News Review 03/04/2021

Biden Offers Support to Ukraine against Russian Military Build-up

US President Joe Biden has reached out to Ukraine in his first official phone call to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday. According to an official US statement: “President Biden affirmed the United States’ unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression in the Donbass and Crimea.” This comes as NATO and Western countries have expressed concern over Russian troop movements in the eastern Donbass region. However, these Russian movements come after Zelenskiy had taken a number of actions targeting Russian interests such as sanctioning the Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, who is a close ally of Russian President Vladmir Putin. Russian media is also reporting that it is the Ukrainians that are mobilising troops, indicating that Russian manoeuvres are only in response to Ukrainian provocations. Ukraine has been in crisis since the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and the infiltration of Russian proxy forces into the Donbass region, fomenting separatism of the Russian-speaking east from the Ukrainian-speaking western part of Ukraine.

It is, in fact, America that is inflaming the crisis in Ukraine, just as it was America that drew the Russians into Ukraine and Crimea in the first place. It is America’s purpose to push Europe, particularly France and Germany, into conflict with Russia. America has repeatedly expressed its opposition to any attempts to reconcile between Europe and Russia, such as protesting against the German-Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline. America is following the same approach that Britain long followed of creating conflicts between the other powers in the world, to keep them balanced and divided against each other. It is this thinking that is responsible for the intense nature of international conflicts in the modern world.

The approach of the Western powers is very different from the practice of the Khilafah State over the millennium that it remained the world’s superpower and which brought stability and harmony to international affairs, resorting to balance of power tactics in particular situations only, such as in the dealings of the Ottoman State with the factionalised European continent. The Western powers then copied and generalised such tactics, elevating them to grand strategy and projecting their own divided political model onto the entire world.

With Allah’s permission the Muslim Ummah shall soon re-establish the Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) State on the method of the Prophet (saw), which shall almost from its inception enter the ranks of the great powers and work to confront, contain and calm the other global powers, returning the entire world to general peace, harmony and stability, as existed before.

Iran JCPOA

As expected US President Joe Biden has taken steps to negotiate with Iran in order to return to the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that had been concluded under President Obama but was abandoned by President Trump. The talks will be conducted indirectly with Iran, in Vienna, through the intermediation of Britain, Germany, France, Russia and China and will be focused on “the nuclear steps that Iran would need to take in order to return to compliance with the terms of the J.C.P.O.A.” according to a US State Department spokesperson. In fact, Iran is already a client state of America; the JCPOA was conducted at that time to smooth international acceptance of Iran’s role in support of American objectives in Syria and Iraq by providing Europe access to Iran’s massive oil wealth. When America no longer had need for Iran, as the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts stabilised, President Trump withdrew from the agreement, despite much European protest. However, Biden is interested in returning to the agreement to overcome the extreme animosity that developed between America and Europe during the Trump years, and also to provide a long-term framework for containing Iran. According to the New York Times, the suggestion of US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken that the next Iran accord must be “longer and stronger” suggests it would have to go beyond 2030 when many of the fuel-production constraints in the last agreement expire. The Muslim countries are all governed by rulers who owe their allegiance not to Muslims but to the West. But still the West is fearful of the power of the Muslim Ummah and continues to make efforts to restrain, control and diminish that power wherever it can. With Allah’s permission, the Muslim Ummah shall soon overthrow their present rulers and pledge their allegiance to a single general leadership for the entire Muslim Ummah, that shall eject the influence of the foreign imperialist disbeliever and dismantle the artificial borders that currently separate Muslim countries thus unifying Muslims within a single state encompassing multiple regions and continents, as existed before.

Pakistan-India

On Tuesday, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan replied to the letter he received from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi calling for peaceful relations between the two countries, in spite of India’s continued forced occupation of Kashmir, which is mostly populated by Muslims. Under British rule, Kashmir had been kept separate from the Indian colonial government, in accordance with Britain’s policy of maintaining buffer areas on India’s borders. But with the partition of India, and the separation of Pakistan, the British sought to have Kashmir brought under the new Hindu-controlled Indian government. For two decades, America has also adopted the same objective, in order to strengthen India as a proxy against China. The rulers of Pakistan, oblivious to the larger geopolitical dynamic, are reconciled to abandoning the Muslims of Kashmir to their Hindu overlords, while the Muslims of both Pakistan and Kashmir desire that Kashmir should be fully liberated from Hindu occupation. Like other occupied territories, Kashmir can be easily retaken with military force. But Muslim rulers, under US instruction, have always restrained their armies from such actions, resulting in an artificially diminished perception of Muslim strength. Fighting to liberate occupied territories is a legal obligation upon Muslims. But as with so many other issues, liberation will only practically be possible once the existing governments are overthrown and replaced with the re-established Islamic Khilafah that shall marshal its military power for the benefit of only Muslims and Islam; the Islamic Khilafah shall restore the Islamic way of life and carry the light of Islam to the entire world.