From Consortium News
King Salman of Saudi Arabia and his entourage arrive to greet President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 27, 2015.
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President Trump's ban against letting people from seven mostly Muslim countries enter the United States looks to many like a thinly concealed bias against a religion, but it also is a troubling sign that Trump doesn't have the nerve to challenge the false terrorism narrative demanded by Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The Israeli-Saudi narrative, which is repeated endlessly inside Official Washington, is that Iran is the principal sponsor of terrorism when that dubious honor clearly falls to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Sunni-led Muslim states, including Pakistan, nations that did not make Trump's list.
The evidence of who is funding and supporting most of the world's terrorism is overwhelming. All major terrorist groups that have bedeviled the United States and the West over the past couple of decades -- from Al Qaeda to the Taliban to Islamic State -- can trace their roots back to Sunni-led countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Qatar.
Privately, this reality has been recognized by senior U.S. officials, including former Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Trump's National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. But that knowledge has failed to change U.S. policy, which caters to the oil-rich Saudis and the politically powerful Israelis.
For instance, in August 2012, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency -- then headed by General Flynn -- warned that Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al Qaeda were "the major forces driving the insurgency" against the largely secular government in Syria.
Flynn's DIA advised President Obama that rebels were trying to establish a "Salafist principality in eastern Syria," and that "western countries, the gulf states, and Turkey are supporting these efforts" to counter the supposed Shiite threat to the region.
Hillary Clinton also was aware of this reality, as the threat from the head-chopping Islamic State -- also known as ISIL or ISIS -- grew worse in summer 2014. In September 2014, the former Secretary of State wrote in an email that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were "providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups."
Later in 2014, Vice President Joe Biden made the same point in a talk at Harvard's Kennedy School: "Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria ... the Saudis, the emirates, etc., what were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world." [Quote starts at 53:25.]
Known But Unknown
So the truth was known at senior levels of the Obama administration -- and now via National Security Adviser Flynn at the top of the Trump administration -- but the Israelis and the Saudis don't want that reality to shape U.S. foreign policy. In other words, this truth about the real source of terrorism was known but unknown.
Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn at a campaign rally for Donald Trump at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Oct. 29, 2016.
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Instead, Israel demands that Washington share its hatred of the Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah, a Shiite force that organized in the 1980s to drive the invading Israeli army out of southern Lebanon. Because Hezbollah dealt a rare defeat to the Israeli Defense Force, Israel puts it at the top of "terrorist" organizations. And, Hezbollah is supported by Iran.
Saudi Arabia, too, hates Iran because the Sunni-fundamentalist Saudi monarchy considers Shia Islam heretical, a sectarian conflict that dates back to the Seventh Century. So, the Saudi government has viewed Sunni jihadists as the tip of the spear against these Shiite rivals.
Israeli and Saudi officials have even made clear that they would prefer Al Qaeda or Islamic State to prevail in the Syrian war rather than have the largely secular government of President Bashar al-Assad survive because they see his regime as part of a "Shiite crescent" reaching from Tehran through Damascus to the Hezbollah neighborhoods of Beirut.
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