by Giulio Meotti
The Islamic State is exultant: “The war in Ukraine is a punishment against the infidels”. They are right.
While Qatar is the great energy winner of this war – Italy has now shown the way and prime minister Mario Draghi is openly negotiating new gas supplies with the Emir of Qatar – Islamic volunteers arrive on the ground from all over the world. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz says clearly, “Erdogan’s Turkey is the great winner of the conflict”. Time reports that one of the most important weapons against the Russians are Turkish drones, as the Muslims of Crimea are increasingly under Erdogan’s protection.
Former editor of the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, adds another aspect of the geopolitics of civilizations. Former State Department official and Iranian sanctions expert Gabriel Noronha released details of the nuclear deal that the United States is ready to conclude next week in Vienna with Iran. Noronha provided his report to officials at the National Security Council, the State Department and the European Union who divulged the contents of the nearly completed agreement in hopes of convincing Congress to stop Joe Biden from moving forward sooner.
“Noronha’s sources described a total collapse of all US positions and a willingness to lift all sanctions against the Iranian terror masters” writes Glick. Biden’s envoy Robert Malley has agreed to remove the Iranian Revolutionary Guards from the State Department’s list of terrorist groups. He also agreed to remove Iranian institutions that finance and conduct terrorism, repression, mass murder, torture and other crimes. The easing of sanctions Biden is granting will provide Iran with a cash injection of more than $90 billion shortly after the deal is concluded and another $50 billion annually through oil and gas revenues.
Biden has been obsessed with the idea of reaching a nuclear deal with the mullahs and the Europeans, for their part, have waged a twenty-year campaign to protect Iran and its nuclear program.
And Iran means Turkey and Qatar and Muslim Brotherhood. Daniel Greenfield is right when he explains that Islam is the only winner in this European tragedy.
The Intercept tells how Ukraine has become a “magnet for Jihad.” Chechens against Chechens. “In the West, most view the war in Ukraine simply as a battle between the Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian government. But the truth on the ground is now much more complex, particularly when it comes to the volunteer battalions fighting on the side of Ukraine. The ‘Dudayev battalion’ is named after the first president of Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudayev, and was founded by Isa Munayev, a Chechen commander who fought in two wars against Russia”. Crisis Group explains that over the past thirty years Ukraine has become a refuge for many Islamic fighters from Dagestan, where there was a failed insurrection against Russia.
The American neo-conservative Michael Rubin writes that, in the event of the collapse of Russia, “not only Ukraine and Belarus would be free, but also Chechnya, Dagestan, Karelia, Tartarstan and Tuva”. There are those who predict the birth in Europe of 3-4 new Islamic states.
Already Mikhail Lermontov described his “Hero of our time” as a tormented officer looking for himself in the adventurous life of the Caucasian garrison, grappling with the unnamed “hairy devils” of Chechnya. And something of this myth is found in “Chadzi-Murat”, the indomitable mountaineer with a childlike gaze that Lev Tolstoy elevated to the protagonist of the homonymous story, between an obligatory russophilia and an intimate aversion of the Caucasian mountaineers for what is Slavic. “Better to die fighting with the Russians than to live with the infidels”, we read in the novel by Tolstoy. And it is no coincidence that Tolstoy never published his Chechen novel and kept it well hidden in his drawers, as if to exorcise a nightmare.
It is also said that China, an ally of Russia for now, is the great winner of this frightening European explosion. Emmanuel Lincot, author of “Chine et Terres d’islam: un millénaire de géopolitique”, in Le Figaro recounts the convergence between China and the Islamic world in an anti-Western key. China, Pakistan and Turkey … And now there is also the entry of Afghanistan into the Chinese axis, after it has freed itself from Western influence and returned to the Taliban.
“The Islamic Ummah benefits in all circumstances”, explains the analyst Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, who translated a text by a famous Egyptian religious figure who went to fight in Syria, Abu Shu’aib al-Masri: “The Ummah Islam benefited from the Second World War, as the armies of the western states left most of the lands of the Islamic world. The Islamic Ummah benefited from the Cold War between East and West, as it expelled the Soviet Union from a number of Islamic countries. The Islamic Ummah benefited from the weakness of Joe Biden, since all of Afghanistan was liberated and from the stupidity of Emmanuel Macron, while the Muslims of Mali mobilized against the French presence which announced the withdrawal from Mali”.
Nationalism is only a decrepit facade for the huge tragedy in which Ukrainian and Russian boys are dying in a useless war and whose only and final winners will be the Ummah that is going to demographically replace the Europeans.
Many hope to draw some immediate benefit from this latest bloody chapter in the agony of European civilization. For the Americans, it’s Putin fall, while for Putin, it’s Ukraine out of Nato forever. But in the long run, if this continues, Europe is doomed.