A US Opening to 'Moderate' Islamism?

China Confidential:


"Old habits are hard to break.Like a recidivist abuser of alcohol or drugs, the United States is apparently again attempting to manipulate radical Islam, or Islamism, in order to defeat an enemy, much the way Washington did during the Cold War.

This time around, however, the enemy is not the Soviet Union, which no longer exists--partly because of the US-supported jihad in Afghanistan that proved to be Moscow's Vietnam--but Islamism itself. The US is rerportedly reaching out to oxymoronic moderate-radical Islam to isolate and contain ultra-radical Islam--mainly, Al Qaeda, which was spawned by the struggle in Afghanistan, and assocated jihadist movements. Put differently, the US is seemingly sympathetic to--and tacitly supporting--rightwing political Islam as a counter to far-right political Islam.

Secular alternatives are nowadays no longer in favor in Washington and among key members of the foreign policy establishment; hence, a push to engage, if not embrace, the Muslim Brotherhood--which in reality only differs with Al Qaeda over strategy and tactics and minor theological issues--and the mixed signals sent out by the US to two increasingly threatened Muslim allies: secular, democratic Turkey and Islamic but not yet Islamist, authoritarian Pakistan. Though the two countries are clearly dramatically different in terms of history, culture, and geography, they are both counting on their armed forces to check the Islamist tide.

The military is the political party that matters most in most Muslim societies; and Turkey's military is staunchly secular and can be expected to fight fiercely if need be to preserve Turkey's impressive secular institutions and traditions. In Pakistan, however, the military and intelligence agencies have a sordid history of siding with Islamists--Pakistan basically created and then sustained the Taliban and cooperated closely with Al Qaeda before 9/11--but for reasons that may have more to do with self-preservation than ideology. The nation's intelligence agencies, in particular, have tended to play the Islamist card as a hedge, seeing Islamism as the winning team in the battle for Muslim hearts and minds.

The developing US strategy of supporting supposedly moderate Islamists, guided by an appeasement-oriented State Department, is dangerous and almost certainly as self-destructive, or downright suicidal, as the bipartisan, pro-Islamist policy that spanned some six decades and blew back so horrifically in the Islamist attacks of 9/11. Most immediately, anti-Islamist forces in Turkey and Pakistan are likely to be undermined in ways that may recall Jimmy Carter's craven betrayal of Iran's pro-Western Shah and the Carter administration's failed efforts to cozy up to the Ayatollah Khomeini and his legions of mad mullahs and the secular Iranians whom they duped into helping to bring about the toppling of the modernizing monarch.

POST SCRIPT: Tomorrow, July 22, marks the 28th anniversary of the assassination--on US soil--of Ali A. Tabatabai, who, as founder-president of the Iran Freedom Foundation, had become the most visible and ouspoken opponent of Khomeini's regime. A gentle, dedicated proponent of democracy--though he served as a press attache at Iran's Embassy in Washington, he had actually once been targeted and harassed by Iran's dreaded secret police--Tabatabai was shot to death in his own Bethesda, MD suburban home, not far from the US capital. The killer was Dawud Salahuddin--born David T. Belfield--a US citizen who had converted to Islam, whose photo appears below.




Belfield fled to Tehran, where he still lives under the protection of the monstrous mullahocracy. He confessed to his crime in a chilling on-camera interview with the ABC News program 20/20 that aired on Friday, January 19, 1996. He also admitted to killing Tabatabai in an interview with The New Yorker magazine, describing the deed as "an act of war and a religious duty."

"In Islamic religious terms, taking a life is sometimes sanctioned and even highly praised, and I thought that event was just such a time," Belfield said.

An African-American who grew up in Bayshore, Long Island in a Baptist family, and attended Howard University for one semester, Belfield reportedly converted to Islam at the age of 18. He frequented an Iranian student center run by anti-Shah islamists. During the early 1970s he spent time visiting prisons around Washington to, "bring the message of Islam to black inmates," possibly as part of an Iran-supported recruitment effort.

Belfield has worked as a freelance writer and occasionally traveled to Arab countries and North Korea.

Incrediby, he played a sympathetic major character in the internatinally acclaimed 2001 feature film Kandahar.Back to Bethesda. After killing Tabatabai while disguised as a US Postal mail carrier, Belfield fled the country using a phony passport assumed to have been provided by Iranian agents with the help of Algeria. It is also assumed that the Carter administration allowed Belfield to escape to avoid provoking the Khomeini regime.

Fawning liberal journalists (many of whom cheered the Shah's overthrow) have never confronted or seriously questioned Carter about the assassination.And here is the rest of it."

Peviously Related:
Carter's profile in Incompetence

Iran: Carter's Habitat For Inhumanity

Carter's Islamic Green Belt