In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius inquires, “What do you read my Lord? Words, words, words” Hamlet replies. This precisely is the case of Western freedom and its sham democracy, mere words without any substance. Decades ago, a prophetic statement by Herbert Marcuse exposed the reality of Western democratic freedom. “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom,” he said, “prevails in advanced industrial civilization…”. That comfortable unfreedom existed because of the USSR and the threat of socialism.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US became a single dominant power. Fukuyama pronounced the end of history, Huntington came up with an incomprehensible and rather vulgar theory of the clash of civilizations, and Rushdie endorsed that clash with his bleak vision of a loveless and Orwellian world by writing a controversial fiction attacking the prophet of Islam (PBUH).

Khomeini’s imprudence gave Rushdie the knighthood. His dream came true, and it simultaneously gave false credence to the manufactured theory of civilizational clash. A premeditated design to create hatred against Muslims, to generate Islamophobia, and to provoke or manufacture a backlash from the faithful.

Akin to Hollywood, Osama and men of his ilk were the American products and the US knew the psyche of its Trojan horses. The much-anticipated attack visited the US on 9/11. A calamity or a meticulously engineered, fully grasped, and expected terrorist attack gave the entire Muslim community a bad name.

It opened the doors for the US and Israel to overthrow all the populist leadership of the Middle East that once sided with the Soviets and challenged the legitimacy of Israel by openly supporting the Palestinian state. Once all of them were toppled by overt or covert meddling of the US, all threats to Israel’s illegitimacy were over. The Abraham Accord sealed the Palestinians’ fate.

However, history never fails to follow its dialectical path. It gave birth to a new axis of resistance. Akin to the “well-fed” Indian sepoys who initiated the war of........

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