Thursday, May 01, 2008

Inventions of the British Imperialists

Early 70's Oman. Selected Arabs are being flown to Mao's China for guerilla traning and indoctrination. From Ranulph Fiennes' "Where Soldiers Fear To Tread" :

Ahmad Deblaan remembered the endless indoctrination lessons for the Chinese instructor had spared no pains to see that every word was lodged firmly in his head. He would be able to repeat them for the rest of his life :

"What is the Koran and who is the Prophet, comrade ?"

"The Koran, the Prophet and all other manifestations of Islam are the inventions of the British imperialists who are runing dogs and lackeys of the U.S."

"Why did they spread about such inventions in Arab lands ?"

"They wished to poison our society with the class-ideologies of religion. To cloud the Arab mid with Islamic ritual - leaving no time to ponder the injustice of our suppression ... to make us place all inequalities at the door of a make-believe God when in reality the British and their puppet-Sultans were to blame ... "

The guerillas took it seriously - torturing villagers for publicly praying and executing any of their members who failed to reject God. I'm not sure many on the Left, including those so keen for Mao in the 60s, would follow this approach now.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Left would be torturing villagers for not publicly praying.

The end is the torture itself, not the 'crime'.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps that's the solution to fighting the rise of Islamism.

Tell them it's a British/American/Zionist conspiracy and they'll reject it and attack those who practice it.

If you could convince the Guardian writers that Islam was a western invention they'll protest the loudest about how dreadful and Patriarchal Islam is.