‘AL QAEDA’ IN 2013: REALISTIC THREAT OR JUST A CATCH-ALL PROPAGANDA LABEL FOR THE WEST’S ISLAMIC ENEMIES

Neoconservatives have quickly jumped on the ‘al Qaeda is still a threat’ bandwagon after the weekend’s shutdown of many Western embassies throughout North Africa and the Middle East due, so we are told, to as yet unexplained and unspecified threat chatter between various so-called ‘al Qaeda’ groups.

Con Coughlin, a British neoconservative journalist with the UK’s Daily Telegraph, writes:

For an organisation that is said to be in terminal decline, al-Qaeda will draw immense satisfaction from the events of this past weekend, when it demonstrated its ability to disrupt the work of Western governments by forcing the temporary closure of dozens of diplomatic missions throughout the Arab world.

Coughlin concedes that he has no idea what the threat is; only that “American intelligence officials are convinced that al-Qaeda is planning a spectacular attack to mark the festival of Eid, which comes at the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan” (Thursday 8 August 2013).

Coughlin takes the opportunity to expand the propaganda by mentioning ‘al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’ and referring to it as an “al Qaeda franchise”.

There are, it seems, a number of ‘al Qaeda franchises’ scattered around the broader region. Neoconservative writers are keen to mention them often in their various articles as they perpetuate the al Qaeda myth as being some kind of homogenous organisation that is well disciplined and structured and operating via a central ‘head office’ based somewhere in Afghanistan/Pakistan.

Well known warmonger and neocon, Max Boot writing in Commentary today lists some of these ‘franchises’. He writes:

News of al-Qaeda’s imminent demise was, it seems, greatly exaggerated… Far from going out of business, al-Qaeda has spread, via its regional affiliates, to North Africa (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), the Persian Gulf region (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), and Iraq and Syria (al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).

For Boot, the objective of his article is two-fold; first, to perpetuate the myth of a vast Islamic extremist organisation determined to destroy America and Israel, and, two, to justify the existence of a massive US security network and, in particular, the importance of the work of the NSA. This, in turn, justifies a massive expenditure on the military and especially in the new science of robotic surveillance and remote and robotically controlled weapons all aimed at keeping the West and the US in particular, as top dogs in the superpower stakes.

Ever since 9/11, al Qaeda has become a useful label that can be attached to any Islamic enemy of the West regardless of whether or not any of them actually do have any connection to the tiny hard-core original organisation that clustered around Osama bin Laden up until his demise in December 2001. The Israelis even tried to create a bogus ‘al Qaeda in Palestine’ group – but they were soon exposed as fakes.

Makes you wonder about the origins of the other groups. And, of course, if they’re such a tightly organised group, how come they’re fighting among themselves in Syria – and how come the most sophisticated ‘terror’ plot since several airliners were used to attack targets on 9/11 has been some bloke who tried to blow up his Y-fronts?