John Humphrys yesterday (08:10) blamed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 for the rise of ISIS, choosing a moment in time and a particular event that Humphrys’ world seems to revolve around, and making that the sole trigger for events that occurred subsequently.
Humphrys is anti the Iraq War and so any chance he gets he tries to pin some blame for world calamities upon the invasion.
Two can play at that game of course…a good argument could be made to say John Humphrys is solely to blame for the rise of ISIS and the spread of Islamic terrorism around the world…having made false allegations about Tony Blair and having misled the world into thinking that the war was illegal he has ensured that governments now are very reluctant to engage in military action or suppression of Islamic terrorism…..leading to a free for all in the Middle East….never mind the rise of ‘conservative Islam’ here in the UK.
But let’s not be judgemental…let’s be more generous and merely ask why Humphrys limits his historic blame game to events in 2003? He has always opposed the Iraq War and was prepared to mislead the listener and spread misinformation when broadcasting on the subject…perhaps his editor or producer should reconsider when choosing who to front a piece on Iraq, Humphrys being seriously compromised, damaged goods.
Wy not choose to go back to say 1914?…..the BBC are after all always ready to blame the British in WWI for the creation of Israel, which as we know is the cause of all the trouble in the world……so why not blame Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, for the rise of the Jihadis?
The link is clear…Princip kills the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, leading to the First World War, the rise of the Soviets, the rise of Hitler, the eventual creation of both Israel and Pakistan and Al Qaeda.
Hitler started the Second World War and lost. The Soviets then annexed much of Europe and started the Cold War which climaxed in their defeat in Afghanistan by Mujahideen supported by the West. The Mujahideen had morphed into Al Qaeda under the guidance of Osama Bin Laden.
Bin Laden wanted to invade Iraq and depose Saddam with his own Mujahideen…’He didn’t like him, and he told me he wanted to kick him out of Iraq, as he considered the Ba’th regime to be an atheist regime. He considered Saddam Hussein an atheist, and he hates an atheist’…… but was rebuffed by Saudi Arabia who invited in the infidel Americans to do the job in 1991…leading to OBL’s terminal case of the grumps against the world and his subsequent plots against the ‘Far Enemy’, the USA, with his creation ‘Al Qaeda’.
Meanwhile Pakistan created the Taliban as a proxy army to control Afghanistan which led to Al Qaeda having a Jihadi friendly training base and 9/11, and thence the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq by the West….then we had the Arab Spring, set in motion by a fruit seller, Mohammed Bouazizi, in Tunisia as the BBC always admiringly tells us , followed by mass uprisings and conflict in Egypt and then Syria.
‘Mohamed Bouazizi’s image has been used to inspire protesters throughout the Arab world’
Events in Syria led to the resurgence of ISIS….So Mohammed Bouazizi must be a good candidate for hanging the blame on for the recreation of ISIS in John Humphrys world.
ISIS is an off-shoot of Al Qaeda, and as mentioned Al Qaeda wanted to depose Saddam long before the US got boots on the ground in 1991…so Humphrys’ claim that ISIS and the current war in Iraq is a creation of the 2003 Iraq invasion has little basis in fact…ISIS was beaten in Iraq by the ‘Surge’, the same Surge that Humphrys always claimed would never work. ISIS retreated but rebuilt and used the violent carnage in Syria to recreate itself…..only to be driven out of much of Syria by another Jihadi group, al Nusra…..ISIS made the best of it and set out to take as much of Iraq as it could…taking advantage of the discontent felt by Sunni Iraqis towards the Shia lead government.
Humphrys also blames the 2003 Iraq invasion for putting the Shia Maliki in government as PM who then adopted policies that favoured the Shia that subsequently created that ISIS friendly discontent opening the way for the ISIS takeover.
But that is all to convenient and suits Humphrys’ own narrative. If you want to cast some blame for the Shia/Sunni conflict you only have to look at Saddam’s policy of crushing the Shia rather than integrating them. They now take their revenge. Humphrys also conveniently forgets the Shia Iran/ Sunni Iraq war.
Or you could go right back over a thousand years to the split in Islam between the Sunnis and the Shia.
Why doesn’t Humphrys go back to that time? Why does he stop in 2003? It suits his agenda.
What we have with Humphrys is a BBC journalist hijacking history, abusing his position to peddle his own fantasies with editors and producers too weak or too much on board the same narrative to stop him.
Trying to pin the blame for particular events on a single previous event is, as shown above, childishly simple to discredit and mock. No one single event can be said to be to blame for future events, any event is the cumulation of many, many historic occurrences that lead up to it. Cherry picking ones that allow you to spin a tale that you want to be true doesn’t make it so.
Just as Humphrys misled us about the start of the war he now misleads us about the subsequent fallout.
Good job we don’t have to rely on the BBC for the truth. Just a shame we still are forced to pay for this misinformation/tripe.
Yes, INBBC starts with some anti-West diatribe of an historical presumption.
INBBC doesn’t provide the historical information that groups such as Jews and Christians lived in the Middle East centuries before the Islamic imperialists.
“World Ignores Christian Exodus from Islamic World”
by Raymond Ibrahim.
http://www.meforum.org/4770/world-ignores-christian-exodus-from-islamic-world
For INBBC :-
“The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam: And the Crusades ”
by Robert Spencer.
‘Look Inside’-
Wasn’t Robert Spencer banned from entering the UK by the Home Office? Apparently his views would have upset too many followers of the RoP so rather than enforce the law of the land regarding violent disorder they simply shot the messenger. (Excellent book, BTW)
Robert Spencer was indeed barred from entry to the UK, unsurprising given the number of SWP supporters in power.
Funny but Greater Manchester’s Fascist Police commissioner Tony Lloyd (and he’s been called that in mainstream media & not sued, the evidence is damning) signed a petition to keep him out while ignoring the Saudi preacher who hosts a weekly TV program which teaches men the correct way to beat their wives, and who hold some pretty unpleasant views about the rights of women.
At the same time Lloyd was running a campaign against domestic violence.
Sickening hypocrisy.
For INBBC:-
‘Islamic Imperialism: a history.’
By Efraim Karsh,
Yale University Press.
“From the first Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of the Middle East has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams. So argues Efraim Karsh in this highly provocative book. Rejecting the conventional Western interpretation of Middle Eastern history as an offshoot of global power politics, Karsh contends that the region’s experience is the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior, and that foremost among these is Islam’s millenarian imperial tradition.
“The author explores the history of Islam’s imperialism and the persistence of the Ottoman imperialist dream that outlasted World War I to haunt Islamic and Middle Eastern politics to the present day. September 11 can be seen as simply the latest expression of this dream, and such attacks have little to do with U.S. international behavior or policy in the Middle East, says Karsh. The House of Islam’s war for world mastery is traditional, indeed venerable, and it is a quest that is far from over.”
http://books.google.co.uk/books/yup?vid=ISBN9780300106039&redir_esc=y
About right . The ebb and flow of empires. Isis senses that we lack any real will to defend our culture. Maybe Isis is right.
Nothing is clear at the moment.
Westerners have spent too much time thinking and agonising about “the right thing to do” in a Western world where nobody is any longer sure what “right” is. They cannot understand certainty. They seek always the ” correct “way to behave and how to live without causing offence to anyone.
Impossible. That is not how the world works.
Our culture is worth defending. Our art and our law is worth defending. Our beliefs are worth defending.
Our ancient peoples are worth defending.
It looks as if it will come down to this and we will have to choose.
We will need the old virtues. Courage and stubborness and leadership. We will need brave men and women and above all we will have to face reality.
It’s expedient, is it not, for the Left to blame the rise of Islamic extremism on recent foreign policy; you see, through immoral imputations they can absolve themselves of any guilt in letting islamic extremism on our streets go unchecked.
‘a good argument could be made to say John Humphrys is solely to blame for the rise of ISIS and the spread of Islamic terrorism around the world…having made false allegations about Tony Blair’
Do you write this stuff with a straight face?
Do you write comments on articles without reading them to the end? Move your finger to the third paragraph from the end of the article, read it – you may move your lips – then come back and tell us what you have learnt.
Yep, re-read it. My comment still stands.
I should also point out that it was Andrew Giligan who made that report on Today, JH was just asking him the questions. I guess that means its Alan re-writing history.
No , Al’s right, the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with what’s going on there at the moment, nothing at all. Dee dee, de dee dee (fingers in ears).
You just ignored 1400 years of history so your smugness rings a little hollow, my child.
The rise of ISIS/IS could also be put at the door of the European Soviet Union. Consider: E(S)U policy has to increase bio-fuels in diesel. Therefore, more land has been taken out of food production for bio-fuels. This has increased the price of food – which hits the poorest most. Hence the immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi. And the Arab Spring etc
Although this is a length piece, I cannot agree with its pretext.
The root cause of ISIS is the stupidity of the British government, and the French government for whom stupidity is a given when it comes to terrorism, Islamic in particular.
It began in Tunisia with as you have noted Mohamed Bouazizi’s self immolation, which sparked the Arab Spring.
If it hadn’t been for the intervention of mindless Western powers these young revolutionaries would not have been able to overthrow their leaders and their revolutions would have been squashed in their infancy.
If they’d had a chance they would have been helping ISIS in Syria, and their can be no doubt that if it were not for their stupidity the Syrian uprising would probably never have happened.
Without Syria there could be no ISIS as they could not have gained a safe haven for long enough to form & train. Following that they moved to Iraq.
Iraq and the allied invasion is not the cause, Syria is, and it can be laid at the door of Cameron & Sarkozy without whose ineptitude it could not have happened.
Cameron is well known for his rose tinted naïve view of Muslims, and Sarkozy is French!
If you want to go back to the history then again you come back to Haj Amin Al Husseini who is the father of modern Jihad. Well worth reading up on this nasty piece of work whose hate is still affecting the Middle East.
The left/BBC wants to sanitise ISIS/IS by blaming the Iraq war – i.e. the West – for the rise of jihadism (or “radicalism” as they prefer to call it). Presumably they take this line to try to blur the straight-forward and obvious fact that the “root cause” of the barbaric fascism of ISIS is Islam itself, and its pathological sectarian hatreds.
Just always remember – Humphrys is a Cultural Marxist, so his mindset is to destroy what he considers the ‘old regime’ to make way for some kind of glorious lefty revolution. Let’s face it, whatever happened in Iraq he would have critisised. Imagine a world where Iraq stabilised and became a successful democratic country. I can see the BBC headlines now: “Iraqis bemoan loss of traditional values to Western consumerism” or “Gap between rich and poor in Iraq widens”
“It’s Anti-Semitism, Stupid”
by Efraim Karsh.
http://www.meforum.org/4772/gaza-antisemitism
Reposted – unaccountably redacted along with the thread I replied to:
Isis can be excused for supposing that the west lacks the will to defend its culture, based on the shameful and cowardly behaviour of its political class and the way that mainstream western media largely ignores or under-reports its vile excesses. However, the defeatist attitude adopted by the body politic is not shared by the majority of inhabitants of western nations, who are gradually waking up to the lies which they are fed daily by organisations such as our beloved state broadcaster.
It is an inescapable fact that at some time in the not too distant future, the religio-political ideology which is murdering its way across the Middle East will have to be faced head on, and our current western leadership, clearly not up to that task, will have to be replaced, one way or another, in order to protect our chances of pulling off this task successfully.
The BBC will of course do its best to prevent change of this nature from happening, utilising its formidable armoury of obfuscation and misinformation techniques in the effort, but this can do no more than delay the inevitable for a short while.
A clear example of the BBC’s favourite ploy is the way that Israel’s actions to defend its very existence against a similar band of murderous medieval throw-backs are raised to the public’s notice in an extremely negative way, while the continuing vile genocide perpetrated against Iraq’s non-muslim minorities is minimalized in BBC reporting, if it is reported at all.
I have never been quite sure what it is that motivates those in high positions at the BBC, but it is increasingly clear that their principal values are not necessarily aligned with anything I hold dear.
When the useless political class we are suffering is finally unseated, a reckoning must be reserved for those at the corporation.