[go with me on these 8 points, then decide. Gleaned and organized from DemocracyNow! in NYC on TimeWarner CUNY channel 75, weeknights at 6:30 pm ET--set a series recording] 1. this was an appalling attack and a barbaric act to slaughter these journalists...That is obvious....Now, again, we are seeing a deluge of far-right vulgar kind of racist attack on Muslims, in general. And that’s why it’s important to put such events in context. 2. on the scale of rampage killing, this appalling killing in Paris comes after...the Islamophobic mass killing by the Norwegian, Anders Breivik...over 75 people killed, young people in Norway—and the massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein in Hebron in 1994, something like 29 or more people killed...you have these appalling demonstrations of the far right in Germany, of all places, that’s really frightening. You had—you have Jewish fundamentalist extremists in Israel killing regularly and no one is saying Judaism is the source of all these killings. You have Hindu fundamentalists doing all sorts of appalling things, and again, no one is saying this is the problem of Hinduism. But when it comes to Islam, Islam is finger-pointed immediately. Again, these are appalling acts of what I described years ago as a clash of barbarisms, because that’s what we are getting—the barbarism of the strong...being the primary responsible [party] in this awful dynamic. And it leads... to a counterbarbarism on the side of those who see themselves as the downtrodden, the oppressed...I think we have also to be clear on this: We should not always expect Muslims to be condemned as Muslims. I think they should be condemned as French citizens, or as human beings. When Breivik, killed those 77 individuals in Norway, he was not portrayed as a Christian, a white Christian individual. He was not even portrayed as a terrorist. So it seems like when a Muslim commits a terrorist act, he is referred to as a terrorist, but when a non-Muslim does the same, there is a double standard. 3. In the case of Iraq, you just mentioned how these French killers had been affected by and had fought or been connected with networks fighting in Iraq against U.S. troops...what you had in Iraq is that the barbarism represented by the U.S. occupation of that country, which went actually beyond what even one could expect, with things like the torture in Abu Ghraib or the massacre in Fallujah bred a counterbarbarism represented by al-Qaeda. And the Bush administration invaded Iraq in the name of eradicating al-Qaeda, and it only managed to give al-Qaeda the largest territorial base they could ever have dreamt of in Iraq. And what we are seeing now in the name of the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is the continuation of al-Qaeda, of this same al-Qaeda that the Bush administration was supposed to eradicate. So that’s what you get, because these kind of actions by the United States in invading other countries and acting as an occupying force, with all what this means, leads, of course, to extremism on the other side, as we have seen. 4. Moreover, we have to take into consideration that for decades the United States, in alliance with its best friend in the Middle East, which is the Saudi kingdom...the Saudi kingdom [practices] the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, which is the most fanatical interpretation of Islam, even against other branches of Islam. It’s extremely offensive. They use this ideology in the fight against anything left-wing, anything progressive in the region. That was in the ’50s, the ’60s and the ’70s, and it peaked in the war in Afghanistan, where such ideologically inspired groups were used by the United States in the fight against the Soviet occupation of that country. And, ultimately, a chicken came home to roost, as you know, and tragically, with the appalling massacre of 9/11...that was a direct continuation of that. And everyone knew that at that time, and it was very much emphasized--although it was blurred in public opinion by the kind of characterization that we heard from the Bush administration: They hate us because of our freedom and our democracy. And we hear the same kind of tune now, and this is quite misleading... 5. another dimension concerning France...this is a country that has not cleared the problem of its colonial past. In France in 2005, the Parliament voted a law requiring that in the schools what should be taught is the positive role of colonialism in Africa, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Imagine. Imagine in the United States a law asking schools to teach the positive role of slavery. This is quite unimaginable. And as I said, for instance, in France the sense of guilt—for very good reason, which is actually an awful historical reason—about the Jewish genocide is not equalled by any sense of guilt with regard to the colonial past of France. And Algeria is one of the most appalling episodes in the history of colonialism...there are few worse cases, with the Belgians in the Congo, and such, but the history of French presence in Algeria, which lasted until 1962--not that long ago--is just appalling. And at the level of the whole French society and the French media, this is not really integrated. And you have this kind of secularist arrogance towards Islam, which is a continuation of the kind of arrogance and colonial spirit that existed at the time of direct colonialism. One has to understand all this background, not of course as an excuse for these appalling murders—definitely not—and these guys belong to a completely crazy kind of ideological perspective. But one has to understand how, in a society which is supposed to be relatively wealthy and all that, you can have such hatred growing and coming to such extremes. 6. fortunately, those who identify with this kind of jihadist perspective may be in the hundreds, out of a community of several millions of people in France of Muslim background. So, we are speaking here of a tiny minority...the risk is that victimization of Muslims in general, the targeting of Islam, the finger pointed at Muslims, requiring that they should condemn all that as if it were their specific problem, and not seeing that this is a problem of the French society and the French state in the first place, all this creates the risk of people finally identifying even with these two crazy guys—I mean, think of what you had in the United States turning Bonnie and Clyde into heroes? Although if you look at the record, it’s not exactly a humanistic record. So there is here a real danger of the clash of barbarisms going further. 7. In fact, the policeman who was laying on the ground outside the offices of Charlie Hebdo, named Ahmed Merabet, was Muslim himself, when one of the two assassins came and shot him directly and killed him. [An ironic echo of the killing by Ismaaiyl Brinsley of two minority NY police officers after shooting his girlfriend; the media ran with the narrative that these were plotted revenge assassinations against white officers for the recent exonerations in killing unarmed African American men. So, again, the tendency in profit-driven media is to run with the sensationalist narrative rather than examining actual causes and conditions.] 8. we need also to mention that Charlie Hebdo’s role in fostering this Islamophobic context has been very, very controversial, and especially since the early 2000s. They use some of this rhetoric of the clash of civilization, and they apply it to Muslims, who were always portrayed in the most degrading ways. So, we are very clear on the condemnation of these attacks, which cannot be justified in any way, shape or form. But we also, as citizens, should be entitled to criticize the content of the newspaper and the shift in its editorial line since the early 2000s ... the way it’s been portrayed here, at least in the United States, is that the magazine was an equal opportunity satirist, attacking the Christian religion, Judaism, as well as Islam. But...that’s not quite so ... I think when you target the weakest of the weak, a segment of the French population which is already the target of institutionalized racism, this is not brave. I don’t think it’s courageous. Again, they have the right to do it, and it’s the law, so nobody puts into question the right to do so [!] but we should also—without being afraid of being linked to this attack---question the responsibility of the newspaper and question their ethics in that matter. democracynow.org/2015/1/9/gilbert_achcar_on_the_clash_of
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 16:30:52 +0000
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