The Turkish Ottoman Empire had been one of the most powerful and successful empires in the world for more than 6 centuries.

Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the spiritual and political head of the Ottoman Empire, and head of the Islamic Caliphate, had been maneuvered in 1881 by the British and French creditor banks and governments (all under Rothschild ownership) into accepting foreign bankers control over the national debts and finances of the Ottoman Empire, a modern day version of the IMF. This debt bondage was draining Turkish finances to repay the Rothschild banks and, in the process, weakening the financial ability of Istanbul to control its far-flung empire. That weakening was precisely the aim of the Rothschilds to prepare for the looting of the vast wealth of the Ottoman Empire. A weakened Empire can then be broken up, and its lands taken over, the most valuable part of which was Palestine, and the newly-built Suez Canal – the British Empires lifeline to its Indian colony – the jewel of its Empire.

In the decades up to the outbreak of World War 1, as the Ottoman state fell into deeper debt to the Rothschilds, Britain and France used that debt to control the Ottoman Empire and take control over its vast wealth. During this decay of the Ottoman Empire and growing resentment on the periphery toward the Sultanate in Istanbul, the British were cunning in taking every opening through deceit to gain large parts of the Empire for its own.

Then, in 1882, the British informed the Ottoman government it was sending troops to Egypt to “restore order for Istanbul” by putting down the Urabi military officers revolt. The British took control of Egypt and the strategic Suez Canal from the hapless Ottoman Sultan.

The Berlin-Baghdad Railroad

With the defeat of France by Germany, which became a unified state a year later, the German economy progressed at a very fast rate. In comparison, Britain’s economy was in terminal decline. The British Navy was in firm control of the maritime trade routes. German trade had to pay a high price in terms of shipping and insurance to London. Soon, the Germans began building their own merchant fleet, and also began building its own navy to protect its shipping fleet.

To bypass the maritime choke-points of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles and the Suez Canal, Germany and the Ottoman Empire signed an agreement to build a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad. Both of these points ran counter to British interests, as they were seen to be an economic threat to London’s control over trade with the Middle East, and the East. This was the key cause of World War 1.

To neutralize this threat, the British signed a treaty, in 1899, with another Ottoman province, Kuwait, and made it into a British colony. This would block the southwards expansion of the Berlin-Baghdad railway route.
Then, in 1899, oil was discovered in Iran, and the entire geopolitical equation of the region changed. Now, the British were in a great haste to grab these oil-rich areas for themselves.

Lawrence of Arabia and the Arab Revolt

Owing to her huge foreign debts and economic troubles, the Ottoman Empire had declined in extent to a territory consisting of only modern-day Turkey, the Middle East, and the Arabian coast. It had lost the Caucasus, Crimea, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands – and the tax revenues that they had paid to the Sultanate. Increased financial pressure from the Rothschilds resulted in sharply increased taxes across the Arab and other parts of the Empire. Istanbul’s rule became more brutal. That sowed the seeds of the Arab revolt against Ottoman Turkey.

As a reaction to the increased severity of life under Istanbul’s rule, the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire began organizing secret Arab nationalist societies to oppose Ottoman oppression.

Sheriff Hussein Ali was the Emir of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The British intelligence office in Cairo made contact with him and made a deal. This was to fight the Ottomans in return for Britain recognizing an independent Arab nation. In 1916, the Arab revolt against the Ottomans began, and a British agent, T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), was spearheading this effort, working with Hussein.

While promising Hussein and his Hashemite tribesmen their rule over a new Arab Caliphate, another British agent, Percy Cox, was sent to Hussein’s bitter rival, Ibn Saud, a Bedouin tribal leader of legendary ferocity against his desert foes. In reality, the cunning British were selling the same horse twice to gain their goal. The Anglo-Saudi Friendship Treaty was signed in 1915, which explicitly acknowledged Ibn Saud as head of a Saudi State and gave the Arab leader the guarantee of British protection in any revolt against Istanbul, promising him rifles and money. The British made no effort to unite the two Arab leaders.

Sykes-Picot

Not only did the British back two bitter Arab foes in order to defeat the Turkish forces, but at the same time they secretly signed an agreement with the French to later divide these “newly-independent” Arab lands among themselves after the war. Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes and French diplomat Georges Picot worked out a deal to carve up the Arab Middle East. Syria and Lebanon went to France, while everything else went to the British. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, Russia revealed the secret Sykes-Picot agreement. A few weeks after this betrayal of the Arabs, London reneged on its deal to supply Ibn Saud with money and arms. Which forced Ibn Saud to remark on the departure of British aid: “Who after this will put their trust in you?” This British double-cross cut deeper for Ibn Saud than that against Hussein.

The Balfour Declaration

The next British betrayal of its Arab allies came in October 31, 1917. This was when 150,000 British troops landed in Palestine, and took control of Jerusalem. Once news reached London, British Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour wrote a letter to Walter Rothschild, head of the London Rothschilds, promising the Rothschilds the land of Palestine. This letter was dated November 2nd, 1917.

As Jewish historian Arthur Koestler noted of the declaration between Balfour and Rothschild, “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third. More than that, the country was still part of the Empire of a fourth, namely Turkey.”

In August 1920, the Rothschild-controlled countries of Britain, France and Italy met at a Rothschild estate in Sevres, to carve up the defeated Ottoman Empire as spoils of war. The US had withdrawn into isolation, leaving Sevres to become a carving up of the Arab Middle East by the Rothschild family and its captive countries of Britain and France. This sealed the fate of millions of Arab Muslims for the following century.

No other power had managed to emerge from the post-war carve up of the Ottoman Empire with more gain than the British. Britain had won the vast oilfields of newly formed Iraq; it had annexed Kuwait in 1899 well before the war for its oil and had annexed Egypt in 1914, and her control over the vital Suez Canal and Sudan. And Britain had managed to get Palestine as a “national home for the Jews.”

That Rothschild Jewish homeland in Palestine would prove to be a cause of endless conflict between Muslim Arabs and Jews. It would provide a new source of Muslim Arab rage against not only Jews as they settled there in the 1920s, but also against Christian Europe for allowing that incursion. As Ibn Saud saw it, it was a theft of Muslim homelands. Britain had at its means to the power to detonate the simmering tensions in the Middle East as it chose.

By 1920, London and its oil companies, BP and Shell had largely achieved their combined goals of carving up the vast territories of the Ottoman Empire in order to divide and dominate the Arab oil lands at the dawn of the oil age. Now, they had to make sure of their continued control. To insure that continued control, London chose and installed leaders who were dependent on London for financial and military backing. London used these Arab leaders to politically control the region and its vast oil riches, as well as guarding the Suez Canal as the route to India.

These Arab leaders faced a simmering rage from their people in the face of continued Western betrayal. That rage was instrumental and politicized by the cultivation of political Islam that soon began to spread under the harsh conditions in Egypt. It was a secret society to become known as the Society of the Muslim Brothers, or, in Arabic, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun. That Muslim Brotherhood survived into the 21st century as the most powerful organized force in the Muslim world. Its origins were revealing as they were alarming.