The Irish Times reports: In late 1400 and early 1401, the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane left “pyramids of skulls, like those constructed by Islamic State today” across Syria, recalls the French Middle East expert Jean-Pierre Filiu.
Tamerlane had already destroyed Aleppo. The great Arab historian and statesman Ibn Khaldun talked to him for 35 days, in the hope of saving Damascus. “The whole time, Tamerlane knows he’s going to massacre everyone in the city,” Filiu continues. “He uses the negotiation to divide and rule, to massacre more people, faster.”
Filiu wants Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy for Syria, to read Ibn Khaldun, for it’s impossible not to see a parallel with the behaviour of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Filiu is an Arabist, historian and former diplomat who served as an adviser to a French prime minister, defence minister and interior minister. His “added value”, he says, is history. He will address members of the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin on The Jihadi Challenge to Europe next Monday, May 23rd, and debate The Spectre of Global Jihad with the author Shiraz Maher that evening at the International Literature Festival Dublin.
In his most recent book, From Deep State to Islamic State; The Arab Counter-Revolution and Its Jihadi Legacy, (published by Hurst in London) Filiu concludes that the Arab revolution of 2011 – a term he prefers to “Arab spring” – is being destroyed by a counter-revolution led by the remnants of dictatorships in collusion with jihadists.
Over the past century, Filiu writes, the Arabs’ right to self-determination was “denied by colonial intervention, ‘hi- jacked’ at independence by military regimes, trampled on by the double standards of the war for Kuwait and the ‘global war on terror,’ and perverted in the UN, where peoples are represented by the regimes who oppress them”.
No other people have faced “so many obstacles, enemies and horrors in the quest for basic rights”, Filiu says. [Continue reading…]
In January, Filiu spoke about the price being paid because of President Obama’s failure to uphold ethical principles.
“Who liberated America from the British?”
The French. I suggest a quick read of the Wikipedia article “Siege of Yorktown.”
” It was doctors, farmers and pharmacists. A revolution is made by the people who exist.”
Sort of. But this kind of broad, undetailed wishful thinking leads only back to itself.
Had today’s anti-interventionists being living in revolutionary America, I’m assuming they would have sided with the sovereign power – Britain – and opposed French intervention. After all, if the revolutionaries were not strong enough to defeat the British without relying on foreign military support, they had no right to try and overthrow the governing power — isn’t that the way the argument goes?
It never ceases to amaze me that there are nominal opponents of war who by applying a dark blend of pacifism/isolationism/realism, can blithely assert that Putin and Assad are using legitimate means to defend national sovereignty. Every self-declared opponent of Western hegemony apparently earns a free pass for brutality.