Islamic Extremists an Analysis of Research Paper

But it was soon forced to abandon…the Islamic purists, who U.S. officials now say are unfit to rule, as the militia began imposing its brutal version of Islamic law." The fact is, the U.S. abandoned the Taliban when it no longer served their interests to support them. Ryan Dawson observes that the "U.S. actively supported the Mujaheddin, of which Bin Laden and his foreign fighters were a sub-group, in a war against the Soviets. The Afghans were purchasing American weapons with Saudi oil money and receiving training from the CIA and ISI. Tim Osman as the CIA called Bin Laden, had full support of the U.S. And met with the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski." Here was the beginning of a relationship that the U.S. hoped to be a thorn in the side of Russia. To state that the U.S. only dropped its friendship with the Taliban once it saw some of the brutal aspects of Islam is a blatant misrepresentation. As Dawson states, "In spite of their human rights violations and barbaric treatment of women, the U.S. willingly fostered the Taliban…In fact as late as May 17, 2001 Colin Powell, then the Secretary of State, announced that a $43 million aid package to the Taliban coupled with other recent aid made the U.S. The main sponsor of the Taliban." Why would the Taliban bite the hand that fed it? That is a relevant question -- but a better question might be: what did the U.S. have to stand by invading Afghanistan and, essentially, the whole of the Middle East?

To do so, of course, it would need a pretext for war. And what better pretext than a war against terror -- an elusive, mysterious abstraction that could allow the military-industrial-congressional complex to turn the entire world into one big Gulag?

In conclusion, while Islam certainly presents an extremist ideology that the West can portray as violent and aberrational, such evidence is far from indicating that Islamic extremists were the sole engineers of the attack on 9/11. In fact, there is an overwhelming wealth of evidence that points to a conspiracy between CIA and Mossad Intelligence -- but, again, analyzing that aspect of the events may be the subject of another paper. In this one, we have chosen to show the elements of Islam that have been represented as the force behind 9/11 and how Americans view it as a shield for terrorism. What we have seen is that those elements were coupled with foreign assistance -- namely Western -- and that any sense of "shielding" is fueled by American propaganda.

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Fundamentalist Islam. NY: Owl Books, 2005. Print.

Knightley, Philip. "Taliban Rise to Power." The Guardian. 8 Oct 2001. Web. 8 Dec

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