 You know, we hear a lot of things about Islamic fundamentalism in the media as this, you know, great bogeyman. But what's really interesting is, compared to how much time is spent on talking about it and, you know, bringing it up in every single day, we never really hear where it's coming from and how it's kind of formed. It's always portrayed as some kind of murky, obscure thing that just spontaneously erupted amongst, you know, Arabs basically, or people in the Middle East, Muslim people. But that's a really good question, why is that so? Why are we never told where did this phenomenon come from and how did it develop? And the truth is, well, very uncomfortable for the people, the ruling class in the West, because, you know, even if you look at today, for instance, this morning I hear they were going on and on again about a assumed chemical attack in Syria against Idlib, which is the governorate that the Syrian regime, you know, allied with the Russians, are attacking at the moment. And you know, we're told that the people who have power in this area, in Idlib, you know, freedom fighters, rebels, moderate rebels, whatever that means. But what we're never really told is that these people are effectively, that whole region is effectively controlled by a branch of al-Qaeda, which has many, many different names over the time, but which is essentially a branch of al-Qaeda. In, for many years, in the beginning of the Syrian civil war, we were always told that what we have here is a, is a, on the one side we have the brouh al-Assad regime, we agree that's a very brutal regime, and on the other side we have these freedom fighters. And of course this was true to begin with, but at a certain stage this movement became, became sectarianized and was hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists, by the same people who, you know, later suddenly became known to everyone as ISIS and who were suddenly the worst bogeymen in the world. They were there all alone, supported by the West, supported by the allies of the West in the regions, by Saudi Arabia, by Turkey, by Jordan, and the CIA, who had an operation in the country. And even, you know, if we go to Afghanistan today, there are negotiations, we never really, you know, they don't talk about it in the US, but at the moment US imperialism is in negotiations with the Taliban to secure a withdrawal from Afghanistan, essentially handing power, you know, sorting out some kind of power sharing deal with these, these extremists. I would say that more or less at all stages, Islamic fundamentalism, as we know it today, has been tied to imperialism at all stages of this development. From the first days of the modern Middle East, the main form of counterrevolution has been one form or another, in one way or another connected with Islamic fundamentalism. That doesn't go to say that all Muslims are Islamic fundamentalists, but that this is a political movement, it's a counterrevolutionary political movement that at all stages has been dropped up by the imperialists and by the most reactionary forces in the region. Even if we go back, you know, just after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when Turkey was known as Turkey today, was occupied by Western imperialist powers, you had the Turkish War of Independence, which was essentially a bourgeois revolution, led by Kemal Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and which was fighting a struggle against the imperialists, and what was the imperialist's last card, what was the last card that they played, was this old sultan, who was basically a British puppet, nothing more than that, who used his formal designation as a caliph to call for an uprising against this movement, trying to reach out, trying to connect with the most backward reactionary layers of Turkish society against the Ataturk movement, which wasn't leftist in any way, but it was revolutionary and it was a complete break with the backwardness of the past, trying to modernize Turkey, trying to bring it into a new era. And we saw that the bourgeois revolution in Turkey, and what we'll see throughout the history of the Middle East, the main task of the revolution can only take place under the banner of secularism, the division of state and religion. And that's more or less just like it happened in Europe, but there's a big difference in that this time strong capitalist powers do exist. So this is not like the Enlightenment period, the rise of the capitalist class in Europe, which was fighting against the Catholic Church. This time there are actually more powerful powers in Europe, which have already developed capitalism, and which do not have an interest in an independent, strong capitalist society developing in the Middle East. And that's the irony of the whole thing, that you have the European bourgeoisie coming to power fighting against obscurantism, against religious fanaticism of the Catholic Church, and in the Middle East they lean on these exact type of forces, and lean on the most conservative layers and classes, even classes going far before, who were established and who belonged to eras which are far before capitalism in order to dominate the region. European capital had no interest in developing an independent, strong capitalist Middle East. Insofar as they did help the development of some sort of capitalist class, this class was completely tied to the old order. It was basically the big landowners, aristocratic, you know, one form or another of aristocratic and tribal people. And these people were completely tied to imperialists. They were completely tied to the old regime, to the old order in society, and they were completely incapable of developing society in any meaningful way, and they were hated by the masses. And at the same time the empire, the Ottoman empire after World War I, was broken up and divided in the most humiliating way, and the Arab nation in particular was divided up in exchange between the big powers like change in a poker game or something like that. And these people who all share a common history, there's not a difference at least before. There's not a difference between people living in what's known as Syria today or Jordan or Palestine or Lebanon. It's the same tribes and peoples who lived across these borders. In fact, if anything, the imperialists made sure to cut these up and make sure that they are divided up as many different groups in each nation in order to keep them weak, in order to be able to divide, play them up against each other in order to rule them. And these people who used to live side by side for centuries were divided up and split up like cattle basically. And this humiliation and this betrayal left a mark on the psyche of the Middle Eastern masses which is still there today. And the oppression and the humiliation of the imperialism was obviously the source of enormous anger. And immediately after World War I, you saw that the general crisis in society, the general turbulence in society, opened the way for a whole series of national liberation movements everywhere. Immediately beginning from after the World War I, especially in Egypt, there was a revolution against the British which was defeated. But everywhere you saw in Iraq, in northern Iraq, in southern Iraq, you saw uprisings, mass movements against imperialism, for national self-determination and liberation. And in general, you saw widespread radicalization. But as I said, the capitalist path was repeatedly blocked basically by the imperialists, by the so-called, by the ones who were, in fact, capitalist in the region as well. And therefore, you saw actually the development of movements which even went further and further and further to the left of capitalism. You know, starting off from just the basic democratic demands, they were more and more radicalized, moving to the left. And here Egypt was a key country, especially because it was the most developed country at the time. And in Egypt you have these new cities developing with layers of industrial workers for the first time, although it was a small working class, but for the first time you had industrial working class, you had the beginning of an urban intelligentsia, urban middle class, intellectuals, and top state officials who were being radicalized in this situation by the desire to develop society basically and being blocked at every single step. And at the same time you had, on the other hand, a pool from Marxist or leftist perspective in the sense that the Russian Revolution where the masses, the workers, the poor and the peasants had taken power in their own hands was an enormous source of inspiration. So while you had people being blocked from the capitalist path, you had the Soviet Union becoming this example to follow in the eyes of millions and millions of people. Now, in Egypt, imperialism was seen as a massive impediment for the development and modernization of Egypt, and that was the main driving force. In fact, especially amongst middle classes, they wanted to have some sort of national dignity and development and modernization of Egypt. That goes for every single country in the Middle East up until this day. But they couldn't because they were faced with this imperialism. Now, at the same time you had also another layer developing, which is what was called in Egypt the lower FND, I think it's pronounced, which is a layer of newly urbanized village dwellers, often people coming not from really poor background, but from basically middle class, medium landowners, who are not the enormous big landlords who have ties to the imperialists, who have direct ties to the state, but the mediums ones which are being out-computed by the state, by industrialization and who feel the pressure from the rising cities who are coming to dominate the villages, the under pressure from the economic crisis and the pressures of imperialism, and then losing their independence. These are people who had a traditional position in society before, like kind of village heads, people would go to them and ask for advice about all kinds of things, like who to marry and whatnot. People would go to borrow money from them and get advice from them if they had economic problems and so on. They had a certain social stature, which was being undermined by the development of capitalism, by the inroads that imperialism was making, and they couldn't really see any way out. These were the most conservative layers of Egyptian society. If they stayed in the village, they were constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. Imagine every single day thinking, you can lose everything basically, and it wasn't people who didn't own anything. They actually had something and they were losing all of it. At the same time, if they went to the cities as well, they would be ruined because in the cities they didn't have the connections to move up. They might be able to get jobs as a teacher or a lawyer or a doctor, the lowest layers of the middle class, but they didn't have the connections to the big landlords, to the imperialists and so on to move up. Everywhere they went, they felt this hatred and this humiliation, and they longed for stability and for the rehabilitation of their own positions. They were dreaming of a return to the good old days, which is always what the conservative Petit Bourgeoisie does. Being under pressure from all sides, they can't understand the working class and the communists, and obviously they can't deal with the big bourgeoisie. So they kind of dreamed their ways back to this old society where they had a certain position. And it was amongst this layer that the Muslim Brotherhood was formed in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Bana. And the ideology, obviously there's lots of different parts of it, and it is a developed ideology. But basically from our point of view, what it represented, from a class point of view, what it represented was a return to the early days of Islam, kind of a revivalist, puritan view of society. And that became a focal point for this layer within the cities and also the conservative layers which were in the villages as well. Nevertheless, the Muslim Brotherhood was not the dominant force in society. The dominant movement was still to the left. Like you can see, actually the communist party in Egypt made many, many mistakes and didn't ever really grow to become a mass force. But you had all kinds of organizations instinctively, you know, pressured by events, basically moving to the left and taking on a more and more socialist Marxist, leftist rhetoric and ideology. But, as I said, the communist party didn't manage to capitalize on this mass movement to the left, which was especially after the defeat of the 1919 revolution. You saw very, very big radicalization. People saying, you know, this is not enough, we need to break with the whole thing. But as I said, the communists couldn't take advantage of this. And therefore the mass movement on the streets, and there was a mass movement developing, lacked organization, lacked a political focal point. And so this vacuum was filled by a group of officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, which was called the Free Officers Movement. And this stage, a coup in July 1952 against the Farouk regime. The Farouk was the king, was basically a puppet king controlled by the British. And the reason why, well, the character of this movement, of this officers movement was, you know, these were people who were deep within the state apparatus. They were high within the military, and therefore they could see all the rot, they could see all the incompetence. In 1948, they lost the war against, you know, all of the Arab nations lost the war against Israel, which was based purely on, you know, on the incompetence of the ruling classes and the deal that they were making with different imperatives. And they could see all of this, and they wanted to rehabilitate their nation, basically. They also had a higher education, they had access to education systems in Europe, and they had a higher cultural level, in essence. And therefore, and also they were organized, as one of the only organized forces in Egypt. And they took power, and initially, Nasser was not a socialist, or even a leftist. In fact, just after taking power, he cracked down on a communist-led, massive textile strike. But he was a nationalist, and Nasser wanted to restore Egypt's honor. That was basically the main driving force of his rule, at least in the early days. But in doing so, so he would increasingly come into conflict with Western imperialism. And he would increasingly find himself leaning on the Soviet Union, which, for him, also was kind of a model which was appealing. Here you had a military-run society, I know democracy, there's one guy from the top that decides. But also a society which had managed to modernize itself from extreme backwardness and barbarism to being the second power on the planet within a very short period of time. And you saw him drifting towards the left, and taking on a left-leaning Arab nationalist, Arab socialist point of view. And he became a focal point throughout the whole of the Middle East for all of the movements developing in the whole of the region and even beyond. Now this movement was radicalized again in 1956 where Nasser, because of conflicts with the British, ended up nationalizing the Suez Canal, which was built by Egyptians, which was run by Egyptians, and the only thing that was not Egyptians was the Prophet of it. And Nasser wanted to use the Prophet from the dam, from the canal to modernize Egypt, to industrialize Egypt. Being blocked by the imperialists, he nationalized it, and then he was attacked by a coalition of Israel, France, and Britain, which he defeated. Again, this further pushed him to the left, radicalized not only the movement, not only the mood in Egypt but throughout the whole of the Middle East against the imperialists and further to the left. Now Nasser actually, he was never Marxist or socialist, he didn't implement socialism, and that was his mistake in fact. If we have to go and study the mistakes of what has led Egypt to where it is today, because Nasser never finished what he started. He nationalized the main industries in Egypt, and by doing so he developed free healthcare, free education, the railways. In fact, you go to Egypt today, nothing has been built since Nasser's time. And that says something about Egypt, about Nasser. But he still maintained the old bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie remained, and capitalism wasn't in fact overthrown. Nevertheless, he moved far to the left, and in doing so, he became increasingly into conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Muslim Brotherhood, as I said, represented this conservative religious layers who were not interested, and who were interested in maintaining the power of, you know, had this revival as basic ideology, and had an interest in maintaining the power of these layers, which were being undermined by Nasser's industrialization. His middle class layers, that's the bourgeoisie in the villages, in the cities, and so on. So whereas in the beginning, Nasser actually gave the Muslim Brotherhood positions within the regime, top positions within the regime, like Sayyed Utfour, like the main ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, had like top state positions. But as they came into conflict with each other, he started to crack down on it. And that actually radicalized the movement from being kind of a conservative, bright conservative movement, to becoming more and more extreme, to going more and more into terrorism and into like, you know, armed struggle and so on. But nevertheless, Nasser was in no mood to share power, and his extreme popularity meant that him cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood and essentially destroying them didn't really cause anyone to complain. Or, you know, it wasn't at least not that really good. Yes. Now, Nasser at that point was the most popular man in the whole of the Middle East. But that was because he reflected, he reflected a general movement which was being seen everywhere. And this process actually went further, for instance in Syria, it went even further than Egypt, with a group of officers taking power through a series of coups moving to the left. And actually nationalizing everything, completely expropriating the bourgeoisie, and essentially getting rid of capitalism, as we know it. You had left-wing developments in Iraq, in Libya, in Yemen, there was the same type of movements developing. And you saw the Soviet Union gaining influence as the British were losing out. And the Soviets were stepping in and filling this vacuum. And this terrified the new world power, US imperialism, and obviously also the ruling classes of the region who really terrified where this whole thing was going. The king of Jordan, the kings of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and so on. The Americans, in fact, tried to convince the Iraqis to attack and invade Syria, which was a country, as I said, which had gone the furthest. And in fact, within a few weeks or months, Iraq was in the middle of a revolutionary movement itself. And so, from the military path, the Americans realized that they needed to take the political path. They needed to prepare the political ground for counter-revolution. And the main architect of this was the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who saw the role of political Islam, who saw the role that religion could play in galvanizing a layer of people, a galvanizing movement to fight against these things. And he found a partner in Saudi Arabia, which I'll explain later, and actually he was petitioning the Saudi king for calling for a jihad against the Syrian regime and so on, but the Saudi king at that point said, we cannot do that. We cannot go against these regimes publicly because the movement was so strong also in the Arabian Peninsula. Now Saudi Arabia is a peculiar nation because in many ways it's an artificial formation. At least it's a formation that wouldn't last as long if it was just left to itself. It's basically based on an alliance of a clan, the Al-Saud clan, and the Wahhabi clergy of the Sheikh Al-Sheikh and the Sheikh clan, I think I called, and the Wahhabis who have this extreme Puritan form of Muslim ideology, they basically made a power sharing deal whereas the king and this Al-Sauds basically controlled the state, they're the king and they controlled the state and the Wahhabis formed the ideological of that state. Now this probably could survive for a very, very short period of time if it hadn't been due to the support of first British imperialism in order to have a foothold in the region and later on the Americans who used the Saudis and the Gulf states on the one hand as a political tool of counter-revolution but also later on as a source of oil as we know it. Now the Saudis were terrified of the movement that was going on, of the development that was going on in the region. They had taken in many of the Muslim Brotherhood people who had been escaping Egypt and they had been helping to maintain the network of the Muslim Brotherhood in the whole of the region. There was no problem in that this activist organizational side of the Muslim Brotherhood they found a common ground with the Wahhabis and this basically strengthened both of them and radicalized the Muslim Brothers but also gave the Wahhabis a more organizational, political kind of character. Now the fundamental problem in Saudi Arabia, in the Saudi regime is that on the one hand you have the ideological arm of the regime calling for a caliphate for an Islamic state which does not have a king and on the other hand you have the same country ruled as a kingdom by a king who also is no secret does not live in any way as to prescribe by Islam and certainly not that of the type preached by the Wahhabis. And therefore these groups increasingly they come into conflict many many times but throughout the 60s and 70s this became worse and worse. In fact there was at a certain time in 79 there was an uprising where a series of Islamists took over the grand mosque of Mecca and led to several hundred dead people but all of this was a warning sign to the Saudi royal family where this whole thing was going that they were actually faced by uprising internally a right wing reactionary uprising against themselves and so they made a deal with the Wahhabis which was basically if you just leave us alone in Saudi Arabia we'll give you tons of money and everything we can helping you set up schools and so on throughout the region and hand in hand with again the aims of US imperialism which was looking for a base of support to counter the left word drift that we saw in the region and the first time that this was tested was in Afghanistan in 1979 and it started in 1978 in fact in the Sauer revolution were similar to Egypt a group of army officers left wing army officers took power in Afghanistan and immediately implemented a whole series of things such as banning the buying and selling of women canceling all debts that the poor peasants had to landowners expropriating 75% of land which was held by the big landlords and other progressive measures such as literacy programs and so on they also made many many mistakes but it was nevertheless a huge break with the past that Afghanistan had endured and the regime immediately fell under the in the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union and the US the way that the Americans countered this was by basically forming an alliance with the Saudis and the Pakistani intelligence again leaning on the most backward layers in Afghan society with its clan leaders the big landlords and you know forming what is called the dollar jihad which is the channeling of billions and billions of dollars into this movement of the Mujahideen which later on became the Taliban as we know it I think the figure is 3.2 billion billion dollars and a lot of this money would come from Saudi Arabia who also would provide this arms and so on and the CIA was kind of coordinating this whole thing the war that lasted more than 10 years and eventually ended up with barbarism in Afghanistan and I don't know if you remember they talk about al-Qaeda and all these people these extremely evil people now but back then Osama bin Laden there's a very famous article interview of Robert Fisk with him funny enough he's like the most anti jihadi person now but it was like a freedom fighter that was the title that they had with the picture of Osama bin Laden next to it and I don't know if any of you guys remember it but Rocky what's it called Rambo Rambo which is an action film from the 90s or 80s it's actually dedicated to the Mujahideen it's dedicated to these people to these animals that was the west pushing it now all of that is of course forgotten anymore and of course once the business was finished the Taliban remained and became a headache for the Americans but nevertheless for them the main point was the class questions was the defense of the property rights of the capitalists and the ruling class in Afghanistan and elsewhere because Afghanistan wasn't that important but it was a model for other people to follow to expropriate the big landlords the banks and the capitalists to run society without any private property and this guy Brzezinski who was one of the main architects of this they asked him recently in an interview what about everything that happened since and he said this what's important to the history of the world the Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire some stirred up Muslims or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the Cold War and this shows exactly the way that the Americans and the imperialist thought but they not only destabilized Afghanistan they destabilized Pakistan they also in the same period in 65 they supported in Indonesia the massacre of 1 million communists by mainly Islamist backed groups and the Indonesian regime in Palestine the liberation movement in Palestine against Israel was predominantly a left wing movement and it's documented very much how the Israeli and the western intelligence agencies everything they could hounding down the lefties blocking them every single, every chance they could while allowing Hamas the Muslim Brotherhood to set up mass to preach this to disseminate basically because they knew that the Islamists while they might be a headache they weren't a fundamental threat to the fundamental interests i.e. of capitalism they couldn't in any way appeal to the Israeli working class which is what the Israeli regime is terrified of that the Israeli working class somehow would turn against the state itself if we come up a bit closer to today in Iraq before the Iraq war there wasn't any there wasn't no, you can say what you want about Saddam Hussein and he certainly wasn't a pleasant man but there wasn't al-Qaeda and the form of sectarianism that we see today was nowhere to be seen in Iraq, in fact the main traditions in Iraq were leftist, again communist leftist Arab nationalist traditions and also the Kurds had leftist traditions in Iraq but after the Iraq war in order to dominate, in order to control the country the Americans talked about winning the hearts and minds what did that actually mean in practice that meant stirring up tribalism sectarianism playing out Sunnis and Shias and Kurds who've been living together peacefully for centuries we never had any problem you didn't ask what people were before all of this you might know but it wasn't like a big thing most Iraqis from that generation, from the generation before me they were marrying and mixing across all of these things but the American pushing sectarianism pushing this form of nationalism and tribalism in order to fight down the anti-American uprising and fight that was brewing supported by the Saudis and when the Arab revolution came this is even more recently the Arab revolution also had a big impact in Iraq in huge demonstrations in the east sorry in the west where the Sunnis are based especially big big mass mobilizations taking over squares and they were non sectarian they were for democracy, for democratic rights against sectarianism, against poverty against inflation, against unemployment but what did the Saudis and the Gulf states supported by the Americans do they poured in billions of billions of dollars supporting especially tribal forces but also these sectarian Islamist forces which later on fed into the development of ISIS as we know it and reinvigorated al-Qaeda in Syria we had the same thing first of all obviously the Syrian revolution was a genuine revolution to begin with but because of things that we can't really discuss now it went into an impasse and that allowed the counter revolution to step in again with the scourge of sectarianism the Assad regime opened up the prisons released all the jihadis in order to push them to actually polarize the society on sectarian basis and to prove this is what the Americans and the West are going to do they want to destroy Syria and they supported the jihadis and of course that is exactly what the Americans and the others were trying to do in fact the campaign in Syria was the biggest campaign in the budget of the CIA and the groups that they supported the so-called freedom fighters and moderates as soon as you went in to look who they actually were they were all Islamist of one kind or another and they were being radicalized more and more in this in this sectarian civil war eventually ended up being two main groups which were ISIS and Jihad al-Nusra or al-Qaeda and all the other ones were dominated by these two there was nothing, there was no moderate groups there was too tiny to operate alone they could be switched off like this but they were kept alive especially by al-Qaeda in order to have like a front where they could receive money and what was the main reasons for this on the one hand in the geo-strategical game that these people are playing against each other, the Saudis, the Israelis the Americans against the Iranians but at the same time it was to cut across the Arab revolution and use it as an example throughout the region which they are doing every single day to say this is what happens when you go on to the streets you know some of our comrades in Morocco were saying people on the streets are saying Alhamdulillah we didn't go that far and we didn't do what the Syrians did because we don't want our country to end up like that and that was the main purpose of carrying out that counter-revolution as it happened and in doing so again they were leaning on what not on the urban working classes in fact the working class in Syria was not really involved in the movement as a class but mainly on tribal rural, backward layers and at the same time also a layer of European youth who has been radicalized by the constant racism harassment every single day that goes on in the media which is supported by the unions which is not really supported even by the left wing and the workers party so we're not saying anything to this just buying into it and that was the main kind of bulwark of reaction against the Arab revolution that the imperialists and the local ruling classes could foster they did the same thing in Libya which is now in a complete state of of barbarism in Yemen they say oh yeah we're fighting against the Houthis the Houthis you can say whatever you want they're certainly not progressive people they're extremely barbaric reactionary but they have some sort of support but who is it that they're Saudi and Saudi attack on Yemen is leaning on Islam al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula Islam al-Qaeda in Yemen all forms of Islamist types they've been importing Islamist from Sudan and elsewhere because they can't fight their own struggle now I'm going to sum up in a minute but just there's one more factor in this whole thing is the crisis of capitalism is basically the driving force of Islamism and of the imperialist supporting this because they cannot solve the basic daily needs of the Arab masses on the basis of capitalist society therefore they cannot afford the smallest concessions and they're forced to fight against it but there's another there's another element as well in the Middle East which is Saudi Arabia which is in an existential crisis as I said before this is a civil nation no one I mean people would say I'm Saudis but it's not like the whole country is named after one family no one feels this is my nation I'm going to fight to the death the Saudi army has never been in war it's a puppet army because people wouldn't necessarily die for crown prince or king who lives this extremely disgusting lavish lifestyle whereas the vast majority of Saudis in fact Saudi Arabia is not like the ghost states where everyone are rich there's a huge number of poor people on the one hand 20% of the population are extremely oppressed extremely poor hate the regime then there's the youth and everything living and progressive which is against this dictatorship the authoritarianism the hypocrisy in society women are also against the regime then you have obviously the poor but not getting anything out of this society then you have the Wahhabis and the extremists who also hate the monarchy just from a right wing point of view and so there's no one actually in defense of this country and this country this nation could survive as long as it was supported by the imperialists and as long as oil prices were high as long as the economy was booming it could pay off it would basically pay itself out of social tensions but as the crisis of capitalism oil prices fall you begin to see for instance Saudi Arabia had the first budget deficit what does that mean that means it cannot buy off its network of patronage cannot buy off the jihadis cannot buy off the working class and also it's not as important from the point of view of imperialism the Americans are now self-sufficient in oil Saudi oil is still important but the Americans don't need Saudi Arabia like they did in the 80s where they got 90% of their oil from the Gulf and the way that the Saudis have been acting in the Middle East for instance has also at times brought them into clashing with US imperialism itself for instance in Syria where the Americans at one point said okay we shouldn't support these groups anymore because now they're just spinning out of control and the Saudis kept doing it basically provoking the Americans so in that sense the basis for Saudi Arabia is gradually being eroded and there's no one who's actually going to stand up and defend it which is why it's lashing out which is why the kingdom is lashing out sending out these troops sorry sending out these groups and supporting counter-revolution in one country after another basically trying to keep all these plates spinning in order to divert attention from its own prices but sooner or later all of this is going to come back obviously and I think the days of Saudi Arabia are numbered one way or another it's not going to be what it is today so just to sum up Islamic fundamentalism as we know it today is nothing but pure counter-revolution it has nothing to do with ordinary Muslims in the Middle East who in fact if you want anything the traditional political trend that they would have is leftist, is socialist is communist in the 60's and 70's and 80's you had millions of communists in Iran in Iraq, in Sudan each of these countries you had millions not just as a total in Egypt obviously there was the Arab nationalist trend the same was in Syria, in Libya in Algeria Tunisia, all of these countries the main trend of the masses was a left wing trend and the Islamists were the pure counter-revolution who could never actually achieve mass space on their own without the support of the imperatives it's a reflection of the blind rage and impotence of the Pency Bourgeoisie the tribal layers, the most primitive and also the lumpins, the ones who have been completely dispossessed by the wars and havoc and destruction that it has of course they're downtrodden by the imperatives but they're not finding a lead in the working class and that's the main thing that they're not finding a lead a socialist lead from the working class as it is independently they're extremely weak they find somehow common cause with the imperatives extremely hypocritical because they always go on about how anti-imperial they are but in the end they always end up on the same side fighting the struggles of the imperatives like you know the what do you call it, mercenaries and what it really shows is a complete dead end of capitalism as I said capitalism in Europe came to power fighting against obscurantism fighting against religious fanaticism but in the Middle East it's the exact opposite it's actually leaning some of these tribes this is something that belongs to periods way way way before capitalist developments and for all the radical talk the Islamists don't touch capitalism at all or even fight as I said the role is to cut across the class contradictions in society and they can only gain when the working class is retreating when the Egyptian revolution was moving forward the slogan was we're all Egyptians Christians were forming a ring around the Muslims who were praying that's class solidarity in Syria it was the same thing the main slogan when the revolution was moving forward was we're all Syrians but now that's changed as the revolution met one obstacle after another because of its own mistakes because it wasn't able to take power and it was forced to retreat in that vacuum you saw the development of these reactionary groups tapping into the most backward layers and using them basically as cannon fodder for their own ends so the only way to approach this thing is on a class basis in my opinion the way to fight against Islamic fundamentalism the fight against Islamic fundamentalism and the fight against imperialism and the fight against capitalism cannot be separated the fight for the liberation of the Middle East for democracy cannot be separated from this fight and from the struggle for socialism now that is something that the Middle East and masses will have to learn themselves through their painful struggles but I'm confident that just like we saw this enormous mass movements in the post-war period moving sharply to the left those traditions are and will be revived and reignited and the masses will understand that the only way to overcome the barbarism and the backwardness that prevails in the region is to take power in their own hands and to overthrow the capitalist system