An Intelligence Branch Recruiting Under Religious Cover

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

In the Tulkarm area of Palestine, there appeared a religious man whom people described as pious and God-fearing, one who kept God Almighty’s covenant and people’s trusts and looked after their affairs. This man was known to be diligent in performing the dawn prayer in congregation at the mosque; he kept a long, well-groomed beard, carried long prayer beads, and was constantly engaged in supplication, never tiring of saying “praise be to God,” “glory be to God,” and “there is no god but God.” He was also known to inquire after people’s circumstances, and to provide the needy with financial and food support out of piety and love. He carried out his charitable works continuously and under cover of darkness, so as to stay out of the sight of the Zionist Jews. He was known to be a patriotic Muslim, staying up long nights planning with the young men the steps that should be followed in fighting Israel’s army.

It later turned out that this man was a spy working with Israeli intelligence. Israeli intelligence had taught him how to play the role of the pious, God-fearing Muslim who extends help to people and earns their trust, so as to learn their news and their secrets and pass them on to Israeli intelligence. Israeli intelligence was prepared to invest a fair amount of money in this spy so that he would carry great weight and influence, so that the region’s young men would feel safe with him and confide in him their national and jihadi secrets and their future plans. This false sheikh was an excellent trap for the young, and he provided great services to Israeli intelligence. His true nature was not discovered until Palestine’s young men had paid a heavy price.

As for the Gaza Strip, some religious young men who had the desire and the will to carry out martyrdom operations against the Israeli army sought to translate their intentions into action through a religious man known for his piety and his very hostile positions toward Israel. But some of these young men noticed that the explosive devices carried by the would-be martyrs detonated in locations other than the ones designated, and that the casualties were limited to the martyr himself. That is, these devices had been programmed in a particular way, with Israel controlling their detonation, and they were made to explode in places empty of Israeli soldiers and Jewish civilians. The truth about this “sheikh” was later exposed, and it turned out he was an agent of Israel.

The skill of the intelligence services in recruitment

Intelligence services are skilled at fabricating personas that inhabit multiple roles in order to achieve their goals, and this is a worldwide matter, not confined to the Arab-Islamic region. But because of the region’s particular character, intelligence services focus on fabricating religious figures and training them how to behave according to various situations. These figures are usually trained in a foolish, fanatical form of religion that sees no further than its own nose, so as to leave no room for reasonable people to calm matters down, or for tolerance, or for logical thought. Because of the Islamic tide sweeping the region, Arab intelligence services — Jordan’s, Egypt’s, and Saudi Arabia’s foremost among them — along with Israeli and American intelligence services, have focused on establishing special intelligence sections to recruit spies and agents and train them to recruit and lead religious individuals and groups who desire martyrdom in order to achieve the great victory in the hereafter.

There are intelligence departments in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel that teach religion in its ugliest form, in order to use the obsessed to carry out criminal and seditious acts that ultimately bring great benefits to these departments and to the political regimes overseeing them. This hideous religious image rests on two elements: metaphysical misguidance, and destructive “jihad.” These agencies focus on turning the Islamic religion into a religion of metaphysical legends about the torments of the grave, the movements of spirits, the behavior of angels, the methods used by jinn to spread guidance and misguidance, and about the horrors of hellfire and the bounties of paradise, the wide-eyed maidens especially. They dwell at great length on describing the afterlife — not only the Day of Judgment, but the life that begins immediately after death — and they instill in their students an obsession with hastening death in order to obtain the countless privileges and bounties. That is, these departments turn their students into people intoxicated, wandering through a metaphysical world they believe to be the absolute truth that the ordinary person is incapable of reaching.

Lying in the name of God’s Prophet

…in this way they mislead Muslim youth and drive them into crime, in the belief that ranks of angels and houris await them at the gates of paradise.

The traditional religious instruction that a Muslim learns in kindergarten, school, and university helps to achieve the desired result: stirring sedition and shedding blood in the service of perpetuating the rule of the rulers and the occupation. Religious instruction gives priority to the metaphysical and to ritual, and rarely teaches people about bearing responsibility, commitment, serving the public good, the injustice of the ruler, the fair distribution of wealth, revolt against exploitation, and the achievement of justice among people. It is a foolish form of instruction that teaches people submission and flight from confrontation in this worldly life, and confines them to merely searching for the shortest priestly routes to accumulating good deeds.

The rulers are happy with this, because they want peoples whose consciousness has been obscured and who flee from confronting their own concerns. And since most Arab rulers were originally installed by Western colonialism, and the continuation of their rule is tied to their preservation of Israel and their service to American interests, they remain Arab and Islamic tools in the hands of Israeli and American intelligence. The rulers, and those allied with them, form the political incubator for the deluded youth who live lost and adrift, and they serve as a cover for them, allowing them to continue their acts that are so destructive to the nation.

It is an interconnected, clearly structured dialectic: the survival of the Arab ruler is tied to Western domination; Israel is the creation of the Westerners; and so the Arab ruler is a servant of that creation. Religious instruction is backward, and lies told in the name of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, fill the books; the peoples are unaware, their gaze fixed on paradise through supplications rather than through practical acts of worship. Western money is plentiful and Israel’s stick is heavy, and the ruler is cheap, having built a political system that makes people cheap. Cheapness plants stupidity, stupidity plants blind obedience, and blind obedience plants bombs in Shia mosques just as it plants them in Sunni mosques. The fool imagines paradise awaits him, while the ruler sits upon his throne, laughing with joy at the foolishness of the fools.

These fools do not only serve the rulers and their Zionist and American masters; they also demolish Islam itself, because they generate broad public opinion against Islam, both in Muslim lands and beyond them. Many Muslims have come to hate their own Islam because of the crimes they see committed in Islam’s name, and resentment is widening in non-Islamic countries against Muslims, because they have come to see Islam as a religion of crime and bloodshed.

The Sunni-Shia strife

I was clear about this back in 1979, in my book titled The Fall of the King of Kings, when I said that the Arab rulers, America, and Israel would follow several policies in order to get rid of the new Iranian regime, foremost among them stirring up Sunni-Shia strife. That regime had at the time announced several steps against Israel and America, and it seemed clear it would try to raise the profile of Shia Iran’s role in the region and on the international stage. Touching the American role is forbidden, and threatening Israel poses a danger to the Arab regimes, including the regime of the Palestine Liberation Organization, so it became necessary to besiege Iran, strike it militarily, and work tirelessly to stir strife between Sunnis and Shia.

For this reason I believe that those carrying out acts of strife among Muslims — bombings and attacks on places of worship in particular — are the very same people who waged war on Iran at the start of the 1980s. They sensed the seriousness of the Iranian threat to Israel and to United States interests after the year 2000, and even more sharply after the 2006 war, and so they decided to redouble their seditious efforts in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and they will go to Egypt too if they can.

As an example of these seditious efforts: in Palestine there are no Shia — or if there are, they are so few as not to register as a percentage of the population. Yet because of sectarian-strife media, we would see individuals from Fatah accusing Hamas of being a Shia organization, and individuals from Hamas accusing Islamic Jihad of being a Shia organization, and we began to hear some corrupt mosque preachers, taking their orders from the Ministry of Endowments, cursing the Shia and stirring up strife. And this is, of course, a false accusation, because Palestinian and Arab media had begun portraying the Shia as misguided and as false Muslims, slandering Islam and Muslims. And if this is happening in Palestine, what then is the situation in Lebanon, where the Shia form a fundamental and large component of the population?

At the end of this article, I say to our Lebanese people that trusting those who outbid one another in extremism is very dangerous, because such people are, in the main, pillars of treachery and collaboration with Israel. And since I follow events in Lebanon closely, I will point to just one figure from Tripoli who is very dangerous for Lebanon, and who does not hesitate to keep raising the pitch of sectarian incitement. This is an agitated parliamentary figure who must be guarded against with great care, and every time I listen to his speech I feel the muzzles of rifles opening in Tripoli and across all of Lebanon. He is A. F.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “فرع مخابرات تجنيد مسلمين” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.