Imperialist powers maintain a toolbox of tactics they employ to maintain dominance and pursue their interests. Among them is propaganda. In this case, playing on planted ideas about Islam and conflict in the region to dissuade the public from supporting the Axis of Resistance as they battle the zionist entity.
Since the launch of the Palestinian national liberation struggle on October 7, 2023, the Axis of Resistance – comprising of Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, Yemen, and Iran – has been at the forefront of the struggle against the Western-backed colonial entity implanted in the region, Israel. To counter these valiant forces fighting on the side of humanity, the zionist entity and its Arab functionaries across the world have immediately turned towards the use of ideological cajolery and media campaigns to dissuade the masses from supporting the Axis of Resistance. They have begun propagating the idea that what the world is witnessing in the region is not a fight between the zionist entity and its enemies; it is, rather, an intra-Muslim struggle, one between Shias and Sunnis. In such a context, the zionist entity is siding with Sunnis to fight a so-called Shia-led Irano-Persian imperialism, which is presumably attempting to expand its tentacles over the Arab region. These claims are not simply the result of laughable propaganda; they are outright imperialist fabrications and lies. More importantly, their primary aim is to instill ideological confusion, further dividing the Arab and Islamic world over the Palestinian fight against zionist colonialism and U.S. hegemony.
According to conservative estimates, the ongoing genocide in Gaza has taken the lives of more than 43,000 people. This number has been challenged by a Lancet report, published more than three months ago, which puts the number over 186,000 people. It is fundamental to understand the forces enabling the scale of destruction and death in Palestine. While the zionist entity has been carpet-bombing Gaza endlessly since the launch of the resistance, with massacres being committed everyday, it was not working alone. NATO and the US joined in from the very start. Since October 7, 2023, NATO countries have been repeating the mantra that the zionist entity has the right to defend itself, and using that to justify the provision of all kinds of weapons to the entity to commit these massacres. Then, there is the role of reactionary regimes in the region, the Arab zionists, whose support varies according to the degree of humiliation and subjugation of their national sovereignty. These include Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Türkiye. These neocolonial entities have either provided gas and food to the zionist entity or have allowed the direct use of their airspaces by the US and NATO forces to deliver military aid and/or shoot down any rockets launched by the resistance. Moreover, the reactionary regimes use various intelligence tools to suppress and even criminalize protests of their own populations against the genocide of Palestinians.
However, imperialist oppression always drives resistance. There is, in fact, a multitude of regional forces that are mobilizing as a counterweight to the ongoing genocide by supporting the armed resistance of Palestinian factions. From Yemen, Ansar Allah has launched an economic blockade on ships entering the Red Sea from Bab al-Mandab. From Lebanon, Hezbollah has made sure to displace 60,000 zionist settlers from the northern part of the occupied Palestinian territories, while relentlessly undermining the zionist war machine. From Iran, we have seen rockets and missiles landing successfully on zionist military targets. From Iraq and Syria, drones and attacks on US military bases and on sites of the zionist entity have been steady and precise. It goes without saying that, as the Axis of Resistance stepped up to counter the genocidal nature of the war that the West is enabling in Gaza, its members have made heavy sacrifices in terms of human lives and infrastructural destruction.
One might be tempted to argue that the mapping of the forces of imperialism, its functionaries, and its contestants might seem simplistic and strategically essentialist. However, when reality turns so violent, the choices that the revolutionary souls of the world face are rather simple. Are we willing to die under imperialist bombs without resisting? Yet, this is precisely where the enemy use of ideological cajolery and media campaigns take place: the attempt to convince the masses that what they are seeing and living as a genocide is really a a sectarian issue. The enemy, thus, presents Hamas, the Syrian Arab Republic, Ansar Allah in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the PMU in Iraq and Iran not only as terrorists, but also as sectarianist Shia. In addition, we are constantly bombarded with the claim that all of these resistance groups are somehow puppets of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In other words, the enemy’s formula is easy to follow: the Axis of Resistance is either an Iranian-led project, or a Shia-led plot.
We urge our readers to remember that the zionist entity has been opposing Iran for decades. In 2002, for instance, the zionist war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, famously said that there are three governments that need to be toppled in the region: Iran, Iraq and Libya. While NATO has brutally succeeded at toppling the last two, today we are witnessing intense war propaganda efforts against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The enemy is clear in its objective: by reducing Iran–and, also the Axis of Resistance – to a religious (Shia) actor with imperial ambitions in the region, the ultimate goal is to rewrite history and promote sectarianism in order to stifle the unity of regional forces against Western imperialism. This, they believe, will diminish support for Palestine’s national liberation.
Fomenting sectarianism for imperialist purposes
“Haven't you read those versed in fiqh… who warned you in a very clear manner from the dangers of the Shia?… don’t you see the danger of Iranians? … Even Yusef AlQaradawi [who claimed that Prophet Muhammed came to his sleep and told him that NATO forces in Libya are angels], on the intellectual invasion, said “the danger of the Shia is in their attempt to invade the Sunni society, and they are capable of this given the billions of wealth they possess.”
Avichay Adraee (zionist entity’s defense forces Head of the Arab Media division)
The imperialist policy of dividing the masses on religious and sectarian lines has been tried and implemented well before. During the Pan-Arab zeitgeist of the 1950-1970s, the battle against imperialism in the region was clear. While there were reactionary regimes serving imperialist and zionist projects, Pan-Arab forces sought to unite the region based on the rejection of colonialism, the pursuit of national security and development, and regional solidarity. Such a strategy of unity inevitably crossed divisive religious lines because the regional functionaries of imperialism were both Sunni and Shia. In Iran, for instance, theShah, a Shia, was an imperialist puppet planted after the CIA couped Mossadeq in 1953 following Iran’s decision to nationalize oil. The Shah had close ties to the zionist entity (e.g. Iran’s police force, SAVAK, was trained by the Mossad to suppress dissidents, leading to the highest prisoner death rate in the world). The same history of imperialist collusion can be found amongst the Sunnis, especially the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. The leadership of Saudi Arabia conspired with the US in arming and supporting obscurantist forces in Afghanistan to supplant communist influence and topple the progressive leadership of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). As a cable leak from the US embassy in Kabul in August 1979 stated, “the United States’ larger interests will be served by the demise of the PDPA government despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.” In other words, both sides of the religious and sectarian divide worked as puppets of imperialism.
In 1979, the region experienced a colossal change, when the people of Iran toppled the reactionary Shah through an Islamic revolution. It is good to note that both the Shah and the leaders of Iran’s revolution are Muslims, and they both are Shia. But since 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency began propagating that Iran’s Islamic Revolution was not an Islamic revolution, but a Shia one and that it is pursuing expansionist policy similar to that of the Persian Empire. In other words, while religious sects can be considered a natural development of humanity, reflecting the plurality of beliefs within Islam, imperialism began operationalizing them to instigate sectarian divisions.
It is very important to remember that a close exegesis of religious texts is not required to understand that sects can be manufactured and manipulated to serve different political agendas. Kwame Nkrumah, his book Class Struggle in Africa, clearly delineated the divisive tools that the imperialist octopus uses to accentuate existing societal contradictions, ranging from class, race, and gender divisions. For instance, tribes (clan and familial connections) were transformed into tribalism (preferential treatments tied to transnational capital and (neo)colonial administrations) to sustain the infiltration of imperialism into spheres they were no longer directly in-charge of. As opposed to colonial administrators, imperialism favors one tribe over the other by luring them with lucrative agreements to cause further division. Consequently, it makes it easier for those under imperial occupation to become fixated on sectarian issues rather than the principal contradiction – imperialism.
Ever since the Islamic Revolution in Iran, sectarianism has been one of the most abused imperialist frames to fragment the region, especially in relation to Palestine. During the 1980s, for instance, when the Palestinian Liberation Organization was operating from Lebanon with popular support, imperialism astutely mobilized the Lebanese Christian Maronites (in cahoots with the zionist entity) to fight them. To understand religion’s role in societies is tantamount to better analyzing the social fabric for better economic, political, social and cultural cohesion. However, imperialists always do the opposite; that is, they weaponize religion only to wreak more divisions.
Unfortunately, the popular masses in the region are still deceived by this narrative that the fight against imperialism is driven by sectarian forces. In light of the Sunni majority in the region, the ongoing battle between the Axis of Resistance against imperialism and zionism is parsimoniously portrayed as a fight between two enemies of the Sunni world – imperialism-zionism on the one hand, and the Shia on the other. In other words, given the assumption that the Shia and the zionists are both enemies of the Sunnis, then some believe it is better to let them fight one another, while the Sunnis become mere spectators while also wishing for the collapse of both. As the current situation in Lebanon is showing, this often translates into regional apathy towards those ‘Shia’ confronting the zionist enemy.
The enemy’s sectarian-infused propaganda offers this simplistic sectarian view of the events of the region to serve their ideological purposes. The enemy groups claim that Hezbollah and Iran are aiding Bashar Al-Assad because he is fighting the Sunnis in Syria; they suggest that the Shia of Yemen are fighting the Sunni Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its barbaric coalitions; and they argue that the conjoining of forces by Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, Iran and the PMU of Iraq are theatrical moves that produce no results on the ground, despite Iran’s effective military response to the zionist entity in April and October of this year. These dubious framings overlook the centrality of imperialism in the region.
We argue that a clear analysis of the role of imperialism in the region helps to critically and cognitively map the position of the actors among the Axis of Resistance. First, while Hezbollah and Iran aided – and continue to support – the Syrian government, they do so in order to fight US and NATO-backed obscurantist forces that claim to be Muslims, i.e., Al-Qaeda, Nusra Front and the Islamic State. Even the so-called “moderate rebels” have been trained by the US in the Timber Sycamore program. Hence, the Syrian government is fighting to protect the national sovereignty of the country from imperialist and reactionary threats of war. It seeks to liberate its territories from foreign US occupiers, which have been usurping, extracting, and selling Syria’s oil. Second, if it were not for Yemen’s staunch resistance against the Saudi-led coalition, not only will Socotra Island (a Yemeni island off its coast currently and illegally occupied by UAE) be occupied by the zionist entity and the United Arab zionist Emirate, but the whole country’s sovereignty will be reduced to an imperialist-controlled area. It was Ansar Allah that protected the national sovereignty of Yemen. And now, it is able to enforce a maritime blockade in support of the Palestinian national liberation struggle. Third, when the enemy’s sectarian talking points are contradicted by the fact that Hamas is a Sunni group fighting imperialism alongside the Shia, the enemy resorts to absurd mental gymnastics. They ask: what did the Palestinians gain from the Al-Aqsa Flood? Was this worth all the destruction? The enemy then reverts to the facade of humanitarianism and the false promise of a peaceful “two-state” solution all the while pretending that Palestinians are not living under a brutal colonial occupation. Al-Aqsa Flood exposed the enemy’s lies of working toward peaceful coexistence by showing the true terrorist face of the zionist entity. It showed the whole world the unabashed, barbaric violence that the zionists will be allowed to use in order to clobber a righteous national liberation movement and protect Western imperialist interests.
Towards Unity of Forces
No matter how hard the imperialists try to portray this war as a sectarian conflict, there is only one enemy that obstructs the revolutionary masses of the region: the terrorist and imperialist zionist entity. Zionism is a spearhead of US imperialism. For the masses of the region, the time has come to decide whether religion is going to be a yoke that is destined to bend the peoples’ backs, or a weapon directed at the imperialists’ jugular. We should not accept the narrative that the fight against imperialism in the region is a sectarian conflict. Our battle is against US imperialism, U.S. cultural hegemony, the zionist project, and those extremists, the Arab puppets, who want to crush our future. We understand that, after centuries of foreign meddling, many of us often resort to sectarianism to push specific political agendas. However, this is an existential battle for the region, and so it is a very dangerous phase. Sooner or later, we will all fall within the range of imperialist fire, no matter what sects of Muslims one belongs to.
The survival of the zionist entity is about the future of this region. It affects everyone, and everyone must act with awareness and take responsibility. We cannot allow the fabricated thesis of sectarianism to be used as a stick to beat the people into groveling acquiescence. We cannot allow ourselves to be taken by the “carrot” of large U.S. presence in the region, with coca-cola factories and dollars. The consequences of a win for the zionist entity and Western imperialism are dire: the U.S. would continue to increase its military presence in the region, kill as many Muslims for the safety of zionists, and exploit the local resources. This must not happen again. The Muslim revolutionary masses, possessors of culture, faith and arms, will not let it happen. It is unity that the imperialists fear and with good reason. On October 7, 2023, the Palestinians demonstrated to the world that unity of forces can deliver an immense blow to the enemy. Unity is victory!
Essam Elkorghli is a Libyan PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He researches Libya’s modern political history and contemporary imperialism in education. He is a labor organizer with the Graduate Employees’ Organization, assistant editor for Middle East Critique Journal, and a member of the Global Pan African Movement.
Matteo Capasso is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Venice, Italy. He is the author of Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and Editor of Middle East Critique.
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