Israelis Publicize Support for ISIL Terrorists

The Israelis publically displayed their support for the ISIL (ISIS) by proposing the western states not to destroy the terrorist group since it is a “useful tool” against Iran, Hezbollah and Syria through savage crimes that can bring security to Israel.
Head of an Israeli right-wing think tank says the existence of ISIL serves a “strategic purpose” in the West’s interests.

According to a think tank that does contract work for NATO and the Israeli government, the West should not destroy ISIL, the fascist extremist group that is committing genocide and ethnically cleansing minority groups in Syria and Iraq and has carried out several terrorist operations even in the European states, including France and Belgium.

Why? The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant “can be a useful tool in undermining” Iran, Hezbollah, Syria and Russia, argues the think tank’s director.

“The continuing existence of ISIL serves a strategic purpose,” wrote Efraim Inbar in “The Destruction of Islamic State Is a Strategic Mistake,” a paper published on Aug. 2.

By cooperating with Russia to fight the genocidal extremist group, the United States is committing a “strategic folly” that will “enhance the power of the Moscow-Tehran-Damascus axis,” Inbar argued.

“The West should seek the further weakening of ISIL, but not its destruction,” he added. “A weak ISIL is, counterintuitively, preferable to a destroyed ISIL.”

Inbar, an influential Israeli scholar, is the director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank that says its mission is to advance “a realist, conservative, and Zionist agenda in the search for security and peace for Israel”.

In his paper, Inbar suggested that it would be a good idea to prolong the war in Syria, which has destroyed the country, killing hundreds of thousands of people and displacing more than half the population.

As for the argument that defeating ISIL would make the Middle East more stable, Inbar maintained, “Stability is not a value in and of itself. It is desirable only if it serves our interests”.

Inbar boasts an array of accolades. He was a member of the political strategic committee for Israel’s National Planning Council, a member of the academic committee of the Israeli military’s history department and the chair of the committee for the national security curriculum at the Ministry of Education.

He also has a prestigious academic record, having taught at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown and lectured at Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Oxford and Yale. Inbar served as a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and was appointed as a Manfred Wörner NATO fellow.

Several days after Inbar’s paper was published, David M. Weinberg, director of public affairs at the BESA Center, wrote a similarly-themed op-ed titled “Should ISIL be wiped out?” in Israel Hayom, a free and widely read right-wing newspaper funded by conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson that strongly favors the agenda of Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In the piece, Weinberg defended his colleague’s argument and referred to ISIL as a “useful idiot.”

The strategy Inbar and Weinberg have proposed, that of indirectly allowing a fascist Islamist group to continue fighting Western enemies, is not necessarily a new one in American and Israeli foreign policy circles. It is reminiscent of the US Cold War policy of supporting far-right Islamist extremists in order to fight communists and left-wing nationalists.

In the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the CIA and US allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia armed, trained and funded Islamic fundamentalists in their fight against the Soviet Union and Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed socialist government. These US-backed rebels were the predecessors of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Israel’s support for the terrorist groups, specially ISIL, in the regional countries was also earlier displayed by transferring the wounded terrorists to its hospitals.

Medical sources announced in August that the Israeli hospitals are receiving the terrorists who have been injured in clashes with the Syrian forces after Jordan closed its borders to them.

“Several militants have lost their lives after Jordan closed its borders (since 40 days ago) and field hospitals are also facing a lack of medical personnel,” Jamal al-Sayasenah, a medical source close to the terrorist groups in Syria, was quoted as saying by Rai al-Yom news website.

“A number of field hospitals operating under the terrorists in Dara’a and Southern Syria have been forced to send the wounded militants to the occupied territories to be treated at Israeli border hospitals and return to Syria again,” he added.

The American daily Wall Street Journal had also reported last year that Israel had opened its doors with Syria in order to provide medical treatment to the gunmen of the ISIL, al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda Takfiri groups who were wounded in the ongoing fighting against the Syrian army.

The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that al-Nusra Front “hasn’t bothered Israel since seizing the border area last summer” along the Golan Heights.

Those Takfiri elements “who control some two-thirds to 90% of the border on the Golan aren’t attacking Israel. This gives you some basis to think that they understand who is their real enemy – maybe it isn’t Israel”, Amos Yadlin, the former military intelligence chief, was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying.

The fact that the Israeli-Syria border area along the occupied Golan Heights has remained largely quiet has sparked accusations that the Takfiri operatives are backed by the Zionist entity.