It is not surprising that Muslim governments, organizations and individuals right across the globe have condemned the heinous murder of 12 persons — 10 journalists and two police — at the headquarters of the satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, in Paris in the late morning of the 7th of January 2015. This dastardly act of terror, allegedly carried out by three Muslims, violates every norm in the Islamic faith.
If it is true that the killers were trying to avenge the sanctified memory of the Prophet Muhammad who has been the subject of continuous ridicule and contempt in the weekly, murdering its cartoonists and editors is clearly an abomination. One should respond to satirical cartoons with cartoons and other works of art that expose the prejudice and bigotry of the cartoonists and editors of Charlie Hebdo. One should use the Charlie Hebdo cartoons as a platform to educate and raise the awareness of the French public about what the Quran actually teaches and who the Prophet really was and the sort of noble values that distinguished his life and struggle. To assassinate those who mock the Prophet in such a barbaric manner shows that the terrorists have no understanding at all of how the Prophet himself responded to those who poured their venom and hatred upon him when he was conveying the message of justice and compassion that is the kernel of Islam to the people of Mecca and Medina in the early 7th century.
Of course, provoking the six million Muslims in France and the larger 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide through constant insults and indignities directed at the Prophet and the religion — albeit through the medium of cartoons — is not only utterly reprehensible but also an affront to inter-religious harmony and social stability. It is an example of the reckless abuse of the freedom of expression which brings much grief to everyone. Freedom of expression is not the freedom to denigrate and desecrate a Prophet who is so deeply cherished by millions and millions of Muslims. If the advocates of human rights regard the freedom of a handful of cartoonists as crucial for human civilization, they should also show some appreciation of the honor and dignity of an entire people. Surely, the right to protect one’s dignity — the dignity of a collectivity — is also a fundamental human right.
The Charlie Hebdo episode has underscored yet again the importance of exercising freedom with a deep sense of responsibility. Restraints are part and parcel of rights. It is by balancing rights with restraints that one ensures the well-being of the whole.
This balance is especially critical at a time like this in Europe. Negative feelings towards non-European migrants are getting stronger in various parts of the continent. Islamophobia is part of this though as a phenomenon it is centuries old. If attitudes towards Muslims and migrants in general have hardened in recent years, it is partly because of rising unemployment and stagnating economies. As it often happens in such situations, the “outsider” becomes the scapegoat.
If in the midst of all this, elements from the majority, established community in Europe continue to provoke a minority which by and large views religion from a different perspective than the majority, and if some individuals from that minority react to the provocations through mindless violence, tension and conflict will become the order of the day. This is why both sides should be responsible and restrained.
Indeed, both the majority and the minority should realize that acts of terror can also be manipulated to serve the agenda of some political actor or other. In the context of Charlie Hebdo, shouldn’t we ask if the killing spree on the 7th of January was also a message of sorts to the French ruling elite? Was some group sending a warning to the elite that it should not have supported Palestine’s recent failed bid in the UN Security Council to obtain endorsement for its goal of establishing an independent, sovereign state within a short time frame? Was that group the master-mind behind 7th January?
Questions of this sort strengthen the case for an independent investigation preferably under the aegis of the UN Secretary-General into the Paris massacre. The truth behind the massacre may tell us a great deal about terrorism itself in our time.
Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).
Malaysia.
9 January 2015.
POSTSCRIPT.
Since the above was written, there has been a major development in the Paris massacre. The two brothers responsible for the massacre, Cherif and Said Kouachi, were gunned down by the French police on the 9th of January, as they emerged from a small printing firm in the Northeast of Paris where they were hiding after their widely condemned act of evil. A third person, purportedly an accomplice, who was holed up in a supermarket elsewhere in the city was also killed by the police.
By killing these terrorists — which may have been inevitable from a security standpoint — it has now become more difficult to find out if the three acted on their own or if they were part of a larger group and supported by an ideologically driven network. Were they, especially the Kouachi brothers, motivated solely by a desire to punish Charlie Hebdo for its despicable cartoons of the Prophet as claimed by one of them according to the media or were they also fulfilling some other cleverly concealed agenda, unknown to them?
This is a valid question to ask because the cartoons which have enraged a lot of French Muslims have become a regular feature of the Charlie Hebdo weekly for at least eight years now. There has been no report of any specific cartoon in recent days eliciting a particularly potent reaction from any section of the French Muslim community. Incidentally, the weekly also lampoons revered personalities from other religions.
It has been suggested that it was not just the cartoons that incensed the terrorists. France’s aggressive role in fighting so-called Islamic jihadists in central Africa may have also been a factor. This argument is somewhat compromised by the fact that the French government was directly and indirectly on the side of the jihadists in Libya in the brutal overthrow of the secular Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Even more significant, the French clearly share the same trench as Islamic rebels of different shades who have been fighting another secular leader, President Bashar Al-Assad of Syria, for almost four years now. So there is no reason to believe that it is France’s adventures in other parts of the world which have angered Islamic jihadists. This story about the country’s stand against jihadists in other lands may have been deliberately put out by the media to divert attention from some other more plausible explanation for the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
The massacre may well be a Mossad operation to arrest the growing tide of support and sympathy for the Palestinians in their struggle for statehood among people in France and in a number of other European countries. This is the one really momentous development of the last few months that has impacted upon the Israeli government and global Zionism. Parliaments in Sweden and Spain to Ireland and Britain have adopted resolutions endorsing the Palestinian struggle. France has also taken a similar step. In my main article I alluded to the French vote in the UN Security Council which some analysts have described as the culmination of a major shift in the public mood vis-a-vis the Israel-Palestine conflict within Europe.
By staging a massacre which once again reinforces the image of the Muslim as a terrorist opposed to civilized values such as the freedom of expression and incapable of living in harmony with the majority population, Mossad and the Israeli government may be seeking to drive a wedge between the majority European citizenry and the Muslim minority. The aim may be to dissuade governments and citizens in Europe from moving any further along their newly discovered path of engagement with Palestinians who they are now beginning to see as victims rather than as aggressors which is how they have been portrayed all these years by the Israeli elite and the Zionist controlled media. What better way of doing this than by reviving that deeply entrenched image of the Muslim in the European mind as a violence prone creature hell-bent on wiping out the innocent?
What has always enabled the Mossad and Israel to achieve their objective is the readiness of some Muslim groups to resort to violence in order to redeem the honor of Islam which invariably leads to the vilification of the religion and the denigration of its adherents.
CM.
10 January 2015.