News Release

Manchester and the British Election’s “Unsayable”

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JOHN PILGER, [in London] jpilger2003[at]yahoo.co.uk, @johnpilger

Pilger is an Australian-British journalist based in London. He just wrote the piece “Libya’s Link to Manchester’s Tragedy,” which states: “The unsayable in Britain’s general election campaign is this: The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy.”Critical questions — such as why the security service MI5 maintained terrorist ‘assets’ in Manchester and why the government did not warn the public of the threat in their midst — remain unanswered, deflected by the promise of an internal ‘review.'”The alleged suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was part of an extremist group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, that thrived in Manchester and was cultivated and used by MI5 for more than 20 years. The LIFG is proscribed by Britain as a terrorist organization, which seeks a ‘hardline Islamic state’ in Libya and ‘is part of the wider global Islamist extremist movement, as inspired by al-Qaida.’

“The ‘smoking gun’ is that when Prime Minister Theresa May was Home Secretary, LIFG jihadists were allowed to travel unhindered across Europe and encouraged to engage in ‘battle’: first to remove Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, then to join al-Qaida affiliated groups in Syria.

“Last year, the FBI reportedly placed Abedi on a ‘terrorist watch list’ and warned MI5 that his group was looking for a ‘political target’ in Britain. Why wasn’t he apprehended and the network around him prevented from planning and executing the atrocity on May 22?

“These questions arise because of an FBI leak that demolished the ‘lone wolf’ spin in the wake of the May 22 attack — thus, the panicky, uncharacteristic outrage directed at Washington from London and Donald Trump’s apology.

“The Manchester atrocity lifts the rock of British foreign policy to reveal its Faustian alliance with extreme Islam, especially the sect known as Wahhabism or Salafism, whose principal custodian and banker is the oil kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Britain’s biggest weapons customer.

“This imperial marriage reaches back to the Second World War and the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The aim of British policy was to stop pan-Arabism: Arab states developing a modern secularism, asserting their independence from the imperial West and controlling their resources. The creation of a rapacious Israel was meant to expedite this. Pan-Arabism has since been crushed; the goal now is division and conquest. …

“In the current election campaign, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has made a guarded reference to a ‘war on terror that has failed.’ As he knows, it was never a war on terror but a war of conquest and subjugation. Palestine. Afghanistan. Iraq. Libya. Syria. Iran is said to be next. Before there is another Manchester, who will have the courage to say that?”

Pilger’s website is: johnpilger.com. His new film, “The Coming War on China,” is available in the U.S. from Bull Frog Films.