| Like the ignorant leading the willing blind, this conference forges the alliance between radical Islam, and the pathetic and moribund Socialist Left, who withthe demise of the Socialist Utopia known as the former Soviet Union, has few real causes left to rally over, save for demonizing America and Israel, reviving the old scourge of antiSemitism masking as anti-Colonialism by the israelis to delegitimizing said country, and because they MUST have a cause to be useful idiots for. All that were absent were a few good men in small moustaches and armbands, but that is only a matter of time:
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Consummated in Cairo
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 16, 2004
George Galloway, the maverick British parliamentarian who was expelled from the Labour Party after his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq led to charges that he incited Iraqis to fight against British troops, was there. Tony Benn, another former Labour MP and prominent defender of Socialism, also made the trip. So did Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General (for Lyndon Johnson) and a high-profile advocate for the impeachment of George W. Bush, the freeing of Leonard Peltier, and a host of other fashionable Leftist causes. At the 2003 Cairo Conference held in mid-December by The International Campaign Against U.S. & Zionist Occupations, these high-profile antiwar advocates had a chance to rub elbows with their newest ideological bedfellows: radical Muslims who openly advocate the restoration of the caliphate, the politico-religious ruler of a unified Muslim world, and the establishment of an Islamic world order under the rule of Islamic law, the Sharia.
That such an alliance was an actual goal of the Conference was hinted at by Salma Yacoob, an activist with the Muslim Association of Britain as well as chair of the Birmingham chapter of the Stop the War Coalition. In Cairo, she told the assembled dignitaries that “it is because we are potentially so strong together that our enemies try to divide us.” “Us” in this case would be the amalgamation of Islamists (that is, Muslims who see Islamic law as the only rightful way to order society), secular socialists, and Arab nationalists.
The polarities of the Conference were exemplified when Ma’mum Hudaybi, leader of the Egyptian radical Muslim group the Muslim Brotherhood, shared the platform with Revolutionary Socialist Kamal Khalil. The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in the 1920s, was the first modern radical Muslim organization. It still states that one of its goals is, according to a website operated by a Brotherhood sympathizer, “mastering the world with Islam.” The Brotherhood proclaims: “Allah is our objective. The messenger [i.e., the Muslim Prophet Muhammad] is our leader. Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
For his part, Khalil referred in a fiery speech to an antiwar demonstration held in Egypt as the Iraq war began: “I am speaking in the name of thousands of Egyptians who were in Tahrir Square on 20 March. They chanted against the imperialist aggression but they also chanted against the Egyptian state and the Mubarak regime. We want a world without Bush, Blair, Sharon and Mubarak. Let’s link the struggle against imperialism with the struggle against dictatorship and oppression. When the fingers of the Americans burn in Iraq and Palestine, the fingers of the dictator in Egypt will also burn.”
Hudaybi’s presence alongside Khalil heralded the welding of the antiwar movement’s anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist boilerplate to the caliphate and Sharia yearnings of radical Islam. Thus Cairo represented the flowering of the unique political vision of another luminary, who sent a laudatory message to the Conference: the octogenarian former president of Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella.
Ben Bella embodies this new alliance in his own person. He cites the Egyptian Arab nationalist Gamel Abdel Nasser as his intellectual mentor, but his view of Arab nationalism partakes of none of the secularism that other Arab nationalist leaders have espoused at least publicly. “I am an Islamist,” Ben Bella declared flatly to Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly in May 2001, adding that “being a Muslim is an essential, a sacrosanct component of our identity.” He spoke in decidedly Leftist terms of a convergence between ostensibly secular Arab nationalism and radical Islam, praising the terrorist group Hizbullah as the contemporary embodiment of Nasser’s vision: “The essence of Nasserism is to struggle against imperialism and for social justice. I fear that some of those who claim to be Nasserists today might inadvertently mummify Nasserism the way the communists mummified Lenin. We must not speak as if it was still 1956. I believe that the Hizbullah in Lebanon have incorporated many aspects of the Nasserist philosophy. Times have changed.”
Ben Bella waxed sentimental about his old fr |