USA-Radical Islam

Collected

USA: Flirting with fundamentalist Islam

Many US government officials and so-called experts take a head-in-the-sand view, routinely siding with terrorists rather than terror victims – criticising the Bangladeshi government for barring Jamaat from directly participating in elections. The report, likely written to bolster the US’s regime change operations in Bangladesh, seeks to project Jamaat-e-Islami as a victim of harassment by law enforcement authorities, while ignoring the hate campaign the party is running. It states, “leaders and members of Jamaat-e-Islami (Jamaat), the largest Muslim political party in the country, could not exercise their constitutional freedoms of speech and assembly because of harassment by law enforcement authorities. Jamaat was deregistered as a political party by the government, prohibiting candidates from seeking office under the Jamaat name.”

The US State Department raises questions on the legality and fairness of the Bangladesh International Crimes Tribunal, established in 2010 to conduct trials of those accused of war crimes and atrocities that took place during the 1971 War of Independence. The US State Department report accuses the proceedings of the war crimes tribunal of being “politically motivated, as the court almost exclusively indicted members of opposition political parties.” Such baseless allegations in its human rights report raises questions about whether the US is once again backing Islamist radicals for its own strategic interests, a pattern that has been observed in other countries in the past. The US has a long history of supporting Islamist radicals in other countries for its own strategic interests. Since the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used Islamist radicals to bring down Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh regime when it threatened to nationalise Iran’s oil industry. Similarly, the CIA used Islamist radicals backed by Pakistan to torpedo Afghanistan’s Saur revolution that was making progress in terms of women’s emancipation and the end of  clan-based feudalism. Moreover, the US also backed the Pakistani military in the suppression of the 1971 Bengali uprising in erstwhile East Pakistan. Through its infamous Operation Cyclone the CIA armed and financed the Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, heavily supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favoured by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighbouring Pakistan. The US sponsored Arab Spring ended Hosni Mubarak's 'police state' but propelled the Islamic brotherhood to power. The US spent more than $4 million in federal grants to shadowy jihadi organisations, ironically under the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programme. Jamaat’s Western proxies have raised tens of millions of dollars in the U.S. since 2005.

Jamaat and its associates have a decades-long history of violence. In 1971, Jamaat death squads murdered thousands of civilians during Bangladesh's War of Independence from Pakistan. During the run-up to Bangladesh's election in 2014, Islami Chhatra Shibir, Jamaat’s student wing, was ranked the third most violent non-state armed group in the world because it frequently targeted religious minorities like Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and Ahmadi Muslims to intimidate and disenfranchise them.

Speaking at a seminar hosted by the Middle East Forum in USA in association with South Asia Minorities Alliance Foundation and other influential think tanks, in November 2018 US Congressman from Indiana, Jim Banks, expressed concerns over the growing influence of radical Jamaat-e-Islami in South Asia and stated that much of the violence in Kashmir is linked to JeI related affiliates. He stressed that there is a lack of awareness and action by the US against the activities of the JeI. It may be pointed out that JeI leaders in Bangladesh were opposed to the independence movement in 1971 and were part of Pakistan Army’s crackdown against innocent civilians in erstwhile East Pakistan. JeI affiliated al-Badr and al-Shams, actively participated along with Pakistani military in the massacre of nearly three million Bengalis.According to him, "Jamaat-e-Islami is especially operating in South Asia with its violent factions found in Pakistan and Bangladesh. It is a violent, theocratic group that has committed violent acts against minority Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Ahmadis." The US lawmaker further said that the JeI continues to grow its influence in South Asia, and today has been operating on a large scale with multiple international partners.

Other influential figures have also spoken about Washingtopn’s support for Islamists. Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman openly said that this has been the West's worst kept secret. According to him, the Saudi-funded spread of Wahhabism - the main source of the fundamentalist ideology of terrorist groups like ISIS began as a result of Western countries asking Riyadh to help counter Russia during the Cold War. Speaking to the US media in 2019, bin Salman said his Western allies prodded Saudi Arabia to invest in mosques and madrassas overseas, in an effort to prevent Moscow from making inroads into Muslim countries.

In 1999, the year that Vladimir Putin came to power, the Russian President uncannily predicted the rise of the Islamic State. In a television interview he referred to Islamist groups backed by the West: "We are up against a very serious enemy, one that is in fact armed and trained abroad. What's actually happening is that the extremist part of the Islamic world - and only the extremist part, let me emphasise that it has a solid infrastructure in the West, in North America and in Western Europe."

The European Parliament has presented a scathing report on how Western countries, especially the US has contributed to the growth of radical Islamic groups - including those that have targeted the West - by ignoring the financing of such groups.

According to Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, the US- led invasion of Iraq was a mistake and helped to create the Islamist State militant group, "The break-up of the Iraqi forces poured hundreds if not thousands of disgruntled soldiers and police officers onto the streets." These men later formed the core of al-Qaeda and later the Islamic State.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) — the independent federal government body responsible for massive amounts of foreign aid, has been accused of “gross negligence” in failing to investigate credible allegations that a nonprofit ‘Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD)’ which was linked to designated terrorist organisations received a $110,000 grant. HHRD’s alleged links to Jamaat-e-Islami have come up repeatedly. In 2019, representatives Jim Banks, Chuck Fleischmann, and Randy Weber wrote to a State Department official requesting an investigation into “the nexus of charitable networks and terrorist groups” such as Jamaat. Why does USAID, which the State Department oversees, continue such dubious funding despite red flags? Does the Joe Biden administration support sponsorship of such shadowy Islamist groups?

Under the Awami rule, the country has made significant progress in tackling extremism and radicalism. The government has taken measures to counter violent extremism, and security forces have successfully apprehended and neutralised many extremist terrorist groups. Additionally, the Awami League has implemented policies to promote religious tolerance and pluralism, as well as economic development, which has reduced the appeal of extremist ideologies.

The bipartisan deep state has continued its policy of supporting radical Islamist groups in order to remove surviving secular regimes anywhere in the world. The US interest lies in keeping third world countries poor, unstable and in a state of regression. For this the US seems to be reverting to its old tactics of regime change using a mix of “civil society” figures, to chastise the secular stabilising Awami League government, and prevent Bangladesh from continuing on its path of development.