Is the “Resistance” Legitimate? - Part II

Religious Bigotry and the Insurgency

In the last post of this series, “Part I - Under the Dictator’s Shadow”, I sought out to prove that a great part of the insurgency was formed with the objective of reinstalling an illegitimate Arab/Sunni regime. The truly legitimate representatives of Iraq were established under the guiding hand of the US occupation. This new government was appointed in an election that is internationally recognized to be transparent and fair.

Now I will focus on how religious bigotry is another major motivation for the insurgency. The three main flavors of religious bigotry are:

1. Anti-Christian
2. Anti-Jewish
3. Anti-Shiite

It cannot be denied that the ideology of Saddam’s Baathist regime was very secularist. However, Leftists have taken this fact out of context because Saddam has used Islamist propaganda to achieve his own ends. In order to strengthen his regime and his insurgency Saddam has eagerly courted religious bigotry.

A towering monument to Saddam’s Islamist ambitions is the Mother of All Battles Mosque that he built just outside of Baghdad shortly before the liberation of Iraq. It is truly the sickest celebration of the use of Islam as a military weapon. The minarets are shaped like scud missiles and the dome resembles machine gun barrels. In an effort to promote his personality cult Saddam had a 605 page Koran written in his own blood! Dahar Al-Ani, Director of Information for the mosque said, “Over three years, the President gave us a total of 28 liters of his own blood which has been mixed with chemicals to produce this hand-written Koran of 605 pages.”

The building of this mosque was a part of the regime’s “Faith Campaign” which began in 1994 with the banning of alcohol. This campaign was an effort to win Islamic favor in exchange for fatwas condemning the US and to quiet religious unrest against the regime. Some elements of Sharia law were re-introduced (such as the 2001 edict imposing the death penalty for homosexuality, rape and prostitution, and the phrase “Allahu Akbar” [“God is the Great”], was added to the national flag.)

The manipulation of Islam by the Baathists has continued into the insurgency. They have either taken over or actively collaborated with Islamist terrorist groups like Jaysh Muhammad and Ansar Al-Islam. Saddam has even taken to walking into the courtroom, where he is currently being tried for war crimes, brandishing a Koran. He quoted a verse from it which reminds believers that God knows who actually participated in Jihad or Holy War.

Saddam had a proven template of religious bigotry that he could exploit in his struggle with the US, the mobilization of the Islamic world in a war of hatred against the Jews. In the first Gulf War Saddam launched 39 scud missiles at civilian targets in Israel to elicit sympathy from such anti-Semitic bigots. One missile attack on Tel Aviv was described by an official Iraqi military communique as “missiles pour(ing) out of the sky, making Tel Aviv and other targets a crematorium.” This statement was released with the intention of placing images of Nazi concentration camps in the minds of horrified Israeli civilians.

Saddam’s contributions to Palestinian terrorism have been well documented. He has given bonus payments to the families of terrorists who have killed and wounded well over a 1,000 Israelis and less than a dozen Americans. In his bellicose ravings against Israel, Saddam has claimed to be the second Saladin (the medieval Muslim warrior who recaptured Jerusalem). The irony is that Saladin was a Kurd and Saddam’s regime was well known for its brutality against the Kurds, especially in the Anfal Campaign. (The Saladin link is really interesting because it comes from a highly anti-Bush academia-influenced website. The comment section to the article is classic, see for yourself.)

I have posted extensively on how Islamic leaders and their media have brainwashed the faithful into a bigoted war of extermination against the Jews. This was the game that Saddam wanted to tap into, as much as Osama bin Laden has. Propaganda is helpful to any country and it is especially helpful to terrorists because they are militarily weak and can use such misinformation to exaggerate their power. The Palestinian conflict has given the Baathists easy access to a fanatical mass audience that offers their support without question* (see footnote at bottom). Here are some links to relevant posts and websites on the subject:

A Blogger’s Diagnosis

The Mop and the Terrorist

The Middle East Media Research Institute

In Iraq the most ruthless religious bigotry is reserved for the Shia. The country is over 60% Shiite and Saddam’s regime has a long history of cruelty towards them. Details of his regime’s murderous 1991 anti-Shia campaign are well documented by the Human Rights Watch website (of course they go through extreme lengths to blame the US for the Baathist bloodbath). This was the bloodiest anti-Shiite violence by the Baathists, but the oppression continued right up to the liberation and through the insurgency. It has increased in direct proportion to the insurgents’ military loses at the hands of the Americans. Even though the Sunnis are a minority, most members of the Baathist regime were Sunni Arabs. The Shia were kept poor, with little public utilities and forbidden to express their religious holidays in public. It is the fear that the Shiites could yield power equal to their percentage of the population that has fueled Sunni attacks against the Shia. A loose Baathist alliance with Islamist terrorist groups has ensured that the flames would be fanned even higher.

Although religious strife between the Sunni and Shia has existed for almost a millennium and a half, it was Saudi Arabia’s embrace of Wahhabism that has led to the modern day escalation of violence between them. Terrorist groups like al Qaeda and Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) are inspired and funded by Wahhabi militants in Saudi Arabia. These groups consider the Shia to be infidel non-Muslims and are responsible for countless horrific attacks on them.

The picture at the top of this post is from a bombing of the Imam Ali Mosque (a Shiite mosque) back in August of 2003. In this bombing somewhere between 85 to 125 Shiites were killed. For years Sunni insurgents have been committing attacks on Shiites in an effort to provoke a full scale conflict between the two. The recent bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra is the closest that they have come to achieving this goal. Overall insurgent attacks on civilians are claiming many more lives than attacks on US soldiers, making claims that the resistance is fighting against foreign occupation sound very hollow.

Stay tuned for Part III next week -
The Blood Soaked Conclusion

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Footnotes:

* This is something that Republicans are very often accused of. Such accusations completely lack substance. See issues like the foreign ownership of US ports, amnesty for illegal aliens and the nomination of Harriet Miers. Leftists make such observations based on what they want to believe and not the facts, as they are quite prone to doing.