News Review 24/10/2020

 US Accelerates Foreign Policy Wins Before Election

As the date of the American presidential election approaches, the administration of US President Donald Trump is accelerating work in foreign policy in order to produce substantial wins by 3 November 2020 and, of course, to bring some closure to its foreign policy efforts in case Trump fails to be re-elected. At this time, it can only work on those initiatives already in play, which this week include partial achievements in Libya and Sudan.

America is close to success in its long struggle to take over Libya from the European powers. On Friday 23 October 2020, the two sides in the internal Libyan conflict agreed to a complete, countrywide and permanent ceasefire, signing an agreement at the United Nations in Geneva at the end of a full week of meetings between representatives of the Government of National Accord that controls the west of Libya, and the Libyan National Army led by Khalifa Hifter that controls the east. After the failure of the American agent Hifter to make substantial progress over years of fighting, America was able to forge the agreement by introducing the duo of Turkey and Russia to the Libyan conflict, enabling it to better control the conflict through these external powers.

Also, on Friday 23 October, Trump formally submitted to Congress his decision to remove Sudan from the list of state sponsors of ‘terrorism’ in exchange for the opening of economic relations between Sudan and the illegal Jewish entity in Palestine, as a first step towards full normalisation with the illegal entity. This is of course a very partial success. Trump had wanted to implement Kushner’s Middle East Peace Plan but clearly failed to do so. As a consolation prize, Trump has tried for some Muslim countries to at least normalise relations with the illegal entity. But only small strongly-controlled states like the UAE feel confident enough to comply. Egypt and Jordan had of course normalised relations with the illegal entity but that was decades ago in quite different political times. Sudan is the first large state to take such a step at this time and even it has not been able to achieve full normalisation.

America has in any case been looking for an excuse to improve its own diplomatic relations with its agent Sudan. Last year the US had to accept a power-sharing agreement between the American-controlled military and the British-infiltrated civilian political opposition after its longstanding agent Omar al-Bashir was forced from power over widespread civil protests. Britain still has strong connections within the Sudanese political class because of its lengthy imperial rule, and its agents were comfortably able to take advantage of the mostly leaderless mass protests. Nevertheless, America is also trying to benefit from this arrangement by using the advent of ‘democracy’ in Sudan in order to now forge direct diplomatic relations, a matter that was not appropriate for America, the champion of freedom and democracy, during the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir.

Roman Catholic Church Continues to Compromise with Western Ideology

Contemporary Western civilisation is built on a compromise between religion and materialism but over the centuries the terms of this compromise have been shifting increasingly away from religion and further towards materialism, which is more commonly referred to as atheism. Christianity is becoming a minority religion in the UK, for example, with only around 50% of the population believing in it. It is the West’s empiricism that ejected religion from rational debate and reduced it to the status of personal vocation. Furthermore, the West public adopted the materialist political values of freedom and democracy that continue to undermine even the personal practice of religion. However, Christian churches, instead of challenging materialist thought, have tried to find a path for religion within it. Hence, the spectacle this week of the release of a documentary in which Pope Francis, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, reiterates his support for ‘same-sex unions’ in stark opposition to the divine texts. He had previously made such comments but this is the first time he had done so as Pope.

Christian thinkers thought that the Western adoption of freedom would provide protection for Christianity, for example under the idea of freedom of belief. But freedom is the antithesis of submission to God, which is what religion demands. Furthermore, the materialist conception of freedom is submission to one’s material nature. So naturally when, without any evidence, Western liberal activists began erroneously categorising ‘homosexuality’ as a permanent characteristic that is innate to the nature of particular individuals, then opposition to it is viewed as criminal oppression of the individual. And the Roman Catholic Church, weakened by corruption and scandal, its adherents drastically reduced within Western countries, finds itself unable to resist such an opinion.

It falls to Muslims to take up the fight against Western Ideology. Man is neither capable to devise his own way of life as Western freedom and democracy assume, nor must man submit himself to a crude and harmful conception of his inner nature, as called for by the materialists. It is religion that promotes the correct understanding of selfless love of man for man and woman for woman, while situating intimate relations within the only relationship that can provide the proper foundation for it, both socially and biologically, which is the marital relationship between man and woman. Allah (swt) has provided in Islam the perfect code of conduct for man, fully in accordance with the true reality of man’s nature and the divine purpose in creating man. With Allah’s permission, the Muslim Ummah shall soon rise up and overthrow their Western imposed systems of governance and re-establish the righteous Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) State on the path of the Prophet (saw) that shall unify all Muslim lands, restore the full Islamic way of life and carry the light of Islam to the entire world.