This is my talk at the book launch at the Islamic Society of York Region in commemoration of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on the 26^th anniversary of his passing took on May 31. Among the speakers were Moulana Zaki Baqri, Zafar Bangash and myself. Despite hate-filled demonstrators with placards and megaphones, threatening attendees, 400 people came. Sadly, many others turned back, intimidated by the angry demonstrators.

i surveyed the various Islamic movements, how the US manipulates them, how a frightening development like the rise of ISIS is a logical outcome of imperial interference.
http://www.themuslimtv.net/view_video.php?viewkey=682527359 the talk begins at the 5 minute mark.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO6j4ivNedw
This version begins at 5:45 and starts with a reading from the Quran and some announcements

NEW WALBERG BOOK A GATEWAY TO UNDERSTANDING ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS PATHWAYS AND PITFALLS OF THE ISLAMIC RESISTANCE

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ISBN: 978-0-9860731-8-2 EBOOK ISBN: 978-0-9860769-8-5

$$23.95  299 pp.  2015

Distributors in the US and Overseas

Eric Walberg’s third book on geopolitical strategy focuses on the Middle East and the global ramifications of the multiple state destruction resulting from Western aggression.  It addresses these questions:

What is left of the historic Middle East upheavals of 1979 (Afghanistan, Iran) and 2011 (the Arab Spring)?

How does 9/11 fit into the equation of Islamic resistance? Is al-Qaeda’s long term project still on track?

What are the chances that ISIS can prevail in Iraq and Syria?

Are they and likeminded jihadists dupes of imperialism or legitimate resistance movements?

Pax Amercana vs offshore balancing

The latest jargon justifying imperialism, as if straight from the business page contrasts Pax Americana, where if they behave well, clients become more prosperous and more democratic. If that fails but you have a few reliable regional partners, there is an offshore balancing system, where the empire’s quislings bear the primary responsibility for dealing with crises on the ground, and US military strategy is oriented toward policing the seas and skies. Nothing new except the name.  The British were masters of ‘offshore balancing’.

Since the Cold War, and especially since 1991, the Pax Americana idea has predominated. But in the Middle East, Dohat lectures, there has been no real evolution toward democracy among our network of allies; instead, their persistent corruption has fed terrorism and contributed to al-Qaeda’s rise. All is the fault of the stupid, greedy towel heads. Apparently Bin Laden can’t see the difference between local and foreign greedy bastards.

Hence the Bush administration’s post-9/11 decision to try to “start afresh, by transforming a rogue state into a regional model”, a foundation for a new American-led order that would be “less morally compromised than the old”. That order did not, of course, emerge. Instead, the obliteration of Iraq destroyed the only vaguely functional regime in the Middle East, killing 100,000s of innocent Iraqis (who knows how many? According to the invader chief, General Tommy Franks, “We don’t do body counts).

IS continues to confound. Not only for its ability to outmanoeuver the US (remember it is a rag-tag unfunded collection of wildly courageous jihadists fight a monster Goliath) but for its defiance in pursuing its grim revolutionary justice despite the threats of empire. They believe in the old fashion justice of Muhammad’s time (though Muhammad was very sparing in cuttings, encouraging remorse, forgiveness and financial compensation paid to the victim or heirs of a victim in the cases of murder, bodily harm or property damage.

The world’s bastion of peace is packing up its bombs and tanks in a humiliating retreat from the desert of Yemen. How could this be? After all, the US has been directing events in Yemen, more or less, since WWII, dominated by US dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. After the collapse of the Arab world’s only communist state, South Yemen, in 1991, it looked like clear sailing. But sadly, fantasy and reality have little in common in the intractable Middle East.

Yemen is most celebrated as the fatherland of jihadist Osama Bin Laden (his father was a Yemeni-born Saudi construction billionaire with close ties to the Saudi royal family). Osama was energized in his tender youth in the 1970s to travel the Middle East exhorting independence fighters to fight the kufar with increasingly alarming tactics—and success. But that is ancient history now. He was gunned down unarmed by US special forces in Pakistan in 2011 and dumped unceremoniously in the ocean, in yet another US insult to the Muslim world.