Abdulmalik Alejri, senior member of the Ansarallah Politburo:
"The death of Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zindani brings to mind the era of global jihad led by Salafi Jihadism and the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s against what was then termed the communist threat. The result was that they handed America and the capitalist West a victory without war, as then-US President Reagan borrowed a phrase from his predecessor Nixon. In the context of the Cold War, Afghanistan, that distant corner of Central Asia, transformed into a hub of Islam, and Kabul became a destination for Arab mujahideen, while Palestine, with Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Prophet’s Ascension, was within arm’s reach, yet failed to attract Arab mujahideen to jihad or to the allure of the virgins. Ironically, when America occupied Afghanistan, Kabul ceased to be a hub of Islam and a destination for jihad.
At that time, Western capitalist intelligence agencies and their Arab allies succeeded in portraying Marx and socialism as a threat to religions, whereas the truth was that they posed a threat to exploitative capitalism, and Marx’s battle was fundamentally against capitalist exploitation. Marx’s legacy fundamentally did not prioritize religions, and all he wrote about them was few and scattered texts. His most important work, “Capital,” in which his genius shines, explained the structure of capitalism, analyzed its internal mechanisms and contradictions, its capacity for expansion, crisis generation, and self-renewal. Even according to his adversaries, Marx’s legacy remained the primary reference for analyzing capitalist crises, with his ideas resurfacing with each historical cycle of capitalist crises.
Marx believed that the Enlightenment had overthrown the exploitation of the church and that the real looming danger was capitalist exploitation, even suggesting that religion could play a positive role in mobilizing against capitalist exploitation. I don’t understand how some perceive Marxism and communism as a threat to religion while finding no risks in liberal capitalism, even though the Enlightenment movement with its liberal tendencies was the one that battled the church, and the French Revolution raised the slogan “Hang the last king with the intestines of the last priest,” while the slogans of the Bolshevik revolution called for overthrowing the bourgeois government. Naturally, this is just a question of amazement, as the issue as a whole is not as simple, and civilization cannot be reduced or approached solely from the angle of combating religion.
The real danger to religion is such exploitation of religion to serve the battles and projects of America and the imperial West in the region, and those involved should take heed from the dramatic end of the Afghan jihad."
What’s that, North American Israel or something? On a more serious note, I’ve been reading a lot about the “discovery” of the Americas recently and it’s just crazy how random British, French and Spanish guys just got given ships and some money and were told to like fuck off and find something useful out west. Imagine being some loser smelly French guy and stumbling upon something as majestic as the Mississippi River. Or imagine being the Spanish dude that found Florida and suddenly saw the wildest swamps possible. Or the Brits that sailed into the most frozen fucked up parts of Canada and only found some delicious fish types that didn’t exist anywhere. What an insane time for humanity. Yeah I know that those explorer guys were mostly bootlickers and had awful intentions, but the timeline of these “accomplishments” by the European explorers is astonishing. 30 years between Columbus first voyage and the fall of Tenochtitlan feels unreal.