RT TV interviews Syrian President Bashar Assad

In an ideal world Uncle Sam and his British poodle would compromise with Russia and China and pressure both sides in the Syrian Civil War to come to a compromise agreement, if necessary with guarantees of safety for Assad and his associates if that is the price of peace. I’m not holding my breath however.

It is just possible that Uncle Sam is not fully in control of Saudi and Qatar and that the Mordor of Wahabism has its own imperialist agenda. Riyadh is clearly trying to subvert the Arab Spring and promote its far right perversion of Islam by sponsoring these terrorists.

Completely unrelated to this post, but as this issue was brought a few time ago:
http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_11_06/Polish-editor-laid-off-over-plane-crash-story/
I think this will end definitely the ludicrous accusation that Russia planted bombs in the Polish presidential plane that crashed in 2010.

I also have an unrelated article which I thought was interesting, that I would like you to read and give me your personal thoughts on it:

http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/kabbalah-head-seeking-court-nasrallah

Thanks Saker…One more article of interest:

http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2012/11/09/a-syrian-barb-at-turkeys-islamist/

@ VS: This is a typical satanist/masonic/ecumenist idea: instead of seeking the truth, let’s blur the differences and unite around some minimal list of things we can agree with. The entire history of the (real) Jewish people in the Old Testament and the entire history of the Church has always been centered on the key idea of *upholding the truth unadulterated*, to preserve it at all costs. In contrast, the syncretistic approach aims at obfuscating the truth and, eventually, at abandoning it as a category of logical analysis.

This is an interesting observation. I am reminded of what Professor Kevin MacDonald claims when saying that there is no such thing as truth within Judaism; there is only the consensus of the interpretive community:

Neal Gabler on Creating the Perception of Value

A fundamental aspect of Jewish intellectual history has been the realization that there is really no demonstrable difference between truth and consensus. Within traditional Jewish religious discourse, “truth” was the prerogative of a privileged interpretive elite that in traditional societies consisted of the scholarly class within the Jewish community. Within this community, “truth” and “reality” were nothing more (and were undoubtedly perceived as nothing more) than consensus within a sufficiently large portion of the interpretive community. …

Jewish religious ideology was an infinitely plastic set of propositions that could rationalize and interpret any event in a manner compatible with serving the interests of the community. Authority within the Jewish intellectual community was always understood to be based entirely on what recognized (i.e., consensual) scholars had said. It never occurred to the members of this discourse community to seek confirmation of their views from outside the community of intellectual discourse itself, either from other (non-Jewish) discourse communities or by trying to understand the nature of reality itself. Reality was whatever the group decided it should be, and any dissent from this socially constructed reality would have to be performed within a narrow intellectual space that would not endanger the overall goals of the group.

Acceptance of the Jewish canon, like membership in the intellectual movements reviewed here, was essentially an act of authoritarian submission. The basic genius of the Jewish intellectual activity reviewed in these chapters is the realization that hermeneutic communities based solely on intellectual consensus within a committed group are possible even within the post-Enlightenment world of intellectual discourse … and may even be successfully disseminated within the wider non-Jewish community to facilitate specific Jewish political interests. [Chapter 6 of The Culture of Critique]

I thought you might be interested in reading this particular article Saker. I would also love to hear your input on it:

Something Curious is Happening to Sunni Islam By: Alastair Crooke

http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/something-curious-happening-sunni-islam

@VINEYARDSAKER and @Mari:

I am studying the Crooke article. It plays the sly game of analysis-in-the-interest-of-imperialism exceptionally well, and separating the wheat from the chaff will take some work. I will start from just one confusion:

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Quietly, almost unnoticed, mainstream Sunni Islamism has been, over the years, preparing – not some withdrawal from secular modernity into some inner sanctum – but its Islamist takeover, as the means to establish a new, pan-national, social sphere: an umma (a global ‘nation’ of believers) grounded in the social media of the Internet era, that ultimately will bring to fruition the notion of a modern Islamic state, in Muslim majority societies.
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Well, surprise surprise! There is absolutely nothing new about this, to anyone who has followed the Muslim Brotherhood since the days of Hassan al-Banna. A “withdrawal from secular modernity into some inner sanctum” was never the name of the game.

But notice how Crooke throws the word ‘secular’ in the mix. This obfuscates things. The point that Sayyid Qutb, the greatest intellectual of the Brotherhood, always made was that there is no necessary coupling between modernity and secularity. In his analysis, Crooke deliberately hides this aspect of things to steer the Brotherhood in a secular direction.

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They have been de-ideologizing Islam: that is to say, the Brothers have been unobtrusively, but deliberately, de-linking from Islam’s intellectual tradition, by creating in its stead, an undefined, ambiguous, non-doctrinal ideological framework.
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What baloney! Again, Crooke is projecting his own expectations and desires for how to steer the Brotherhood to fit the imperialist agenda. Again, Crooke is cooking up half-truths: Yes, the Brotherhood has always held the ancient intellectual traditions of Islam in some disdain. Unlike the Salafis (or Wahhabis or Taliban etc), they have been progressive in their disdain, not reactionary.

But it is that very progressive disdain for traditional Muslim (as opposed to Islamic) institutions that marks one of the ideological pillars of the Brotherhood. There is no “de-ideologizing” of Islam. Quite the opposite: Islam qua ideology on the basis of a progressive agenda is in many ways the chief legacy of the Brotherhood in the 20th century.

What Crooke is hoping is that the Brotherhoods abandons its ideological underpinnings so that it may be more easily assimilated into the Imperialist agenda, just as has already happened with the Wahhabis many generations ago.

The rest of the article is in a similar vein. It is a mixture of half-truths couched within an imperialist agenda.

I have no time for a detailed critique of the entire article, but if there is a specific question I’ll be happy to contribute to the discussion.

Peace

@ishamid: Thanks a lot for sharing your insights with us!

@Mar: the right person did reply, as I had hoped :-))

@ Mari

Wa 3alaykum salaam, Sister.

As for agendas, I guess you know that Crooke was a British diplomat/MI6 spy for decades, so go figure …

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I am interested in what you think about Crooke’s claim that “Indeed, mainstream Sunni Islamism increasingly is defining itself – not in opposition to western modernity – but to Shiism.”
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This is another half-truth. The original consciousness of Brotherhood Sunnism was largely trans-sectarian. See, for example, Sayyid Qutb’s letter to Ayatullah Kashani in the 1950’s during the struggle of oil nationalization in Iran.

On the other hand, Wahhabism has worked relentlessly since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, sparing no expense or dirty trick, to drive a wedge between Sunni and Shi3i revolutionary consciousness.

This, combined with an ongoing campaign to take the leadership of the Sunni world at large. Note that Wahhabis did not used to consider themselves Sunni; Sunnis did not consider Wahhabis Sunnis; and Wahhabis considered most traditional Sunnis as heretics to one degree or other (they still do, actually).

Some progressive and other Sunnis have been coopted: THe most famous example is perhaps Yusuf Qaradawi, the famous Egyptian cleric who now lives upon Qatari largess.

The amount of resources poured by the Saudis into Palestine and Egypt especially for the purpose of demonizing the Shiʿah has been incalculable. This puts pressure on Hamas and the Brotherhood, each of whom faces variants of Wahhabi-Salafism as competition. This is one reason Hamas has no choice but to engage e.g. Qatar: The gulf monarchies are funding the reactionary opposition.

So Crooke is working to fulfill a vision: the cooptation of Sunni Islamic movements into an anti-Shiʿi front to serve the purposes of divide-and-rule. Many Sunnis are quite aware of this. But poverty and the allure of Sauid-Qatari finance is a powerful motivation for compromising principle or even selling out.

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And how he compares the Sunni Islamic movement to the Shia Islamic movement in the internal and external senses.
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This is largely incoherent on Crooke’s part (placing Shiʿi and Sufi in the same category for purposes of the ideological context of his article is just plain wrong). OTOH, there are important distinctions between the spirit of Shiʿi and Sunni ideological movements, differences discussed by many sincere writers in the first decade after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. It is an important issue, but one for which Crooke’s article sheds no light whatsoever.

Peace

@ Mari:

Hve you seen

http://www.crescent-online.net/

This is probably the best source for Sunni analysis of events in the spirit of progressive Sunni movements. I don’t agree with much of what they say but at least they are sincere.

Peace