What is it about the lived experience of being a working class second-generation French Algerian Muslim at the margins of society that might lead to Salafist ideology making some degree of sense? What is it about the structures of global politics that the jihadi mentality can make some sense of? What is it about the nature of French politics, and particularly working class politics in the suburbs, which means that this section of the working class is somewhere that religious reactionaries can recruit? What is it about this strain of Islamist politics, its history, its patterns of organising that would appeal to detached, marginal, racially oppressed French Muslims? What is it about fighting a guerilla war against an occupying force in Iraq that may have killed around a million people, both directly and through General Petraeuss trained death squads, that would consolidate and radicalise the jihadi politics of those involved? And what kind of strategic impasse would lead to them brutally lashing out at two, what I must imagine are utterly peripheral targets from their perspective: a satirical publication, albeit one with a line in crass racist humour about Muslims, and a kosher supermarket? Its important at least to ask, because if you leave it to the mainstream news, the tacit pseudo-explanation viz. Muslim nutters threatening our way of life will be the one that dominates.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 04:23:39 +0000
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