22 December 2005
Allah the Exalted has said in His Noble Qur’an, Surat ar-Rum (30:39):
What you give with usurious intent,
aiming to get back a greater amount from people’s wealth,
does not become greater with Allah.
But anything you give as Zakat, seeking the Face of Allah –
all who do that will get back twice as much.
There is a classical drawing in cognitive psychology which, when looked at at first, is the form of a rabbit, but if looked at long enough slowly becomes a human face. To the psychologist, the important thing is that you cannot look at both viewings of the form simultaneously. You will see either a rabbit or a face. From the very beginning, I along with millions of Muslims believed I was looking at the rabbit. However, in the conviction that we were all caught up in a deception, it seemed inevitable that a moment would come in which Allah would offer us the insight of how things were, viewed from another perspective, viewed with new eyes. It would be foolish to pretend that we were not all bewildered and confused. On the one hand there was certainly a corrupt and usurious system, yet on the other hand we, the Muslim World Community, fragmented as we were into illegitimate Nation States and currencies, could not accommodate ourselves to the idea of a Jihad under a leadership which had received no Bayat and which had in fact never raised high the Banner of Islam, let alone acknowledged that Jihad itself had very strict rules, and that acts of individual suicide, even in a para-military context, were categorically forbidden.
Our distress became twofold as intelligence reports began to reveal that the proponents of terrorism, both in leadership and execution, were of the lowest and most dubious social background, and that their rhetoric gave no indication of an Islamic identity, but rather uniquely used the language of radical politics. This distress became aggravated when we saw how, with alarming speed, the outrageous acts were producing a much more outrageous response. In the shortest time, led by the USA, Britain and the EU States began to throw out all the foundational principles of law on which European, and later American society had been founded since the time of Henry VIII and François I. It was not an Islamic event, but once the dust of the explosions cleared, we were the guilty party collectively responsible for the crimes, and at the same time to be collectively punished and oppressed, because among our two billion Muslim World Community lay hidden the thousand terrorists.
All we were able to see on the page was the outline of the rabbit. We were convinced that this form we perceived was not the truth of events or people. We had observed one thing from our knowledge of the classical roots of modern terrorism in Czarist Russia. It embodied three factors. One: terrorist events declared themselves with one savage attack and then could be seen on the graph which traced their progress to decline in intensity and decrease in enormity. Two: since terrorism itself was a manifestation of the inner contradictions of the tyrannical State, the State’s anti-terrorism took on the outline and character of the very force it was opposing. Three: the successful pursuit of terrorism in fact presages the downfall of the host State. The propulsion of these three motor-forces towards one inescapable end has been analysed both sociologically and psychologically in the great writings of Dostoevsky and Turgenev.
The more time revealed that the current model of terrorism conformed almost strictly to its original Russian model, the more it began to become clear – as the world’s media all used the same analytical vocabulary, and as the world’s States all began to dismantle the great legal heritage of the Renaissance, and that, with no challenge from the educated classes – that we had all been held to the confirmation of an illusion.
Allah the Exalted says in Surat ar-Rum (30:41-42):
Corruption has appeared in both land and sea
because of what people’s own hands have brought about
so that they may taste something of what they have done
so that hopefully they will turn back.
Say: ‘Travel about the earth and see the final fate
of those before.
Most of them were mushrikun.’
What we will here propose is that there is no terrorism as such. It is not the product of lone, desperate and minute Islamic groupings. Nor is it the acting-out of an equally sinister and secretive US Republican policy.
It is a war. It is clearly not a war of one sovereign State against another. The end of the Cold War saw the end of inter-State conflicts. It is categorically not a war between a coalition of sovereign States and a mysterious band of nihilists, called terrorists. It is something quite new. Let us examine the matter.
We are in a completely new situation. But such a radical sea-change as we are now experiencing does not happen overnight. It is certainly not initiated by the targeted destruction of two skyscrapers, even if that violence is the first scar on the homeland of a country that has sown savage destruction from Europe to Asia, any more than the vast suicidal trench warfare of World War I was the result of the assassination of the Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand. It took The Hundred Years War to end the social system of Feudalism, and it took The Thirty Years War and the political genius of Henry VIII to end the political and financial hegemony of Roman Catholicism. What we now witness in the present world situation we must trace back to the middle of the Twentieth Century. The recognition of the case we make here is thematically to be found in the famous Farewell Speech of President Eisenhower in 1961. At the centre of his speech lies an overt sounding of our theme, heralding the age to come, and in which we are now living. It is not incidental to this affair that Eisenhower was not a professional politician but a great soldier who had gained office uniquely by his military success. Here is the central theme of the USA’s last sovereign ruler before the Republic came to an end as the future he warned against became our present reality.
President Eisenhower declared:
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plough-shares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defence; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defence establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal Government. We recognise the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
“In the councils of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military-Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
The man who had been chosen by the emerging Power Elite to represent them in the hallowed halls of political discourse, Senate and Congress, was Richard Nixon. He had already been put in place under the War leader Eisenhower, just as his monetarist equivalent, Pompidou, was forced on De Gaulle when he was required to rescue French interests. I recall the playwright Lillian Hellman telling me that the McCarthy Trials were not about purging a Communist threat, but were a sophisticatedly staged arena of patriotism to prepare a path for the enthronement of Nixon. Nixon lost to Kennedy when the Mafia delivered him the White House. One could say that Kennedy was not ‘meant’ to be President. His failure to deliver Cuba to his official masters, the Military-Industrial Complex, and his hidden masters, the Mafia, placed him in a position vis-à-vis the Pentagon where he had to, in his words, ‘give them Vietnam’. His assassination put the new programmation of the Power Elite again into limbo, but soon the categorical imperatives of war brought Nixon at last to power. With ‘their man’ in power, events began to move fast.
The most important event of the Nixon administration was not the termination of the Vietnam War, nor the strangely admired Opening to China. It was the conflict that was presented to us as that between the USA and Chile. A highly cultured Marxist intellectual, Salvador Allende, was elected President of the sovereign State of Chile. Within the terms of that dialectic he saw his task as that of liberating his country’s economy, and indeed social nexus, from the imperialist presence of the USA. One of the most menacing of the trans-national corporations dominating the Chilean economy was the communications giant ITT. The head of ITT, Geneen, a Polish American jew, went to Nixon, and as we know from the records that emerged after Nixon’s disgrace, he handed him a briefcase crammed with $100 bills to activate the subversion of the Chilean economy leading to an end of the affair with a Coup d’État. It is at this point that we have to begin to redefine both the vocabulary of events, and the relevant integers of the narrative of the events.
War broke out in Chile. This was the first war in the modern age that we can categorically define as not being a war between sovereign States. Allende declared the war. Although President of Chile, he did not in reality declare it on behalf of the people of Chile. He acted on behalf of the dispossessed, the oppressed and the slave workers. Nixon, from the Oval Office, declared the war, openly, to his Chilean Ambassador. He did not declare it on behalf of the American people. He acted on behalf of the interests of the presence of the great American corporations functioning inside Chile.
It must be remembered that Allende spoke within both the language and the dialectics of Marxist-Leninism, which are in themselves shattered instruments of political policy, not just because of the collapse of Soviet Communism, but also in no small measure due to the tragic failure of Allende’s government. His use of this now out-moded system in no way inhibited him, indeed it must be grudgingly admitted that it helped him understand the one great burning issue of our time. It must also be remembered that in mid-Twentieth Century, UNO did not mean to the world a fascistic Security Council, but rather the UNO Assembly, in itself a then-active arena for the voices of the world’s dispossessed masses.
On 4 December 1972, President Salvador Allende addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations in a speech of the utmost historical importance. In it he said:
“At the third UNCTAD I was able to discuss the phenomenon of the trans-national corporations. I mentioned the great growth in their economic power, political influence and corrupting action. That is the reason for the alarm with which world opinion should react in the face of a reality of this kind. The power of these corporations is so great that it goes beyond all borders. The foreign investments of US companies alone reached US$ 32,000 million. Between 1950 and 1970 they grew at a rate of 10 per cent a year, while that nation’s exports only increased by 5 per cent. They make huge profits and drain off tremendous resources from the developing countries.
“In just one year, these firms withdrew profits from the Third World that represented net transfers in their favour of US$ 1,743 million: US$ 1,013 million from Latin America; US$ 280 million from Africa; US$ 376 million from the Far East; and US$ 74 million from the Middle East. Their influence and their radius of action are upsetting the traditional trade practices of technological transfer among States, the transmission of resources among nations, and labour relations.
“We are faced by a direct confrontation between the large trans-national corporations and the States. The corporations are interfering in the fundamental political, economic and military decisions of the States. The corporations are global organisations that do not depend on any State and whose activities are not controlled by, nor are they accountable to any parliament of any other institution representative of the collective interest. In short, all the world political structure is being undermined. The dealers do not have a country. The place where they may be does not constitute any kind of link; the only thing they are interested in is where they make profits. This is not something I say; they are Jefferson’s words.”
The impact of Allende’s speech was overwhelming. When he sat down the Assembly erupted in a roar of cheering and applause. When he rose to acknowledge them, the whole Assembly rose to its feet in wave after wave of confirmation in an applause that recognised there had been a marker set down to declare a new age was upon us.
Everything had become different. The fall of Allende, and not the fall of the Berlin Wall, marks the end of the idiom of Communism as the language of the struggle of the world’s impoverished masses. It marked the end of Communist policy, and it also heralded what we might term a new ambience and indeed a new evaluation in the nature of political struggle. When Pinochet’s brutal Coup d’Etat ended the rule of the Allende Government, its tanks surrounded the Al Moneda Presidential Building. Facing inevitable defeat, Allende committed suicide. This was witnessed by his companions. Some years later his Political Secretary, known as La Paya, also committed suicide, as if to align herself with Allende’s struggle. Of the suicide of Allende the Communist leadership in Chile said, ‘We needed him alive. With his death we lost our future.’ In place of the utopian futurism of radical politics, a fatal sickness had set in. The Chilean masses had not rallied to defend Al Moneda. Also, the Chilean masses could not have defended it. Castro, the experienced Marxist, had told them you cannot succeed without your own army. The political was re-defining itself. One could say that the Doctrine of Perpetual Revolution was the logically ultimate end of the earlier Revolutionary Struggle according to Trotsky. The perpetual recycling of suicide became the logical end-game of the new world Anti-Capitalist movement. The old political dialectic Left/Right had dissolved into the global centralism of so-called political democracies which found themselves forced to surrender to the new Catholic Church of bankism and its mystical doctrine of ‘Market Forces’.
Politics had atrophied in a centrism that reduced it only to a minimalist supervision of medicine, education and the policing of the streets. In the world outside – conflict remained. In the next stage of the War, terrorism emerged as itself a kind of battlefield terrain. While suicide was to remain a founding pillar that embodied resistance to the death, it began also to transform from the Allende-style defeat into an active force of violence. This brought us to what we may now define as Terrorism.
In this new stage of the War against bankism, we are now able to subsume under the term bankism its constituent elements:
- Centralist ownership of goods, without limitations, defined as a doctrine of unsubsidised liberal trade.
- A world trade on paper currencies, while at the same time blocking some currencies and making others (Mali etc.) non-negotiable.
- A global imposition of a Value Added Tax on all goods commercially sold inside every national State.
- The transformation of family farms into agricultural corporations.
- Expansionist wars for commodities gain re-designed as excuses for the production of democratic modules which detach wealth from government.
In this new stage of bankism’s War against the masses, we are now able to subsume under the term ‘the masses’ the constituent elements of their on-going war on capitalism:
- Militant opposition to the rape of commodities leaving the host country impoverished.
- Oil on a global level, focussed on Central Asia and the Middle East.
- Draining of the world’s gold reserves into the USA, from where gold cannot be exported.
- Coffee: imported for the technocratic elite, while the coffee producers starve without education or medicine
- Uranium: supplies one third of France’s electricity, while starvation and disease decimate the population of Mali.
- Plutonium: massive wealth is extracted from Lesotho, where a ten-year-old child is sentenced to ten years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread.
- Militant opposition to the ruthless policing of migrant populations driven from their homes by the natural instinct of survival.
- Militant opposition to the absolute licence granted to the Israeli State in its totalitarian oppression of the Arab peoples.
- Militant opposition, given the perception that bankism recognises Islam as its only authentic enemy, to the mass deportation, torture and disappearance of men and women deemed to be Muslim activists throughout the world, and thus subjected to trans-State deportation, rendering them non-people.
In the decades of the second half of the Twentieth Century, the War began to take on its silhouette of terrorists and street-fighting activists against military and local police forces. Note, how even in the above list reference has been made to France, Israel and Mali. This is no longer a relevant explication of events. Where we say France, we should be saying, for example, Dessault, as where we say USA we should be saying Halliburton, or Mobil Oil and Monsanto.
At this next stage, therefore, we should not say Germany and Italy, but rather we should identify the War’s embodiment in the terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof group in the one country, and the train station bombings in the other. The infamous R.A.F. groupings, the pro-Mussolini groupings, along with the I.R.A. and E.T.A. terrorism, represent a sporadic resistance to the capitalist system gathering an increasing momentum, so that the War passed from its first ‘phoney war’ stage, with Greenpeace activists as its romantic heroes, until two strands of the resistance began to come together. The endless killing of the Palestinians and the brutality of the Israeli regime with its targeted blinding of children’s eyes during the Intifada, which forced its doctors to plead to the world for glass eyes since their supply had run out, began to collide with the ever-intensifying street battles of the so-called Anti-Globalists. What became clear to all these terrorists and activists was that they interpreted the enemy as one enemy. The terrorists who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma saw their enemy as a Federal Government whose organ of world domination, that is the enslavement of both American and Asian populations, was the World Trade Organisation. The oil that fuels the WTO’s rough-shod drive over national legislations is nothing other than the protocols issued by the World Bank and the IMF, which demand the surrender of sovereignty in obedience to monetary imperatives.
The attack on the WTC gave the bankers’ Power Elite an opportunity that could not have been more beneficial to it. In the words of one of their Think Tanks, ‘This let us kill two birds with one stone!’ Immediately, the American President was talking of a Crusade.
In reality, all the terrorists, whether they have labelled themselves as Islamic, or been named so by the USA and its allies, their true identity is better defined as being that of Arab modernist intellectuals who see themselves as part of the War on Corporation Capitalism. If they are educated, it is clear that they have been rehearsed, from Bin laden down, in the language and rhetoric of an anti-globalist War. The rest of their grouping represent that under-class which has always been used in political violence and assassinations, not only an under-class but, as with the shoe-bomber, mentally retarded.
This War, whose darkness is shot through with the lights of many, many un-rescued just causes, will have in the end of the day only two victims. The first victim will be inescapably the USA as a Nation State. It has not proved possible to defend the USA/Israel as a Nation State basis for trans-national corporations and supra-national police operations. It is not even possible, as is now popular, to lay the blame on the jews. Part of the irony of the USA’s present position is that it spent the Reagan Years in slandering all the famous jewish intellectuals who had bitterly opposed Americas role in world capitalism. From Lionel and Diana Trilling to Norman Mailer, they were forced to re-embrace a jew-ism they had long abandoned, with a new threat that to deny their background was un-patriotic, now that Reaganism saw the wedding of the Republic to the bankers’ world programme of dominion.
The other victim of the War is the dismantling of that legal tradition of an individual’s sanctity which preserved it from State power, as enshrined from Magna Carta, Star Chamber, Habeas Corpus, Double Jeopardy, and No Detention without Charge. The radical monetarist programme of turning every single child in the world into a debtor on birth – to them – could not be accomplished without the removal of that rare respect for the person that had been achieved at cost by a christian civilisation, and with glory by our Islamic civilisation.
In all of this, the role of the Muslim World Community is to return to the Deen. Allah the Exalted has said in Surat ar-Rum (30:30-31):
So set your face firmly towards the Deen,
as a pure natural believer,
Allah’s natural pattern on which He made mankind.
There is no changing Allah’s creation.
That is the true Deen –
but most people do not know it –
turning towards Him.
Have taqwa of Him and establish salat.
Do not be among the mushrikun.
This means that King Abdullah of Arabia must abandon the treachery of wahhabism and return to the tradition of his own country, and take up the School of the ‘Amal of the Ahl al-Madinah. This means that King Muhammad of Morocco must not sell a single Palace to those who, in buying them, will dethrone him, and he must act upon the unfulfilled promise of his great father, Hasan II, may Allah be merciful to him, for his defence of Morocco against a life-time war of France to recover its old colony. King Hasan, in the last year of his life, promised to a delegation of Murabitun from Granada, on receiving a gift of Islamic Gold Dinar, that with it he would re-institute the practice of the Collection of Zakat, and that he would set up a group of ‘ulama to put this into action. This means the abdication of the dinosaurs of the Ikhwan al-Muslimun and their recognition that their ‘Aqida is flawed, and that they are allied to Western doctrines and utterly unaware both of modern financial dynamics and the relevance of Divinely ordained Zakat, which must be collected in Dinar and Dirham. It is the minting and distribution of the Islamic Gold Dinar which will shatter the imagined power of the kafir Paper Dollar and banish forever the totalitarianism of the bankers’ epoch.
On 9/11, 1973, Salvador Allende was driven to suicide.
On 9/11, 2001, Arab anti-globalists committed suicide, flying their planes into the Twin Towers of the WTC.
That is the War, and it has not ceased on any front. Beyond this darkness, for us, there lies the spread of the Light of Islam throughout the world, a great reward, and a great forgiveness. Allah the Exalted has said in Surat al-A’raf (7:158):
Say: ‘Mankind! I am the Messenger of Allah to you all,
of Him to whom the kingdom of the heavens
and earth belongs.
There is no god but Him.
He gives life and causes to die.’
So have iman in Allah and His Messenger,
the Unlettered Prophet,
who has iman in Allah and His words,
and follow him
so that hopefully you will be guided.’
