Are Islamic extremists potential allies or definate enemies?

Hey comrade,

sorry this has been so long coming. I promised to reply ages ago but tbh I've been totally snowed under with essays and exams at university. It's what you get for leaving it til the last minute.

Anyway, Islamic fundamentalism. I'm hardly an expert but I'll jot down my thoughts about it and post a few links with more information. It's a good question because the fact is that many fundamentalist Islamic movements portray themselves as being anti-Imperialist and even revolutionary. The US is also keen to portray them as the biggest threat since communism. And as the saying goes, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". The questions we need to ask though is do the words correspond to the facts?

Obviously there are many different fundamentalist groups with big differences between them. The fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia are different to the fundamentalists in Iran or Pakistan or Palestine.

The fundamentalist Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan for instance were funded and established by the Americans through the Pakistani puppet dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq. The objective was simple: to unseat the left-wing PDPA government in Afghanistan which was backed by the Soviets. Zia used CIA money to establish religious schools called madrassas which churned out cannon fodder for the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan. In fact the term "Taliban" simply comes from the word "talib" or student - they are the students of the madrassas. Zia also made a point of "Islamising" the Pakistani army. The question now is, why have the Taliban gone from the servants of the US to enemy number one? The reason is that a section of the Pakistani army, in league with religious so-called "tribal leaders" and the hundreds of thousands of poor souls recruited through the madrassas, got itself involved in the Heroin trade, racketeering and crime in general. This is what the "civil war" in Pakistan is all about. The Pakistani state is split down the middle: it's a civil war between the "legitimate" capitalists and the criminal capitalists thriving off the drugs trade. It's a split which goes all the way to the top of the Pakistani and Afghan governments. Karzai has refused to clamp down on the drug trade - probably because he's as much involved in it as anyone else. The working class and the poor have little to gain from either side in this conflict. Here's a good article on the violence in the Swat Valley:

http://www.marxist.com/pakistan-malakand-swat-drenched-in-blood.htm
"In Malakand if you ask a street hawker, a bus driver, a car mechanic or a college student “who are the Taliban?” He would first smile at your question and then would say that they are in fact nothing and that it is the agencies that are playing games here."

The likes of Hamas and Hezbollah are very different of course. What popularity they have was clearly gained by being seen to put up some kind of resistance to imperialist backed Israel. Again though, it's worth looking at their history and whether the resistance they are putting up can actually be a force for the liberation of the people living under Israeli oppression. I can't speak much for Hezbollah, I don't know much about them, but Hamas certaily were funded by the Israeli government. The reason was the same as usual: fear of communism. The Palestinian resitance has always been secular and very democratic in nature. The first Intifada for example, which the PLO and Hamas had very little to do with, was actually coordinated by democratic community based committees. Even within the PLO there were many groups which claimed to be socialist or marxist of some kind (whether they actually were is debatable). The Israelis were afraid of a genuinly popular, democratic and even socialist resistance which could find support within the Israeli working class so they used Hamas as a counter-balance. It's easy to see why: Hamas, like the PLO, have substituted small-time terrorist methods for democratic mass action. They are also virulently anti-semitic. Here's some stuff from their manifesto, which would be laughable if the situation in the middle east wasn't so deadly serious. The Jews even get the blame for the French Revolution and world communism!!

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=1075
"With money they have taken control of the world media - news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting services, etc. With money they sparked revolutions in various countries around the world in order to serve their interests and to reap profits. They were behind the French Revolution and the Communist Revolution and [they are behind] most of the revolutions about which we hear from time to time here and there. With money they have formed secret organizations, all over the world, in order to destroy [those countries'] societies and to serve the Zionists' interests, such as the Freemasons, the Rotary Clubs, the Lions, the Sons of the Covenant [i.e. B'nei B'rith], etc. All of these are organizations of espionage and sabotage. With money they were able to take control of the colonialist countries, and [they] urged them to colonize many countries so that they could exploit their resources and spread moral corruption there."

When the fate of the Palestinian people is intimately bound up to that of millions of Jewish workers who are their neighbours, leaving the resistance in the hands of anti-semites is a death sentence for the unity of workers and poor people in the region. So why have Hamas come to be identified with the resistance? Because Fatah have shown themselves to be totally bankrupt. Hamas on the other hand are at least giving the impression of making some kind of resistance and they seem to drive a slightly harder bargain than Fatah at the moment. The problem is that their resistance doesn't always work. A lot of their resistance involves sending rockets into working class towns in the south of Israel such as Sderot. We can't just ignore them though so what should the attitude of marxists be towards them? Palestinian marxists could give a fuller picture but I imagine marxists in the region would encourage any armed resistance groups to put their arms at the disposal of democratic committees in the traditions of the first Intifada and to give up individual acts of terror which can never out match the terror that Israel can mete out. Hamas aren't friends of the labour movement though and I don't think we'd find a friendly ear there. One of their first moves for instance was to shut down the HQ of the Palestinian federation of trade unions.

Anyway, there's plenty of stuff out there on Islamic fundamentalism, let me just find a few articles...

Here's a decent overview of the Iranian Revolution and the rise of fundamentalism there. If you scroll to the bottom of that article it has several more links by marxists from Iran and observers from outside Iran:
http://www.marxist.com/thirty-years-since-iranian-revolution.htm