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By Afro-Middle East Centre (AMEC)

In the past two months, Tunisia organised three successful electoral polls – a parliamentary then a presidential election that was followed by a runoff vote. The results of all three indicate a weakening of the Islamist Ennahda party, and a tolerance for remnants of the Ben Ali regime re-entering politics. The largely peaceful elections and the willingness of defeated candidates to accept the results augurs well for democratic consolidation in Tunisia. However, the country’s authoritarian past, the willingness of its civil society to choose authoritarianism over Islamism, and the re-emergence of Ben Ali remnants suggests the temptation to reverse the gains of the 2011 uprising will remain strong.

Electoral outcomes
The three polls saw the rise of Nidaa Tounes (Call for Tunisia), which won thirty-eight per cent of the parliamentary vote, with its candidate, Beji Caid Essebsi, winning the presidential runoff election with fifty-six per cent of the vote. Nidaa is comprised of a motley of trade unionists, independent politicians, secularists, and former Ben Ali supporters, whose main rallying point has been a disdain for Ennahda’s Islamism. Besides this unifying factor, the party lacks a clear economic programme and has not yet convened its founding congress, because of fears that former Constitutional Democratic Rally members will gain prominence.
Ennahda suffered the most losses in the polls, with its vote share dropping from thirty-seven per cent in 2011 to twenty-eight per cent, and its preferred presidential candidate being defeated by a substantial twelve per cent margin. (Officially, Ennahda did not support any candidate for president, but it is a known secret that most members backed Moncef Marzouki, a secular politician and former president of the Tunisian Human Rights League who was president in the previous Nahda-led governing coalition.) Economic stagnation, increased insecurity caused by a growing extremist Salafi trend, and spillover of the Libyan and Syrian conflicts had made voters question Ennahda’s ability to rule. This was worsened by the party’s lack of grassroots’ institutions – a direct result of it being persecuted and banned under Ben Ali. Tunisia’s new constitution, however, grants a great deal of power to the legislature, which will ensure the Islamic party significant prominence in policy formation.

Coalition Building
Nidaa’s eighty-six seats falls short of the 109 required to form a government, meaning that coalitions will have to be built. Although the country’s myriad challenges can best be tackled through a coalition between Nidaa and Ennahda – with their similar economic platforms and ability to mobilise large sectors of society, and despite Ennahda’s willingness to join a Nidaa coalition, this is unlikely, since Nidaa was formed on an explicitly anti-Islamist platform, and includes many who had striven, under Ben Ali, to eradicate Ennahda. More likely is a coalition between Nidaa and the Popular Front (with fifteen seats) and/or Afek Tounes. The Popular Front’s economic policy is radically different from Nidaa’s, but it has previously worked with Nidaa Tounes. The Free Patriotic Union (with sixteen seats) is also a possible coalition partner, especially as its economic platform is similar to Nidaa’s. However, the friction caused by the presidential campaigns of the leaders of the two parties will first need to be addressed.

Challenges
Clearly, the elections will not erase the country’s structural and systemic challenges, plagued as it is by economic stagnation. Essebsi’s recognition of the disparities in development between different parts of the country is encouraging, but his assertion that instability was caused by the Ennahda-led government and that ‘hard steps’ are needed to reverse this will likely exacerbate the problem and increase polarisation. Recent reports of tensions within Nidaa will also constrain his ability to act, especially if the party splinters and refuses to sanction the soon to be formed cabinet. Many within Nidaa oppose his decision to appoint Habib Essid (a relative independent) to head the cabinet, and his decision to appoint his sons Hafiz Caid Essebsi, Mohamed Ennaseur and Mohamed Imran to the legislature. Perhaps positive is that the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) and other civil society organisations will watch Essebsi’s performance carefully, and will not hesitate to oppose what they regard as bad policies.

16 January 2015

By Shamus Cooke

A core tenet of journalism is answering the question “why.” It’s the media’s duty to explain “why” an event happened so that readers will actually understand what they’re reading. Leave out the “why” and then assumptions and stereotypes fill in the blank, always readily supplied by politicians whose ridiculous answers are left unquestioned by the corporate media.

Because the real “why” was unexplained in the Charlie Hebdo massacre, an obviously false culprit was created, leading to a moronic national discussion in the U.S. media about whether Islam was “inherently” violent.

For the media to even pose this question either betrays a blinding ignorance about the Middle East and Islam, or a conscious willingness to manipulate public sentiment by only interviewing so-called experts who believe such nonsense.

Media outlets should know that until the 1980’s Islamic fundamentalism was virtually inaudible in the Middle East — outside of the U.S.-supported dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, whose ruling monarchy survives thanks to U.S. support. The official religion of Saudi Arabia is a uniquely fundamentalist version of Islam, which along with the royal family are the two anchors of Saudi government power.

Before the 1980’s, the dominant ideology in the Middle East was pan-Arab socialism, a secular ideology that viewed Islamic fundamentalism as socially and economically regressive. Islamic fundamentalists engaged in terrorist attacks against the “pan-Arab socialist” governments of Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iraq and other governments that aligned themselves with this ideology at various times.

Islamic fundamentalism was virtually extinguished from 1950-1980, with Saudi Arabia and later Qatar being the last bastion and protective base of fundamentalists who were exiled from the secular countries. This dynamic was accentuated during the cold war, where the U.S. aligned itself with Islamic fundamentalism — Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states — while the Soviet Union became allies with the secular nations that identified as “socialist.”

When the 1978 Saur revolution in Afghanistan resulted in yet another socialist-inspired government, the United States responded by working with Saudi Arabia to give tons of weapons, training, and cash to the jihadists of the then-fledgling fundamentalist movement, helping to transform it into a regional social force that soon became the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The U.S.-backed Afghan jihad was the birth of the modern Islamic fundamentalist movement. The jihad attracted and helped organize fundamentalists across the region, as U.S. allies in the Gulf state dictatorships used the state religion to promote it. Fighters who traveled to fight in Afghanistan returned to their home countries with weapon training and hero status that inspired others to join the movement.

The U.S. later aided the fundamentalists by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, destroying Libya and waging a ruthless proxy war in Syria. Fundamentalists used these invasions and the consequent destruction of these once-proud nations to show that the West was at war with Islam.

Islamic fundamentalism grew steadily during this period, until it took another giant leap forward, starting with the U.S.-backed proxy war against the Syrian government, essentially the Afghan jihad on steroids.

Once again the U.S. government aligned itself with Islamic fundamentalists, who have been the principal groups fighting the Syrian government since 2012. To gain thousands of needed foreign fighters, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf states promoted jihad with their state-sponsored media, religious figures, and oil-rich donors.

While the Syria jihad movement was blossoming in Syria, the U.S. media and politicians were silent, even as groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS were growing exponentially with their huge sums of Gulf state supplied weapons and cash. They were virtually ignored by the Obama administration until the ISIS invasion of Iraq reached the U.S.-sponsored Kurdish region in 2014.

In short, the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria have destroyed four civilizations within Muslim-majority nations. Once proud people have been crushed by war — either killed, injured, made refugees, or smothered by mass unemployment and scarcity. These are the ideal conditions for the Saudi-style Islamic fundamentalism to flourish, where promises of dignity and power resonate with those robbed of both.

Another U.S. media failure over Charlie Hebdo is how “satire” is discussed, where Hebdo’s actions were triumphed as the highest principle of the freedom of the media and speech.

It’s important to know what political satire is, and what it isn’t. Although the definition isn’t strict, political satire is commonly understood to be directed towards governments or powerful individuals. It is a very powerful form of political critique and analysis and deserves the strictest protection under freedom of speech.

However, when this same comedic power is directed against oppressed minorities, as Muslims are in France, the term satire ceases to apply, as it becomes a tool of oppression, discrimination, and racism.

The discrimination that French Muslims face has increased dramatically over the years, as Muslims have been subject to discrimination in politics and the media, most notoriously the 2010 ban on “face covering” in France, directed at the veil used by Muslim women.

This discrimination has increased as the French working class is put under the strain of austerity. Since the global 2008 recession this dynamic has accelerated, and consequently politicians are increasingly relying on scapegoating Muslims, Africans, or anyone who might be perceived as an immigrant.

It’s in this context that the cartoons aimed at offending Muslims by ridiculing their prophet Muhammad — a uniquely and especially offensive act under Islam — is especially insulting, and should be viewed as an incitement of racist hatred in France, where Arabs and North Africans are especially targeted in the right-wing attacks on immigrants.

It’s a sign of how far France has politically fallen that people are claiming solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, which has produced some of the most racist and inflammatory cartoons directed at Muslims, Arabs, and people of North Africans, which contributes to the culture of hatred that resulted in physical attacks against Muslims after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. This is the exact same political dynamic that led to Hitler’s racist scapegoating of the Jews.

Racism in France may have surpassed racism in the United States, since it’s unimaginable that, if the Ku Klux Klan were attacked in the United States for anti-Mexican hate speech, that the U.S. public would announce “I am the KKK.”

Hebdo is of course not a far-right publication. But the consistent attacks on Muslims and Africans show how far Charlie had been incorporated into the French political establishment, which now relies increasingly on scapegoating minorities to remain in power, in order to prevent the big corporations and wealthy from being blamed by the depreciating state of the French working class. Better to blame unions and minorities for the sorry state of the corporate-dominated French economy.

The only way to combat political scapegoating is to focus on the social forces responsible for the economic crisis and have them pay for the solutions that they are demanding the working class to pay through austerity measures and lower wages.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org).

14 January, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Mustapha Marrouchi

Like everyone else on the planet, I have been following the carnage that has been taking place in Paris; a carnage that has left nearly twenty people dead, including a black woman from Africa recently appointed a policewoman, a French policeman of Algerian descent, and three “terrorists,” also of African lineage. And while it is inhuman not to feel sympathy for all the victims who died in horrible conditions, we must remind ourselves of the stand that France has been taking vis-à-vis many issues concerning Muslims living inside its belly. For France, unlike the other colonial powers, has never faced up to its xenophobic past, especially when it has to do with those from The Maghreb.

France has banned the hijab by law, has barred the road to any form of political representation (foreigners forever yet not one of the five million French of Maghrebian descent hold a seat the French Parliament), has continued to play a game of hide and seek when it comes to the question of the Arab, who has been described as banlieusard (i.e. vermin, rat, locust). Think about it. To hear (and many French do) that Islam is a religion for idiots is not uncommon in France. If this sounds too extreme, all you need to do is to read France’s most celebrated writer, Michel Houellebecq and the case will be clear enough. This is a country that pries itself on being the only functioning democracy in the world yet gives no voice to those it considers lesser people except to pray in the streets of Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and elsewhere; a country that says it is the cradle of the Rights of Man yet does allow the dissemination of several abject cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, the sensibility par excellence for millions of Muslims, in the name of freedom of speech is to ask for trouble, to say the least. What else did these cartoonists expect? When you attack the last rampart, the terminus, the citadel of a religion that struggles on a daily basis to shield itself from all sorts of invasions coming from the West: Nike, CNN, BBC, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, you must take responsibility for your actions. Il faut assumer, as the French like to intone.

To degrade a man—namely, Muhammed, is to sally the very core of a cultural, social, economic, spiritual, and even metaphysical value that is so dear to so many people; people who may have nothing at all at home but who have plenty if they have a Qur’an they can cling to, a book that is held in some quarters dearer than life itself. In the West, on the other hand, we must call a spade and spade. This is done, we are told, in the name of saying it as it is in an enlightened West. Well, were the very same Charlie Hebdo to try and criticize Israel, or claim that the Shoah never existed, which it did, or that the Holocaust is a tall tale, which it is not, then we will see what happens to the so-called sacred freedom of expression. It will be savaged, taken off the shelves, eradicated tout court. To that effect, we still recall how the comedian Dieudonné and his quenelles were meted in a ruthless way simply because he was deemed to be un agent provocateur to public order (i.e. anti-Semitic and therefore undesirable). He was not only banned in France but in the rest of Europe as well thanks to the pressure brought to bear on him by a powerful Jewish lobby that stands as a chienne de garde for everything that is meant to harm Judaism/Israel and its image in the world. But to typecast Muslims and/or their Prophet, a man who stood for tolerance, equality, and modesty; a man who has been compared to Charlemagne and Jesus, is fair game because Muslims the world over are still thought of as the “small” people who understand only the language of force, who are barbaric and backward and stupid and deserve to be pissed on. But we, on the other hand, are civilized, advanced, and rational. Any representation of them (Muslims) is therefore fair game. After all, if you go after the source, the origin, the beginning as it is embodied in the Prophet, and get away with it, then the sky is the limit.

Here, one particular culprit comes to mind, someone who opened the Pandora Box for many to follow. That person is Salman Rushdie. Muslims have never had a break ever since The Satanic Verses came out in 1987.[2] Oddly enough, I have a copy signed by Monsieur Rushdie himself. The team of cartoonists who were killed in Paris were marching in the footsteps of Rushdie, Hirsi Ali, Anne Coulter, Niall Ferguson and Co. Their main objective is to insult in the most hideous way Muslims and what they hold dear, very dear. There is an irony worth mentioning here in that I have never heard a Muslim saying something negative about Jesus or Moses or David or Buddha any other prophet for that matter. In fact, they treat all prophets with reverence. One does expect the same to happen on the other side. For the West, though, nothing is sacred. Their argument is that we are here to debunk, satirize, and degrade everyone and everything that stands in our way of thinking. Well, the Prophet Muhammed is not everyone. Like Moses, Abraham, David, he is someone and ought therefore to be treated with respect and even veneration.

In the midst of the tragedy that took place in Paris, the West cannot accept the fact that it is unable to force so many of the earth’s people to embrace all of its ideals, to bow to all its ideas, and to sit aside and watch while they are defaced and disfigured. The time has come for such a West to reconsider its views about the rest of us, to rethink its ideas about not only freedom of expression but also about how far it can go to diminish those of us who believe and do not believe in another Supreme Being as Nietzsche once put it. The West should know better than sally a people and one person they hold high up there. That one person is the Prophet Muhammed. For many, including those alienated young men who killed the cartoonists in Paris, he is a reason for being, refuge, a tiny corner where they can run in times of desperation, reclaim their identity, and be who they truly are. It is funny, is it not, that the weapons the men used to kill their victims are made in the West, the virtuous West who intervenes in a Rambo-like fashion in Libya, Mali, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria; a West that says very little when innocent civilians are killed in Palestine and elsewhere as if they were flies in the name of national security; a West that fathered the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, Zionism, colonialism, racism; a West that calls the Paris killers “barbarians” yet drops bombs on innocent civilians whom it deems “collateral damage.” It is a sad state of affairs.

In the end, do I feel sorry for those who were shot in Paris? Of course, I do. Any decent human being would feel terrible about what happened. But at the same time and until the West and the Rest speak the same language; until we are able to come to an understanding that the loss of human lives is the same the world over, that the spilling of blood of one life in Paris is no more, no less precious than another in Gaza; until we realize that there is enough room for all of us to live in harmony with each other without prejudice, only then can we claim to be decent and fair-minded and possibly even civilized. Otherwise, we are all barbarians avant la lettre, except that some of us are more astute at manicuring their barbarity that others.

An internationally renowned literary and cultural critic, Mustapha Marrouchi lives on borderline between the West and Rest. He is the author of half-a-dozen books, including The Fabric of Subcultures.

[1] Mustapha Ourrad who died in the assault was the copy-editor for Charlie Hebdo. The other victim of Maghrebian origin is the policeman who was shot at point blank and died instantly on the pavement in front of the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo. Ironically, their names have hardly been mentioned in the Western media. They remain a non-entity.

[2] The following is a piece I wrote against orthodoxy and in favor of Rushdie’s right to freedom of expression. See Mustapha Marrouchi, “Salman Rushdie in Alphaville, at Cross-Purposes,” Brick (Summer 1989): 38-46.

14 January, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By John Chuckman

The Extremely Dark and Unexamined Underside of the Charlie Hebdo Affair

We hear much about bloody events in Paris being an attack upon western traditions and freedom of the press, and I am sorry but such claims are close to laughable, even though there is nothing remotely funny about mass murder. It certainly is not part of the best western tradition to insult the revered figures of major religions. You are, of course, technically free to do so in many western countries – always remembering that in many of them, a wrong target for your satire will get you a prison term for “hate crimes” – but it does represent little more than poor judgement and extremely bad taste to exercise that particular freedom. What Charlie Hebdo does is not journalism, it is sophomoric jokes and thinly disguised propaganda. Hebdo ‘s general tone and themes place it completely outside the mythic tableau of heroic defender of free speech or daring journalism, it being very much a vehicle for the interests of American imperialism through NATO.

Of course, the best western traditions don’t outlaw what garments or symbols people may wear for their beliefs, as France has done. Note also the history of some of the politicians making grandiose statements about freedom of the press. Nicolas Sarkozy was involved a number of times in suppressing stories in the press, even once getting a journalist fired. Sarkozy is a man, by the way, who took vast, illegal secret payments from the late Muammar Gaddafi and from France’s richest heiress to secure his election as president. David Cameron had police seize computers at Guardian offices and allows Julian Assange to remain cooped in the Embassy of Ecuador to avoid trumped-up charges in Sweden. Cameron is also best buddies with Rupert Murdoch, the man whose idea of journalism appears to be what he can dredge up to exchange for what he wants from government. His Fox News in the United States enjoys a reputation for telling the truth only by sheer accident. Barack Obama is a man transfixed by secrecy and ready to use all of his powers to punish those who tell the truth, a man who holds hundreds in secret prisons, and a man who regularly oversees the extrajudicial execution of hundreds and hundreds of people in a number of countries.

The parade celebrating the good things of western tradition – which Obama missed but which saw now-potential presidential candidate Sarkozy shove his way to the front – also included such luminaries as the Foreign Minister of Egypt’s extremely repressive government, which, even as the minister marched proudly, held innocent journalists in prison simply for writing the truth. The Prime Minister of Turkey was there celebrating, a man who has put a number of journalists in jail. Celebrating rights and freedoms also was King Abdullah of Jordan who once saw a Palestinian journalist sentenced to hard labor for writing so simple a truth as that the king was dependent upon Israel for power.

We shouldn’t forget, too, that Israel targeted and killed a number of journalists in its Gaza invasions, that the United States’ forces in Iraq targeted and killed a number of journalists, and that “NATO” deliberately targeted Serbia’s state television service with bombing, killing many civilians. Free speech and western traditions, indeed.

There are more doubts and questions in the Charlie Hebdo affair than there will ever be answers. In part this is because the French security forces silenced witnesses, killing three assumed perpetrators in a display which seems to say that Dirty Harry movies are now part of French training programs.

And then we have the sudden death by apparent suicide of a police commissioner in charge of the investigation just as he was writing his report alone at night, an event which received little mainline press coverage. A man in his forties in the midst of likely the biggest case of his career just decides to kill himself?

We should all be extremely suspicious of a trained killer, seen as being informed and exceedingly efficient at his work, leaving behind his identity card in an abandoned car. It really is a touch more serendipity than we would credit in a mystery story. We should all be extremely suspicious of men so obviously well trained in military techniques, about men who were well informed about schedules at the offices they attacked, and about men heavily armed in the center of Paris. People serving in notorious killer outfits like America’s SEALs or Britain’s SAS rarely achieve such complete success as twelve victims, all shot dead, and an easy get-away.

And just to add to the confusion we have the video of one of the armed men shooting a police officer lying on the sidewalk. The armed man, face covered, lowers his AK-47 to within a couple of feet of the victim’s head and fires. The head goes down, but we see no blood. Have you ever seen photos of someone shot in the head with a high velocity weapon? That’s what the Zapruder film is about, and the results are more like an exploding pumpkin than a death at the end of a stage play. Even the propaganda-ridden BBC now has expressed doubts about the video.

We need to be more than suspicious about anyone or any event which has any connection with ISIS. ISIS is one of the terror groups assembled, armed, and supplied by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States for the deliberate and wanton destruction of Syria. The two brothers killed in Paris both fought in Syria. It certainly would be easy enough for someone to have obtained an ID card there from one of them. Remember, the excesses of ISIS we all read about – at least those that aren’t clearly staged propaganda stunts such as video of a hostage beheading – are the direct result of assembling large bands of cutthroats and fanatics, arming them, and setting them loose to terrorize someone else’s country.

It is the simplistic view of ISIS that the involved intelligence services want us to have that it is a spontaneous fanatical rebellion in favor of one extreme interpretation of Islam. Despite many recruits for ISIS holding what are undoubtedly genuine fanatical beliefs, they almost certainly have no idea who actually pays their salaries or provides their equipment – that is simply the way black intelligence operations work. And those participating in such operations are completely disposable in the eyes of those running them, as when the United States bombs some in ISIS who perhaps exceeded their brief.

Every society has some percentage of its population which is dangerously mad, and if such people are gathered together and given weapons, their beliefs are almost beside the point, except that they provide the targeting mechanism used by those doing the organizing.

We should all be extremely suspicious about any event when a man such as Rupert Murdoch is quoted afterward saying, “Muslims must be held responsible for jihadist cancer,” as he was in The Independent . In case you forgot, Murdoch is a man whose news organizations for years lied, stole, and violated a number of laws to obtain juicy tidbits for his chain of cheesy mass-circulation newspapers. Murdoch also is a man who has had the most intimate and influential relationships with several prime ministers including that smarmy criminal, Tony Blair, and that current mindless windbag and ethical nullity, David Cameron. Publicity from large circulation newspapers, which can swing at a moment’s notice from supporting to attacking you, plus campaign contributions buy a lot of government compliance. Murdoch also is one of the world’s most tireless supporters of Israel’s criminal excesses.

And speaking of David Cameron, Murdoch’s made man in Britain, David felt compelled to chime in on the Hebdo publicity extravaganza with, “Muslims face a special burden on extremism….” Now, why would that be? No less than Murdoch’s creepy words, Cameron’s statement is an indefensible thing to say.

Who has a special burden for the massacre of students at Columbine High school in Colorado? Who has a special burden for Israeli Baruch Goldstein who murdered 29 Palestinians as they worshipped? Do Noweigians bear a special burden for Anders Breivik, who shot 69 people, mostly children, perhaps the most bizarre mass murderer of our times? Does the American Army bear a special burden for Timothy McVeigh’s horrific bombing in Oklahoma City, killing 168, he and his associates having met in Fort Benning during basic training, two of them having been roommates? Perhaps, in both these latter cases, Christianity bears a special burden since these people were exposed to that religion early in life? As was Hitler, as was Stalin, as was Mussolini, as was Franco, as was Ceau?escu, as was Pinochet, and countless other blood-drenched villains?

The late Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, was responsible for a great many murders, including about a hundred people bombed in a terror attack on the King David Hotel. He also was responsible for the assassination of the distinguished Swedish diplomat, Count Folke Bernadotte, and he started the invasion of Lebanon which eventually left thousands dead, but you’ll have a hard time finding him described anywhere as a “Jewish terrorist” or finding prominent people asking who has a special responsibility for his extraordinarily bloody career.

There is something hateful and poisonous in conflating the religious background of a criminal or mentally unbalanced person and his violent crime. We seem to do this only in cases involving violent men with Muslim backgrounds. Why? How is it possible that even one decent Muslim in this world has any responsibility for the acts of madmen who happen to be Muslim? This gets at one of the deep veins of hate and prejudice in western society today, Islamophobia, a vein regularly mined by our “free” press and by our ‘democratic” governments. Our establishment having embraced Israel’s excesses and pretensions, we have been pushed into worshipping the mumbo-jumbo of Islamic terror, a phenomenon virtually invented in Israel and perpetuated by Israel’s apologists as a way of stopping anyone from asking why Israel does not make peace, stop abusing millions of people, and return to its recognized borders.

Well, we do have an entire industry exploiting every event which may be imagined as terror. I read an interview with the great cartoonist, Robert Crumb, who happens to live in France. When asked if any other journalists had approached him on the topic of controversial cartoons, he said that there weren’t any journalists in America anymore, just 250,000 public relations people. That is precisely the state of American journalism. It digs into nothing, at least nothing of consequence, working full time to manage the public’s perceptions of government and its dreadful policies, from murdering innocents with drones and remaining quiet on the many American and Israeli atrocities of recent decades to manipulating fears of “terrorism” and saying little about such domestic horrors as the many hundreds of citizens shot dead by American police every single year.

The French government is reported to have been quite concerned about Benjamin Netanyahu showing up at the Paris march and making volatile speeches, and they specifically asked him not to come. At first, Netanyahu’s own security service, Shin Bet, agreed that he should not go because the parade in the streets represented a difficult security situation. But neither the host government’s formal request nor the security service’s concerns can stop a man like Netanyahu. France was advised he would come, and the French made their displeasure clear by saying they would then also invite Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestine Authority to the parade, which they did.

Netanyahu not only marched for the cameras at the front rank of a parade where he had no business, he made arrangements with the families of four Jewish victims for an all-expense-paid showy funeral in Jerusalem. None of the victims was even an Israeli citizen, yet at this writing they have all been buried in there with pomp and plenty of publicity. But Netanyahu didn’t stop there, he went on to make speeches that the French and other European Jews should leave their countries riddled with anti-Semitism and come to Israel, their true homeland. In diplomatic terms, this was what is termed unacceptable behavior which in almost any other case would get you thrown out of a country. In ordinary terms, it was outrageous behavior, much like seeing a seriously drunken guest loudly insulting his host at a party to which he was not even invited.

The ineffectual current President of France, François Hollande, sent notice to Jerusalem that the four dead shop victims were being awarded the Légion d’Honneur , France’s highest honor. The nation’s highest honor, founded by Napoleon over two hundred years ago for exceptional contributions to the state, awarded for the act of being murdered by thugs? Simply bizarre.

I don’t pretend to understand everything involved in this complex set of events, but it is unmistakable that we are being manipulated by a number unscrupulous and unethical people who use murder victims and the public’s natural sympathies for them as board pieces in some much larger game.

There is even a trivial side to these bloody events with many Parisians carrying signs which read “Je suis Charlie,” surely the kind of asininity posing as deep feeling that long has been established in the United States where Walmart teddy bears and plastic flowers with cheap slogans are regularly tossed in piles here and there as memorials to this or that. Perhaps Euro-Disney has had a more devastating influence on French culture than I realized.

John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company.

14 January, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Ulrich Rippert

Governments throughout Europe have responded to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in France by moving quickly to push through a raft of anti-democratic measures. They are exploiting the shock and confusion generated by the event in Paris to take actions that have long been prepared, but that have so far encountered resistance.

Immediately after the attacks, the police presence at airports, in front of embassies, government buildings, newspaper offices and public places was reinforced by thousands of security forces in European capitals and major cities.

Heavily armed and camouflaged military troops have been deployed throughout Paris and elsewhere in France, including at the Eiffel Tower and in all public places. Parts of the city resemble a war zone.

On Monday, the Ministry of Defence in Paris announced the deployment of 10,000 troops to maintain peace and order and protect public buildings. In addition, the government has provided 4,700 police officers and gendarmes to guard Jewish schools and synagogues that are considered particularly vulnerable.

After a cabinet meeting on Monday, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian spoke of a permanent threat. Prime Minister Manuel Valls promised more money for the secret services and more effective surveillance.

At a security summit last weekend in Brussels, the European powers agreed that a European-wide passenger data system must be adopted as soon as possible. Airlines will be obliged to retain the records of their passengers for up to five years. US General Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA and chief of the NSA, also took part in the meeting. Hayden has been responsible for implementing and expanding much of the illegal and unconstitutional spying programs developed in the United States.

Individual countries throughout Europe are planning their own measures. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) has called for better international intelligence cooperation.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière (CDU) stressed on Monday that one of the most important measures in Germany was the deployment of more intelligence staff for the monitoring of Islamic fundamentalist groups. For this, funding would have to be significantly increased, he said.

De Maizière and others have called for the reintroduction of data warehousing. In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that the mass storage of telephone, e-mail and internet traffic data of all users for several months, without any grounds of suspicion, was legally questionable.

Last year, the European Court of Justice ruled that such monitoring and collection of personal data was illegal. It explained that the storage of communications could not abrogate professional secrets, including those of journalists. Now, in the name of defending the freedom of the press, the German ruling class is pushing to rapidly implement these anti-democratic measures.

Also on Monday, Justice Minister Heiko Maas (Social Democratic Party, SPD) said that individuals accused of traveling to participate in terrorist activity will face even harsher punishment. Up to now, only those attending a terrorist camp in order to prepare an attack could be punished. In the future, it will be a criminal offence to travel abroad with the intention of participating in attacks or to train as a terrorist. It will make no difference whether the accused individual actually arrives at the terrorist camp.

According to political weekly Die Zeit domestic political affairs spokesman Burkhard Lischka (SPD) complained that there are cases in which someone expressed their intentions in a letter or on a social network, but could not be prosecuted. In the future, these individuals could be detained in Germany or abroad.

The Minister of Justice also wants to create a specific criminal offence of financing terrorism. Donations of all sizes supposedly aimed at supporting terrorist activities would be punishable. In the US, such laws have been broadly applied and used to target groups that are not directly connected to any Islamic fundamentalist organizations.

Later this week, the government in Germany will consider a bill that provides for the withdrawal of identity cards from “potential attackers.” It is already possible to withdraw a suspect’s passport under certain conditions.

In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has announced a drastic expansion of Internet surveillance. He wants to ban encryption programmes and news services like WhatsApp.

Cameron said that there must be no “means of communication” that “we cannot read.” Previous governments have hesitated in taking such steps, Cameron said, but they are necessary so that, “in extremis,” any communication could be obtained with a signed warrant from the Home Secretary.

The “Snoopers Charter”, as these proposals came to be known when they were first introduced, failed to pass parliament in 2012. They would require communications companies to retain details of their entire communication traffic for twelve months. Any person who communicates using encryption or sends encrypted files would be required to provide government officials access to cryptographically-protected information. Those refusing to hand over their password could face up to two years in prison.

The Italian government under Prime Minister Matteo Renzi (PD, Democratic Party) has also announced a significant expansion of state powers. Interior Minister Angelino Alfano has announced that he will introduce a bill in the Council of Ministers that will enable the police to withdraw the passport of any terrorism suspect.

In addition, Alfano will provide the police and judiciary with extraordinary powers that will allow increased Internet surveillance. The government is planning to shut down suspicious websites. Internet service providers must cooperate in the future, to “track messages in the network that contribute to radicalization,” Alfano said. The government would prohibit providers “from accepting websites that incite terrorist behavior.”

The main purpose of this coordinated offensive by the European powers is not the fight against an alleged “Islamist threat.” The ruling elites are increasingly turning the continent into a police state as popular resistance against the European Union and its policies is growing. The military employed in the streets of Paris, the building up of the intelligence apparatus and the assault on democratic rights are directed above all at the growing opposition in the European working class to austerity at home and unending war abroad.

14 January, 2015
WSWS.org

 

 

By Mehdi Hasan

Dear liberal pundit,

You and I didn’t like George W Bush. Remember his puerile declaration after 9/11 that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”? Yet now, in the wake of another horrific terrorist attack, you appear to have updated Dubya’s slogan: either you are with free speech… or you are against it. Either vous êtes Charlie Hebdo… or you’re a freedom-hating fanatic.

I’m writing to you to make a simple request: please stop. You think you’re defying the terrorists when, in reality, you’re playing into their bloodstained hands by dividing and demonising. Us and them. The enlightened and liberal west v the backward, barbaric Muslims. The massacre in Paris on 7 January was, you keep telling us, an attack on free speech. The conservative former French president Nicolas Sarkozy agrees, calling it “a war declared on civilisation”. So, too, does the liberal-left pin-up Jon Snow, who crassly tweeted about a “clash of civilisations” and referred to “Europe’s belief in freedom of expression”.

In the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a “bid to assassinate” free speech (ITV’s Mark Austin), to “desecrate” our ideas of “free thought” (Stephen Fry)? It was a crime – not an act of war – perpetrated by disaffected young men; radicalised not by drawings of the Prophet in Europe in 2006 or 2011, as it turns out, but by images of US torture in Iraq in 2004.

Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.

Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn’t think so (and I am glad it hasn’t). Consider also the “thought experiment” offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the “unity rally” in Paris on 11 January “wearing a badge that said ‘Je suis Chérif'” – the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. “How would the crowd have reacted?… Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?” Do you disagree with Klug’s conclusion that the man “would have been lucky to get away with his life”?

SEE ALSO: #WhoIsMuhammad takes over Twitter to reclaim the Prophet for Islam

Let’s be clear: I agree there is no justification whatsoever for gunning down journalists or cartoonists. I disagree with your seeming view that the right to offend comes with no corresponding responsibility; and I do not believe that a right to offend automatically translates into a duty to offend.

When you say “Je suis Charlie”, is that an endorsement of Charlie Hebdo’s depiction of the French justice minister, Christiane Taubira, who is black, drawn as a monkey? Of crude caricatures of bulbous-nosed Arabs that must make Edward Said turn in his grave?

Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic. Also, as the former Charlie Hebdo journalist Olivier Cyran argued in 2013, an “Islamophobic neurosis gradually took over” the magazine after 9/11, which then effectively endorsed attacks on “members of a minority religion with no influence in the corridors of power”.

It’s for these reasons that I can’t “be”, don’t want to “be”, Charlie – if anything, we should want to be Ahmed, the Muslim policeman who was killed while protecting the magazine’s right to exist. As the novelist Teju Cole has observed, “It is possible to defend the right to obscene… speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech.”

And why have you been so silent on the glaring double standards? Did you not know that Charlie Hebdo sacked the veteran French cartoonist Maurice Sinet in 2008 for making an allegedly anti-Semitic remark? Were you not aware that Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published caricatures of the Prophet in 2005, reportedly rejected cartoons mocking Christ because they would “provoke an outcry” and proudly declared it would “in no circumstances… publish Holocaust cartoons”?

Muslims, I guess, are expected to have thicker skins than their Christian and Jewish brethren. Context matters, too. You ask us to laugh at a cartoon of the Prophet while ignoring the vilification of Islam across the continent (have you visited Germany lately?) and the widespread discrimination against Muslims in education, employment and public life – especially in France. You ask Muslims to denounce a handful of extremists as an existential threat to free speech while turning a blind eye to the much bigger threat to it posed by our elected leaders.

Does it not bother you to see Barack Obama – who demanded that Yemen keep the anti-drone journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye behind bars, after he was convicted on “terrorism-related charges” in a kangaroo court – jump on the free speech ban wagon? Weren’t you sickened to see Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of a country that was responsible for the killing of seven journalists in Gaza in 2014, attend the “unity rally” in Paris? Bibi was joined by Angela Merkel, chancellor of a country where Holocaust denial is punishable by up to five years in prison, and David Cameron, who wants to ban non-violent “extremists” committed to the “overthrow of democracy” from appearing on television.

Then there are your readers. Will you have a word with them, please? According to a 2011 YouGov poll, 82% of voters backed the prosecution of protesters who set fire to poppies.

Apparently, it isn’t just Muslims who get offended.

Yours faithfully,

Mehdi

Mehdi Hasan is the political director of The Huffington Post UK.

By Anne Norton

I condemn the murderers who attacked Charlie Hebdo. I condemn the demand that calls us to say #jesuischarlie. Condemning murder does not require the embrace of bigotry. The demand that we embrace Charlie Hebdo belongs to Europe’s rightward turn.

#jesuischarlie might be meant as solidarity. But it calls for an identity bounded by bigotry. Charlie Hebdo is a scurrilous rag, willfully offensive, that defended the powerful by attacking the weak. The journal ‘s favored practice was baiting the Muslim minority: developing ever more pornographic and offensive blasphemies. Muslims in France, especially religious Muslims, are a minority, subject to daily slights and institutional discrimination. Charlie Hebdo manifested its moral courage in a continual parade of hook-nosed Muslims (often Mohammad), leering and lustful, held up for the mocking amusement of secular elites. I mourn the dead. I defend freedom of expression, but I want no part in that. I am not Charlie Hebdo.

They have the right to write, to publish what they choose. We should defend that right, but we are not obliged to praise or agree with Charlie Hebdo. We are not obliged to republish their shameful cartoons, or defend their bigotry. The demand that we do so is another attack on free speech. It is requiring us to speak a script dictated by others, to speak against our will.

I fear for a Europe that embraces these practices.

#jesuischarlie says if you are not Charlie, you are not ours, you are alien. It’s us against them (and you know who they are). There is a close kinship between the seemingly liberal #jesuischarlie and the French right of the le Pens, père et fille. Both know who doesn’t belong. Both seek a single France, unified in culture and practice. Both call for placing religious Muslims, perhaps Muslims altogether, perhaps even those of Arab descent, outside the boundaries of France, of the West.
We can see this in the photographs of the victims, photos that rarely include the two victims with Arab names; two working people: the copywriter and the policeman.

Though they disagree on the France they want, much of the French right and left concur in the demand that France be a single people, alike in their public practices, marked by no sign of religious difference. Right and Left reject the “unassimilable” and regret “the failure of integration.” They seize on the ritual humiliation of those who are not like them as an occasion for solidarity. The “je suis charlie” hashtag makes unanimity compulsory: we must all be Charlie, we must all agree, we must all be one.

No. We should be able to value, and to mourn, the lives of those we disagree with.

I mourn. I am angry at an unjust and shameful attack. I grieve the lives lost — all the lives, not least Ahmed Merabet, the policeman who was one of the first victims of the murderers. His murder is the only one seen, yet it has been rendered almost invisible. Officer Merabet was there to guard Charlie Hebdo. That is duty. That is bravery. That is the defense of free speech. He belongs to a larger France, and a better Europe.

Anne Norton is Professor of Political Science and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

10 January 2015

By Tony Cartalucci

Corroborating claims by French security agencies, a bizarre interview conducted just before the death of terror suspect Chérif Kouachi reveals that he had been in Yemen and in direct contact with none other than Anwar Al Awlaki – the notorious Al Qaeda leader allegedly killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

The UK Mirror in an article titled, “Paris shootings: Listen to terrorist Amedy Coulibaly’s bizarre conversation with hostage during supermarket siege,” quoted Kouachi as saying:
We are just telling you we are the defenders of the prophet and that I Chérif Kouachi have been sent by Al Qaida of Yemen and that I went over there and that Anwar Al Awaki financed me.

Not only was Anwar Al Awlaki a senior leader in Al Qaeda, he also infamously spent dinner with top brass at the Pentagon shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks in Washington, New York, and over Pennsylvania.

CBS News would report in their article, “Qaeda-Linked Imam Dined at Pentagon after 9/11,” that:
Anwar al-Awlaki – the radical spiritual leader linked to several 9/11 attackers, the Fort Hood shooting, and the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an airliner – was a guest at the Pentagon in the months after 9/11, a Pentagon official confirmed to CBS News.
Awlaki was invited as “…part of an informal outreach program” in which officials sought contact “…with leading members of the Muslim community,” the official said. At that time, Awlaki was widely viewed as a “moderate” imam at a mosque in Northern Virginia.
At the same time, the FBI was also interviewing Awlaki about his contacts with three of the 9/11 attackers – Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al Midhar and Hani Hanjour – who were all part of the crew of five that hijacked the American Airlines jet that hit the Pentagon.

Indeed, Anwar Al Awlaki would admit to having met Hazmi – in yet another incident the general public is supposed to believe is simply an astonishing coincidence.

The list of “coincidences” and “accidents” is so far impressive and include the following:

1. French authorities arrested and imprisoned Chérif Kouachi in 2005 for terrorism. He would be released in 2008 after sentencing was suspended for “time served,” this despite evidence suggesting Kouachi may have even gone as far with his plot as travel to Yemen. Slate Magazine would report in their article, “The Details of Paris Suspect Cherif Kouachi’s 2008 Terrorism Conviction,” that:
Kouachi was arrested in January 2005, accused of planning to join jihadists in Iraq. He was said to have fallen under the sway of Farid Benyettou, a young “self-taught preacher” who advocated violence, but had not actually yet traveled to Iraq or committed any acts of terror. Lawyers at the time said he had not received weapons training and “had begun having second thoughts,” going so far as to express “relief” that he’d been apprehended.

2. Kouachi and brother Said would be implicated in another terrorist plot again in 2010 but were not prosecuted due to a lack of evidence. The BBC in their report titled, “Charlie Hebdo attack: Suspects’ profiles,” would state:
In 2010 Cherif Kouachi was named in connection with a plot to spring another Islamist, Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, from jail – a plot hatched by Beghal, according to French anti-terror police.
Belkacem used to be in the outlawed Algerian Islamic Armed Group (GIA) and was jailed for life in 2002 for a Paris metro station bombing in 1995 which injured 30 people.
Said Kouachi, 34, was also named in the Belkacem plot, but the brothers were not prosecuted because of a lack of evidence.

3. With French intelligence agencies’ knowledge, the Kouachi brothers would then travel to Yemen in 2011, receiving weapons training directly from Al Qaeda. CNN’s report titled, “France tells U.S. Paris suspect trained with al Qaeda in Yemen,” would report:
A U.S. official says the United States was given information from the French intelligence agency that Said Kouachi traveled to Yemen as late as 2011 on behalf of the al Qaeda affiliate there. Once in Yemen, the older brother of the two received a variety of weapons training from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) — the affiliate in Yemen — the official said, including on how to fire weapons. It is also possible Said was trained in bomb making, a common jihadist training in Yemen. Two other U.S. officials confirmed that information about the Yemeni travel was passed to the U.S. from French intelligence agencies.
In addition, French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview broadcast on CNN International that one of the brothers traveled to Yemen in 2005. Taubira would not say which brother.
Admissions that one of the brothers had traveled to Yemen in 2005, suggests the possibility he may indeed have received weapons training from Al Qaeda before his arrest and imprisonment later that same year.

4. It was reported that the brothers then fought in Syria before returning last summer, approximately 6 months ago. USA Today would report in an article titled, “Manhunt continues for two French terror suspects,” that:
The brothers were born in Paris of Algerian descent. Cherif was sentenced to three years in prison on terrorism charges in May 2008. Both brothers returned from Syria this summer.

5. Also about 6 months ago, French intelligence decided the suspects’ serial offenses along with their direct contact with Al Qaeda – including the receiving of terrorist training and battlefield experience fighting along side them in Syria – were “low risk” cases and therefore not worthy of their attention.

Astoundingly, UK’s Daily Mail would report in their article, “Revealed: Police stopped watching Paris killers six months ago after terror cell of kosher deli attacker and his crossbow jihadi wife – who has fled to Syria – were deemed ‘low-risk’,” that:
The world’s most wanted female terrorist has fled to Syria, it was revealed last night – as police admitted they stopped surveillance on her deadly Parisian cell six months ago because they were deemed ‘low-risk’.
The Daily Mail would go on to report on other cell members including Amedy Coulibaly, also killed by police during the recent shootings and attacks in Paris – also a notorious serial offender, known terrorist, and also previously arrested, convicted, and sentenced to prison for terrorism.
Who decided this cell was “low risk” six months ago? That is probably where the French people should begin searching for justice – if justice is in fact what they seek.

Six months, coincidentally, is also about the typical length (6-10 months) of security and intelligence “sting operations” targeting terrorists. It provides an appropriate time frame within which an event like the recent attacks could have been planned, funded, and eventually carried out. The public is expected to believe this obvious terror cell who had been in and out of prison for terrorism over the course of a decade and in direct contact with Al Qaeda, was suddenly dropped from the attention of French intelligence just in time for them to carry out their most spectacular crime to date?

Who decided this cell was “low risk” six months ago? That is probably where the French people should begin searching for justice – if justice is in fact what they seek.

Europe Has Been Here Before

Unfortunately, these “coincidences” and “accidents” are not coincidences and accidents at all. They fit an obvious pattern of staged provocations within the context of an intentionally engineered “strategy of tension,” identical but scaled up from what NATO was exposed to have committed during the Cold War as part of its “stay behind networks,” more commonly known as “Operation Gladio.”

Indeed, if NATO could carry out attacks during the Cold War, targeting Western Europeans in deadly brutality designed to appear as the work of NATO’s enemies, why would NATO now be suddenly excused from the investigation as a prime suspect? With the “coincidences” and “accidents” described above, those occupying the highest of France’s political, military, and intelligence offices, should be removed, tried, and imprisoned for criminal negligence at the very least.

As the puzzle pieces continue to fit together, the picture that appears is one of brazen, intentional provocation either to divide society at home, or wage war abroad, or both. And as this picture comes into focus, the rhetoric designed to distract the public from seeing it will reach a fever pitch.

11 January 2015

By Olivier Roy

FLORENCE — The attack against the Paris satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has re-launched an ongoing debate in France about the compatibility between Islam and the West. The issue is more fraught in Western Europe than in the United States because of the huge number of Muslims who are not only settled there, but who also have citizenship.

By a strange coincidence, on the same day of the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo, we saw the long awaited release of the most recent novel by the bestselling French author Michel Houellebecq, titled “Submission.” The book imagines the victory of a moderate Muslim party in the 2022 French presidential and parliamentary elections.

The issue of the compatibility between Islam and French or Western political culture is no longer confined to the usual suspects: the populist right, conservative Christians or staunch secularists from the left. The issue has become emotional and now pervades the entire political spectrum. The Muslim population — which does not identify with the terrorists — now fears an anti-Muslim backlash.

Roughly speaking, two narratives are conflicting: the dominant one claims that Islam is the main issue, because it puts loyalty toward the faith community before loyalty to the nation, it does not accept criticism, does not compromise on norms and values and condones specific forms of violence like jihad. For the adherents of this narrative, the only solution is a theological reformation that would generate a “good” Islam that is a liberal, feminist and gay-friendly religion. Journalists and politicians are always tracking the “good Muslims” and summoning them to show their credentials as “moderate.”

On the other side, many Muslims, secular or believers, supported by a multiculturalist left, claim that radicalization does not come from Islam but from disenfranchised youth who are victims of racism and exclusion, and that the real issue is Islamophobia. They condemn terrorism while denouncing the backlash that could in turn radicalize more Muslim youth.

The problem is that both narratives presuppose the existence of a French “Muslim community” of which the terrorists are a sort of “vanguard.”

“Muslims are criticized for being a community, but then asked to react against terrorism as a community. This is called the double bind: be what I ask you not to be.”

The juxtaposition of these two narratives has created a deadlock. To overcome this, it is necessary to first take into account a number of inescapable facts — facts which we do not want to acknowledge because they show us that the radicalized young people are in no way the vanguard or the spokesmen of the Muslim population, and in particular, that there is no “Muslim community” in France.

Radicalized young people, who rely heavily on an imagined Muslim politics (the Ummah of earlier times) are deliberately at odds with the Islam of their parents, as well as Muslim culture overall.

They invent an Islam which opposes itself to the West. They come from the periphery of the Muslim word. They are moved to action by the displays of violence in the media of Western culture. They embody a generational rupture (parents now call the police when their children leave for Syria), and they are not involved with the local religious community and the neighborhood mosques.

These young people practice self-radicalization on the Internet, searching for a global jihad. They are not interested in the tangible concerns of the Muslim world, such as Palestine. In short, they are not seeking the Islamization of the society in which they live but the realization of their sick fantasy of heroism (“We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad,” claimed some of the killers at Charlie Hebdo).

The great majority of the converted amongst radicals clearly shows that radicalization is taking place among a marginal fringe of the youth, and not at the heart of the Muslim population.

BEYOND CLICHES

Conversely, one might say, the facts show that French Muslims are more integrated than commonly thought. Each “Islamist” attack has involved at least one Muslim victim amongst the police force — for example Imad Ibn Ziaten, a French soldier killed by Mohamed Merah in Toulouse in 2012, or the officer Ahmed Merabet, killed when he tried to stop the killers at the Charlie Hebdo offices.

Instead of being cited as examples, they are considered counter-examples. The “real” Muslim is said to be the terrorist and the others are the exceptions. But statistically, this is false: in France, there are more Muslims in the army, the police, and the gendarmes than in the Al Qaeda network, not to mention in government administration, the hospitals, law practices or the educational system.

Another cliché is that Muslims do not condemn terrorism. But the Internet is overflowing with condemnations and anti-terrorist fatwas (Just one example).

If the facts contradict the thesis of the radicalization of the Muslim population, then why are they not recognized? Because one attributes to the Muslim population a far-reaching community for which they are, at the same time, criticized for not exhibiting.

Muslims are criticized for being a community, but then asked to react against terrorism as a community. This is called the double bind: be what I ask you not to be.

“In France, there is not a Muslim community, but a Muslim population.”

If, at the local level, in the neighborhoods, there are certain forms of community, such a thing does not exist at the national level. The Muslims of France have never had the desire to put in place representative institutions or even, at the very least, a Muslim lobby. There are no signs pointing toward the beginning of the establishment of a Muslim political party. The candidates of the political sphere who are of Muslim origin are spread out across the French political spectrum (and include the extreme right). There is no “Muslim vote.”

There is no network of denominational Muslim schools (less than 10 in France), no mobilization in the street (no demonstrations around a Muslim cause has attracted more than a few thousand people) and almost no grand mosques (which are almost always financed from outside funding). There are only a handful of small local mosques.

If there is an effort at community, it comes from above, from the state, not the citizens. The purported organized representation of the French Council of the Muslim Faith at the Grand Mosque of Paris is held at arm’s length by the French government and by foreign governments alike. And it has no local legitimacy. In short, the Muslim “community” suffers from a very Gallic individualism and remains recalcitrant. That is the good news.

Yet, both the left and the right do not cease to speak of that famous Muslim community, either to denounce its refusal to integrate, or to paint it as the victim of Islamophobia. The two opposing narratives are based on the same fantasy of an imaginary Muslim community.

In France, there is not a Muslim community, but a Muslim population. To admit this simple truth would already be a good antidote against the current hysteria, and the hysteria to come.

Statement by the International Progress Organization on events in France and the future of multiculturalism in Europe

The International Progress Organization strongly and unequivocally condemns the use of violence for political or religious purposes. Everyone will agree in the condemnation of acts of terrorism such as this week’s attacks in Paris. However, one should also address the deeper divisions and contradictions in Europe’s multicultural societies. The freedom of the press is not absolute; it does not include the right to deride or ridicule religion and it must be based on respect of human dignity. As with the earlier cartoon crisis in Denmark: one must be aware that the deliberate use of media to provoke faith-based communities will poison the social climate and contribute to an atmosphere of distrust and mutual hatred. This, of course, does not excuse violent reactions such as those in Paris; but journalists, including those who use jokes and irony to express their point of view, should be aware of their social responsibility. There can be no peace without mutual respect, first and foremost among people with different worldviews, whether religious or secular.

One should also be aware that the jihadi violence did not come out of the blue. The Western powers in particular have (a) for a long time supported jihadi groups and used them for their geopolitical agenda, and (b), through their policy of “regime change,” they have created the political vacuum in which these groups are flourishing. One should not be surprised about the backlash in Europe.

The tragic events and the reaction to them are a bad omen for the future. The political systems in Europe will become more and more unstable if the governments and the dominant media refuse to acknowledge that these acts of violence are not isolated incidents, but happen in a framework of increasing alienation and confrontation between the religious and cultural communities. This development is further accelerated by the large-scale military engagement of Western powers in the Muslim world – because of (a) the destruction of the social fabric in these countries and (b) the creation of hatred among the affected populations. The situation in Europe is further aggravated because inter-religious tensions are increasingly being exploited for the sake of party politics. This may trigger a never-ending cycle of hatred and violence, and make the “clash of civilizations” a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Focusing on the tragic events in Europe, one should not forget, however, that these past days Boko Haram slaughtered many hundreds of innocent people in Baga town and neighbouring villages in Nigeria.

This is indeed a challenging time for all who are committed to dialogue. Denial of reality will completely erode the basis of Europe’s official multicultural credo. What is most needed now are voices of reason that are able to cross the cultural divide – even in a situation where emotions obstruct rational thinking of political and civil society leaders on all sides.

Vienna, 9 January 2015.