Manuka Wijesinghe

‘The Iranian’s are playing chess, while Trump is clueless’, a recent news caption stated, regarding the US president’s erratic warfare in Iran. Indeed, it does seem that the sitting US president is clueless, but is he? Or, does he appear clueless to one who only sees Iran. For that what cannot be ignored is that the playbook for Iran’s destruction is the same playbook as in Palestine, of Lebanon, of Syria. It is the deliberate and the methodical obliteration of the cradle of ancient civilization and religious history.

If, assuming the US president is clueless, where are those Americans who inherited the baton of British Imperialism? That baton which made and unmade national leaders for overt Nationalism or suspected Socialism, the truth being, not political credo but their refusal to execute Imperial and Manifest Destinies of those who received the reins of empire. For example, the refusal to grant rights for the operation of British military and naval bases in recently independent colonies.   

The strategic island of Cyprus’ first independent president, the Archbishop Makarios’ efforts to terminate the British base resulted in a coup d’etat which ousted him. It resulted in Turkey’s invasion of Northern Cyprus and the eventual division of Cyprus into Turkish and Greek Cyprus. Having seized the north, Turkey, a NATO member, granted the US the rights to establish a military base in Northern Cyprus while Britain maintained their base in the south. It is from the British base that the Americans are currently conducting their deadly against the Republic of Iran.

Ceylon, had a similar history. During the second world war, after the fall of Malaya, Ceylon was identified as an important location for the British control of the Indian Ocean and a Royal Navy base was established in Trincomalee and British troops stationed, for Ceylon was the empire’s main source of rubber which was essential for the manufacture of tyres, gas masks and other military equipment.

In 1942 Singapore fell and the Japanese navy launched an operation against the British naval fleet based in Trincomalee. They did not succeed and the Japanese kamikazes were deterred. But, on the 3^rd of March, the Japanese forces occupied the Andaman Islands, and British focus on Ceylon was intensified upon which the Allied headquarters of the South East Asia command was located in the hill capital of Kandy. The Ceylonese thus became targets in another’s war.  

A few years later, in 1948, Ceylon received her Independence. But the British base remained. Why did DS Senanayake, Ceylon’s first Prime Minister allow it? Browsing through some old papers I found a book of newspaper articles contributed to the ‘Island’ by one Amita. One article that caught my eye. It was titled the ‘Farsightedness of DS’

One day, Muhandiram Pedrick Wakwella, a front line UNP er had come to the Prime Minister’s home, most agitated and said to him, ‘What is this Sir, these Leftist fellows are going around the country telling that the Independence we got was a fake one.  They are saying that no independent country will ever permit any foreign country to have a military bases on their soil. But we have permitted the British to have bases here. So, where is our Independence, they ask? They say when Britain gets involved in a war, we will get dragged in too.’

Thereafter DS had replied, ‘Pedrick, the Tamils want a share of the national pie, Ponnambalam, Chelvanayagam, Suntheralingam and even Peri Sundaram and Thondaman. They are educated and cultured men. They will fight for their rights in parliament and political platforms. They believe in Gandhi’s principles. Now, there is a new threat, a very dangerous threat.’

‘Who is that sir?’ Pedrick has asked.

‘SWRD Bandaranaike’, DS replied. ‘Don’t underestimate the man. With this cry of ‘Sinhala Only’, the due place for Buddhism, a place in the sun for the common man, he will one day unleash forces that cannot be controlled. He is going to rouse communal and religious passions that will make this country go up in flames. Men will go crazy and it will be the rule of the mob. And the Tamils are going to be its target. And, in a few years hence, a new kind of Tamil youth is going to emerge, sick of the supineness of their old leaders, these Tamil men, without the education and the culturedness of their fathers, will go for an armed showdown with the government and its forces. They are going to play hell and there is going to be a blood bath’

Thereupon Muhandiram had asked him, ‘But sir, what does this have to do with the bases?’

Thereupon DS said, ‘My dear Pedrick. We have an agreement with the British. If there is any aggression from without or WITHIN, they have to come to our rescue. When violence and rebellion breaks out in the north and the east, we can ask the British troops in Trincomalee to halt it. They are obliged to protect the democratically elected government in Ceylon. And Britian will pour in men and arms until the rebellion is completely routed. So heaven protect this country if some misguided super patriot ever asks the British to quit and hand over the bases back’   

Indeed, we did have a Tamil uprising more than thirty years later. But how could DS have predicted its inevitability, then? Did he have prophetic powers? His assumption was not based on past experience for we, that is the Sinhalese and the Tamil had shared this island, without mutinies, since known time. Furthermore, the last several kings of the Sinhalese had been Tamils kings. They had ruled, honouring the majority religion, from the seat of Buddhism in the Kandyan kingdom, with the complete acceptance of their subjects, despite the difference of faith. We had never needed an outside force to protect us from each other, why now?

Hence, what one needs to ponder is if DS has been subjected to British brainwashing, which Britain had done, most successfully, with their selected elite in the colonies. Part of the indoctrination protocol of British Colonialism was to convince the new elite that the inevitability of Independence was uprising of minorities against majority rule?  Or vice versa, like in the case of the new Arab states carved up from the former Ottoman empire?

Divide and Rule was British policy. And Independence’s legacy. The Tamils had no reason to rise against us if our leaders would rule as they had, before the advent of colonialism. We spoke two languages, but had a shared geography, tradition, culture and many aspects of faith.

Though DS was in British stooge, the man who followed him, SWRD Bandaranaike differed. He was ardently committed to non-alignment and a staunch supporter of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and defended his right, at the United Nations General Assembly, to nationalize the Suez Canal company and to take the Suez’s control from the British and the French. Thus, SWRD went against Britain and Israel. One year after the Suez affair, on the 15^th of October 1957, Ceylon’s Prime Minister, SWRD Bandaranaike nationalized the British base in Trincomalee and brought complete Independence to Ceylon. Less than two years later he was assassinated.

Unfortunately, although SWRD ceased British military operation in Ceylon, Ceylon was unable to return to the peaceful state of ethnic coexistence as prior to Colonialism for the Ceylon Civil Service which Britain had created to administer the colonies, continued, after Independence, to executed public policy in the colonial legacy of ‘Divide and rule’. In its spirit, it was none other than SWRD’s own advisor Neil Quintus Dias, a civil servant who Neville Jayaweera, the former government agent of Jaffna describes in his book as, ‘the epitome of a colonial civil servant and a pukka sahib. He could neither speak nor write Sinhala well. He was arrogant and aloof. A man of wealth and birth, he played tennis with charm as a member of the Colombo tennis club for the Colombo gentry, he regularly lunched at Galle Face hotel with his favourite digestive liquor, gin and tonic….he was committed to his extreme nationalism’

Neil Quintus Dias, was a creation of Empire, not of Ceylon. A Sinhala Buddhist neophyte who masterminded SWRD’s political victory by engineering his ultra nationalist ‘Sinhala Only’ campaign. Thereafter he began to establish Buddhist dominance in the Public Services and local government services. Upon SWRD’s death, as the chief advisor to his widow, the new Prime Minister, NQ began the militarizing of the north with the deployment of Sinhala speaking forces which led to the gradual alienation of the Tamils.

Neville Jayaweera further states, ‘NQ Dias revealed to me his extraordinary vision of a series of events that were bound to happen in the near future. He was convinced Tamil insurgency would develop into an armed struggle in the next 25 years and the government should be prepared to deal with it now’

Coincidentally, DS had the same vision. If every man in government has the same vision, and these men were not prophets, and their vision is not based on historical analogy, what one must realize is that their visions are nothing but the doomsday aggregation of colonial ideology. NQ and DS, respectively, as a civil servant and as colonial collaborator, had been fed a diet of Tamil uprising.

Anyway, with the loss of Ceylon’s naval base, the Allies had no more naval bases in the Indian ocean and a plan was hatched, between Britian and the US to obtain an Indian ocean base. So, in the 1960s, through legal manipulation, the island of Diego Garcia, the largest island of the Chagos peninsula was separated from Mauritius and brought under a brand new British proclaimed entity called, the ‘British Indian Ocean territory’, and given to the United States for the creation of a joint military and naval base.  The island had a native population, but they were inconsequential, even subjected to nuclear testing. But it was austerities that caused them to take boats to Mauritius for the purchase of essentials and their subsequent return prohibited for not being in the possession of a special British Indian Ocean territory pass.

Their islands had been sold to the Americans by Britian.

Thus, an indigenous population which had lived on those islands for centuries were forcibly removed for being a security threat to the joint military command. The manipulation, lies and corruption; even of the international court of criminal justice before which the islanders appeared is described brilliantly in Philippe Sands’ book, ‘the Last Colony’. Additionally, the Australian journalist John Pilger has made excellent documentaries and books called ‘Stealing a nation’, on the plight of the Chagos islanders.

Since the early sixties, the Chagossians have been homeless refugees. They belong to no sovereign nation for their islands were annexed into a high security zone called the ‘British Indian Ocean territory’ and the Chagos archipelago’s largest island, Diego Garcia, used as a US military base. This base was used for the gulf war, for air strikes against Afghanistan. Against Iraq.

These American and British bases are being used for the rampant destruction of an ancient world, those which still have, not just tradition and faith but has also preserved the cultural and aesthetic heritage of the entire human race. They are being made into rubble. Mesopotamia died when the united west destroyed Iraq. They repeated it with Syria. Its oldest city Aleppo, with its limestone architecture is gone. Now, they are finishing off the last bastion of beauty to drag it too, even as a cadaver, into the ugly club of Globalization, where the map of the world is dotted with Mc Donalds, Seven Elevens, Wendys and Starbucks. It is said that seeing Isfahan is like seeing half the world. A city founded by the Safavids who made mystical Shia Islam the empire’s faith. If faith equals beauty, can one fault faith?  Perhaps the rational west and its paranoid Zionists have no eyes for beauty, no ears for Persia’s poetry? Nor the aesthetic sensitivity to appreciate art, music and architecture; the pinnacle of human genius. Is the will for destruction all that has been programed in the manufacture of the rational and scientific creature?

After great effort by the Chagossians, in 2019, it was ruled that the dismemberment of colonial territories before independence was a violation of the United Nations charter and that the Chagossians had the right to return to their islands. Britain ignored it.

Yet, in its immediate aftermath, in the same year, the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) Agreement, a legally binding treaty was up for signing with Sri Lanka. It was an arrangement made between the US authorities and the Sri Lankan Prime Minister, Ranil Wickramasinghe, in view of the fact that if US loses its naval base in Diego Garcia it would require an alternate base and that would be Sri Lanka.

Fortunately, massive public protest stopped it.

But, where is such reaction in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates? Cyprus has just begun. But those nations of the Arabian Peninsula, are they sovereign nations or mere fiefdoms? Do their people have nothing to say when their leaders collaborate with infidels to annihilate fellow Muslims?

Where is the brotherhood that Islam claims? Be it Shia or Sunni Islam, is its origin not from one source?  Did the prophet not say, that a Muslim is the brother of a Muslim. He does not oppress him nor does he fail him. He does not lie to him and he does not hold him in contempt. Whoever fulfills the need of his brother, Allah will fulfill his needs. Whoever relieves a Muslim from distress, Allah will relieve him from distress. Did he not say, ‘do not envy one another and do not inflate prices for one another and do not hate one another but be slaves of Allah and brothers amongst yourselves’. Where is that brotherhood now?

Why does Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) support Infidels and Zionist rather than brothers, united in one faith?

Or, should one try to understand western cunning before one tries to understand the betrayal of brothers. Perhaps the same tactic that influenced DS to assume that British protection was vital to defend the Sinhalese from Tamils has been the credo of their indoctrination too.   

The British were skilled and cunning, but to understand the American, one must watch a western movie and observe that lone ranger, on horseback, with a gun, killing American Indians for land, for gold or for boredom’s sake. Those lone rangers, when they congregated, became known as the United States of America. Their nation was built by forcing native American Indians into barren reservations and the occupation of their lands with the barrel of the gun. They are the archetypes of Zionism; settler colonials devoid of moral compass. Their state of Israel, like the great marches of the American Indians, was founded on the Nakba, the catastrophe which made the Palestinians stateless refugees.  

‘When the white man comes in my country, he leaves a train of blood behind him’, (Red Cloud of the Sioux)

‘We were once friends with the whites, but you nudged us out of the way by your intrigues, and now when we are in council you keep nudging each other, why don’t you talk, and go straight and let all be well’ (Black Kettle)

The above quotations are from Dee Brown’s ‘Bury My heart at Wounded knee’. It is the elegy of the Indians. But that what Black kettle requests is precisely that what they do not do. They nudge and manipulate.  Their moral compass has no honesty. When murder was considered a crime, they began with the decimation of cultural memory. They abducted native children, forced them in reeducation camps and indoctrinated them. When they were done those Indian children had red skin but a white youl. They spoke white language, worshipped white gods and married white men. 

What was done in the Americans, was done, under settler Colonialism, and subsequent British Colonialism, in nearly every colonized nation.  

But, when Islam was born in Arabia, it was like lush oasis in the barren desert. It was to them, not a new faith, but an improvement of the old. And the holy Quran; the final edition of the Torah and the Bible. And Islam’s prophet Muhammed, the last in the lineage of prophets of the Abrahamic faiths. The one who followed ‘Isa ibn Maryamu’, Jesus; the son of Mary.

Islam spread across the region like a powerful desert wind, where men had no choice, but to submit to its human grandeur for it was the only human faith that had blown their way, that had no hierarchy and called out for social justice, pluralism and non-violence.  

Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun turned author writes in her book titled, ‘Mohammed, a prophet of our times, ‘Muhammed was a brilliant, compassionate leader who navigated immense political and social challenges, emphasizing his humanity and dedication to peace over violence. He was decisive and whole hearted in his role in promoting justice and kindness in the 7^th century Arabia’.

Islam was a magnet of the times.

Unfortunately, that magnet was also a threat to the Christian church. And, once Islam began to spread, not by swords, religious missionaries nor colonial conquest, rather the beauty and kindness of its faith, it became a threat to the Catholic popes and the crusades against the Muslims were commissioned. If Christianity managed to halt the spread of Islam, it was not through the superiority of their faith, but the superiority of their weapons.

Thus, Islam has always been the west’s crown of thorns. Islam’s preaching of brotherhood and community is an anathema to western capitalist civilization whose Christian God has been replaced by Consumerism. The western mind is devoid of faith and his life is one of hedonism and his death, of medical intervention. His churches are no longer places of worship but of tourist attraction reminding the visitor of a golden age when Christian crusaders plundered the wealth of Muslim lands to build their fine monuments to Christian glory. Magnificent cathedrals were financed from robbery, it was the law of the jungle, not the religion of Jesus Christ.  

Therefore, the Christian west’s greatest intent is to destroy Islam. It got their mightiest chance with the fall of the Ottoman empire and has not stopped since. To enable the Ottoman demise, it lured the Mufti of Mecca, to organize an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, promising him the Ottoman territory and kingship. That was an Islamic leaders first act of betrayal. ‘‘Let no believers take disbelievers as allies’’. But the Mufti broke a fundamental edict of Islam and allied with infidels and delivered to the British what he had promised.

The Arab revolt was the end of Ottoman rule. But the British betrayed the Mufti. They agreed to deliver their promise if the Mufti would forfeit Palestine to European Zionists. By this time, the European Zionist lobby, the militant wing of political Judaism had begun lobbying the British for a Jewish state in Palestine.

The house of Islam was on the eve of destruction, not by Arab Jews living in Ottoman territory such as Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, but by Zionism, a western idea born from the Dreyfuss affair which convinced European Jews that a separate state for Jews was all that could save them from Christian barbarism.  Those who imprisoned Dreyfuss were French, not Arabs. The architects of the Holocaust were Germans, not Arabs.  Christians, not Muslims.   

The desert faiths were simple. So were desert minds. They survived nature, not through craftiness, but endurance for in these large barren spaces, endowed with nature’s sandy impermanence, all that was lasting was the sweetness of their eternal God, to whom they prayed five times a day. The desert faith was not of rocks and mortar that built stone cathedrals of vain glory, but of faith, prayer, alms, fasting and pilgrimage; cemented upon brotherhood amongst its community of believers.

What has happened to that brotherhood now? The world is in a state of war and that brotherhood has turned against its brother and is letting infidels, Americans and Zionists, use their territory for the destruction of his brother.

Did it not happen before, during the reign of King Faisal?

When the Mufti refused to cede Palestine the British, they had had no more use of him and found amongst the Arab tribes, one greedy and ambitious man from the house of Saud which had recently allied itself with the powerful Abd al Wahhab, the father of Wahhabism. His name was Abdul Aziz. Abdul Aziz was going to be Britain’s ally in breaking the unity of the community, the prerequisite for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Following the UN resolution for the partition of Palestine, when 700, 000 Palestinians were violently displaced and dispossessed by the Zionists, the king of Arabia, Abdul Aziz turned a blind eye. He had a handsome army, but sent none for the protection of fellow Muslims from militant Zionists.

Yet, Abdul Aziz’s second son, Faisal, did pride to his faith and to his tribe and rose to the defense of Palestine. ‘We believe’, he proclaimed, ‘that there will never be a lasting peace in the area unless Jerusalem is liberated and returned to Arab sovereignty, unless liberation of all the occupied Arab territories are achieved and unless Arab people of Palestine regain their rights to return to their homes and be given the right to self-determination’.

To Faisal, the eradication of the state Israel from Palestine territory was the Only means to territorial sovereignty that would bring peace to the Arabs and to the region. But the west was not interested in peace. Only in an eternal state of crisis which they exploited to plunder the wealth of third nations. The Colonial gambit never ended.

So, when Egypt and Syria began to the Yom Kippur, to take back Palestinian territory lost to the 1967 war, Faisal, now the regent in place of his corrupt brother Saud, supported Palestine. But, as victory was imminent, the Americans entered the war on the Zionist side and the Arab armies were defeated.

It angered Faisal and he refused to sell any more oil to the west.

The crisis of 1973 was as serious as Hormuz is today.

While the west suffered in darkness and economies lagged without oil, Faisal became instrumental in the creation of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC), where all the heads of Muslim states joined Faisal and agreed to make liberation of Palestine a universal Muslim issue. He brought to the gathering of Muslim leaders, the spirit of the Prophet Mohammed, whose core premise was justice. And to whom his community of believers were not individuals, but one body, united in mutual goodness and suffers when another suffers and responds accordingly.

The seeds Islamic solidarity had been sown, but even before it could take root Faisal was assassinated.  By nis nephew, the son of his elder brother Saud. A prince who had lived in the United States for a greater part of his life and was known for womanizing and drugs.

Upon Faisal’s death, most of the Muslim leaders who had joined him, were pulled like puppets on a string to the west and the question of Palestine went into the dustbin of history, becoming a refugee issue, not a political issue, until one country, in the spirit of Islamic community picked it up; Iran. Not during the reign of the Shah, but after 1979 when the Islamic revolution brought Ayatollah Khomeini from France and placed him as the supreme leader of Iran and its Shia Muslims.

Yet, what are the Shia and how do they differ from the rest of the Muslim community?

It is said that the word ‘Shia’ was first uttered from the prophet’s mouth. ‘The Shia (followers of the prophet) and his household are pious, they obey God and one recognizes them by their humility, submission to God, honesty, abundant praise of God, fasting and their goodness to parents, attention to poor and needy. Debtors and orphans. The Shia speaks the truth, recite the holy Quran and hold back their tongues for good work and for trustworthiness towards one’s relatives. These are the characteristics of the Shia. They follow God, the holy Quran, prophet Muhammed and after him the nearest people to the prophet who have been appointed by the prophet and that is ‘ahl il bayt’; the family of the prophet’.

He has further cemented it by saying, ‘Islam is like a tree, in which I am the root. Ali is the branch Hassan and Husein are the fruits and the Shiite are the leaves’, as according to the Sunni scholar Ibn Hajar.

But Ali, the prophet’s son in law, was bypassed for Abubakr the prophet’s companion and when Ali did finally become the leader of the community, after the murder of Sunni Islam’s 3^rd caliph Uthman, Ali became the first Imam of the Shia but the fourth caliph of the Sunnis. Tragically, his leadership was short for he was assassinated at the great mosque at Kufa. Yet, to the Shia, Ali’s life was an embodiment of piety, justice and courage and his death, one of martyrdom.  Even today his death marks a day of national mourning where Iranians spend nights in prayer and vigil while mourning and reciting the holy Quran, weeping, for Imam Ali.

Hence, the fundamental difference between Sunni and Shia Islam is the question of leadership.

Yet Twelver Shiism, that special branch of Shia Islam which is Iran’s national religion, which was introduced to Persia under the Safavid dynasty not only believes that the leader of the community should be from the Prophet’s family, but also believes that if none are manifest, a religious scholar, known for his piety and theological knowledge must guide the community until the rightful leader, the Mahdi (the hidden Imam) will emerge at the end of time and establish peace, justice and also redeem Islam. It is called Twelver Shia for it recognizes 12 Imams beginning with the prophet Muhammed and following him, his son in law; Ali.

Not only Ali, but the prophet’s grandson was martyred too, one in the Najaf and the other in Karbala; in Iraq. The blood of martyrs run deep in Iranian veins. Hence, when Imam Khamenei was killed, the west created another martyr. Imam Khamenei’s death does not weaken the Iranians; it strengthens them for he gave his life, for nothing less than a battle against infidels for having been martyred, not at any given time but when he was in discourse, trying to find appeasement to western ambition and Zionist paranoia, through dialogue.

If the west assumed that killing Imam Khamenei was comparable to the murder of Sadam Hussein or Muhammar Qaddafi, they made a terrible mistake. Those murders were heinous crimes, but not sacrilegious. Ayatollah Khamenei’s assassination was an attack, not against a political system, but against faith.   

But how would the west even identify faith when most of them are members of the Eppstein sect which is the supreme evidence of moral debasement. The assassination of a spiritual leader shows the ethical bankruptcy and moral debasement of western society. Perhaps it would be wise to recollect the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘God is dead. God remains dead and we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers. What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives, who will wipe the blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?’

Nietzsche wrote this passage in in the nineteenth century, illuminating the western society in which he lived. Today, that society is in a worse state. It cannot identify truth, is devoid of empathy and resides in the new Realism of Digital Platforms and Disneyworld. Its God is Consumerism, its dress is blue jeans, its food is the burger and its drink is coca cola and its high priest; Jeffery Eppstein. Was the murder of 175 Iranian school girls by the western powers an offering to that high priest?

The breath of God was in every one of those 175 dead little girls. By killing them, the west created 175 more martyrs. The Iranian is not alone; all those who have a heart and a sense of faith will hate Israel and its ally and fight unto the last man for the death of those little girls. And when America wins, for it always wins, even when it loses, the world’s citizens would have rediscovered faith; Islam.

Let us hope it will be the peaceful and just the Islam of the prophet Muhammed. Not like Islam of the Taliban, ISIS and Boko Haram; the results of the west’s weaponized effort to destroy the equality and justice of the faith revealed to Muhammed of Mecca.

Islam has been the greatest threat to western Capitalism. For it preaches brotherhood; the anathema to western society’s rabid individualism. Hence, it has done its utmost to destroy it. Had they not ruined Afghanistan, there would be no Taliban. Had they not destroyed Syria, there would be no ISIS, had they not killed Qaddafi, there would be no Boko Haraam. The root of Islamic fundamentalism is not Islam, it is in the Crusades, which was not the religion of Jesus Christ, but that of popes and kings.  

My heartfelt condolences to the people of Iran, you have lost your supreme spiritual leader. May you have in his son, a spiritual leader as able and wise as his father. May he guide you in the true spirit of Islam and of the prophet Muhammed. And may peace come to you soon. And your faith redeemed. If one does not see its beauty, it is for the privation of their gaze. And may you be rewarded on the day of judgement. For you alone remembered that the human family creates no refugees.  

Manuka Wijesinghe