08 October 2017

A Ticking Timeline

You can say what you like about our - it seems to me - more and more domestically (as distinct from  internationally) violence-ridden world. And also about the part that politicized, militarized religion does or does not play in it, whether here in peace-loving America or farther abroad.

One thing is burningly clear to me: Fundamentalist, supremacist Sunni Islam was surely awful enough c. 1900, in backwater places like the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. And no doubt the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt itself, in 1928, played its part in further radicalizing/mainstreaming an already bad idea. During and after the last world war, various Soviet-leaning, anti-Western Nazi and other pro-Axis elements likely did their best to continue pushing it along down that road. But to think . . . now try and stay with me here . . . to think it took a pro-Western Saudi Arabia . . . along with its through-thick-and-thin partner, the American deep state . . . to make Sunni jihadism the geopolitical cancer we all (including perhaps a majority of the world's Muslims?) know and fear today . . .

Or was it just a pro-American Saudi Arabia?