ISIL serving Saudi-Israeli alliance
Press TV has conducted an interview with Anthony Hall, a professor of globalization at Lethbridge University, to discuss a report on ISIL terrorist group killing over 2,100 people off the battlefield since June in Syria.
This is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: What is the main solution to root out the ISIL menace in the Middle East?
Hall: Well, far be it for me to give the ultimate solution but the diagnosis has to be right. I think it is increasingly clear that ISIL is a reflection of this very strong, strange axis between Israel and Saudi Arabia perhaps through Jordan. We have to understand how this works.
Through Saudi Arabia there is this alliance that we are seeing coming in to play in Yemen, which looks to me like a kind of popular uprising. The old imperial powers, the legacy of this imperial inheritance seems to be invested now in this Israel-Saudi axis and one of the instruments that this axis uses is ISIL. It is a proxy army and it is a psychological operation, and a very toxic psychological operation, that is here in North America.
Press TV: What are the global impacts of the emergence of ISIL?
Hall: Well, it is part of this phenomenon. After the demise of the Soviet Union you had the United States with its war machine, you had the political economy of the major world powers geared to militarism, and an enemy was required and that enemy was produced on 9\11 and we see on 9\11 there was again this Saudi-Israeli axis playing itself out, the Bin Ladens, the Bushes, now prince Bandar. There is this need for an enemy and to construct the enemy and of course to draw the Islamic Republic of Iran into some kind of new cold war in the Middle East. This serves many agendas.
Press TV: How would you explain the ISIL’s media campaign?
Hall: This is fascinating in a certain grotesque way. I think the metaphor is a kind of Disneyesque. It is almost like there has been a production, a very concerted production of a kind of Disney Theme Park of the Islamic terrorism to terrify western people, European and North American people.
My prime minister in Canada Stephen Harper, he is getting ready to run a political campaign and seeks re-election based on his fighting this Islamic State, this Islamic Caliphate. So there is beyond the ground kind of politics which you are seeing, I am sure, from your perspective in Tehran, but here in North America we see the psychological dimension of keeping this war mentality alive. Keeping this idea that we have got to empower our central governments to have more police power, more power to spy on us, that we have got to be distrustful of every one and especially of Muslims that is very painful and ruthless on the Islamic people within Canada, within the United States, within Europe.