Thank you for Frankenstein

The images of ISIS terrorists trading slaves for sex that circulated on YouTube last week were so repulsive that even a Muslim man like myself could feel at risk of developing Islamophobic thoughts. How is this possible? What kind of people commit such atrocities? What kind of sickness has overtaken them?

"The world is a sick place" a friend of mine said to me a few days ago, and he added, "it always has been, but since the camera was added to the mobile phone, we are seeing it". Massacres, rape and other atrocities were always part of our warrior DNA. This is in my view nothing in comparison with the evil that leads to raping and killing children, for instance. Psychopaths and predators are among us, we often do not recognize them, because they look like us and behave like us, we assume that they share our own humanity and our own values.
 "We never expected this, it is hard to believe" is the sentence that is almost always repeated by friends and neighbors of child rapists and other monsters. So then I wonder, did we Arabs, and Muslims expect ISIS? Did we see this coming? In an article I published in 2011 that you can read fully here I wrote the following : 
"... The reality is that once a repressed society, whose dignity and consciousness have been violated, has set itself free from the grip of its tyrants, it will reveal all the issues that had been lodged within. The revolution causes all the social ills, all those conflicts that had never been resolved, and all the injustices and suppressed feelings to surface, which can definitely be scary. But we have to understand that we cannot extract the beautiful without extracting the ugly at the same time, and that we cannot achieve stability before first addressing the tensions. We cannot close historical records without first opening them."

So yes, I and many other people expected to see the ugly face of our civilization resurfacing from the deep dungeons of the Arab dictatorships and humiliation at the hand of foreign and domestic foes. However, we never expected it to be this ugly, and this scary. This is not merely a natural phenomenon of issues surfacing after being suppressed, it is not just our dark side, this is much more.
ISIS is a manipulated monster, that was fabricated and created. Of course, just like Frankenstein, it was created from body parts that belong to the dead, our dead ancestors. Thus, parts that belong to the dark side of our civilization and culture and religion. But these parts were dead and buried. They were nothing more than stories in our history book, until the graves were desecrated, the parts sawed out and then tailored back together in the laboratory of International Jihadism that was created in Afghanistan as a joint venture of the CIA and the Saudi intelligence services. That laboratory was an actual place, called AL Qaeda, the base. It was sponsored by the CIA and managed by a certain Ossama Ben Laden. This is not a conspiracy theory, not a wacko paranoid idea, this is mainstream history, and above all, it is recent documented history.
Wahhabism together with Western agendas created a monster from dead parts of our culture and history and engineered life back to it. An abomination that fought fiercely and defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. But in 1990 that monster went loose. Disappointed with its father and creator, just like Frankenstein, it felt forsaken, and became aware of itself, and more angry. The rest is history.   
So thank you, Britain, and thank you, USA, for fostering Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia for almost a century now. Thank you for establishing and further maintaining the power of the most literalist and the most oppressive form of Salafist Islam on the most holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. Hence, giving it a legitimacy that it abuses every day to radicalize more young people in the wrong direction and to promote its sick world views. Thank you for fighting together with it every progressive attempt for change in our countries, every progressive leader or regime, every modernization project. Thank you very much for doing that.
Thank You, USA and Britain for invading Iraq illegally in 2003. For destroying it, for killing and torturing and raping its people into madness. Thank you for attracting the Jihadis to come and fight you there and for giving Jihadism the perfect enthronement to mutate into a more violent, criminal and ruthless version under the name ISI (Islamic State in Iraq).  On the other hand, Thank you, Assad regime, for making Syria a harbor for Salafism since 2003 in order to feed Al-Qaeda in Iraq and let it function as a shield against the madness of George Bush and his neocon crusaders. And once more, thank you, USA, for putting Bashar Assad in that position. Thank you again Mr Assad for massacring your people that demonstrated peacefully for six months and by doing that forcing the revolution to militarize. And thanks a bunch really for, directly and indirectly, stimulating Salafi Jihadis to fight you because you knew that this will drive the people partly back into your arms, as the lesser of two evils, and will drive the west away from the rebels and by doing that thank you for allowing ISI to enter Syria and revitalize itself by becoming ISIS.
Above all, and before all, thank you, Israel, for massacring our people and stealing our land, for killing our children, for making us fight you in ways that do not always honor our humanity for as much as they reveal our desperation. Thank you for humiliating us, making us open for extremism and showing us that democracy and rights are not destined for us. And thank you international community for allowing Israel to do that, for defending it at all times and for considering any real opposition to it as antisemitic and terrorist. And by the way, thank you, Europe, for massacring the Jews, thank you for driving them crazy and extremist, and then exporting them to us, where they take out the madness and the grudge that you have planted in their minds and souls through centuries of Antisemitism, on us. We really appreciate this. And last but not least,  thank you, Arab regimes for adding to the humiliation of our people, for throwing free minds behind bars or forcing them to immigrate, for managing countries like you manage farms, for running governments like you run mafias, for establishing kleptocracies keeping the people ignorant, hungry and hopeless. Thank you all for creating the conditions allowing this Frankenstein made by you out of dead parts of our history and tradition to become alive, to thrive and prosper... Now that the monster is on its own, you all gather forces to fight it, and you blame us, the normal Arabs and Muslims for it. In the meantime, it is us, who are its victims, it is upon the flesh of our innocent that it feasts. ISIS kills us, and you hate us more and become more racist, Islamophobic, and more oppressive against us because of it. Really, I cannot Thank you enough for this too.