France realises a little late that the jihadists who have carried out attacks on its soil and others who are preparing new ones are supported by foreign states, military allies within NATO. The refusal to draw conclusions in terms of foreign policy makes the bill to combat Islamism of little use.
President Emmanuel Macron and the government of Jean Castex drafted a bill to combat the political instrumentation of the Muslim faith. This text is currently being discussed in Parliament.
It revolves around four strong ideas, including the prohibition of the financing of religious associations by foreign States. Everyone is well aware that this is the head of Islamism, but no one dares to name these states: Turkey and Qatar, remote controlled by the United Kingdom and the United States. Indeed, fighting against Islamism in France has many brutal consequences in foreign policy. No party dares to tackle this problem, rendering all the efforts made in this struggle ineffective.
France has already experienced this hesitation in the face of Islamism in the mid-1990s. At the time, the United Kingdom and the United States supported the jihadists in Algeria against French influence. London also offered political asylum to these “democrats” who were fighting against a military regime. The Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua, launched a showdown that led him to have the members of a commando of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) who had hijacked an Air France plane shot dead and to expel the CIA chief of post in Paris (who was also compromised in a case of economic espionage). The issue was thus settled for 20 years.
The Directorate General of Internal Security (DGSI) inspired a press dossier, in the Journal du Dimanche of February 7, 2021, on how “Erdoğan is infiltrating France”. Note: the newspaper did not question Turkey, but the only President Erdoğan. Similarly, at least initially, it did not mention Qatar, the United Kingdom or the United States. Above all, it quoted the Millî Görüş which it accuses, without noting that it was the militia of Prime minister Necmettin Erbakan and that President Erdoğan was one of its leaders. Finally, it omitted to mention the alleged role of the Turkish secret services in the attacks of November 13, 2015 (the Bataclan).
It is this theme that we are going to develop by rectifying many prejudices.
Islam: faith and politics
Mohammed was a prophet, warlord and prince at the same time. The Islam he founded was at the same time a particular rite of Christianity [1], his policy towards the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and the law he promulgated. No one was able at his death to distinguish his spiritual heritage from his political and military action. On the contrary, his political successors (in Arabic: “Caliphs”) inherited his authority in religious matters, although they had no theological knowledge and sometimes even did not believe in God.
Today, Muslims living in Europe aspire to sort out this Islam, to keep only the spiritual part of it and to abandon dated aspects, especially the Sharia. On the contrary, President Erdoğan, who officially wishes to be declared Caliph of Muslims on October 29, 2023 (the centenary of the Turkish Republic), is doing everything possible to oppose this.
It is therefore a struggle between two civilisations. Not between European culture and that of Turkey, but contemporary civilisation against another, which disappeared a century ago.
Erdoğan: an Islamist thug who became president
President Erdoğan is not a politician like the others. He started his career as a thug who was punching in the streets of the capital. He entered politics in the 1970s by joining an Islamist militia, Akıncılar, until joining that created during the fall of Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan in 1997, Millî Görüş. This killer organisation was financed by the Iraq of President Saddam Hussein and placed under the control of the Grand Master of the Sufi Order of Naqchbandis, General Ezzat Ibrahim Al-Douri, future Iraqi vice-president.
The Anglo-Tunisian Rachid Ghanoucchi, one of the great figures of the Muslim Brotherhood, said: “In the Arab world of my generation, when people talked about the Islamic movement, they talked about Erbakan. When they talked about Erbakan, it was the way they talked about Hassan al-Banna and Sayyed Qutb”. So, although the Islamist movement is organisationally divided between the Muslim Brotherhood on the one hand and the Naqchbandis on the other, they undoubtedly form a single ideology.
It is in the name of the Millî Görüş that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan played an effective role in the wars in Afghanistan alongside Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and in the wars in Chechnya alongside Shamil Basayev. Once he became president, he imposed himself as the leader of this movement during the NATO war in Syria. Today he is the leader of both the Muslim Brotherhood (established in the wider Middle East and Europe) and the Naqchbandis (established mainly in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Russian Dagestan, South Asia and Chinese Xinjiang).
Islamist networks
The transformation of the Order of Naqchbandis and the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood on the model of the United Grand Lodge of England was led by the United Kingdom in the context of the “Great Game” between the United Kingdom and the Russian Empire and the colonial conquest of Sudan. Even today, MI6 still exercises direct control over these two organisations. The donors change (first Saudi Arabia, then Qatar and Turkey), but never the principal.
Before the First World War, the British used Al-Azhar University in Cairo to unify the Muslim world behind a single version of the Koran (there were about forty at the time). The aim was to exclude from the text the passages used by the cruel Sudanese Mahdi sect against the British Empire. The Grand Imam of Al-Ahzar was sent to convert the Sudanese Muslims to the ’true’ Islam that had just been born.
The first form of the Muslim Brotherhood was founded by the Egyptian Hassan el-Banna. It was conceived as an extension of the British investment in Islam. The second form of the Brotherhood was organised after the Second World War and the execution of Hassan el-Banna, directly by MI6. The United States soon introduced an atheist Masonic intellectual, Sayyed Qutb. Qutb converted to Islam, which he conceived as a weapon for seizing power. He created a binary ideology (we and they forbid and allow it) and preached jihad. Gradually, under British control and with funding from Saudi Arabia (Islamic World League), the Brotherhood spread to the whole of what we today call the Broader Middle East. They seized power in Pakistan making possible the CIA war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Then they transformed themselves into a real army and fought in Bosnia and Herzegovina alongside the Pentagon. Today they are involved in several conflicts, notably in the Sahel, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan [2].
Rohollah Khomeini’s Iran is also based on a conception of political Islam. The Ayatollah had met Hassan el-Banna in Cairo, not to rally to him, but to share the Muslim world with him. The current Guide to the Revolution, Ali Khamenei, has translated two books by Sayyed Qutb which he says he admires. He systematically invites the Brothers to the congresses he organises on Islam, but the two groups never miss an opportunity to slander each other in private. A kind of armed peace was established between them.
Europeans in general and the French in particular are just beginning to take an interest in political Islam, which they are unable to distinguish from Muslim spirituality despite the work of Louis Massignon.
Turkey and NATO
Let us return to Turkey. The United States included it in NATO because it bordered the Soviet Union. They were able to appreciate the value of its soldiers during the Korean War, without whom they would have suffered a shameful defeat. They themselves organised a labour migration of Turkish citizens to West Germany in order to stabilise its population in the Atlantic camp. Moreover, as the Kurdish Turks had created the PKK with the help of the Soviets, the US occupation authorities in Germany were able to monitor them directly.
Later, when the Soviet Union dissolved, the US relaxed its pressure. Turkish workers began to spill over from West Germany to other border countries, including France.During the Cold War, the United States had set up the European headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Munich, then in Geneva around Said Ramadan (husband of the daughter of Hassan el-Banna and father of Tariq and Hanni Ramadan). After each failed coup d’état in the Middle East, NATO had Germany or France grant political asylum. As a result, these two countries have historically raised their enemies in their midst. Charles Pasqua was the first to oppose this alliance of dupes. The files then accumulated by the French intelligence services were recently compiled by Jean-Loup Izambert [3].
With the Islamist turn imposed on Turkey by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the agency of religious property (Diyanet) considerably developed its hold on the diaspora. It has multiplied the number of imams made available and has relied on the Millî Görüş, and more recently on the Grey Wolves (another Turkish militia, also linked to NATO, but henceforth forbidden in France [4]).
Erdoğan and the attacks of 2015 and 2016 in Paris and Brussels
The investigations into the attacks in Paris-Saint Denis and Brussels-Zaventem in 2015 and 2016 were not carried out as the actions of isolated combatants. According to the French and Belgian investigators, they were military-style operations. The question is therefore which army organised them?
The investigators showed that the two groups were very closely linked. So it was the same principal.
Four days before the attacks in Brussels-Zaventem, President Erdoğan explicitly threatened the European Union in general and Belgium in particular with an attack [5]. The day after this bloodbath, the press in favour of the president made no secret of its joy [6].
There can therefore be little doubt that he had the same desire for the Paris-Saint Denis attacks, since France had betrayed its commitments to Turkey in Syria [7].
As always, the only jihadist identified as having belonged to both the Paris and Brussels commandoes (Mohammed Abrini, the “man in the hat”) has been identified as an informer for the British secret services [8].
Did you say “financing jihadists operating on French soil”?
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[1] C’est ainsi qu’il fut présenté lorsque les Omeyyades arrivèrent à Damas, avant que le Coran ne soit transcrit par écrit.
[2] See the “Global history of the Muslim Brotherhood” (6 parts), by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, July 5, 2019.
[3] 56— tome I : L’État français complice de groupes criminels, 56 — tome II : Mensonges et crimes d’État, IS édition (2015 et 2017).
[4] “The Gray Wolves attempt organizing anti-Armenian pogroms in France”, “France to ban Turkish Gray Wolves”, Voltaire Network, 30 October and 3 November 2020.
[5] “Erdoğan threatens the European Union”, by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 18 March 2016.
[6] « La Turquie revendique le bain de sang de Bruxelles », par Savvas Kalèndéridès, Traduction Christian Haccuria, Réseau Voltaire, 24 mars 2016.
[7] “The motive for the attacks in Paris and Brussels”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 28 March 2016.
[8] “First Isis supergrass helps UK terror police”, Tom Harper, The Times, June 26th, 2016. « Terror suspect dubbed ’the man in the hat’ after Paris and Brussels attacks becomes British police’s first ISIS Supergrass », Anthony Joseph, Daily Mail, June 26th, 2016.
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