Over the past 80 years, Western governments and their allies have supported radical Islamist groups. However, this was not merely opportunism, a bad case of "my enemy's enemy is my friend." As part of this process, Western governments seriously denigrated popular secular and democratic movements. Indeed, from the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s to Israel's role in the forging of Hamas in the 1980s, the explicit aim of Western support for radical Islamism was to isolate, weaken, and ultimately destroy popular political movements that very often were based on Western ideas of democracy and progress. Thus, many of these radical Islamist groups – the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah – have a built-in suspicion of and hostility toward secular democracy.
Brendan O'Neill
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