Testi, not even close. Bush Sr. was a late comer to the game. Believe it or not, if you're looking for the american president who poked the stick into the islamo-fascist hornets nest and gave them a big recruiting program it's Jimmy Carter.
That's right!
That loveable little house building peanut farming democrat from Georgia who never resists the urge to point at republicans as the war mongoring aggitators of all the worlds troubles is the american president most responsible for stirring up the father of the modern islamofascism movement, one Abdullah Azzam.
From chapter one, book two of Terry McDermotts
excellent book Perfect Soldiers:
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The Rebirth of Jihad
Peshawar
In July 1973, In Kabul Afghanastan, Daoud Khan led a bloodless coup that overthrew his cousin, the King of Afghanastan, who was vacationing in europe at the time. Daoud installed a new government controlled by his Afghan Communist Party. Although it seemed of little import outside Afghanastan at the time, the coup precipitated three decades of almost ceaseless warfare that eventually drew nearly the entire planet into its orbit. Daoud was himself deposed, and killed, in a second coup five years later. After that coup produced yet another the next year, this one accompanied and followed by waves of violence and bloodletting, the place seemed to be spinning out of control. More to the point it seemed in danger of falling out of the grasp of its near nieghbor to the north, the Union of soviet Socialists Republics. airborne commandos from the USSR landed in Kabul in 1979, the heralds of an armed force that eventually numbered 100,000. The government was over thrown again and a new one installed. The Soviets spent the next decade fighting with what became, in effect, the last stand of the empire.
Their outright invasion into Afghanastan was widely condemned throughout the community of nations, but no where with the vehemence expressed in the Muslim world, where it was regarded as a direct assault on Islam, one that required a direct response. the herald of that response was a Palestinian named Abdullah Azzam.
Azzam born in 1941 in Jenin on the West Bank, was a product of the Palestinian diaspora, steeped in Islamic learning and politics. He answered his first call to battle in the 1967 Six-Day War, after which he joined the Palestinian resistance, and later left because it was, he said, merely a political cause insufficiently rooted in Islam. He joined the Islamic Brotherhood and later helped found Hamas as an Islamic alternative to the Palestinian Liberation Orginazation. He resumed an academic career that earned him degrees in Jordan and Damascus and eventually a Ph.D. from Cairo's Al Azhar, the high temple of Islamic learning.
When the USSR invaded Afghanastan in 1979, azzam was among the first non-Afghan muslim sympathizers to join the cause against the Soviets. He came at once to Pakistan, initially to the capital Islamibad. When that proved to far distant the battlefield he moved his base to Peshawar, a capital of Pakistans Northwest Frontier Province, a land governed chiefly by fear and high-caliber ammunition. there, Azzam found his cause: Afghanastan would be the incubator for a new muscular Islam, a religion of warriors like that of the Prophet's time. The core texts of the standard modern Islamist creed had already been written by Egyptians Hasan al-Bana and Sayid Qutb, one the founder and the other the great populizer of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Remaking old teachings for the modern world, they sought the imposition of Islamic law in their native Egypt and any other country that pretended to be Muslim. To achieve their ends they, they insisted on violent revolt in the name of god, against the unfaithful and against apostate Muslim regiems.
Their insurgency was greeted with fierce, deadly, and largely effective repression within Egypt. Because of the response it remained mainly theoretical and contained within the intellectual elites until Afghanastan.
There Bana saw a real chance to make real the abstract promises of Qutb and Bana, to fight an unequivocal battle for Islam and, in doing so, to recover their virtue. \"One of the most important lost obligations is the forgotten obligation of fighting\" he said. \"Because it is absent from the present condition of the Muslims, they have become as rubbish of the flood waters.\"
Jihad, Azzam wrote, wasthe way of everlasting glory, and the only way to get there was behind the barrel of a gun. \"jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogues,\" he said.
Azzam, more than any man popularized the modern-and, within its world, triumphant-notion of the contemporary Muslim's duty to wage holy war. the goal was no less than to ressurect the reign of Islam on Earth and it's imperative was universal. It was a duty, Azzam said, that commanded all Muslims to its banner. He quoted the Qur'an:
'
Then, it is obligatory upon the whole of creation to march out for jihad. If they fail to respond, then they are in sin....The light, the heavy, the riding, the walking, the slave, and the free man shall all go out. Whoever has a father, without his permission and whoever has not a father, until Allahs religion prevails, defends the territory and the property, humiliates the enemy and resques the prisoners. On this there is no disagreement. What does he do if the rest stay behind? He finds a prisoner and pays his ransom. He attacks by himself if he is able, and if he is not he prepares a warrior.'
SNIP/ ------- ------- -------/SNIP
Even beforethe Soviet invasion, a civil war had been underway. The soviet purpose was to change one puppet government for another, one they hoped would be more palatable to the Afghans yet still compliant to Moscow. Domestic opponents of the government-in particular, those who thought it lacked Islamic purity-had already begun establishing exile orginazations based in Peshawar. After the invasion, the number of those orginazations-not to mention exiles-mushroomed. In the beginning, most of these groups were underfunded or not funded at all, and survived mainly on what they could steal or conscript. But funding more bountiful than anyone could have imagined soon arrived. By the middle of the 1980's more than $1 billion per year was pouring into the resistance. Sorting out the varied Afghan opposition was almost an impossible task, but sorting out who would get the money was imperative. A hierarchy was constructed at the insistance of the sponsors, mainly the United States, Saudi Arabia and, especially, Pakistan. the Pakistani's who regarded themselves as the general staff of the war effort, designated six Afghan political parties to recieve the money and later added a seventh. All were fundamentalist religious parties and all eventually fielded seperate armies.
As the geographic headquarters of the resistance, Peshawar naturally became the destination for those from beyond Afghanastan who wished to join it. Largely through efforts by Azzam, thousands of muslims came to join the Afghans in holy war against the heathen Communists.
Azzam internationalized the jihad. He worked tirelessly-and globally- as a recruiter. He traveled to Europe and throughout the Middle East and made several trips to the United States, raising money, and at least theoretically, an army to fight the jihad. Funded by donations mainly from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states but with contributions from around the globe, he opened recruiting offices in thirty countries, including the United States. his writings were not intellectual treatises, but pure agit-prop; Tom Payne not John Locke. his activities in the United States were endorsed by the American government, which chose to ignore its content while activiely promoting its results.
The United States was one of the main allies of Afghan resistance. President Jimmy Carter had earlier confronted the Soviet Union in his human rights campaign and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was eager to confront them with surrogates on the battlefield as well.
Acting on Brzezinski's recommendation, Carter had approved American financial and military assistance to the Afghan resistance even before the soviet invasion. Brzezinski said the express intent of the secret assistance was to encourage Soviet intervention, which of course it did. The Afghan resistance, Pakistan, Azzam, and the Americans were joined in their unlikely alliance by Saudi Arabia, which provided hard cash and volunteers.
\"Muslim governments made it a religious issue, a way to reinvigorate Islam, to counter Western cultural invasion, to counter Iran and the Shiite threat to the Sunnis,\" said Waheed Hamza Hashim, a Saudi political scientist \"so here comes the Soviet invasion in the midst of this. The Arab world see's itself under siege. the governments main legitimacy derives from religious authority. they see this as an opportunity to strengthen their religious credentials, thereby strengthening their political authority.
SNIP/----------/SNIP
Among the first of those to answer Azzams call was a former student of his from Jeddah, Ossam bin Laddin,.....
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So there you have it folks, the rebirth of militant Islam was forged in the fires kindled by Jimmy Carter meddling in the affairs of a foreign country. Bet you never hear the \"mainstream media\" discuss this, they will be too busy making sure all you youngsters believe as Testi does, that all war mongoring and all the meddling that brings us terrorists is perpetrated by republicans.
Heh!
The biggest threat to our democracy is the awol free press!