Staged! (The link between the Charlie Hebdo massacre and professional wrestling.)

The problem with immersing oneself in the details of one scandal is that it becomes easy to lose sight of everything else. Over the past few days, the Jeffrey Epstein mystery has commanded much of my attention, which means that many of you are way ahead of me on the Charlie Hebdo case (not to mention several dozen other matters).

Nevertheless, I'd like to focus on this outrageous opinion piece by radical Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary, published by USA Today. This "cleric" defends the killing of anyone who dishonors Mumhammed. Moreover, he seems to think that western governments should abide by Sharia law.

Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression...

Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is considered to be an obligation upon them.

The publication of this USA Today article should be seen as an exercise in psy-war -- as a deliberate provocation. It's all staged.

Welcome to the show, my friends.

These theatricals exist for the purpose of stoking the fear-fantasies of the American right: See here and here and here. The Islam-haters have fastened onto Choudary's words, and they are going nuts.

USA Today won't tell you one key fact: Anjem Choudary -- who is quite infamous in the UK -- is widely considered to be an agent of the British state.

Some of the most damning evidence for that claim is contained in the video embedded above, at around the six minute mark.

Consider these observations from an Irish chat board:

I dont have any actual evidence that he is but its very strange that though he only represents a tiny proportion of Muslims he is constantly invited on to the TV in the UK when during the Troubles they banned a Pogues song because it was seen as "sympathizing with terrorism"...

Is this chap with the spliff and Fosters really an Islamic radical? Doubt it.

That last comment has to do with the known proclivity of this "radical Muslim cleric" for vices not normally associated with religious figures. The Daily Mail published a piece with a telling title: "Swilling beer, smoking dope and leering at porn, the other side of hate preacher 'Andy' Choudary":

One former friend said: 'I can't keep a straight face when I see "fundamentalist Muslim Anjem Choudary" in the papers attacking the British for drinking or having girlfriends.

'When I knew him, he liked to be called Andy, would often smoke cannabis spliffs all day, and was proud of his ability to down a pint of cider in a couple of seconds.

In 2013, The Spectator directly stated that Anjem Choudary was part of a "clerical honeypot" conducted by MI5.

Ever since 9/11 the police and Security Service have pursued a disastrous policy of cultivating ‘clerical honeypots’. The thinking behind it seems reasonable enough at first glance: leave extremist clerics to preach in the open and then you can easily identify the network around them, and the various actors within it.

Almost all decent people in this country are bemused at how Choudary has managed to avoid arrest for this long. A report by the Henry Jackson Society found that around 20 per cent of all terrorist convictions in this country can be linked back to the al-Muhajiroun network (and its offshoots) that he once led. He has benefited from the ‘clerical honeypot’ strategy more than anyone else.

In 2009, a website supporting the boycott of Israel published a piece titled "Anjem Choudry, MI5 & The Far Right – Whats The Connection?"

The Daily Express continue their crusade to highlight Anjem Choudry’s call for Shariah to replace UK law.

The narrative the express are using is one I touched upon in an earlier post, which you can read here, but right now, I don’t want to look at the message, I want to look at the messenger.

We have a problem in the UK that none of us is willing to accept a single person or body to represent us. Whoever thinks Anjem Choudry represents the views of almost two million people needs their head examined.

The media run to him because they know they will get a soundbite, an ‘extreme’ view that will help to shift papers and get hits on their sites, in turn increasing their ad-revenue’s, thus enabling them to pay off whatever columnist is passing off their propaganda views as news these days.

Anjem Choudry and his collection of organisations, be it, HT, AM, or whichever front they are using these days (Islam4UK) are either unbelievably naive, stupid or are paid up agent provocateurs.

I suspect Anjem Choudary (like his mentor Omar Bakri) is an agent of MI5, he is used to portray Muslims as a threat in order to continue government policies of war in Muslim countries, as well as inciting divisions in society so people never focus their anger on the true blameworthy culprit, our government, but instaed our focus is on each other.

The new Islam4UK website is just another tool that the MI5 will use to cause further tensions between Muslims and Non-muslims in the UK.

It actually amazes me how no one sees this connection up to this point, even with his ability to walk around the streets without being attacked, his seemingly infinite amount of money to fund his subversive campaigns and roadshows, as well as the elephant in the room, the fact that no action is being taken against him.

I would urge people of all faiths to understand that you are being manipulated, by MI5, to hate ‘the other’. Laugh at Choudary for what he is, a cartoon character, a Muslim bogeyman under your bed, a puppet which has been set up...but focus on those who are pulling his strings.

This 2013 article appeared on an Alex Jones website. As regular readers know, I consider Jones and his followers to be despicable fools.  Nevertheless, consider the following:

Choudary, along with Omar Bakri Muhammad, led the Islamic organization al-Muhajiroun. The group was proscribed under the UK Terrorism Act 2000 along with Islam4UK, another group led by Choudary.

Prior to the July 7, 2005 bombings in London, Bakri admitted to journalist Ron Suskind that he worked for British intelligence.

Anjem Choudary’s shady connection to radical Muslims linked to British intelligence reveal that his commentary on the murder may be part of a larger script.

For a more academic viewpoint, go here:

Challenging and contextualising Choudary’s contributions has rarely been exercised in the British press if assessments of news output over periods of time are considered. For example, academics at Lancaster University studied news output in the British nationals from 1998 – 2009, concluding that extreme and fringe elements within the Muslim community dominated news coverage.

Here is a fellow who proclaims himself leery of conspiracy theories yet feels compelled to ask if Choudary is on the CIA or MI5 payroll:

The guy was uni educated. Very intelligent. A trained lawyer. English teacher. Was a full on hedonist, as western as any white guy.

And now, 20 years later, he comes up with stuff that even a 5 year old, taliban-brainwashed muslim child would laugh at.

These words evinced a response from someone who obviously knows how the world works:

Both the quartermasters of the IRA and one of the main protestant paramilitaries were agents during the later years of the 'troubles' in Northern Ireland. A number of subversive organisations in the past (the 'Free Wales Army' during the 1960's, for example), have had more undercover special branch people in the upper ranks of their organisations than they have had 'real' members. The EDL is a likely newcomer to the ranks.

MI5 was opposed to popular calls for the closure of the Regent's Park Mosque because it considered the place to be an intelligence asset.

It may not be fair of me to keep mentioning the book Who Framed Colin Wallace? by Paul Foote, since the work is so rare in the U.S. But if you can get hold of a copy, you'll learn a lot about how these deception operations worked during "the Troubles."

My hipper readers may know about British psy-war specialist Frank Kitson. He promulgated the concept of the "pseudo-gang" -- a fake opposition group set up by the state in order to smear real groups.

What worked half-century ago is still undermining trust among today's resistance to British Occupation in Ireland. Forming fake republican groups, is a British speciality in Ireland today, practiced since 1971, when Kitson recruited 'turned' IRA members, nicknamed the 'Freds' operating undercover in Brigadier Kitson's area of responsibility.

Kitsonian pseudo-gangs are a key part of the "low-intensity operations" deployed by British Imperialists in the waning days of colonial rule and their legacy has been bequeathed to the Americans.

Wrestling with the truth. These theatricals remind of an event I witnessed back in the 1980s. A friend talked me into attending a display of so-called "professional" wrestling, which was then experiencing one of its periodic moments of semi-mainstream popularity. We were looking for laughs.

One of the heels, or bad guys, was the Iron Sheikh, originally named the Iranian Sheikh. He got a standing boo, as was to be expected, since the Iranian hostage crisis was then a recent memory. Nobody in the audience seemed to know that Iran does not have sheiks.

Another heel was an allegedly "communist" wrestler named Nikolai Volkoff, who demanded that the audience pay respectful attention as he sang the Soviet national anthem. I need not tell you how the crowd reacted.

"Do people really believe this nonsense?" I asked my friend.

"Yeah," he assured me. "A lot of them do."

Actually, most members of that crowd seemed to be caught up in a difficult-to-define psychological miasma -- a strange combination of belief and unbelief. They went along with the deception as long as the storyline fit their biases. Deep down, most of them probably understood that this "sport" was a massive hoax -- but acting as if everything was real seemed to fulfill an important psychological need.

We thus return to the Choudary piece in USA Today, a "newspaper" whose offerings do not differ greatly from those of the World Wrestling Federation. Same shit, different decade. Same theatricals, different arena.

I am personally convinced that Anjem Choudary is a professional heel. If he were not fulfilling a script, the British state would have silenced him long ago. Instead, he is given a seemingly illimitable supply of megaphones and money.

Moreover, I am quite sure that the editors of USA Today know who and what "Andy" really is. Even some of our professional Islamophobes may be in on the gag.