After cheering the bombing of Libya and killing of Gadaffi, the racist UK’s The Daily Mail now laments that if Gaddaffi was alive, the Manchester killings would not have happened.
Another powerful factor in encouraging extremism, as this paper has so often warned, has been the West’s reckless intervention in foreign wars.
Though this in no way excuses Abedi, the Manchester victims would almost certainly be alive today if it hadn’t been for David Cameron’s crass bid to impress America by helping to topple Gaddafi.
Thus, he destabilised the entire region, leaving a vacuum to be filled by Islamic State and turning Libya into a haven for global terrorists, arms dealers and people traffickers.
In 2011, under the pretext of protecting civilians during an armed uprising, the United Nations Security Council greenlit the no-fly-zone and bombing of Libya. Despite massive pro-Gaddafi protests and heroic resistance against the faltering western-backed contras, the revolutionary government fell under the merciless onslaught of imperialist missiles and air strikes. When the imperialist forces ran out of military installations to target, they began bombing civilian infrastructure to support the chaotic groups of western-backed militias, including the anti-Gaddafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Despite having been supported by Britain and the US since its foundation in the early 1990s as it made attempts of Gaddafi’s life, the LIFG was officially identified by the British Home Office in 2005 as a banned terror organisation, membership of which should attract a 10-year spell in jail.
Today Libya is in ruins, with opposing governments in Tripoli and Tobruk and large parts of the country under the control of various militias and jihadist groups, including Islamic State. Refugees and migrants are abused and sold in open-air slave markets, if they are not killed by their kidnappers. Libyan natives that survived the initial invasion have been subjected to ethnic cleansing by the wests ‘rebels’. Those looking to Europe for relief have often been left to die in the Mediterranean Sea if their overcrowded or broken vessels cannot complete the journey, while $32bn of Libya’s money in US banks and $63.5bn in EU banks were ‘frozen’ (i.e. pocketed) at the start of the invasion.