The destructive legacy of Arab liberals

Click here to access article by Joseph Massad from The Electronic Intifada.

Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York. He is the author most recently of Islam in Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

I think that this article offers considerable insights on a much overlooked weapon in the arsenal of US-Zionist imperialism which has been applied to Arab nations. I'm referring to ideological warfare using Saudi money and Western psychological expertise to recruit and promote Arab liberals to further the agendas of the US Empire and Israel. I think that this strategy applied to the paranoid Medieval rulers of Saudi Arabia and its allies by focusing on the threat of other Islamic threats to their rule, particularly by targeting Shias and thus implementing a "divide and conquer" strategy. 

Intellectuals from across the Arab world joined the effort, abandoning old leftist, communist, Nasserist and Islamist positions and adopted the much, much more profitable pro-US and pro-Israel liberal line politically, and the neoliberal economic order being globalized. By the dawn of the new century, the Saudis and the Americans issued new orders to their media and agents to spread an unprecedented sectarian campaign against Shiites inside and outside the Arab world.