Islam Is Not the Enemy of Christianity: An Arab Christian Perspective

All ‘terror’ comes ‘rooted in Islam’, or at least, so we are told. It arrives wrapped in words like ‘Allah Akbar’ and ‘Kafir’, framed as the sworn enemy of civilisation and humanity

This article was written by Arab Christian Myriam Charabaty, tagged in the post, for UK Column. It is a very important report that I cannot recommend highly enough. We have all been lied to by Western regimes, for far too long. Now Trump is putting Nigeria on his list of targets because “genocide of Christians” - another narrative that needs serious investigation - who is behind Boko Haram (Al Qaeda in Nigeria) and why is the world silent about the massacres of Shia Muslims in Nigeria?

Islam Is Terrorism, and Christianity Must Launch a New Crusade?

For decades, this has been the story that has been echoed and repeated across Western media, and over time, it appears that it has achieved its goal and has hardened into an unquestionable truth.

Initially, the ideal of a dichotomy defining Christianity as this superior ‘civilised’ faith, in opposition to the ‘heretic’ Islamic faith of ‘terrorism’ which does not tolerate the ‘other’, was founded on Eurocentric notions of identity aimed at othering a world that was, in fact, more advanced in its structure and wealthier in its social fabric and resources than Europe and the modern-day ‘West’. This world was, and remains, the Arab world; the very world where Christ lived, preached, and delivered the ultimate miracle of sacrifice and resurrection in service of humanity and of the oppressed.

This view had even framed the Crusades in an oversimplified manner as a religious ‘clash of civilisations’ between Christianity and Islam, something that is being capitalised on in our media today.

The argument was put forward in a past era by Samuel Huntington in The  Clash  of  Civilizations  and  the  Remaking  of  World  Order, which aimed to entrench a Eurocentric and Orientalist perception of the East and Arabs.

Still, the truth is much more complex, and that vision distorts not only history, but also disregards accounts of local Arab Christians who lived in the region at the time.

Similarly, today, the notion of a ‘modern’ and ‘democratic’ Christian West that is at war with a ‘backward Islamic world’ that oppresses women and is ‘threatening’ Christian ‘values’ and continuity in West Asia is a story that Hollywood has rehearsed in hundreds and thousands of movies and TV series for decades.

Painting terrorists as ‘barbaric Muslims’, ‘faceless immigrants’, or any conveniently ‘othered’ group, this script is not only about manufacturing consent for foreign intervention, but also for a more significant goal: entrenching the idea that the war against Arabs must be fought abroad before it threatens the West at home.

The same script appears in political discourse, amid an evident rise in Christian nationalism, which has little to do with Christianity and much to do with reviving a white supremacist ideology using the pretence that a ‘White Christian West’ is superior to all else.

Take, for example, Tommy Robinson making claims on a Zionist-funded trip to Occupied Palestine, known as ‘Israel’, responding to the Arab award-winning journalist Hala Jaber, who debunked his ‘Christian Zionist’ claims that Hamas would ‘kill’ the Muslim family who had protected the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and held its keys for centuries. According to a history-ignorant Robinson, ‘the wrong type of Muslims’ was ignoring the fact that Hamas has historically protected churches in Gaza which Israel has bombed.

A Threat To Europeans at Home (in Europe) and Arabs at Home (Arab Countries)

This notion not only threatens Europe itself but also weaponises the tragedies of people who have paid the price of foreign domination deployed through colonisation, imperial expansion, capitalist exploitation, and direct military occupation.

After World War II, Europe and the West secured their access to vital resources by establishing compliant client states such as the Gulf monarchies, Lebanon, and Jordan, ensuring a steady flow of oil and geopolitical leverage.

Yet other states, like Iraq and Syria, proved far less sustainable under such control. Iraq remains to a large degree under Western influence, although it has been weakened since 2003. Syria was not particularly occupation-friendly, which led to the Battle of Maysaloun in 1920, against the French and their allies.

And then, despite the French mandate, which failed to consolidate influence, Syria remained the heart of the Arab world’s dignity and wisdom.

Let me explain with this small retell of a significant incident no history book will tell you about:

In the spring of 1945, as the newly formed United Nations convened in San Francisco, delegates flaunting their colonial privilege spoke in French and English, drawing lines in the sand as they designed the post-war world order. Then came a Syrian representative who refused to bow.

Syria’s Prime Minister at the time, Fares al-Khoury, a man who rose from a small village to make the voice of an independent Syria heard, walked deliberately to the seat of the French delegate and sat down. The hall froze. Moments later, the French ambassador approached, demanding he vacate the chair.

Al-Khoury looked up and replied calmly: “You are outraged that I sat in your chair for five minutes. Imagine how Syrians felt after 25 years of your occupation”.

In Syria, until the US, UK, and the Zionist bloc succeeded in regime change in December 2024, Arab resistance was entrenched as a government policy. Through that policy, resistance movements were not just protected but welcomed, trained, armed, and offered the space to consolidate their identity as enemies of imperialists and occupiers.

The West was most threatened by the idea that some Arabs would be willing to fight and sacrifice their lives to seize freedom because, in doing so, they would slowly diminish the sphere of influence of the occupiers and, with time, reclaim their right to their resources, stripping the imperialists of their illegitimate gains.

And with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the West lost one of its most strategic pillars in the region: the Shah’s dictatorship in Iran. This, in turn, created a ripple effect, giving resistance movements in the region greater momentum as they rediscovered, not just their identity, but their faith.

Under Imam Khomeini, Islam transitioned from being confined to symbolic ritual into a living, active understanding of the message of Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), his son Imam Ali, and his grandsons Imam Hasan and Imam Hussein. It was a message rooted in refusing submission to falsehood for the sake of self-preservation, and in upholding dignity and truth above all. It is a message that deeply resonates with genuine Christianity.

From that point on, reclaiming influence over these areas became a central Western objective, not only to reassert dominance and secure exploits, but to suppress any model of independence that could liberate West Asia from US and UK-led hegemony.

For Europe, such a shift would mean the loss of access to the very resources and stability on which its prosperity still depends. The push for liberation at the time was not just bound to Muslims. Christians were part of that regional resistance, from former Syrian PM Fares al-Khoury to Archbishop Hilarion Capucci, who dedicated his life to the Palestinian cause.

Why does this matter? Because an Islam capable of breaking the West’s sphere of influence became the ultimate enemy. To fight it, the West chose not a Crusade, at least not openly, but infiltration. Through client regimes, payroll sheikhs, and compliant priests, the West sought to subvert religion against itself, creating an agenda-driven Islam and promoting the false narrative of ‘saving Christians in the Middle East’.

But this meant facing a legacy of Arab resistance rooted in real and public positions taken by inspirational people in the region’s history. The client states (Gulf states, Jordan, and eventually Egypt) were compliant; the enemy of the Imperialist bloc, was resistance. Another excerpt from history to show that this legacy is not against Muslims, but also Christians, is when al-Khoury was confronted with this ‘white saviour of Arab Christianity’ narrative, and he responded by saying:

“If France claims it occupied Syria to protect us Christians from the Muslims, then I, as a Christian, ask for protection from my own Syrian people”, and moved on to proclaim, from the Ummayad mosque’s pulpit “La Ilaha Illa Allah [There’s no god but God]”.

This was a Christian reciting prayer from a Sunni Muslim Mosque.

Meanwhile, the West continues to present itself as the embodiment of ‘human values’, even while supporting genocides and massacres across the world. Its goal remains the same: to mobilise populations under any banner that can reshape and fragment Arab identity by reducing it to the colonial term ‘Middle East’. This, in itself, is a term rooted in British geographical and imperial perspective. All this serves one purpose: to sustain its flow of resources and wealth, and to shield Europe and the West from the consequences of their inevitable economic crises.

The more accurate term, from the perspective of the author, an Arab Christian, seeking to restore the Arab world to its rightful identity as part of a broader Islamic world, and within its true geolocation, is West Asia, the western part of the Asian continent that has long borne the intertwined burdens of faith and colonisation.

But, let’s be clear, this is not a defence of Islam. Islam does not need a Christian to defend its honour. Muslims themselves have long stood against Western proxies that tried to tarnish their name and exploit an externally engineered sectarian division in the region.

This is an explanation for those misled by exploitative narratives who are kept from seeing the truth by the constant simplification of events that are deeply political. It is also a testimony from an Arab Christian honouring the sacrifices of Muslims who have not only defended the Arab and Islamic worlds, and continue to do so, but who have also protected the very existence of Arab Christians in this region — while the Imperialist alliance has worked to create the conditions that would cause a catastrophic exodus of Christians from the region.

Western media’s fixation on sectarian narratives is not accidental. It is a deliberate strategy meant to divide societies, distort the region’s image, and weaken the unity that once stood firm between Muslims and Christians. Its aim is to make sure that the unified identity of Arabs as a whole is not written or spoken about to Western audiences.

Yet on the ground, unity overcame these challenges — from Iraq to Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. Every headline that speaks of ‘religious violence’ without context serves one goal: to frame neocolonialist domination as a moral crusade while othering the peoples they claim to protect.

It is a construct designed to justify occupation, sanctions, and proxy wars, all hidden behind the language of “civilisation,” “Democracy,” and “saving minorities.” It is a manoeuvre to manufacture consent by the rapacious Western alliance.

Exploiting Sectarianism to Infiltrate and Occupy

Sectarianism thrives on division: between Sunni and Shia, Muslim and Christian, Arab and Persian — categories that collapse whenever people on the ground unite against the same foreign hand shaping their fate.

In Iraq, when ISIS swept across Mosul and the Nineveh Plains in 2014, massacring civilians and destroying churches, it was the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an alliance of Iraqi fighters from every sect, who rose to confront them. Among them were Shia units, Christian brigades like the Babylon Brigade, and tribal volunteers.

They fought side by side to reclaim Iraq, including the Christian villages, rebuild churches, and restore coexistence.

What Western observers called ‘Shia militias’ were in fact Iraqis defending their land from an organisation grown out of foreign funding and occupation.

In Syria, the Syrian Arab Army, comprising Shia, Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Druze, and even Kurds, fought not for their sect but for the survival of an inclusive sovereign nation. During the 2013/14 siege of Al-Kindi Hospital in Aleppo, soldiers from every background endured hunger and bombardment together.

Local accounts tell of Christian soldiers sharing their food with fasting Muslim comrades as so-called ‘rebels’, armed and coordinated by Western governments, closed in.

At that time, these terrorists were celebrated in Western headlines as ‘the Syrian people’. When their name changed to Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Qaeda in Syria), they were shown as ‘moderate rebels’ when needed and as enemies of Christianity when needed, depending on the region and narrative.

In Lebanon, the Lebanese Forces, a US-allied party, proclaimed support for the Western-backed Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (Free Syrian Army), which openly threatened Christians, especially in places like the Valley of Christians (Homs), and Al Sqeilbiyyeh, an Orthodox Christian town in northern Hama. Simultaneously, Western media framed the ethnic cleansing Takfiri brigades as ‘freedom fighters’ in order to maintain the narratives that would ultimately topple the Syrian Government.

Eventually, Nusra Front were rebranded as HTS to distance them from the savagery of the Syrian Al Qaeda. This was also in preparation for bringing them to power as the newest addition to the regional client states.

Among the soldiers who became symbols of this shared struggle was Yahya al-Shughari, a Sunni Muslim from Aleppo who, in the middle of battle, looked into the camera and said, “Wallah l-namḥīha” (“By God, we will erase it”). He was speaking of ISIS and the imported extremism fragmenting his country.

His words became a national cry: a Sunni soldier fighting beside Alawite, Shia, Christian, and Druze comrades against terrorism imposed from abroad. He was later martyred, but his words outlived him.

The same spirit lived in Mufti Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, the former Grand Mufti of Syria (above photo), now being imprisoned and tortured by the Jolani regime (Ahmed Al Sharaa). When his son was assassinated by militants in 2013, he publicly forgave the killers and called for inter-Syrian dialogue. He refused to turn grief into sectarian vengeance.

Later, as HTS consolidated power in the north, Hassoun disappeared from public life, silenced for rejecting the narrative that reduced Syria’s war to a religious or sectarian civil war, rather than a war against the Imperialist alliance and their foreign Takfiri factions.

When acclaimed journalist Robert Fisk spoke to the Mufti in 2013, this is what he told Fisk:

I am the Mufti of all Syrians – Sunni Muslims, Christians, Alawites, Druze – of all the diversity of sects we had before the war. There is no choice other than reconciliation; it is the only way back. But to offer reconciliation, we must eliminate the ‘external hand’ first.

2025: Mufti Hassoun, held in an undisclosed Takfiri prison in Syria, faces execution and has endured torture according to sources inside Syria.

In short, what the West calls sectarianism is, in truth, a colonial project that took advantage of societal differences sustained by media, reinforced by payrolls and foreign policy, only to be sanctified by a narrative of Western high morality: ‘Islam is not compatible with Western values’ or ‘Islam is not compatible with Christian values’.

That same narrative had also disenfranchised Arab Christians.

By turning ‘Christianity’ into a Western marker and insisting that Islam is inherently hostile to Christians, the narrative strips Arab Christians of their history, language, and place in the region. It recasts their faith as alien, as if belonging to Europe instead of to Damascus, Alexandria, Beirut, or al-Quds (Jerusalem).

It erodes the lived memory of coexistence and regional identity. Thus, the only plausible future becomes separation or disappearance.

In truth, the ‘Islam is the enemy’ frame does not protect Christians; it eradicates their Arab identity, and makes their survival contingent on foreign powers rather than on the shared societies they have historically built, together with all other sects and creeds.

Foreign Policy and ‘the Making of’ Extremism

Leaked and declassified records trace how external powers fed the rise of regional extremist groups. In August 2014, an email from the Podesta cache acknowledged that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups and urged US pressure on both governments.

The memo, later verified by journalists, confirmed that Washington knew its allies were funding terrorists.

Two years earlier, a 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report predicted that a ‘Salafist principality’ would emerge in eastern Syria and western Iraq, precisely the region ISIS later controlled. The report shows foreknowledge of what those proxy wars would create.

U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Information Intelligence Report: The General Situation in Syria (R 050839Z AUG 12), August 12, 2012. Declassified in May 2015 under FOIA (Case No. 14-F-812).

The Pentagon’s report further stated:

If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime.

Britain’s Legacy, However, Reaches Back Even Further

During World War I, London cultivated Ibn Saud and the Wahhabi movement, signing the Treaty of Darin (1915) and the Treaty of Jeddah (1927). British officers, such as St. John Philby and the infamous Lawrence of Arabia, helped solidify that alliance. The intent was political: to build a dependable power in Arabia and to support the British-led Zionist project in Palestine.

The unintended result was the internationalisation of Wahhabism, a fanatical ideology that is weaponised by the West and ‘Israel’ against the Resistance Axis while still upholding the debunked ‘war on terror’ narratives.

Wahhabism itself is older, but its global reach came through Gulf Arab oil wealth and state backing. Most Arabs, Muslim and Christian alike, have opposed its extremism, favouring instead the inclusive Islam that coexisted with all other faiths for centuries across the Levant, Mesopotamia, and North Africa.

The same pattern was repeated in the Cold War. Operation Cyclone armed the Afghans and hailed them as ‘freedom fighters’ to bring about the fall of the Soviet Union.

From that network emerged al-Qaeda and all its branches, and decades later, ISIS. Each was a product of external influence built on the successful exploitation of the internal conflicts of a complex and wide social fabric, not founded on an authentic or natural regional religious identity vis-à-vis the complex social fabric.

This is the cycle: foreign-backed terrorist organisations like ISIS, al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra, and HTS are creations of war economies and foreign intelligence alliances.

In contrast, the Islamic resistance movements and Christian militias in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine are armed resistance groups constituted of the people, defenders of their homes, not instruments of foreign agendas.

Takfirism: Theocracy as a Political Weapon for Empire

We must be precise about Takfīr. It has a place within Islamic jurisprudence as the legal and theological act of declaring someone an unbeliever. Historically, however, it was not a licence to kill everyone who disagreed or refused to comply. Authentic Islamic law developed limits, procedures, and moral prescriptions around the charge.

A ‘person of the Book’ (Christian, Jew, Samaritan) was not simply to be slain. Christians and Jews occupied a protected place in Muslim polities; they were neighbours, taxpayers, and sometimes fellow officials. Even when theological disputes were heated, the lived practice of the region was largely one of coexistence and legal restraint to avoid sectarian strife.

That nuance matters because modern Takfirism is a distortion of that tradition. In the hands of political entrepreneurs, it shed the old legal constraints and became a blunt instrument. Takfīr was politicised and weaponised by the West and their regional allies.

Bad faith Imperialist actors seeking proxies learned that labelling an enemy group or leader an ‘unbeliever’ justified extrajudicial violence and social cleansing on the behalf of Western military adventurism.

The enemy identified by the Takfiri factions shifted with the needs of their patrons; depending on political expediency, the enemy could be secular nationalists, Alawites, Shia, Druze, Christians or even Sunni Muslims who rejected Takfiri extremism and the foreign agendas threatening their home country.

This Imperialist strategy can be identified as two distinct channels of influence. One was political Islam as practiced by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, which introduced new networks and political vocabularies that foreign backers could manipulate.

The other, and far more direct route to destabilisation of a target nation, was the export of puritanical Salafi–Wahhabi doctrines from the Arabian Peninsula, backed by state money and institutions.

Wahhabi networks funded schools, printed texts, and placed preachers across the region. They also exported this ideology to the Western Muslim communities in preparation for their export to theatres of war; for example, Syria.

That network produced cadres who were predisposed to a narrower, more exclusionary reading of Islam and who could be turned, once trained and armed, into the Takfiri terrorists that committed atrocities against the Syrian people since 2011, with an undisputed increase in Takfiri violence since December 2024.

The modern Takfiri is therefore a modified political product. He or she adopts extreme religious language while serving political ends. The Takfiri proxies are ready to declare religious war against even the most devout Muslims if they do not comply with the Takfiri ideology or policies.

Faith leaders like the Mufti Hassoun, who preached religious inclusivity and reconciliation in Syria, who refused to convert national identity into a sectarian issue, were attacked, not because they violated their own sacred commandments but because they refused to bow down to the external political agenda of the Takfiri agents.

In short, Takfirism was weaponised to break civic bonds and destroy Syrian plurality and to prevent the growth of inclusive, Arab Islamic communities in the region that might resist occupation and colonial exploitation.

That is why grafting the label ‘Islam’ onto every militant group is a political lie. Takfīri militias and the ideologies they come to uphold, on the back of mercenarism, are frequently hostile to indigenous Islamic currents in the Arab world.

They are the enemies, not only of Christians and secularists, but of mainstream Muslim scholars, Sufi traditions, and national movements that refuse colonisation. Western discourse that fails to make this distinction ends up promoting the very fiction that Takfīrism was designed to enforce: that Islam itself is monolithic and murderous. In truth, aside from the political Takfirism, the real struggle is between those who own the land and those who profit from its dismemberment.

The House of Saud: The First Client Regime

The funding of extremism did not begin with ISIS. It began when Britain decided to create the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, bringing to power a tribal ‘monarchy’ that had once been isolated for its violence and fanaticism. The House of Saud, allied with the Wahhabi movement, was forged into a ‘kingdom’ that would serve Western imperial interests and the Zionist entity through the petrodollar medium.

The aforementioned Treaty of Darin and Treaty of Jeddah paved the way towards the British Imperialist legitimisation of Ibn Saud’s despotic reign over the Arabian Peninsula, empowering a family whose brand of Islam was so extreme that it was rejected by the majority of Arabs. What had been a fringe sect confined to the Najd region of Saudi Arabia was rebranded as ‘true Islam’ to secure Britain’s influence over the Holy Lands.

The Zionist movement was also branded an anti-Semitic cult by the majority of Jews in the late 19th century. Without British management of both fanatical movements, their existence long-term would have been in jeopardy. The map below shows the expansion of the Ibn Saud influence in Saudi Arabia from 1902-1932:

When oil was discovered, the Saudi alliance with the Imperialist Axis deepened. The new kingdom became the West’s most servile creation: a political entity structured to guarantee Western access to energy, to suppress anti-colonial movements, and to protect the Zionist entity from regional resistance actors. The US later replaced Britain as its primary sponsor, binding Saudi Arabia into defence treaties and arms dependency through deals like the 1951 Mutual Defence Assistance Agreement.

The British were responsible for the Al-Yamamah arms trade that tied Riyadh to Britain’s military complex. The following is taken from a ‘corruption-tracker’ investigation into the malfeasance that riddled the relationship between BAE Systems and Prince Bandar Bin Sultan:

The Al Yamamah series of arms deals with Saudi Arabia was, and remains, Britain’s biggest arms deal ever concluded, earning the prime contractor, BAE Systems, at least GBP 43 billion in revenue between 1985 and 2007, with further deals still ongoing. In 1985, the UK and Saudi governments signed an initial Memorandum of Understanding, that led to a series of contracts for combat aircraft and a variety of other military equipment and support services over the period 1985-93.

Allegations of corruption surfaced almost immediately, but investigations were thwarted until a large cache of documents was leaked in the early 2000s. An investigation by the UK government’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) uncovered ‘commission’ payments, or bribes, totaling as much as GBP 6 billion paid by BAE Systems to members of the Saudi royal family and others. A key recipient of these payments, including over GBP 1 billion, was Prince Bandar bin Sultan, son of the Saudi Crown Prince. However, the SFO investigation was shut down by the British government in 2006, under heavy pressure from the Saudis.

Yemen, the ancestral cradle of Arab identity and neighbouring the House of Saud to the south, rejected this imposed order. The Yemeni highlands and the birthplace of the first Arab tribes had preserved the linguistic, cultural, and historical essence of Arab civilisation long before the petrodollar monarchies existed. Yemen’s resistance today stands not as rebellion but as continuity: a defence of an ancient Arab authenticity that challenges the colonial construct, threatening it with extinction.

Saudi Arabia’s creation marked the beginning of state-sponsored extremism. Its Wahhabi doctrine, exported through schools, mosques, and media, became the ideological seed for modern Takfiri movements. The House of Saud was not an ally of the West, it was and is an extension of the West, a client regime midwifed to enforce ‘stability’ through obeisance to Wahhabism or instability through religious supremacist wars at the behest of the Imperial industrial complex.

How ‘West Point’ Frames the Same War

Even inside the United States’ own institutions, this distinction is studied but seldom admitted. In the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, analysts acknowledge that groups such as Hezbollah and the PMF fought and defeated ISIS and al-Qaeda, yet they frame them as ‘Iranian-aligned militias or proxies’ or ‘hybrid threats’.

Their research focuses on strategy, discarding the notion of sovereignty in Western-created entities such as Sykes-Picot or anywhere they have not consolidated power.

The CTC teaches ‘counter-framing’, which is essentially the shaping of narratives to undermine an adversary’s legitimacy rather than to understand its origin. What these studies call ‘terrorism’ or ‘militia networks’ are, in Arab reality, national defence formations that arose when the central state collapsed under invasion and economic siege.

What matters most here is to draw the undeniable distinction: ISIS and al-Qaeda are foreign-backed terrorists while Hezbollah, the PMF, and local Christian defence units are people’s resistance movements. One serves occupation while the other resists it.

Manufacturing Consent: The Syrian ‘White Helmets’ Model

Western intervention in the Arab world is rarely sold as the de facto conquest it is. It is marketed as ‘Responsibility to Protect’ along with ‘humanitarian’ principles. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the White Helmets, an al-Qaeda auxiliary group in Syria, funded and promoted by Western governments as a humanitarian force for good in Syria.

Investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley documented the organisation’s dual function: one visible, one concealed. In her 2019 exposé on 21st Century Wire, she argued that the majority sectarian-Muslim Brotherhood White Helmets (later reinforced by Nusra Front members) were not a neutral rescue NGO but a political arm of the regime-change project — an extension of Western intelligence networks tasked with managing public perception of the war and running cover for the multiple terrorist groups they worked alongside.

The staged rescue scenes, she wrote, were the visible front - the tool to rally international sympathy and mobilise political support for Western intervention and a ‘No-Fly-Zone’ that even Hillary Clinton admitted would lead to greater bloodshed for the Syrian people. Through manipulative imagery and media campaigns, the group transformed military narratives into moral imperatives, depicting intervention as rescue and aggression as aid.

But behind that façade lay the hidden operations: Beeley relayed Syrian civilian testimonies accusing the group of involvement in cross-border organ trafficking and child abduction, crimes protected from prosecution by the Western humanitarian branding. These allegations, though almost entirely ridiculed and marginalised by the legacy media apologists for the organisation, reveal how exploitation and propaganda can coexist under one roof, one for public consumption, the other for private profit and covert use.

This strategy was invented long before the regime change war against Syria. Every Empire war arrives draped in ‘humanitarian’ robes. The same powers that arm and promote proxy armed groups and impose unilateral coercive measures on entire populations, also finance ‘human rights’ campaigns and reward themselves with peace prizes.

The White Helmets, as Beeley’s reporting shows, are one face of this system, the face that smiles for the cameras while the hands wreak mayhem and enable bloodshed from within the shadows.

The method used by the Empire to subjugate resistant peoples and states is consistent. It deliberately weaponises compassion to convert suffering into spectacle, and to make the public feel that war is a mercy for the population it will most affect. It is this mechanism — the conversion of terrorism into narrative, even often controversy — that sustains the illusion of moral warfare and turns exploitation into “peace through strength”.

The West’s Takfiri Project Is Coming Home

The extremism that the West has engineered into existence through the above, briefly explained exploitation mechanisms and has bankrolled across the Arab, Islamic, and African worlds has now circled back to the very capitals that nurtured it.

For decades, Western intelligence agencies and their Gulf clients poured money and weapons into ideologically rigid factions to fracture Arab societies and contain nationalist or leftist movements in order to fragment the region, sustain such fragmentation, with the aim of continued extraction and exploitation of resources and markets.

Now the consequences move westward. The same ideology, once exported under Wahhabi sponsorship and covert operations, finds adherents in European suburbs and online networks.

Extremism in London, Paris, or Berlin is treated as an isolated domestic problem, yet the soil was prepared by decades of policies that blended weapons, oil, and fundamentalism with the notion of ‘national security’.

This exploitation consequently resulted in economic surplus for the West, while forcing sustained underdevelopment or even de-development in the rest of the regions wherein they operated.

Meanwhile, the client regimes continue their dual mission. Saudi and Qatari money flows not only to terrorist militias in the Arab and Islamic worlds, but also into Western capitals.

On the destabilised side of the world, they are called ‘aid’ and ‘religious duty’, while in Western capitals, they are dubbed investments, real estate, think tanks, and religious networks, but what they are in essence is entrenched influence.

Reports by the Henry Jackson Society document Saudi funding of extremist preaching in Britain, while Qatari wealth funds have purchased billions in London property and infrastructure, for example.

Thus, when the West faces attacks in its own cities, it confronts a creation of its own making. And instead of reckoning with that truth, it revives an old myth by utilising a crusader and Orientalist narrative of ‘Christianity versus Islam’ to justify new wars that have nothing to do with Christ or Muhammad, and everything to do with profit, hegemony, and proxy control.

On the other hand, it appears there is a legitimate rise in the West in terms of conversion to Islam. And often this is the Western-led Islam, but regardless.

It must not be seen as a victory of one faith over another, but a reflection of the moral failure of the Church, across all denominations, to speak up when humanity was being crucified before its eyes.

While wars, sanctions, and genocide unfolded in the name of politics, churches remained silent, bound by diplomacy or fear of backlash.

Certain denominations of Islam, meanwhile, have offered moral clarity where institutional Christianity has fallen into a coma of caution. Resistance movements acted, not just preached.

And that has been especially evident throughout the war on the Arab world, where true Muhammadan Islam has embodied through action the very love and sacrifice that Jesus preached, standing firm against the Western-born terrorism that the Church has spoken of timidly, if at all, and never truly acted to end.

As such, for many, Islam has become not the enemy of Christ but the echo of his message in an age when those who claim his name often forget his call and distort his mission, which is clear as day: Christianity is the preferential option of the oppressed. Any other Christianity is ultimately devoid of its core message of kindness, love, and sacrifice.

Real Islam on the Front Line of a War against Empire

On this side of the world, true Muhammadan Islam has been at the forefront of the fight against extremist Takfiri proxies. It is the Islam of service and resistance, without a cumulative understanding of the multiplicity of faiths and denominations.

It is, as you have seen, the Islam of those who stood beside Christians in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine to defend the land from imported terror.

As the martyred leader of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, said during a 2014 speech announcing the decision to confront ISIS as the US seeks to create a new reality in the Arab world, where “People are lost, their hearts terrified, believing we [the people of the region] are all headed together toward a catastrophe. And to escape this catastrophe, we will be willing to accept anything, any imposition — just get us out of this disaster”.

He even explains that in this way, Washington creates the very circumstances in which “the primary enemy [imperial core] then becomes the saviour and redeemer in the end”.

Sayyed Nasrallah, in 2014, explained, as he has since the early 2000s, that the principal elements of this US oath of destruction in the region are Israel, with the primary goal of “striking the resistance, disarming the resistance, destroying the resistance’s infrastructure, breaking people’s will to resist, making Gaza surrender. The Gaza Strip will be nothing but ruin and rubble”.

And the second, which he explained carries equal danger but requires greater clarity and it “is what is called the Takfiri current, whose clearest and most visible manifestation today is ISIS. ISIS is now the large, obvious example of that current”.

He later explains that it is possible to confront the Zionist and Takfiri projects, and decades of wars, massacres, and genocide have proven him correct. While we still stand, the fight for the Arab people’s right to life and dignity in the face of all that litters the name of our Islamic brethren and threatens the coexistence of the people of this land will be challenged.

This is the leader of one of the most impactful Islamic movements in the Arab world, and the leader of a movement that was able to expand beyond Islam to rally and mobilise behind it Christians, Druze, secularists, and people of all walks of life, because it identified the enemy clearly and identified itself with great distinction between the greater Arab national identity and the sectarian identity reinforced by Sykes-Picot and Western influence.

As such, from the alleys of Aleppo to the ruins of Gaza, from the mountains of Lebanon and Yemen to the plains of Iraq, the banner of faith has never been one of exclusion, but of resistance against the occupiers.

What the West calls a ‘religious war’ is in truth a war between landowners and occupiers; between those who build and those who plunder. And while Western narratives are collapsing under their own hypocrisy, this region’s unity, Christian and Muslim, stands as a living testimony to the question of shared values between Christianity and Islam.

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