• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 931 0

as children whose heads were smashed against walls. Attempts to blame this on the Algerian security services, one of whose members claimed that his former colleagues were really behind the GIA, were confounded when Zouabri acknowledged his own authorship of a vulgarly phrased communique that called all Algerians ‘kuffar, apostates and hypocrites’. As the US journalist Robert Kaplan reported, relatives of the people massacred by Islamists knew that they rather than the secret police were responsible, although shady army and police units undoubtedly killed many people, sometimes with a view to discrediting the Islamists in the eyes of Western opinion.53

In 1998, and with encouragement on a satellite phone from Osama bin Laden, the Salafist Group for Prayer and Combat emerged out of the wreckage of the GIA. The GSPC took several steps back from the GIA’s universal war on Algerian society, while simultaneously subscribing to the international jihad. It sought to destroy the Algerian military regime, replacing it with a sharia-based Islamist state, while pursuing the cause of the ‘rightly guided caliphate’ against Jews and Christians. Even as the GSPC evolved into one of the world’s most deadly terrorist organisations, with a network of supporters throughout Europe, the AIS came in from the cold, accepting an Algerian government amnesty and the introduction of the presidential elections that put veteran foreign minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika in power. It is widely believed that about two hundred thousand Muslim Algerians were killed in the struggle between Islamists and the government during the 1990s. The head of the Algerian secret police, General Smaïn Lamari, was fully prepared to kill up to three million people in order to wipe Islamism out. No longer willing to treat Algeria as France’s backyard, the US has built up a large CIA presence in Algiers, spreading its eagle wings over the Bouteflika regime, which has become an eager partner in the ‘war on terror’.54

VII TARGETING AMERICA BEFORE 9/11 AND IRAQ

Seeming inevitabilities unravel if one goes back a generation or two. In 1957, a year after US president Eisenhower brutally brought the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Suez to a halt, he inaugurated a new building on Washington’s Embassy Row. This was a mosque. It was built after a Palestinian tycoon had attended the funeral of a Turkish diplomat. He had said to the Egyptian ambassador, ‘Isn’t it a shame that the prayer for such a great Muslim is not held in a mosque?’ An Italian architect designed the building, incorporating details recommended by the court architect in Egypt. Eisenhower dedicated the building: ‘America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have here your own church and worship according to your own conscience. This concept is indeed a part of America, and without that concept we would be something else than what we are.’ Today, three thousand people attend the Friday prayers in a building that is the equivalent of the Episcopalian National Cathedral.

Nineteen fifty-seven is ancient history to most Muslims today, the majority of whom are so young that they come up to the average Westerner’s waist. The jihadi-salafist imagination deals in racial essences and ahistorical archetypes, to which history is a necessary corrective. In their view, the Jews are inherently malevolent, using the USA, the IMF, the World Bank and the UN for their nefarious purposes. This explains the bizarre concept of ‘Crusader-Zionists’. Anyone with even a sketchy recollection of medieval history knows that nothing links medieval Christian crusaders, who on occasion massacred Rhenish Jews prefatory to slaughtering Arabs, with a political movement born in the nineteenth century, primarily as an antidote to European anti-Semitism. But facts do not seem to inhibit emotion and prejudice. Even in countries where there are few Jews, like Indonesia, the local jihadi-salafists find them by imagining mercantile ‘Chinese-Zionists’. In a sense this proves that anti-Semitism links all jihadists. They are like the man looking