Is al-Qaeda a Creation of the Left? The Spectator Thinks So

Now here's something you aren't going to hear much about in the MSM. The Spectator notes:

We hear an awful lot about the birth of al-Qa’eda in the 1980s and the exaggeration about al-Qa’eda since 9/11, but very little about what happened to al-Qa’eda in the decade in between. This is peculiar because, as the US journalist Charles Krauthammer pointed out in Time magazine after 7 July, the 1990s were ‘the seminal period of al-Qa’eda recruitment’; indeed, that was ‘the period during which it created its entire worldwide infrastructure’. Or as the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland argued (in case you would prefer to hear it from someone a little less gung-ho than the war-supporting Krauthammer), ‘the big surge in growth of extremist groups came not after 9/11 or Iraq, but in the mid-1990s.’ The seed for al-Qa’eda may have been sown during the twilight of the Cold War, but something in the Nineties allowed this terror group to metamorphose from being one small part of an Afghan-specific guerrilla army into a global, transnational, nihilistic network. What was that?

In a nutshell, in the 1990s al-Qa’eda became the armed wing of Western liberal opinion. The mujahedin may have been set up, supported and armed to the hilt by the right in the 1980s, but they fought alongside the Left in the early to mid-1990s. This was the period of the mujahedin’s second outing, when hundreds of them moved from Afghanistan following the final withdrawal of Soviet forces in 1992 to Bosnia, to fight alongside the Bosnian Muslims in a holy war against the Serbs. They moved there under the approving eye of the Clinton administration and were armed and trained by Clinton’s allies in the region, the Army of Bosnia Herzegovina (ABiH). Some of the mujahedin, especially those from Europe, including from Britain, were inspired to fight in Bosnia after watching or reading news reports in the Western media — especially the liberal media — which presented the civil war in Bosnia as a simplistic battle between good (the Muslims) and evil (the Serbs).

Though underdiscussed, the mujahedin’s movement to Bosnia had a transformative effect on the holy warriors and was key to the development of al-Qa’eda. In moving to Bosnia, Islamic fighters were transported from the ghettos of Afghanistan into Europe, from being yesterday’s men in a has-been Cold War clash to fighting alongside the West’s favoured side in the Balkans. As Evan Kohlmann argues in his Al-Qa’eda’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network, by 1995 Bosnia had become a ‘strategic foothold for Osama bin Laden and his fanatical allies to infiltrate Europe and the Western world’. Indeed, virtually every major al-Qa’eda attack of recent years has links back to Bosnia. If right-wing intervention in Afghanistan created the mujahedin, then left-liberal intervention in Bosnia globalised it.

Read the whole thing here.

I wonder if MSNBC will devote a night to discussing this. Nah!