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| Terror Networks & Islam |
| How a Mosque for Ex-Nazis Became Center of Radical Islam |
| 2005-07-14 |
| Most of you can't get to this, so I'm posting the whole thing. Editors, feel free to move most of this to p. 73. I feel that this is an incredibly important piece for understanding how we got where we are today. It's like watching an embryo form. All the parts are there and are starting develop. The Nazis, the Saudis, the Islamists, the Nasserites/Baathists, the Euros, and the Americans play a part. We have the benefit of hindsight, but nobody involved in this could know how it would turn out today. MUNICH, Germany -- North of this prosperous city of engineers and auto makers is an elegant mosque with a slender minaret and a turquoise dome. A stand of pines shields it from a busy street. In a country of more than three million Muslims, it looks unremarkable, another place of prayer for Europe's fastest-growing religion. The Mosque's history, however, tells a more-tumultuous story. Buried in government and private archives are hundreds of documents that trace the battle to control the Islamic Center of Munich. Never before made public, the material shows how radical Islam established one of its first and most important beachheads in the West when a group of ex-Nazi soldiers decided to build a mosque. The soldiers' presence in Munich was part of a nearly forgotten subplot to World War II: the decision by tens of thousands of Muslims in the Soviet Red Army to switch sides and fight for Hitler. After the war, thousands sought refuge in West Germany, building one of the largest Muslim communities in 1950s Europe. When the Cold War heated up, they were a coveted prize for their language skills and contacts back in the Soviet Union. For more than a decade, U.S., West German, Soviet and British intelligence agencies vied for control of them in the new battle of democracy versus communism. Yet the victor wasn't any of these Cold War combatants. Instead, it was a movement with an equally powerful ideology: the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in 1920s Egypt as a social-reform movement, the Brotherhood became the fountainhead of political Islam, which calls for the Muslim religion to dominate all aspects of life. A powerful force for political change throughout the Muslim world, the Brotherhood also inspired some of the deadliest terrorist movements of the past quarter century, including Hamas and al Qaeda. The story of how the Brotherhood exported its creed to the heart of Europe highlights a recurring error by Western democracies. For decades, countries have tried to cut deals with political Islam -- backing it in order to defeat another enemy, especially communism. Most famously, the U.S. and its allies built up mujahadeen holy warriors in 1980s Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union -- paving the way for the rise of Osama bin Laden, who quickly turned on his U.S. allies in the 1990s. |
| Posted by:11A5S |
| #7 ed...you are a nice guy and all, and much as I respect the frontpage gusy, my first thought was that it was too glib to take seriously. That BBC NPR type shit isn't quite as good without the sound effects of cooking pots clanking and babies crying. Then I found it a bit interesting, decided to put down the defensive shields to see if perhaps, there was something worth listening to... but then this comment, "The British Secret Service wanted to use the fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood to strike down the infant state of Israel in 1948" it goes downhill from there. I quit reading before the aliens stepped in. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-07-14 14:49 |
| #6 2b: While there is good info in here about who is who and what happened when, I got the feeling that the writer was a bit of a novice in mistaking the the connections that he studied as being the center of the atom. This guy's no beginner - he's got a resume as long as your arm - he's an ideologue. Some people believe in God - this guy's fundamental belief is that most of what is wrong in the world today is the result of Uncle Sam's machinations. At heart, this is the root of the anti-Americanism that pervades much of the media - an unfalsifiable quasi-religious superstition. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-07-14 10:11 |
| #5 Here is an interesting related article from the Oct. 4, 2004 FrontPage titled: The Muslim Brotherhood, Nazis and Al-Qaeda |
| Posted by: ed 2005-07-14 09:57 |
| #4 so much for my novice theory. I don't know.. someone pick an adjective for me...arrogant, stupid, willfully blind. whatever. It's a beginners mistake, who knows what his excuse is. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-07-14 08:57 |
| #3 I agree ZF. While there is good info in here about who is who and what happened when, I got the feeling that the writer was a bit of a novice in mistaking the the connections that he studied as being the center of the atom. Plus I was irritated with his thinly veiled accusation that the CIA was to blame simply because they were present at one point. Yawn - so yesteryears whine. Oh well...still a good piece as knowledge is power. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-07-14 08:42 |
| #2 BTW, Ian Johnson used to write for the Independent or the Guardian (can't remember which), both left-wing papers in the UK. His writing style reminds me of the kind of BS I used to read in the Nation back in the days when I was young and dumb. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-07-14 08:42 |
| #1 This article is just another example of the bullshit leftist opinions that pass for news in the Wall Street Journal's news section. We allied with a lot of dubious people in WWII and the Cold War, including the Soviet Union's Stalin (slaughtered tens of millions of Russians), Pakistan's Yahya Khan (slaughtered close to a million Bangladeshi secessionists) and Indonesia's Suharto (slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Communists). Of them all, the most ungrateful was the Soviet Union, which started proxy wars (Korea and Vietnam) that killed 100,000 Americans. A close runner-up is China, which forgot American assistance in routing the Japanese and invaded Korea, helping to kill almost 40,000 Americans. Then there is Pakistan, which Uncle Sam had supported since independence, but proceeded to create al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew. The reality is that there is nothing dubious in allying - which implies a confluence of interests, not becoming a country's bosom buddy - with unsavory characters. The problem with American policymakers is that they get confused and start mistaking allies of convenience for friends, and let their guard down. (Think Franklin Roosevelt and his lionization of Uncle Joe Stalin). That's the dubious part. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-07-14 08:36 |