sure is weird how the right act all smug towards the left whenever an Islamist kills people. If they had the power to recall events that didn't involve twitter, they'd remember that actually it was the left who warned the right not to create/elevate:
-Wahhabism in the first place in Saudi Arabia,
-the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt in the 1960s to destroy secular Arab socialism,
-the Afghan Mujahideen,
-the Islamic Republic of Iran,
-Al Qaeda, Hamas,
-ISIS/Daesh,
-about 4 different sides of the Libyan shitshow, (but mostly the ones who love turning Libya's ancient city squares into giant open-air slave markets)
-HTS,
the left is CURRENTLY warning the right about the 'Popular Forces' they're creating in Gaza now, and the left will be warning them about the next set of terror-mercs they fund, arm and train in order to achieve some foreign policy goal in MENA.
But they won't listen, because the people making these decisions and coming up with the propaganda in defence of them aren't the ones who'll be killed in their millions abroad and in their dozens at home. They'll get their 10 years in the Cabinet, enough to make a few hundred mil inside trading under their spouses' names, and then they can spend the rest of their life doing lucrative speaking tours of US college and tech-company campuses and thinktank, hailed by their own as an Elder Statesman and Hard-headed Newsmen who Told It Like It Was And Never Compromised, and they'll probably die of old age before the water runs out and the inevitable consequences arrive.
I would argue that the rise of radical Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East had more to do with geographical happenstance than anything else. Saudi Arabia found itself sitting atop oil reserves worth a few quadrillion dollars and used their unlimited disposable income to fund the largest and most effective propaganda campaign in history.
>>2509163The British Empire supported Wahhabists in the House of Saud all the way back in the 1700s as a proxy force against the Ottomans, before petroleum was even relevant.
>British diplomat Harford Jones-Brydges, who was stationed in Basra in 1784 attributed the popular hysteria about the Wahhabis to a different cause. Unlike Ottoman depictions, Brydges believed that Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine was in keeping with the teachings of Quran, was "perfectly orthodox", "consonant to the purest and best interpretations of that volume", and that Ottomans feared its spread precisely on that basis.Now why would a British man in the 1700s have such a strong opinion on Wahhabism being "perfectly orthodox?"