The meeting of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Egyptian counterpart Mohamed Morsi, the first ever meet between the highest officials of the two countries after a gap of 34 years, was one of the major focus of national and international media. Morsi gave a red carpet welcome to Ahmadinejad, and as the two leaders deliberated on various issues, the prospects of an emerging Islamic cordiality between Egypt and Iran appeared in sight. Morsi agreed with his Iranian counterpart that Syrian crisis can not continue unabated, and a peaceful solution must be sought at the right earnest. It may not appear a surprise if Morsi and Ahmadinejad jointly develop a solution format, commonly agreeable to Syrian government and the opposition. The leaders of Egypt, Iran and Turkey met on the sidelines of the summit and deliberated on the Syrian issue. While the states like Saudi Arabia and Turkey may not hesitate to adopt military means to topple the Assad regime, and states like Iran, Iraq and Lebanon may prefer a solution tilting in favour of the current regime, the OIC emerged as a balancer, advocating for peaceful engagement between the parties to the conflict. 

Another positive development worth noting is the appeal of the OIC to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to expedite the resolution process of the conflict. The summit urged the powerful international body to «assume its responsibilities to end the violence and bloodshed». The UNSC has so far failed to evolve a consensus on Syria. Russia and China have opposed any sanctions or military intervention in the country. They have vetoed three such proposals in this international body. The positive development is that Russian and the US diplomats and political leaders have met on many occasions at Geneva, Dublin and other places to evolve a common position. The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has expressed keen interest for an expeditious resolution of the crisis. The UN and Arab envoys like Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi too played key roles in defusing tensions in Syria. Ban observed, «The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and United Nations have an important responsibility to address people’s aspirations, particularly by promoting democratization, good governance, the rule of law, and human rights, as well as socio-economic progress». He further stated, «I am encouraged that cooperation between our two organizations has significantly increased in the socio-economic and political fields, particularly in the area of conflict prevention and resolution». 

The offer of the Syrian National Council (SNC) leader, Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib to Syrian Vice President, Faruq al-Sharaa may not be ruled out as a sham. Any proposal for dialogue needs to be welcomed in the present context. Reportedly, few days back the meeting of SNC with representatives of Russia and Iran in Germany led to the change of course of the opposition. Though the offer is with condition that the Syrian government must release prisoners, it can be considered as a move, howsoever fragile, by the opposition to talk to the Assad regime. Such a prospect was infeasible few months back. The Syrian government has not responded to this offer so far, but it can explore this opportunity or other avenues to engage the opposition by various peaceful means. The conflict is propitious for neither of the parties; hence an indigenous people-centric solution is an urgent task both for the Syrian government and the opposition. 

The call for dialogue and negotiation by the OIC summit will have also another positive byproduct. This call will discourage the extremist groups in Syria, supported by Al Qaeda, and strengthen the constituency of peace. The extremist groups camouflage as the indigenous people and foment religious extremism and terrorism in Syria. The OIC distancing itself from violence may weaken their ideological sustenance. As reports suggest, religious extremists from various parts of the world have gathered in Syria and join the rebel ranks to fight the Assad regime by exploiting sectarian fault lines. It is not to argue here that there is no popular frustration against the Assad regime, but the joining of these extremist elements in the ranks of rebels have not only changed the character of the movement but also contributed to violence and consequent loss of lives. The killing of Tunisian opposition leader, Shokri Belaid considered to be secularist, supposedly by the extremists on the eve of the summit indicates that the Arab Spring might have empowered people, but it has also contributed to extremism at least in some parts of the Arab world. 

The OIC has sent a clear message that the conflict in Syria can not continue for long. Now the question arises: how to deal with this conflict, which has been made complicated with passing months. The OIC may play an active role to distance the conflict from any ethnic or sectarian tangle, and mediate between the conflicting parties as an honest broker for peace, stability and development in the Arab world. 

An example of the CIA ‘s flip-flopping between using its mujaheddin and jihadist allies and then declaring them «terrorists» and putting a price on their heads is the recent declaration by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the Haqqani network based in North Waziristan, Pakistan is a «foreign terrorist organization». 

The Haqqani network, led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, was cobbled together by the CIA and the Pakistani Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the 1980s.

The Haqqani network is the latest former CIA ally to be branded a terrorist group. The Haqqanis are the latest in a long line of so-called terrorist groups that were organized and funded by the CIA only later to be thrown to the side of the road and branded «terrorists». Others include «Al Qaeda», led by CIA Afghan war veteran Osama bin Laden and Hezb-I Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatayar. With the designation of the Haqqani network as a terrorist organization, after the demise of Bin Laden and the designation of Hekmatayar as a terrorist, the CIA has run the table on its old mujaheddin allies. Only those «Al Qaeda» operatives who have allied themselves with the CIA in the Western-backed insurgencies in Libya and Syria.

Bin Laden and «Al Qaeda» were the convenient scapegoats for the CIA and its Mossad allies to provide a «logical» perpetrator for the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the 11^th anniversary of which is now being observed across America. Hekmatayar’s falling out with the CIA appears to be over his attempt to cut into the opium smuggling in Afghanistan run by intelligence cut-outs for the CIA, as well as the family opium harvesting and smuggling business of the family of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

In his book on America’s dalliance with Islamist terrorists, the late ABC News Middle East correspondent John Cooley reveals the nature of the CIA’s involvement with Afghan opium smuggling in his book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism. Getting the idea from French intelligence, the CIA launched Operation Mosquito, a program that pumped heroin and hashish into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in order to «hook» Red Army troops on drugs and decimate their fighting potential. When supplies of narcotics from Pakistan were depleted, the drugs shipped into Afghanistan came from stockpiles of Colombian cocaine and heroin impounded by the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Customs Service, and U.S. Coast Guard. The CIA used various Afghan warlords and operatives like Bin Laden, Hekmatayar, and Haqqani to smuggle drugs into Kabul, Kandahar, and other areas where Soviet troops were concentrated. The proceeds from the drug smuggling were split between the Afghan warlords and the CIA’s off-shore slush funds. 

No less an expert on «Al Qaeda» than the late British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, in an article for The Guardian newspaper published on July 8, 2005, wrote «Throughout the 80s he [Bin Laden] was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally ‘the database,’ was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians». Cook, who, as Foreign Secretary, would have had access to most of the files of two agencies subservient to him – Britain’s MI-6 Secret Intelligence Service and Britain’s U.S. National Security Agency counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) – was revealing some of the most hidden secrets about Western intelligence agency involvement in crafting and exploiting the 9/11 attacks. 

Former French military intelligence officer Pierre-Henri Bunel, who tracked Islamist terrorist networks in the Balkans and discovered their CIA origins, said «Al Qaeda» was not merely a database, but an Intranet the CIA used to call up reserves of mujaheddin to engage in specified terrorist actions, much like those seen during the past few years in the remote-control bombing of civilians in Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, various Libyan and Pakistani cities, Aden, and other locales., all carried out by «Al Qaeda» or its off shoots.

Echoing Cook’s statement, Bunel, a graduate of the elite St. Cyr military academy in France, wrote:

«The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the U.S. and the lobbyists for the U.S. war on terrorism are only interested in making money.

Bunel described in great detail how «Al Qaeda» operated. He revealed that the Al Qaeda «Intranet» was established under the auspices of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), which is based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Users, including OIC member governments and their embassies around the world, could access the database «by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. 

A major in Pakistan’s military told Bunel that the «Al Qaeda» database was «divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, Q’eidat il-Maaloomaat and Q’eidat i-Taaleemaat. Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic Q’eidat ilmu’ti’aat, which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for ‘base.’» 

Among the countries using the Al Qaeda Intranet to conduct terrorist operations was Saudi Arabia. And the «Al Qaeda» Intranet had been around for quite some time before 9/11. Bunel stated: «When Osama Bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages».

Cook died suddenly from a heart attack a month after he wrote the Guardian article. Bunel was charged, convicted, and imprisoned for a dubious claim that he spied for Serbia.

Today, the OIC is at the vanguard of providing covert support to «Al Qaeda» and affiliated rebels fighting against Bashar al Assad’s government in Syria. It is likely that the «Al Qaeda» intranet is working overtime sending coded messages between Jeddah, Riyadh, Doha, Abu Dhabi and «Al Qaeda» field units in Syria and on the Turkish side of the Syrian border. The OIC has suspended Syria from OIC membership and the only reason for such a decision was to sever Syria from the OIC «Al Qaeda» Intranet intelligence link to Syrian rebel forces and CIA covert channel terminals in Langley, Virginia.

Hekmatayar and Haqqani are arms of the ISI and when their services were needed the most by the United States, they served the interests of the CIA. There is now an attempt by the CIA to rewrite the recent history of South Asia and eliminate all the insurgents and guerrillas and their organizations that did the bidding of the CIA. Bin Laden was accused of carrying out 9/11, Hekmatayar of killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan on behalf of the Taliban and «Al Qaeda,» and now the Haqqani network, still an arm of ISI, of attacking U.S. targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

America’s love affair with Islamist radical terrorists goes back to the days of Zbigniew Brzezinki, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, and even earlier, when journalist-turned-CIA agent Archibald Roosevelt, the grandson of U.S. uber-imperialist-turned-progressive Theodore Roosevelt, concocted a plan to bring the Soviets to their knees by stoking anti-Communist Islamists against the Soviets in places like Egypt, where the CIA supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempt to assassinate Egyptian pan-Arab socialist Gamal Abdel Nasser. Archibald’s cousin, Kermit Roosevelt, was in charge of the 1953 CIA coup that toppled Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and restored the hated Shah to power. Both decisions were monumental disasters for U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world.

Bin Laden, Hekmatayar, and Haqqani – all one time allies of the CIA – became «problems» in CIA parlance. And like all CIA «problems», they have all possessed one ultimate destiny – termination with extreme prejudice…

However, the 21-member UNESCO world heritage body voted 13 to 6 with two abstentions to approve Palestine’s first request to the international organization as a full member. The Church of the Nativity was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. The criticism of the vote was intense from the United States and Israel.

The inseparable duo of Israel and the United States cut off funding to UNESCO after the Paris-based UNESCO voted to admit Palestine as a full member state last October. UNESCO lost more than one-fifth of its financial support as a result of Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s action.

Although the St. Petersburg vote was secret, some nations later showed their hands. France admitted that it voted in favor of declaring the Bethlehem church endangered, resulting in the standard charges from Israel’s worldwide lobby that France is historically anti-Semitic with the familiar refrain of Alfred Dreyfus’s name being chanted by the lobby. Dreyfus, a French Jewish army officer, was tried for treason in 1895 and imprisoned on Devil’s Island on the charge that he was a spy for the Germans. Dreyfus’s case became a rallying cause for leading Zionists of the time and he was later exonerated and restored to his military rank.

Joining France to vote for the Palestinian request were Algeria, France, India, Iraq, Malaysia, Mali, Mexico, Qatar, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

The six nations voting for the Israeli position were Colombia, Ethiopia, Estonia, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland. The two abstentions came from Cambodia and Thailand.

It is well-known that the Vatican and the Greek and Armenian Orthodox churches, which have shared responsibility for Jesus’s birthplace, have long protested against Israel’s land grab of church property in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and in Israel proper. Ironically, it was the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) that rallied its members to support the Palestinian request to protect the Church of the Nativity as an endangered World Heritage site. 

The following press release was sent out by the following the UNESCO vote:

The Secretary General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu has welcomed the inclusion of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem among World Heritage Sites during the meeting of the UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee in St Petersburg, Russia. He described this move as an important achievement for the preservation of heritage and historical sites in Palestine and for their protection against instruments of destruction, which the Israeli occupation practices constitute. The Secretary General extended gratitude to all Member States that voted in favour of the resolution and commended the efforts deployed by OIC Member States in this regard.

The OIC member states that carried the day for Jesus’s birthplace were Algeria, Iraq, Malaysia, Mali, Qatar, Senegal, and the United Arab Emirates. Palestine is a full member state of the OIC.

The UNESCO decision recognized that the birthplace of Jesus was threatened by the presence of Israeli troops, something that the Israelis and their American backers vehemently rejected. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has, over the past several years, forged an alliance with Christian evangelicals in the United States, sometimes resulting in heated arguments with orthodox Jewish members of his own Cabinet who are suspicious of the proselytizing engaged in by evangelical Christian missionaries in Israel, particularly among Russian Jewish immigrants. However, Netanyahu has rejected the orthodox rabbis protests. At one point in time during the George W. Bush administration, Netanyahu explicitly told the rabbis that Christian evangelicals represented Bush’s political base and that Bush was a total backer of Israel on all major issues. Therefore, Netanyahu reasoned that he would do nothing to alienate the evangelicals, especially those who are known as “Christian Zionists.”

However, Netanyahu and his Likud Party backers made an explosive pact. On one hand, the Likudniks have curried favor with Christian fundamentalists whose interpretation of the Bible varies greatly from Catholicism, Christian Orthodoxy and Coptic Christianity, Anglicanism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and other faiths borne from the Protestant Reformation. On the other hand, Likud, which enjoys the support of orthodox Jewish parties like Shas, whose rabbinical leaders mock Jesus as the son of a prostitute and a heretic who was Satan’s spawn, regards Christian holy sites under Israeli occupation as Israel’s business. The anti-Christian rhetoric that emanates from Netanyahu’s political allies has incurred the wrath of established Christian religions that realize that by claiming the final say over the administration of Christian holy places like the Church of the Nativity and other Christian shrines, disregarding Palestine’s role entirely, these sites are in as much danger as Sufi Muslim sites in Timbuktu and Gao in Mali are from Saudi-funded Wahhabist Muslims.

Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States and the former Vatican envoy to both Israel and Palestine, who died in the United States from complications resulting from surgery, was known to be a harsh critic of Israel’s grabs at church property in the Holy Land. The Franciscan Order of the Catholic Church also raises funds for churches in the Holy Land every Good Friday, reminding Catholic congregations around the world that the church is under extreme pressure in Palestine and Israel. It is quite clear that, for the Franciscans, the threat to the church is from Israel.

Therefore, it made sense for Palestine to raise the issue of the protection of the Church of the Nativity before UNESCO. Israel now fears that Palestine, acting on behalf of the mainstream Christian faiths, will raise protection issues for other Christian holy sites on the West Bank and in east Jerusalem, as well as for Muslim holy sites, including the Dome of the Rock in east Jerusalem, which sits atop the destroyed Second Jewish Temple, which a number of Zionists and their Christian Zionist allies hope to rebuild as the Third Jewish Temple. The rebuilding of the temple would place the Dome of the Rock and the nearby Al Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, in jeopardy.

As for the United States, it was quite instructive that the U.S. ambassador to UNESCO, David Killion, was the point man to strong-arm member delegations to vote against the Palestinian resolution and support Israel. Killion is a former chief aide to two rabidly Zionist chairmen of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Lantos and Howard Berman. 

The nightmare for Netanyahu and his allies are that Palestine will replace Israel as the guarantor of the sanctity and security of the Christian holy places and the knowledge that Israel threatens Christian holy places will gain currency among Christian evangelical sects. Such an eventuality could drive a wedge between sects like the Southern Baptists, Pentecostalists, and other fundamentalist faiths and Israel’s powerful lobby in the United States. Such a development could cost Israel much needed political support in southern and western states. Therefore, Israel and pro-Israelis in the Obama administration, including Killion, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman will stop at nothing to prevent UNESCO from being used as a platform from which Palestine and the Vatican can announce that it is Israel that poses the greatest threat to Christian holy places in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.