Ironically perhaps Isis refers (Front page,19 November) to the perpetrators of the Paris atrocities as its “intrepid (brave in the face of danger) knights”. The quotation illustrates an advantage Isis exploits, an advantage of which the western powers voluntarily deprive themselves, and namely a historical perspective. In the past century the west has time and again cheated and violated Arab and Muslim communities. Sykes-Picot (1916),Balfour (1917), UN Resolution 181 (1948), and Mosaddeq (1953),Suez (1956), Jordan and Lebanon (1958) and Iraq (2003) are all instances where aggression and duplicity have marked the west’s behaviour.
If you wish to defeat an enemy, and first understand him. Western politicians choose to disregard these antecedents,deny responsibility for them or minimise their significance: nothing to finish with us. Isis makes them the context to justify any act of vengeance, however barbaric.
David Butler
LondonContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com