His name is Daniel McAdams and Ron Paul has seen fit to put him in charge of the Ron Paul Institute. While he doesn’t deny that the slaughter of innocent non-Muslims at the Westgate mall in Nairobi on September 21st was a terror attack, McAdams – as do seemingly all Ron Pauliens – finds no fault with Islam. After excerpting a quote from Barack Obama’s U.N. speech, McAdams graces his readers with his brilliance.
McAdams: Westgate Mall attack all about Blowback.
Yes, what happened in Kenya is a terrorist act. But for Obama to tell the rest of the story would undermine his narrative and unravel Washington’s strange relationship with the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Shabaab organization that claimed responsibility for the attack. Al-Shabaab, or “Mujahideen Youth Movement,” in fact owes its birth to US interventionism in Africa, as it sprang up from the ashes of the Islamic Courts Movement that had ruled Somalia until a US-sponsored invasion by Ethiopia destroyed the Courts Movement in 2007 and divided supporters into factions. Some decided to work with the US-supported Transitional Federal Government (TFG); others, like the al-Shabaab, decided to resist US and other foreign occupation and intervention in Somali affairs.
As globetrotting analyst Pepe Escobar points out in a highly recommended recent article, the Islamic Courts had generally stabilized Somalia and disarmed many of the militias. They were proponents of Sharia law, which the US found intolerable and labeled “terrorist,” opening the door for the brand new US Africa Command, based in Germany, to begin working on regime change.
As a nationalist and then religious-oriented group, al-Shabaab may well have been extremist in orientation and even “terrorist” in tactics, but theirs was a localized struggle. The idea that the ongoing battle over who ruled Somalia was somehow covered in the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against those who attacked the US on 9/11 is a stretch to the breaking point. But the AUMF it was — and is — that justifies Obama’s ongoing war on Africa. {emphasis ours}
Before going any further, it’s worth noting that Pepe Escobar – the man whose magnificent article McAdams wants you to read – has had his columns featured on the Nation, Al-Jazeera, and Michael Moore’s website.
A recurring theme that one will always find circulating among the Pauliens is that Islam is either inconsequential, an ideology whose followers are being used as pawns, or somewhat bad but nowhere near as bad as the Bilderbergers and the New World Order crowd, who are mysteriously empowering these Islamic extremists. Giving Muslim hijackers a pass for 9/11 says all you need to know about how much the Paul crowd is willing to ignore the real problem.
What these Pauliens fail to understand is that Islam has a vote in all of this and it has voted repeatedly for an Islamic caliphate.
“Blowback” makes as much sense as some cockamamie theory that the World Trade Center wasn’t brought down by commercial airliners.
h/t WZ