Iran has done it again! It has stage managed the defeat of Islamic countries’ effort to patch together peace with powerful Israel nurtured by the United States of America, its sworn arch enemy.
Personified by its slain general Qasem Suleimani’s cunning, Iran was seething on the skillet of the Arabs’ cosying up to the Israelis, saw its fortunes from war and strife slipping out of its hands and would have none of it. Enter the Hamas attack on innocent, holidaying Israeli women and children!
Also, Sunni Saudi Arabia’s effort at asserting its political and religious hegemony among Islamic countries did not sit well with the Shia theocratic state and therefore the idea sown in gullible and easily incitable minds that the Palestinian attack was impromptu, sudden and swift Muslim vengeance on Israel, sold like hot cakes among its ‘target’.
Furthermore, all this kissing and making up needed to be neutered and spayed because working on the principle of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, the effort by Indonesia’s Nahdatlul Islam ‑ supported by Saudi Arabia ‑ to redirect the understanding of an Islam more in tune with today and translating into peace with Israel etc, was not relished by Saudis’ political rivals Qatar and Turkey and just HAD to be scuttled! The pieces just fell into place.
So Saudi now being in a subsequent quandary and not wanting to be seen as sitting on the fence, is seen to have nodded in reluctant agreement that Israel had indeed been a “naughty boy” by reacting swiftly and harshly to the Hamas beach attack. Gone – for the time being at least – was the olive branch effort to improve relations with Israel, singed now by the searing fury of Israeli reprisal. Ahhh, success at last! Iran’s Hezbollah encouraged its cousin Hamas to “do the needful” and voila!
But it gets worse!
Now fuelled by the frenzy from a bruised, historically tribal, ill-informed and therefore prejudiced ego, muslims from peripheral Islamic states such as Pakistan have taken it upon themselves to rattle their sabers from the comfort of their homes as they call upon others to rally behind their muslim brothers in Palestine, little wanting to understand that the effort by militant groups Abu Ali Mustapha Brigades and Hamas to wrest the Palestinian movement from the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Palestinian National Council, has been tailored to whip up just such a frenzy and play the victim in the eyes of the gullible, the militant and those trying ever so hard to be politically correct, and that the movement for Palestine had nothing Islamic about it. It is this very misunderstanding that has set back the very valid Palestinian freedom movement.
For now, the perilous path to Palestinian peace demands losing Hamas along the way and not giving it a compass!
