'The Islamist Plot'

"....         Although the rebellion was initially presented in the Western news media as a “protest movement,” it is clear from both video evidence and firsthand accounts that the “protests” were extremely violent from the start. Before long, columns of armed “protesters” — as some media continued incongruously to call them — were marching toward Tripoli.... 

The violence of the “protests” is hardly surprising, given what we now know about the involvement of the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) in the rebellion. At least three al-Qaeda-linked militants who had at one time or another been in U.S. custody played leading roles in the anti-Qaddafi uprising. Following the fall of Tripoli, one of them, the historical leader of the LIFG Abdul-Hakim Belhadj, would emerge as the military governor of the Libyan capital. (In Western media, Belhadj is frequently confused with Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi. Al-Hasadi is a different al-Qaeda-linked militant who played a leading role in the early stages of the rebellion in eastern Libya.)

Moreover, little-known evidence cited in a British court case indicates that there was nothing spontaneous about the violence. By the middle of the last decade, the LIFG had in fact elaborated a plan for destabilizing the Qaddafi regime by using many of the same tactics that would be employed at the outset of the rebellion in February 2011. The plan was discovered on a CD seized by British police during an October 2005 raid of the home of a Libyan political refugee in Birmingham. In a 2009 British court ruling, the man is merely identified by the initials “AV.” (See Secretary of State for the Home Department v. AV, April 30, 2009.)

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In conjunction with American, French, and other NATO forces, British forces thus intervened in Libya in support of a rebellion whose methods the British courts had found to constitute terrorism.

Nowadays, it is common for Western commentators to bemoan the fact that the “Arab Spring” has been followed by an “Islamist Winter.” But, when viewed in conjunction with all the other evidence of the Islamist roots of the Libyan rebellion, the existence of the LIFG plan leaves little room for doubt: Whatever may have transpired in the rest of the Arab world, the uprising in Libya was the realization not of democratic aspirations, but of the longstanding ambitions of Islamic extremists. It was an “Islamist Spring” that paved the way for today’s “Islamist Winter.”