Klevius: The islamofascist Saudi dictator family and its basic Human
Rights violating worldwide sharia organization OIC have to go! That
would stop more hate crimes than any other measure.
*
UN has given the spread of Saudi islamofascism legitimacy by harboring
this evil organization, hence motivating a "jihadi reading" in
accordance with taht very original islam that Saudi Wahhabism is all
about.
When Peter Klevius back in 1984 wrote 'The Green Dilemma', he had Orwell
in mind. Today the Green Party has become the green islamist party -
when will they share the Saudi jihad flag?
Today
1984 is again a top seller - but quite often for the wrong reason.
The
1984 tyranny is overseen by Big Brother, who may not even
exist. The Party "seeks power entirely for its own sake. Winston Smith,
is a member of the Outer Party, who works for the Ministry of Newspeak,
which is responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism, so that
the historical record always supports the party line.
Klevius:
The tyranny is now islam/sharia, and the weapon is making "islamophobia"
first socially unacceptable (try get a job if you're known as a
defender of basic Human Rights against islamofascist sharia) and
ultimately a worldwide "blasphemy crime" - as it already is in countries
such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, etc. "Newspeak" may be exemplifdied by
Mr. Obama's and Mrs, Clinton's previous efforts to not mention the words
'muslim', 'islam', 'jihad' etc. when muslim jihadists terrorize
non-muslims and "wrong muslims" while shouting "Allahu akbar". An other
Newspeak strategy being the use of words like 'diversity',
'multiculturalism', 'refugees', 'immigrants' etc. when in fact it's
clearly about mainly muslims.
Muslim Mehmet Kaplan (Swedish Green Party, and Housing and IT
Minister, who is said to belong to the muslim terrorist organization
Muslim Brotherhood) allegedly said it was right that Fadime was honor
murdered.Fadime Sahindal came as a 7 year old to Sweden and became "too
Westernized".
Fadime Şahindal was opposed an arranged marriage, and selected her own
boyfriend. Her father found out about it so she then left her family and
moved to Sundsvall, where her brother found her and threatened her. She
went to the police who advised her "to talk to her family". She then
turned to the media after which she turned again to the police and was
now offered a secret identity. She filed a lawsuit against her father
and brother, accusing them of unlawful threats, and won. Fadime was
scheduled to move in with her boyfriend, Patrik, the following month, in
June 1998, when he died in a car accident. On 21 January 2002, Fadime
secretly visited her mother and sisters in Uppsala. During the visit,
her father arrived and shot her in the head in front of her mother and
two sisters. Confronted by police, he confessed and said to his defense
that he was ill. Despite the confession, one of her cousins later tried
to convince the police that he had killed her.
The naive Western "islamophobia" rhetoric (i.e. sharia "blasphemy" law)
and indulgence with the islamofascist Saudi dictator family/OIC may be
contemplated while reading the following view from Africa (but don't
forget that it's the original islam and the later Muhammad that's the
real problem):
James M. Dorsey: Creating Frankenstein: Saudi Arabia`s ultra-conservative footprint in Africa
[ Masterweb Reports: Annotated remarks at Terrorism in Africa
seminar By James M. Dorsey, Singapore 18 January, 2017. ] - There is
much debate about what spurs political violence. The explanations are
multi-fold. There is one aspect that I’d like to discuss tonight as it
relates to Africa and that is the role of Saudi Arabia. Let me be clear:
With the exception of a handful of countries, none of which are in
Africa, Saudi Arabia, that is to say the government, the religious
establishment and members of the ruling family and business community,
does not fund violence.
It has however over the last half century
launched the single largest public diplomacy campaign in history,
pumping up to $100 billion dollars into ultra-conservative
interpretations of Islam.[1] That campaign has succeeded in making
ultra-conservatism a force in Muslim religious communities across the
globe. It involves the promotion of an intolerant, supremacist,
anti-pluralistic interpretation of Islam that even where it rejects
involvement in politics creates an environment that in given
circumstances serves as a breeding ground, but more often fosters a
mindset in which militancy and violence against the other is not beyond
the pale.
What that campaign has done, certainly in Muslim
majority countries in Africa, is to ensure that representatives of
Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism have influence in society as well as the
highest circles of government. This is important because contrary to
widespread beliefs, the Saudi campaign is not primarily about religion,
it’s about geopolitics, it’s about a struggle with Iran for hegemony in
the Muslim world. As a result, it’s about anti-Shiism and a
ultra-conservative narrative that counters that of Shiism and what
remains of Iran’s post-1979 revolutionary zeal.
The campaign also
meant that at times resolving the question whether the kingdom
maintains links to violent groups takes one into murky territory. Again,
I want to be clear, certainly with the rise of the Islamic State (IS)
and its affiliates in Africa and elsewhere, and even before with the
emergence of Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia has made countering jihadism a
cornerstone of its policy. That is however easier said than done.
What
is evident in Africa is that the kingdom or at least prominent members
of its clergy appear to have maintained wittingly or unwittingly some
degree of contact with jihadist groups, including IS affiliates. What I
want to do in the time I have is anecdotally illustrate the impact of
Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism on three African states – Nigeria, Niger
and Mali – and how this at times relates to political violence in the
region.
Let’s start with Nigeria. One of the earliest instances
in which Saudi Arabia flexed its expanding soft power in West Africa was
in 1999 when Zamfara, a region where Islamic State affiliate Boko Haram
has been active, became the first Nigerian state to adopt Sharia. A
Saudi official stood next to Governor Ahmed Sani when he made the
announcement. Freedom of religion scholar Paul Marshall recalls seeing
some years later hundreds of Saudi-funded motorbikes in the courtyard of
the governor’s residence. They had been purchased to enforce gender
segregation in public transport. Sheikh Abdul-Aziz, the religious and
cultural attaché at the Saudi embassy in Abuja declared in 2004 that the
kingdom had been monitoring the application of Islamic law in Nigeria
“with delight.”[2]
Like elsewhere in the Muslim world, local
politicians in Zamfara were forging an opportunistic alliance with Saudi
Arabia. If geopolitics was the Saudi driver, domestic politics was what
motivated at least some of their local partners. Nonetheless, the lines
between militant but peaceful politics and violence were often blurry.
Political violence analyst Jacob Zenn asserts that Boko Haram even has
some kind of representation in the kingdom.[3] A Boko Haram founder who
was killed in 2009, Muhammad Yusuf, was granted refuge by the kingdom in
2004 to evade a Nigerian military crackdown. In Mecca, he forged links
with like-minded Salafi clerics[4] that proved to be more decisive than
his debates with Nigerian clerics who were critical of his
interpretation of Islam.[5]
Once back in Maiduguri, the capital
of Nigeria’s Borno state, Yusuf built with their assistance a state
within a state centred around the Ibn Taymiyyah mosque and a compound in
the city centre on land bought with the help of his father-in-law.
Yusuf’s group had its own institutions, including a Shura or advisory
council, a religious police force that enforced Islamic law, and a
rudimentary welfare, microfinance and job creation system.[6]
It
operated under a deal struck in talks in Mecca brokered by a prominent
Salafi cleric between a dissident Boko Haram factional leader identified
as Aby Muhammed and a close aide to former Nigerian President Jonathan
Goodwill.[7] Under the agreement Yusuf pledged not to preach violence
and to distance himself from separatist groups, an understanding he
later violated. Boko Haram has further suggested that before joining IS,
it had met with Al Qaeda operatives in Saudi Arabia.[8] Moreover, a
Boko Haram operative responsible for attacking a church in Nigeria
reportedly spent months in Saudi Arabia prior to the attack.[9]
Yusuf’s
religious teacher, Sheikh Ja’afar Adam, a graduate of the Islamic
University of Medina, presided over a popular mosque in the Nigerian
city of Kano that helped him build a mass audience. Adam’s popularity
allowed him to promote colleagues, many of whom were also graduates of
the same university in Medina, who became influential preachers and
government officials. Adam was liberally funded by Al-Muntada al-Islami
Trust, a London-based charity with ties to Saudi Arabia[10] that has
repeatedly been accused by Nigerian intelligence a British peer, Lord
Alton of Liverpool, of having links to Boko Haram and serving as a
platform for militant Islamic scholars.[11] Al Muntada, which operates a
mosque and a primary school in London, has denied the allegations while
a UK Charity Commission investigation failed to substantiate the
allegations. Kenyan and Somali intelligence nonetheless suspected
Al-Muntada of also funding Al Qaeda’s Somali affiliate, Al Shabab.[12]
Among
scholars hosted by Al Muntada are Mohammad Al Arifi, a Saudi preacher
who argues that “the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls and to sever
limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is,
undoubtedly, an honour for the believer.” He also reasons that the
Muslim world would not have suffered humiliation had it followed “the
Quranic verses that deal with fighting the infidels and conquering their
countries say that they should convert to Islam, pay the jizya poll
tax, or be killed.”[13]
Abd al-Aziz Fawzan al-Fawzan, a Saudi
academic, is another Al Muntada favourite. Al-Fawzan advises the
faithful that “if (a) person is an infidel, even if this person is my
mother or father, God forbid, or my son or daughter; I must hate him,
his heresy, and his defiance of Allah and His prophet. I must hate his
abominable deeds.”[14] Organizationally, the charity also maintained
close ties to major Saudi funding organizations, including the Muslim
World League (MWL), the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY),
International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), and Al Haramain
Islamic Foundation,[15] a Saudi governmental non-nongovernmental
organization that was shut down in the wake of 9/11 because of its
jihadist ties.
Adam publicly condemned Yusuf after he took over
Boko Haram. In response Yusuf in 2007 order the assassination of Adam, a
protégé of the Saudi-funded Izala Society (formally known as the
Society for the Removal of Innovation and Re-establishment of the
Sunnah), which sprang up in northern Nigeria in the late 1970s to
campaign against Sufi practices and has since gained ground in several
West African states. Much like Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism’s relationship
to jihadism, Izala after spawning Boko Haram became one of its main
targets. The group has since the killing of Adam gunned down several
other prominent Saudi-backed clerics.
Nigerian journalists and
activists see a direct link between the influx of Saudi funds into
Yusuf’s stomping ground in northern Nigeria and greater intolerance that
rolled back the influence of Sufis that had dominated the region for
centuries and sought to marginalize Shiites. “They built their own
mosques with Saudi funds so that they will not follow ‘Kafirs’ in
prayers& they erected their own madrasa schools where they
indoctrinate people on the deviant teachings of Wahhabism. With Saudi
petro-dollars, these Wahhabis quickly spread across towns & villages
of Northern Nigeria… This resulted in countless senseless
inter-religious conflicts that resulted in the death of thousands of
innocent Nigerians on both sides.” said Shiite activist Hairun
Elbinawi.[16]
Adam started his career as a young preacher in
Izala, a Salafist movement founded in the late 1970s by prominent judge
and charismatic orator Abubakr Gumi who was the prime facilitator of
Saudi influence and the rise of Salafism in northern Nigeria. A close
associate, Gumi represented northern Nigeria at gatherings of the Muslim
World League starting in the 1960s, was a member of the consultative
council of the Islamic University of Medina in the 1970s and was awarded
for his efforts with the King Faisal Prize in 1987. All along, Gumi and
Izala benefitted from generous Saudi financial support for its
anti-Sufi and anti-Shiite campaigns.[17]
Adam and Gumi’s close
ties to the kingdom did not mean that they uncritically adopted Saudi
views. Their ultra-conservative views did not prevent them from at times
adopting positions that took local circumstances in northern Nigeria
into account at the expense of ultra-conservative rigidity. Adam’s
questioning of the legitimacy of democracy, for example, did not stop
him becoming for a period of time a government official in the state of
Kano. In another example, Gumi at one point urged Muslim women to vote
because “politics is more important than prayer,” a position that at the
time would have been anathema to Saudi-backed ultra-conservative
scholars. Similarly, Adam suggested that Salafists and Kano’s two major
Sufi orders, viewed by Saudi puritans as heretics, should have equal
shares of an annual, public Ramadan service.[18]
Peregrino
Brimah, a trained medical doctor who teaches biology, anatomy and
physiology at colleges in New York never gave much thought while growing
up in Nigeria to the fact that clerics increasingly were developing
links to Saudi Arabia. “You could see the money, the big ones were
leading the good life, they ran scholarship programs. In fact, I was
offered a scholarship to study at King Fahd University in Riyadh. I
never thought about it until December 2015 when up to a 1,000 Shiites
were killed by the military in northern Nigeria,” Brimah said.[19]
“Since I started looking at it, I’ve realized how successful, how
extraordinarily successful the Wahhabis have been.”
Brimah
decided to stand up for Shiite rights after the incident in which the
military arrested prominent Shiite cleric Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky
following a clash with members of Shiites in Kaduna state.[20] The
Nigerian military confirmed that it had attacked sites in the ancient
university town Zaria after hundreds of Shia demonstrators had blocked a
convoy of Nigeria's army chief General Tukur Buratai in an alleged
effort to kill him. Military police said Shiites had crawled through
tall grass towards Buratai's vehicle "with the intent to attack the
vehicle with [a] petrol bomb" while others "suddenly resorted to firing
gunshots from the direction of the mosque.” Scores were killed in the
incident.[21] A phone call to Nigerian President Mohammed Buhari in
which King Salman expressed his support for the government’s fight
against terrorist groups was widely seen as Saudi endorsement of the
military’s crackdown on the country’s Shiite minority. The state-owned
Saudi Press Agency quoted Salman as saying that Islam condemned such
“criminal acts” and that the kingdom in a reference to Iran opposed
foreign interference in Nigeria.[22]
Brimah’s defense of the
Shiites has cost him dearly and further illustrated the degree to which
Saudi-funded Wahhabism and Salafism had altered the nature of Nigerian
society. “I lost everything I had built on social media the minute I
stood up for the Shiites. I had thousands of fans. Suddenly, I was
losing 2-300 followers a day. My brother hasn’t spoken to me since. The
last thing he said to me is: ‘how can you adopt Shiite ideology?’ I
raised the issue in a Sunni chat forum. It became quickly clear that
these attitudes were not accidental. They are the product of
Saudi-sponsored teachings of serious hatred. People don’t understand
what they are being taught. They rejoice when thousand Shiites are
killed. Even worse is the fact that they hate people like me who stand
up for the Shiites even more than they hate the Shiite themselves.”
In
response to Brimah’s writing about the clash, Buratai, the Nigerian
army chief, invited him to for a chat. Brimah politely declined. After
again, accusing the military of having massacred Shiites, Buratai’s
spokesman, Col. SK Usman, adopting the Saudi line of Shiites being
Iranian stooges, accused Brimah of being on the Islamic republic’s
payroll. “Several of us hold you in high esteem based on perceived
honesty, intellectual prowess and ability to speak your mind. That was
before, but the recent incident of attempted assassination of the Chief
of Army Staff by the Islamic Movement of Nigeria and subsequent events
and actions by some groups and individuals such as you made one to have a
rethink. I was quite aware of your concerted effort to smear the good
name and reputation of the Chief of Army Staff to the extent of calling
for his resignation. He went out of his way to write to you and even
invited you for constructive engagement. But because you have dubious
intents, you cleverly refused…. God indeed is very merciful for exposing
you. Let me make it abundantly clear to you that your acts are not
directed to the person of the Chief of Army Staff, they have far
reaching implication on our national security. Please think about it and
mend your ways and refund whatever funds you coveted for the campaign
of calumny,” Usman wrote in the mail.[23] Brimah’s inbox has since then
been inundated with anti-Shiite, anti-Iranian writings in what he
believes is a military-inspired campaign.
Brimah was not the only
one to voice opposition to Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism. Murtada
Muhammad Gusau, Chief Imam of Nagazi-Uvete Jumu’at Mosque and Alhaji
Abdurrahman Okene’ s Mosque in Nigeria’s Okene Kogi State took exception
to the kingdom’s global effort to criminalize blasphemy, legitimize in
the process curbs on free speech, and reinforce growing Muslim
intolerance towards any unfettered discussion of the faith. In a
lengthy article in a Nigerian newspaper, Gusau debunked the
Saudi-inspired crackdown on alleged blasphemists citing multiple verses
from the Qur’an that advocate patience and tolerance and reject the
killing of those that curse or berate the Prophet Mohammed.[24]
Brimah
and Gusau were among the relatively few willing to invoke the wrath of
spreading ultra-conservative, sectarian forms of Islam across a swath of
Africa at an often dizzying pace. In the process, African politicians
and ultraconservatives in cooperation with Saudi Arabia have let a genie
of intolerance, discrimination, supremacy and bigotry out of the
bottle. In the Sahel state of Niger, Issoufou Yahaya recalls his
student days in the 1980s when there wasn’t a single mosque on his
campus. “Today, we have more mosques here than we have lecture rooms. So
much has changed in such a short time,” he said.[25]
One cannot
avoid noticing Saudi Arabia’s role in this development. The flags of
Niger and Saudi Arabia feature on a monument close to the office tower
from which Yahaya administers the history of department of Université
Abdou Moumouni in the Niger capital of Niamey. Sheikh Boureima Abdou
Daouda, an Internet-savvy graduate of the Islamic University of Medina
and the Niamey university’s medical faculty as well as an author and
translator of numerous books, attracts tens of thousands of worshippers
to the Grand Mosque where he insists that “We must adopt Islam, we
cannot adapt it.”[26] Daouda serves as an advisor to Niger president
Mahamadou Issoufou and chairs the League of Islamic Scholars and
Preachers of the Countries of the Sahel. “Before, people here turned to
religion when they reached middle age, and particularly after they
retired. But now, it is above all the young ones. What we see is a
flourishing of Islam.” Daouda said.[27]
What Daouda did not
mention was that with Africa, the battleground where Iran put up its
toughest cultural and religious resistance to Saudi-backed
ultra-conservatism, was witnessing the world’s highest rates of
conversion to Shi’a Islam since many Sunni tribes in southern Iraq
adopted Shiism in the 19th century. Shiites were until recently
virtually non-existent in Africa with the exception of migrants from
Lebanon and the Indian subcontinent. A Pew Research survey suggests that
that has changed dramatically. The number of Shiites has jumped from 0
in 1980 to 12 percent of Nigeria’s 90-million strong Shia community in
2012. Shiites account today for 21 percent of Chad’s Muslims, 20 percent
in Tanzania and eight percent in Gaza, according to the survey.[28]
Ironically,
Mali a nation where Shiism has not made inroads and where only two
percent of the populations identifies itself as Ahmadis, an Islamic sect
widely viewed by conservative Muslims as heretics, is the only country
outside of Pakistan that Aalmi Majlis Tahaffuz Khatm-e-Nubuwwat (AMTKN),
a militant anti-Ahmadi, Pakistan-based group with a history of Saudi
backing, identifies by name as a place where it operates overseas.[29]
The fact that AMTKN, which says that it operates in 12 countries,
identified Mali is indicative of the sway of often Saud-educated imams
and religious leaders that reaches from the presidential palace in the
capital Bamako into the country’s poorest villages. The government at
times relies on Salafis rather than its own officials to mediate with
jihadists in the north or enlist badly needed European support in the
struggle against them. Moreover, cash-rich Salafi leaders and
organizations provide social services in parts of Mali where the
government is absent. In 2009, the Saudi-backed High Islamic Council of
Mali (HICM) proved powerful enough to prevent the president from signing
into law a parliamentary bill that would have enhanced women’s rights.
Malian president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita reportedly phones HICM chief
Mahmoud Dicko twice a week. Malians no longer simply identify each other
as Muslims and instead employ terms such as Wahhabi, Sufi and Shia that
carry with them either derogatory meanings or assertions of foreign
associations.[30]
Dicko condemned the November 2015 jihadist
attack on the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako in which 20 people were
killed but argued that world powers cannot enjoy peace by fighting God
through promotion of homosexuality. Dicko said the perpetrators were not
Muslims but mostly rappers with drug-related charge sheets. “They rebel
and take arms against their society. This is a message from God that
the masters of the world, the major powers, which are trying to promote
homosexuality, must understand. These powers are trying to force the
world to move towards homosexuality. These world powers have attacked
the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) into his grave... These masters of this
world, who think that the world belongs to them, must understand that we
will not attack God and escape safely. They cannot provoke God and get
his clemency, his mercy. They cannot have peace and peace with such
provocations towards the Creator of the world down here. They will not
have peace. God will not leave them alone.”[31]
Like elsewhere,
ultra-conservatism as a cornerstone of Saudi soft power has proven in
Mali to be a double-edged sword for the kingdom and its beneficiaries.
Iyad Ag Ghaly nicknamed The Strategist, a Malian Tuareg militant who led
tribal protests in the 1990s and emerged in 2012 at the head of Ansar
Eddine, one of the jihadist groups that overran the north of Mali, found
ultra-conservative religion while serving as a Malian diplomat in
Jeddah. A Sufi and a singer who occasionally worked with Tinariwen, the
Grammy Award winning band formed by veterans of Tuareg armed resistance
in the 1980s and 1990s, co-organized an internationally acclaimed annual
music festival outside of Timbuktu that attracted the likes of Robert
Plant, Bono and Jimmy Buffett, and hedonistically enjoyed parties, booze
and tobacco, Ag Ghaly grew a beard while in Saudi Arabia. His meetings
with Saudi-based jihadists persuaded the Malian government to cut short
his stint in the kingdom and call him home.[32] Pakistani missionaries
of Tablighi Ja’amat, an ultra-conservative global movement that has at
times enjoyed Saudi backing despite theological differences with
Wahhabism and Salafism, helped convince Ag Ghaly to abandon his music
and hedonistic lifestyle. He opted for an austere interpretation of
Islam and ultimately jihadism.[33]
This pattern is not uniquely
African even if Africa is the continent where Iranian responses to Saudi
promotion of Sunni ultra-conservatism have primarily been cultural and
religious in nature rather than through the use of militant and armed
proxies as in the Middle East. It is nonetheless a battle that
fundamentally alters the fabric of those African societies in which it
is fought; a battle that potentially threatens the carefully constructed
post-colonial cohesion of those societies. The potential threat is
significantly enhanced by poor governance and the rise of jihadist
groups like Boko Haram, Al Qaeda in the Maghreb and Al Shabab in
Somalia, whose ideological roots can be traced back to
ultra-conservatism but whose political philosophy views Saudi Arabia as
an equally legitimate target because its rulers have deviated from the
true path. At the bottom line, both Africans and Saudis are struggling
to come to grips with a phenomenon they opportunistically harnessed to
further their political interests; one that they no longer control and
that has become as much a liability as it was an asset.
