet backers," the Asian News reported last September.
As we know, or should know, the CIA, with more than a little financial help from the corrupt Wahhabi monarchy in Saudi Arabia, poured more than $40 billion into Afghanistan to organize, train, and arm the Mujahideen, now popularly, if erroneously, known as "al-Qaeda." Pakistan's ISI micromanaged these terrorists. Additional funding came through opium production, a CIA specialty, up from 250 tons in 1982 to 2,000 tons in 1991(see the Cooperative Research timeline, citing mainstream news sources).
We also know Osama bin Laden worked closely with the CIA and the ISI through Maktab al-Khidamar, or MAK, set up specifically in Peshawar to funnel money to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. "MAK [was] nurtured by Pakistan's state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA's primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow's occupation," none other than MSNBC reported in 1998, before everything changed, including the corporate media telling the truth about the origins of Islamic terrorism. Bin Laden was close to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a rather scurrilous Wahhabi fanatic, and greatly strengthened the opium trade, according to Le Monde. According to the Financial Times, reporting a month before nine eleven, the ISI created "a special cell of agents who use profits from heroin production for covert actions... at the insistence of the CIA." The CIA, through its ISI proxy, confabbed with Osama bin Laden on a regular basis, according to ex-CIA sources cited by Gerald Posner.
In fact, "al-Qaeda" ran its operations off the vastly profitable opium trade. "One report estimates that bin Laden takes up to 10 percent of Afghanistan's drug trade by early 1999. This would give him a yearly income of up to $1 billion out of $6.5 to $10 billion in annual drug profits from within Afghanistan," according to the Financial Times. It is a wonderful deal for the CIA proxy ISI as well, as it makes a whopping $2.5 billion annually from the sale of illegal drugs, according to the United Nations Drug Control Program.
MI6, the CIA, and Pakistan's ISI devised a plan to have the Mujahideen attack Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, targeting military installations, factories, and storage depots, and likely no shortage of civilian targets as well. In order to make sure the Mujahideen became the sort of fanatical murderers to be put to use for years to come, the CIA provided "subversive literature and Korans to the ISI," according to the Washington Post, again years before everything changed and we were expected to believe Muslims hatched plans against the West all on their lonesome, strictly because they hate our way of life and hanker to convert us to Islam.
According to Australian journalist John Pilger, MI6, with the the helping hand of Britain's SAS, trained "future al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts," and no shortage of these cut-throats, especially chosen for their psychopathic personality disorders, were "trained at a CIA camp in Virginia." "Eventually, around 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries will fight with the Afghan mujahedeen," notes Cooperative Research, citing the Washington Post. "Tens of thousands more will study in the hundreds of new madrassas (Islamic schools) funded by the ISI and CIA in Pakistan."
"From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of Mujahideen and other Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs," writes Brendan O'Neill (How we trained al-Qa'eda). "The Bosnia venture appears to have been very important to the rise of Mujahideen forces, to the emergence of today's cross-border Islamic terrorists who think nothing of moving from state to state in the search of outlets for their jihadist mission." This Pentagon plan, tasked to NATO, was uncovered by the Dutch government as it went about investigating the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995. Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University revealed "details [of] the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamic groups from the Middle East, and their efforts to assist Bosnia's Muslims. By 1993, there was a vast amount of weapons-smuggling through Croatia to the Muslims, organized by 'clandestine agencies' of the USA, Turkey and Iran, in association with a range of Islamic groups that included Afghan Mujahideen and the pro-Iranian Hezbollah. Arms bought by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia were airlifted from the Middle East to Bosnia-airlifts with which, Wiebes points out, the USA was 'very closely involved.'"
As well, British intelligence was very closely involved with "al-Qaeda." According to whistleblower David Shayler, "British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice," the Guardian reported on November 10, 2002. French intelligence experts revealed that an Interpol arrest warrant for bin Laden was issued by Libya in March 1998, but this was ignored. "According to journalist Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard, an adviser to French President Jacques Chirac, British and US intelligence agencies buried the fact that the arrest warrant had come from Libya and played down the threat. Five months after the warrant was issued, al-Qaeda killed more than 200 people in the truck bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania."
On March 25, 2004, the Times Online reported one "of al-Qaeda's most dangerous figures has been revealed as a double agent working for MI5, raising criticism from European governments, which repeatedly called for his arrest." Abu Qatada "has been variously described as a 'truly dangerous individual' and a 'key UK figure' in al-Qaeda related terror activity," the BBC explained on May 9, 2006. "In the mid-1990s Abu Qatada was said to have held meetings with an MI5 officer at which he suggested his willingness to co-operate to help prevent Islamic terrorism in the UK," and promised not to "bite the hand that fed him." If we are to believe the corporate media, Abu Qatada was a "double agent," working with MI5 while at the same time recruiting for "al-Qaeda." Of course, considering the above, we can assume this is a load of hogwash-Qatada is in fact an MI5 asset working in "Londonistan," as Melanie Phillip would have it.
Finally, we have the strange case of Haroon Aswat, pegged as the "mastermind" of the July 7, 2005, London bombings. "The July 29 edition of FOX News Channel's Day Side program revealed that the so called mastermind of the 7/7 London Bombings, Haroon Rashid Aswat, is a British Intelligence Asset," writes Steve Watson for Prison Planet. According to John Loftus, former Justice Department prosecutor, "back in the late 1990s, the leaders [of the al-Muhajiroun group, another intelligence contrivance] worked for British intelligence in Kosovo. Believe it or not, British intelligence actually hired some Al-Qaeda guys to help defend the Muslim rights in Albania and in Kosovo," a fact documented above. Aswat "was a British intelligence plant," according to Loftus. By now, it should come as no surprise Aswat was on one hand an intelligence asset, and on the other pegged as the London bombing mastermind (one look at Aswat, however, and it should be obvious he is incapable of masterminding anything short of his own shoe strings-but then, as Webster Tarpley tells us, these guys are uniformly mental deficients, nut jobs, basket cases, and thus ideal patsies).
Melanie Phillips would have us believe "al-Qaeda" appeared out of nowhere, a product of Islam itself, although she is in the habit-as a self-described progressive and a defender of liberal democracy-of issuing meaningless caveats that not all Muslims are violent, Western-hating fanatics, just a large number of them, an assertion at the very foundation of the neocon "clash of civilizations" ideology. If the United States and Britain have nothing to do with the Islamic Terror Network, created by the CIA and ISI and nurtured on illicit opium trade profits, and has nothing to do with the apparent protection of fire-breathing fanatics in "Londonistan" and elsewhere, she needs to explain why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, supposedly the mastermind of nine eleven, was granted a visa to enter the US just six weeks before the terrorist attacks, or why five of the alleged hijackers trained at U.S. military bases, or why Lyman Faris, described as an "al-Qaeda man" and accused of planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, was an FBI operative, a fact reported by the Telegraph.
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