Communism - The Arab link
For several months I have had the nagging feeling that much of what we see in the Arab world has eerie similarities to communism ideas. The depiction of the US as the 'great satan' is a mirror the cries of evil imperialist that often came from the soviets. The continued portrayal of the US as a zionist supporter or stooge is also a cry that I have heard from many on the left. The guerilla tactics that muslim terrorists use also has much in common with the methods the chinese originally created. All in all, it was just a nagging feeling which I have supressed because other than the feeling, there was no real support for it.

That was until this article over at the National Review by ex soviet spy chief Ion Mihai Pacepa caught my attention. Not only does this implicate the UN as a worse than useless bureaucracy, being detrimental to the US and its allies, but also it specifically claims that the attitude of the arab world against the US and its allies was specifically fostered by communist agents. From the article

I spent two decades of my other life as a Communist spy chief, struggling to transform the U.N. into a kind of international socialist republic. The Communist bloc threw millions of dollars and thousands of people into that gigantic project. According to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, all employees from Eastern Bloc nations were involved in espionage. The task of this espionage army was not to steal secrets but to use the U.N. to convert the historical Arab and Islamic hatred of the Jews into a new hatred for Israel’s main supporter, the United States. The U.N. became our petri dish, in which we nurtured a virulent strain of hatred for America, grown from the bacteria of Communism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, jingoism, and victimology.

Truly, I think people everywhere continue to under estimate the effects and influence that communism has had on history and even our current circumstances.

In reading the reviews of Ion Mihai Pacepa's book 'Red Horizons' at amazon I also came accross this statement. As it is a review, I cannot account for its correctness, but I will keep looking into it.

One very interesting piece is where Pacepa relates a conversation in 1978 with Constantin Munteaunu, a general assigned to teach Arafat and the PLO techniques to deceive the West into granting the organization recognition.

The plot thickens. I wonder if there where any other 'instructional' sessions?

Update: This article at NewsMax also seems to bear out what was said in the review. Dr. J. Michael Waller, from the Institute of World politics is quote in this article saying..

This was all done as the core of the international terrorist network under Soviet sponsorship. And by the 1970s, as the Soviets were actually arming the PLO and providing weapons for surrogates to all sorts of international terrorist groups. They did this through their surrogate states like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cuba, East Germany, Bulgaria and other countries.

- posted by Alan Grey @ Thursday, June 23, 2005