ISLAMIC REPUBLIC NEWS AGENCY - Livingstone London Mayor Ken Livingstone blamed Western foreign policy in the Middle East for creating the conditions for terrorist attacks such as the 7/7 bombings in the British capital. Livingstone suggested that Western interventions to maintain control of oil supplies in Arab countries, dating back nearly a century, had produced terrorist organizations, including Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
"If at the end of the First World War we had done what we promised the Arabs, which was to let them be free and have their own governments, and kept out of Arab affairs, and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect this wouldn't have arisen," he told the BBC.
The criticism comes after the mayor blamed western policies for contributing to the spread of extremism that inspired the London bombings, which killed 56 people. "We created these people. We built them up. We funded them," he told his weekly press conference. "Osama bin Laden was just another businessman until he was recruited by the CIA," he said.
Asked in his interview with the BBC what he blamed for the rise of terrorism, Livingstone said "we have just had 80 years of Western intervention in predominantly Arab lands because of the Western need for oil."
"We have propped up unsavory governments, we have overthrown ones that we didn't consider sympathetic," Livingstone also said, while adding many young people in the UK were outraged by the double standards in Western foreign policy.
This, he said, was reflected in America's support for Israel and in detention without trial in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba.
"I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s the Americans recruited and trained Osama bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs and sent him off to kill the Russians in Afghanistan," the mayor said.
"They didn't give any thought to the fact that once he had done that, he might turn on his creators," he added. . .
The mayor also criticized parts of the media for giving too much publicity to certain extreme Muslim figures. "We have 750,000 Muslims in this city, but the same 3 or 4 totally unrepresentative individuals are always stuck on the front page," he said.
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