Brandon Martinez / Non-Aligned Media
From the outset of the foreign-sponsored insurrection in Syria, Israel has decidedly backed the armed opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Reports have shown that Israeli forces have been providing safe haven, hospital care and even weaponry to anti-Assad militants, including to the most radical outfits like ISIS and Al-Nusra Front. On top of material and logistical aid, the Israeli air force has unleashed dozens of air strikes on Syrian regime and allied Hezbollah targets throughout the conflict.
Top Israeli officials have repeatedly stressed that they would “prefer” an ISIS victory in Syria over an Assad victory.
The reasons for this are pretty straightforward:
1) The barbaric, savage atrocities conducted by ISIS in Syria and Iraq garners tremendous bad press for Islam in general, which translates into good or less negative coverage of Israel and its criminal activities. ISIS’s cruel and unusual methods of execution (i.e., beheadings, crucifixions, immolations, drownings, stoning, throwing people off of buildings, etc.), which it openly flaunts in macabre propaganda videos, provokes extremely bad headlines which have obscured any sense of proportional coverage of Israel’s ongoing brutality against the Palestinians. With ISIS dominating the headlines and TV newsreels, Israel escapes international opprobrium and has a free hand to act.
2) By using the word “Islamic” in their official title, ISIS’s atrocious acts of brigandry are automatically associated with Islam generally by the less-than-astute general public, which induces fear and animosity towards the entire religion and any group associated with it. Knowing this, Netanyahu and other Israeli imperialists have employed guilt-by-association fallacies to demonize the Muslim groups in conflict with Israel by falsely equating them to ISIS; groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, both of which have condemned the atrocities of ISIS, and the latter organization being on the frontline in Syria in the fight against the terror group. Hostility towards Islam in this day and age usually induces feelings of sympathy and affinity for the Jews and Israel, whose main rivals are Arab and Muslim countries and groups.
3) Zionist regime officials have continuously said that they would rather see ISIS victorious over the regime of Bashar al-Assad because Assad is the “keystone” in an Iranian-Hezbollah-Syrian arc of defiance against Israel. Over the years Assad has allowed Syrian territory to be used as a transit space for Iranian shipments of munitions to Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon as well as Hamas and other resistance factions in occupied Palestine. Assad is also an opponent of Israeli imperialism who has demanded Tel Aviv return all usurped territory in the Golan Heights back to Syria. For geostrategic and economic reasons, Israel wants to hold on to the pilfered lands it stole from Syria in the 1967 war. Dore Gold, the director-general of the Israeli foreign ministry, said of Israel’s objective in Syria:
At the end of the day, when some kind of modus vivendi is reached inside of Syria, it is critical from the Israeli standpoint that Syria does not emerge as an Iranian satellite incorporated fully into the Iranian strategic system.
Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the US, remarked:
If we have to choose between ISIS and Assad, we’ll take ISIS. ISIS has flatbed trucks and machine guns. Assad represents the strategic arch from Tehran to Beirut, 130,000 rockets in the hands of Hezbollah, and the Iranian nuclear program.
Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon expressed an identical sentiment, saying:
In Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State. They don’t have the capabilities that Iran has. Our greatest enemy is the Iranian regime that has declared war on us. Iran tried to open a terror front against us on the Golan Heights.
4) Another major reason Israel desires a victory for ISIS radicals in Syria is because the group is effectively under the sway, and some would say is outright controlled, by Western and Western-allied regional powers (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, etc.) that are bound to Israel’s security concerns. In 2007, award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh unearthed a secret US-Israeli-Saudi covert initiative to “weaken” the governments of Syria and Iran, and their ally Hezbollah. According to Hersh’s well-placed sources in the Bush Administration, the Saudis, at the behest of the US and Israel, would act as the logistical and financial backer of Salafist and Wahhabi mercenaries – essentially what we now call ISIS, al-Nusra, etc. – who would be wielded as a suicide wave of marauding fanatics to overwhelm Syria, Iran and Hezbollah. This was all aimed at thwarting the anti-Zionist alliance between Syria, Iran and Hezbollah, according to Hersh and his sources.
The Saudis, Hersh noted, pledged to safeguard Israel’s security in the criminal regime change operation in Syria, which is why ISIS has never once attacked, or even attempted to attack, Israel. Despite the group’s propensity for suicide bombings in Syria and Iraq, they have yet to undertake any such suicide missions against Israel. American and Saudi control of ISIS’s leadership seems to be the only logical explanation for this. In fact, the majority of ISIS’s leaders, including Al-Baghdadi, were at one time housed under the same roof in an American prison in Iraq, Camp Bucca, where Baghdadi was said to have literally formulated the doctrines and blueprint for the group, and recruited its leader-class. Yet Baghdadi and his compatriots were all mysteriously released by the Americans just in time for the US-led regime change operations in Libya and Syria.
5) As Hersh’s explosive reportage shows, from the beginning ISIS has functioned as a geopolitical tool in the hands of the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Western powers and their Gulf state puppets are the fathers and patrons of ISIS, and continue to be the principal source of the group’s money, weapons and military training. As a plaything of the pro-Israel rulers in Washington and Riyadh, ISIS is acting in concert with the Zionist regime which has been aiming to fracture and dismember its neighbouring states into a litany of miniature ethnic and religious enclaves; a Machiavellian geostrategy elucidated most vividly in the 1982 “Strategy for Israel in the 1980s” authored by Oded Yinon. This re-drawing of the map of the Middle East, facilitated expertly by ISIS’s putrid quasi-“Caliphate” straddling the Iraqi-Syrian border, is in Israel’s long-term interests as a regional imperial hegemon intent on scuttling any unity between the Muslim and Arab peoples of the Middle East, as per traditional divide and conquer artifice.
6) In addition to being a controlled outfit dancing to the whims of the intelligence chiefs of the US, Saudi Arabia and ultimately Israel, a prominent reason Israel backs ISIS is because the group more or less adheres to the strain of Islam known as Salafism or Wahhabism, a retrograde 19th century revivalist cult championed by the Gulf monarchies, especially the House of Saud. The Israelis view this specific strain of Islam as useful because of its insular hyper-sectarian outlook. Salafists are obsessive fundamentalist lunatics who only care about establishing some “perfect” Islamic state governed by their medieval interpretations of Sharia laws, and are keen to excoriate all other non-Salafist Muslims as “apostates.” Salafists are the quintessential insurrectionary wet-dream for powers looking to divide the Middle East and pit Muslims against each other. Salafists, the Stalinist reactionaries of Islam, are more concerned with punishing and shaming alleged “heretics” within the religion than the liberation of Palestine. They are basically enemies of Arab and Islamic nationalisms that challenge Israeli hegemony, since all they care about and strive for is establishing some wretched Sharia law backwater. With few exceptions, Salafists are Zio-friendly half-wits who despise Shiites most of all, and are therefore useful idiots in Israel’s proxy war against its Shiite opponents in Iran, Syria and Lebanon. Salafists’ primary recruiting base for their deranged and doomed-to-failure sectarian projects are low IQ, economically disadvantaged people. Their ranks have been swelled by troubled, often criminally-inclined youths who feel they have no out in life except to become a “martyr” for a completely manipulated, wrongheaded and false “jihad” in Syria that is in actuality a Zionist jihad for Israel. Others are just psychopaths and fetishists who want to satisfy their blood lust. Such people can only be categorized as dupes, useful idiots and cannon fodder.
Zionist mouthpieces in the media have been using the artificial rise of ISIS, which could not have happened without the deliberate connivance and direct support of the Western-NATO power bloc, to promote ludicrous fantasies about a resurgent Islamic global imperialism that threatens to overrun the West. People like Robert Spencer and other Ziocons are trying to deceive us by portraying ISIS as 1) true representatives of Islam and thereby all Muslims (which would illogically include apparently all the Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian, Kurdish and Lebanese Muslims (both Sunni and Shia) on the frontlines in the fight against it), 2) a wholly organic, indigenous, grassroots movement (the only organic part about it is the Salafist belief system, everything else is fake and contrived), and 3) as some sort of genuine re-birth of one of the ancient Islamic Caliphates. Spencer and other neocon disinformationists peddle fairy tales that ISIS is genuinely powerful, acts on its own accord, and threatens to invade and take over not only the whole Middle East, but Europe as well. This idea is idiotic for several reasons:
1) ISIS could be completely destroyed tomorrow if the Western-NATO power bloc actually desired that outcome, but clearly they do not, since ISIS is their weapon of choice to unseat Assad, undermine Iran and defeat Hezbollah for Israel. ISIS has actually grown in strength and territory even as the 60-country anti-ISIS “coalition” has ostensibly been waging a relentless air war on the group since the summer of 2014. Obviously this “coalition” is a fake PR stunt that has no intention of actually defeating ISIS, and has been dropping caches of supplies and weapons to the group instead of bombs on its strongholds.
2) ISIS cannot be a genuine “threat” to the West because it is nothing more than an extension of Western-Israeli foreign policy itself. Any genuine blowback from ISIS true believers in the West is fully desired by the Western power elite as terrorism serves as a fear-based control mechanism on recalcitrant populations. Such “terror” events blamed on ISIS also works to obscure the reality of Western state-sponsorship and control over the group since its inception. “The West cannot be behind ISIS since ISIS attacks the West” is the desired thinking the elite hope to instill in the masses via these staged psyops, but it is a false contention. ISIS terrorism in the West is in effect Western state terrorism against its own citizens. No major ISIS-linked attack in the West since these incidents ostensibly began happening in 2014 after the West’s phony “war declaration” against ISIS has been natural or organic. Rather, all of these terror incidents are carefully choreographed, manufactured theater sponsored by Western intelligence agencies themselves. All of them were either allowed to happen or made to happen.
3) ISIS cannot survive as an entity when there are major Muslim and Arab countries presently at war with it and committed to its disintegration.
4) There is no reason to believe that all Muslim-majority countries, most of which are governed by monarchies and military dictatorships, will magically agree to eschew national borders, put aside their religious and cultural differences, and work together towards the formation of a Caliphate. This hypothetical “Caliphate” would find itself up against strong opposition within the Muslim world, not just outside of it.
5) Muslim-majority countries are some of the lowest on the global socio-economic ladder; the Muslim world, as divided and fractured as it is thanks to Western and Israeli interference, has neither the military prowess nor the economic clout to achieve anything on par with one of the ancient Caliphates of yesteryear.
According to the Institute of Policy Studies, the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) of all 57 Muslim-majority countries combined adds up to a mere $3.9 trillion, which, the study notes, “is only 8 percent of the PPP adjusted world GDP of 48.5 trillion.” The study adds that, “We can see from this that, while the Muslims constitute at least 21 percent of the world population, their share of PPP adjusted GDP is only 8 percent.” The US has over four times that amount in debt, let alone GDP purchasing power. The notion that eight percent of global purchasing power can take over the world, or large segments thereof, is a laughable delusion that serves to advance Zionist fear mongering agendas that distracts us from the real power brokers of the planet: the US, Europe, Israel, Russia and China. The article also points out that the Islamic world has an illiteracy rate of 32 percent, which is nearly half a billion illiterate people who have limited access to education. But these decrepit and abysmally poor societies will rise up to “conquer the West” in this century, say the Ziocon pundits.
It is Zionist Jews, Americans, Europeans, Russians and Chinese who control most of the world’s economic resources, and who have the most powerful militaries. While Ziocons and their Alt-Right dupes promote scare stories about the erroneous spectre of an utterly implausible future “Caliphate” ruling over a subjugated West, the US-NATO-Zionist power bloc literally is dividing and conquering the Middle East, murdering millions, toppling regimes one after the other, and pilfering the world’s resources for corporate cartels. The few Muslim countries that have some semblance of regional power, like Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are slaves and lapdogs of the US, NATO and Israel. The Muslim-majority countries rebelling against this power bloc – countries like Yemen, Sudan, Iran, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, etc. – have either already been totally annihilated through a Western or Israeli war or a Western/Israeli-backed insurgency, or are presently on the chopping block to be removed and replaced by loyal marionettes.