Latest US “Terror Alert” no surprise

6 June 2016

The latest US “terror alert” in South Africa, should not come as a surprise to anyone. South Africans have had our fair share of these “alerts”, starting with Hussein Solomon in 2007, when he addressed a Zionist Conference in Herzliya, in Israel. They labelled Mosques and Muslim Schools as centres where terrorism is preached and taught, to the perceived threat to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, to terror training camps in the Eastern Cape, Pretoria and recruitment drives in Cape Town and Roshnee. We have heard it all from our “terror experts” locally and from abroad.

While these so-called threats is not about Islam, they do fuel Islamophobia. It is nevertheless important to those who conflate religion with politics. This is a convenient strategy and self-validating. The outlandish and often barbaric behaviour of the so-called Islamic State (IS) has given greater impetus to existing prejudices and propaganda vis a vis Islam.

It must not be forgotten that it was the US, Israel and their Allies that laid waste to one Middle Eastern country after another, working with IS or ISIS to carry out their wars of regime change. The destruction of the cultural heritage carried out by ISIS has a historical precedent carried out by the Pol Pot regime and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, from 1975 to 1979. Daesh (IS), as did the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot regimes, carry out a reign of terror and mass murder against the population. The preconditions for these atrocities had been created through the destruction of entire societies by US imperialism. 

The Media Review Network repeats its request, as we have done in the past, to the Department of State Security to engage the US Embassy, to provide the necessary evidence as to the source of this information. Our Security cluster should then be in a position to carry out its own investigations and not rely on peddlers of “manufactured” information.

Issued by Ibrahim Vawda, Media Review Network, 6 June 2016