Blaming Islam for modern extremism? Look in the mirror.

As Hillary Clinton’s 2009 Congressional testimony highlighted, the U.S. actively supported the export of Wahhabism to fund and arm the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, leveraging religious zealotry to collapse the Soviet Union. It worked, then blew up in our faces.

The strategy is common and commonly fails:

1. Operation Paperclip & MK-Ultra: The U.S. imported former Nazi scientists, sanitizing their wartime dossiers with paperclips to integrate them into defense intelligence—a dark legacy of state intervention that paved the way for illicit domestic programs like MK-Ultra.
2. Iran (1953): The CIA and MI6 orchestrated a coup against Iran’s elected, moderate Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh to control oil, reinstating the Shah and inadvertently fueling the conditions—and systemic state abuse—that birthed the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the stripping of women’s rights.
3. Iraq, Black Sites & ISIS: The invasion of Iraq and the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime funded and created the power vacuum for Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which evolved into ISIS.
4. Ukraine & Modern Proxies: In Eastern Europe, Washington aligned with and armed violent, racist far-right factions like the Azov Battalion to counter Russia, and they have tyrannized their own population in the name of fighting Russia ever since.
5. Superpower Exploitation & Anti-Zionism: Britain and the U.S. strategically used and weaponized Israel as a geopolitical wedge. Modern anti-Zionism is the direct side effect. Leaving Hamas in power to torture Gazans unchecked while simultaneously attacking Israel is part of this same dynamic.
6. The Soviet Proxy Strategy: Superpowers on all sides used this playbook. Following Israel’s rejection of Soviet Communism, the USSR’s KGB helped cultivate and fund secular nationalist Palestinian movements to weaken U.S. and Western alignment in the region.

It was this pattern of unchecked covert action that prompted President John F. Kennedy to famously declare his desire to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

He didn’t live long after saying that.

The rampant extremism, radicalization, cultlike violence, systemic repression of women, and moral degradation we see today is not the product of organic Islam.

It is the monstrosity created when covert agencies destabilize nations without getting their hands dirty.

Just like in cybersecurity, the primary vulnerability isn’t external—the threat was engineered from inside the gates.

It’s time to stop blaming a faith of 1.8 billion people for the disastrous consequences of global statecraft.