{"id":14569,"date":"2015-11-20T07:00:22","date_gmt":"2015-11-20T12:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14569"},"modified":"2015-11-20T07:00:22","modified_gmt":"2015-11-20T12:00:22","slug":"we-created-islamic-extremism-those-blaming-islam-for-isis-would-have-supported-osama-bin-laden-in-the-80s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14569","title":{"rendered":"We created Islamic extremism: Those blaming Islam for ISIS would have supported Osama bin Laden in the \u201980s"},"content":{"rendered":"

We created Islamic extremism: Those blaming Islam for ISIS would have supported Osama bin Laden in the \u201980s\u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n

Jingoists conveniently forget the West’s Cold War strategy was to arm the Islamic extremists that became al-Qaida<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"We<\/a>(Credit: AP\/Dennis Cook)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolute lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today was borne out of the Western foreign policy of yesteryear.<\/p>\n

Gore Vidal famously referred to the USA as the United States of Amnesia. The late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai put it a little more delicately, quipping, \u201cOne of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.\u201d<\/div>\n
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\nIn order to understand the rise of militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida;\u00a0in order to wrap our minds around their heinous, abominable attacks on civilians in the U.S., France, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Nigeria, Turkey, Yemen, Afghanistan and many, many more countries, we must rekindle this historical memory.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Where did violent Islamic extremism come from? In the wake of\u00a0the horrific Paris attacks on Friday, November the 13<\/a>, this is the question no one is asking \u2014 yet it is the most important one of all. If one doesn\u2019t know why a problem emerged, if one cannot find its root, one will never be able to solve and uproot it.<\/p>\n

Where did militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida come from? The answer is not as complicated as many make it out to be \u2014 but, to understand, we must delve into the history of the Cold War, the historical period lied about in the West perhaps more than any other.<\/p>\n

How the West cultivated Osama bin Laden<\/h3>\n

We needn\u2019t reach back far into history, just a few decades.<\/p>\n

A much-circulated photo of\u00a0an article<\/a>\u00a0published in British newspaper the Independent in 1993 exemplifies the West\u2019s twisted hypocrisy. Titled \u201cAnti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace<\/a>,\u201d it features a large photo of Osama bin Laden, who, at the time, was a Western ally.<\/p>\n

\"Osama<\/p>\n

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…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We created Islamic extremism: Those blaming Islam for ISIS would have supported Osama bin Laden in the \u201980s\u00a0 Jingoists conveniently forget the West’s Cold War strategy was to arm the Islamic extremists that became al-Qaida (Credit: AP\/Dennis Cook) History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolute lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[149,10667,326,2559,10666,570,1880,3429,2510,10668,3098,10669,4216],"class_list":["post-14569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-cold-war","tag-editors-picks","tag-foreign-policy","tag-islam","tag-muslims","tag-news","tag-noam-chomsky","tag-osama-bin-laden","tag-paris","tag-politics-news","tag-ronald-reagan","tag-salon","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14569"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14570,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14569\/revisions\/14570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}