December 3, 2008 (LPAC)--The well-known British writer John Pilger points to British promoting of Islamic terrorism, in the course of a column in the Dec. 1 London Guardian, in which Pilger mocks the British Foreign Office's gala open-house day for "human rights." After reviewing various British-sponsored historical atrocities, in India, Iran, Iraq, etc., Pilger continues:

"Stored in the great British libraries and record offices, unclassified official files tell the truth about British policy and human rights ... As we hear the moralising drone of ex-British military `security experts' telling us what to think about current events in Mumbai, we might recall Britain's historic role as midwife to violent extremism in modern Islam, from the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s through the overthrow of Iran's liberal democratic government to MI6's arming of the Afghan mujahideen, the Taliban in waiting. The aim was and remains the denial of nationalism to peoples struggling to be free, especially in the Middle East, where oil, says a secret Foreign Office document from 1947, is `a vital prize for any power interested in world influence and domination.'"

Pilger also takes up the "systematic" British-BAE policy of exporting arms and military equipment to Africa's most war-bloodied and impoverished countries, and he asks: "What will Miliband say to the sufferers of this UK-sponsored violence? Perhaps he will make mention, as he often does, of the need for `good governance' in faraway places, while his own regime suppresses a Serious Fraud Office investigation into BAE's £43m arms deal with the corrupt tyranny in Saudi Arabia - with which, noted Foreign Office minister Kim Howells in 2007, the British had `shared values.'"