The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Lebanese Phalangist militia allies in 1982 and the slaughter by Israeli artillerymen of 106

The Taliban had arrived not to rebuild a country they did not remember, but to rebuild their refugee camps on a larger scale.

President Clinton’s ‘anti-terrorism’ conference at the Egyptian coastal town of Sharm el-Sheikh was regarded by Arabs as a humiliation.

were less an attempt at religious revival than a continuation of life in the vast dirt camps in which so many millions of Afghans had gathered on the borders of their country when the Soviets invaded sixteen years before.

What kind of Islamic state would bin Laden wish to see? Would thieves and murderers still have their hands or heads cut off in his Islamic sharia state, just as they do in Saudi Arabia today? There came an unsatisfactory reply. ‘Islam is a complete religion for every detail of life. If a man is a real Muslim and commits a crime, he can only be happ

Poppy cultivation had become an agribusiness and the dealers for the Afghan drug barons now had technical advisers who were visiting Nangarhar to advise on the crop and the product, paying in advance, and so concerned about the health of their workers that they had given them face-masks to wear in the opium factories. Some said they even offered he

1990, the year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

They helped the Yemeni communists against the southern Yemeni Muslims and are helping Arafat’s regime fight Hamas.

The Saudi royal family had promised sharia laws while at the same time allowing the United States ‘to Westernise Saudi Arabia and drain the economy’. He blamed the Saudi regime for spending $25 billion in support of Saddam Hussein in the Iran – Iraq war and a further $60 billion in support of the Western armies in the 1991 war against Iraq, ‘buying