WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

The past few days has been dominated by reports about the massacre of journalists and cartoonists at the weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris -- and now there is news about further attacks in Paris.  These are very troubling events and raise a lot of issues. Simply put, nothing justifies murder, nothing mitigates the crime. 

However, we can also say that it is wrong for a magazine to profit from obscene insults to the religious beliefs of a whole people -- especially when they are members of an already racially victimized and marginalized community who live in France as a consequence of its own genocidal colonial history. And it’s foolish to expect that a nation’s imperial past and contemporary military interventions will have no negative outcomes.

Political satire that targets the powerful or the reactionary role of some religious figures or institutions is different from intentionally denigrating a people’s beliefs and culture (see here – warning, offensive – and in particular this one). Some of us in DPP are secular, some of various faiths, but none of us, I believe, would defend the wholesale ridicule of African-American religious pieties, even if we might disagree with institutional or doctrinal positions – such as opposition to marriage equality or the pro-Zionist stance of some leaders or churches.  We would rightly call such insults racism. 

Ironically, given the targeted incitement against immigrants within Europe, one of the police officers who was killed defending the building where the attack took place, Ahmed Merabet, was Muslim with immigrant roots.

In the great tradition of the French Revolution, LIBERTĖ is a hallowed principle, but so also are EGALITĖ and FRATERNITĖ. . .  Some would add: HUMANITÉ.

 

Long-time DPP member Hayat Imam (a practicing Muslim) sent this email response from Bangladesh.

(readers are invited to share their own views or comments):

 

I unreservedly condemn the murders at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo by Muslim perpetrators or non-Muslim provocateurs. I condemn it because this act was extreme, violent, intolerant, and devoid of compassion and humanity.

 

For these very same reasons, I want to express my deep disapproval of the editorial board of Charlie Hebdo that continued to belittle and needlessly insult the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), without caring that it hurt the hearts of millions of Muslims who love and revere this gentle man. Similarly, I also disapprove of a film like “The Interview”, which insults and disregards the feelings of a whole nation with its plot of assassinating its living leader, or abhor pornography that markets extreme violence and degradation of half of humanity.

 

The cry seems to be “in the name of free speech, it is my right to denigrate whoever I please”! But that cry is disingenuous because it is a cover up for hidden agendas and double standards. In fact the hallmark of a civilized society is that we must show self-restraint and self-censorship. It would be hard to swallow comments glorifying the Holocaust or justifying racist supremacy. I cling to the premise that compassion and humanity are our birthright as human beings. Let’s not get derailed by false pretenses regarding free-speech.

 

 

THE U.S. HAS MORE JAILS THAN COLLEGES

There were 2.3 million prisoners in the U.S. as of the 2010 Census. It's often been remarked that our national incarceration rate of 707 adults per every 100,000 residents is the highest in the world, by a huge margin… To put these figures in context, we have slightly more jails and prisons in the U.S. -- 5,00 plus -- than we do degree-granting colleges and universities. In many parts of America, particularly the South, there are more people living in prisons than on college campuses. Cumberland County, Pa. -- population 235,000 -- is home to 41 correctional facilities and 7 colleges. Prisons outnumber colleges 15-to-1 in Lexington County, S.C.  More

 

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And then there is the issue of Western wars of aggression in the Middle East, support for repressive regimes, and our own long history of mobilizing religious fanaticism (as in Afghanistan or Indonesia) or allying with it (in Saudi Arabia) when politically expedient. All of these things have helped to foster the violence and despair among some Muslims that we decry. And, no, understanding the causes of extremism is not the same as endorsing or excusing it.

Those who speak about the “clash of civilizations” might remember Mahatma Gandhi’s famous long-ago exchange with a journalist: “What do you think of Western civilization?” “I think it would be a good idea”.  The region of France north of Paris, where the killers were under siege, is also near the location of massive trench battles of World War I, where millions of soldiers senselessly massacred each other. Random gun violence has killed many more people in the US than all the terrorist attacks together.

 

Scholar Tariq Ramadan on Charlie Hebdo Attack & How the West Treats Muslims

I think that we should be very clear on even the double standards, that there are things that you can say about Muslims today that you cannot say about Jews. Let it be clear, what we can’t say about Jews, which is anti-Semitism, it’s completely wrong. Islamophobia is wrong. Don’t have these double standards and just target the weak people…  The problem that I have in the West now, wherever you are—look at the demonstrations that we had in Germany recently—is the normalization in the political discourse of Islamophobic statements…  We are not going to defeat anything which has to do with violent extremism, if we are not dealing with justice, with freedom for the people, with the real reform—reformist approach in the Muslim-majority countries. And what is happening today is exactly the opposite. We have the West supporting the worst dictatorships and coming to us, as Western Muslims, say, "OK, now apologize for the consequences of what is happening." So, we should stand to principles, but we cannot avoid talking about the big picture, and a political one is essential.  More

 

Asad AbuKhalil, a Leftist Arab commentator wrote this:

If a Western publication specialized in insulting Jews and Judaism and in mocking the Holocaust, and if its cartoonists suffered a vicious attack (like the one in Paris yesterday), not a single Western writer or journalist would have dared to stand in solidarity with the publication. Not one person. 

 I am not Charlie Hebdo, and can't be.  And please don't give me the notion that the magazine satirized all religions. It did not. It specialized in mocking and insulting Muslims and Islam (all Muslims and not only radical Muslims).  And no, this stance does not mean that I don't condemn the attack. But the terrorists who attacked the publication, are your terrorists and not mine: these are the children of  Western policies in Syria where the West romanticized for more than three years what they dubbed as "moderate rebels" when in reality they were training and arming and nurturing vicious terrorists and Arab leftists like me were warning of the follies of Western policies and that those policies would produce vicious terrorists, and that the Afghanistan film from the 1980s will be repeated yet again… this was your version of Islam: the one you arm in Saudi Arabia.

 

PATRICK COCKBURN: From Syria to Paris

It was culpably naïve to imagine that sparks from the Iraq-Syrian civil war, now in its fourth year, would not spread explosive violence to Western Europe. With thousands of young Sunni Muslims making the difficult journey to Syria and Iraq to fight for Isis, it has always been probable that some of them would choose to give a demonstration of their religious faith by attacking targets they deem anti-Islamic closer to home… The prison wardens of Abu Ghraib, by mistreating prisoners, and the CIA by torturing them, acted as recruiting sergeants. The counter-effectiveness of that strategy is demonstrated by the growth of al-Qaeda-type jihadi movements 14 years after 9/11…  Catching and punishing those responsible for the Charlie Hebdo massacre is not going to deter people who have martyrdom as a central feature of their faith. But bringing to an end, or even just de-escalating the war in Syria, would begin to drain the waters in which violent jihadism flourishes.   More

 

Paris Terrorist was Radicalized by Bush’s Iraq War, Abu Ghraib Torture

Sharif said, “It was everything I saw on the television, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, all that, which motivated me.” … Sharif was about to go to Iraq in 2005, himself, to fight Bush’s troops there (which he saw as aggressive foreign occupiers), but he and a friend were arrested and interrogated by the French police… At some point after 2011, the Kouashi brothers went to Syria to fight the regime of Bashar al-Assad (which the French government also said it wanted to see overthrown). They are said to have returned this summer… Without Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, it is not at all clear that Sharif Kouachi would have gotten involved in fundamentalist vigilanteism. And if he hadn’t, he would not have gone on to be a point man in murdering out the staff of Charlie Hebdo along with two policemen.  More

 

GREENWALD: Police Now Monitoring and Criminalizing the Wrong Kinds of Online Speech

Despite frequent national boasting of free speech protections, the U.S. has joined, and sometimes led, the trend to monitor and criminalize online political speech. The DOJ in 2011 prosecuted a 24-year-old Pakistani resident of the United States, Jubair Ahmad, on terrorism charges for uploading a 5-minute video to YouTube featuring photographs of Abu Ghraib abuses, video of American armored trucks exploding, and prayer messages about “jihad” from the leader of a designated terror group; he was convicted and sent to prison for 12 years… Like the law generally, criminalizing online speech is reserved only for certain kinds of people (those with the least power) and certain kinds of views (the most marginalized and oppositional). Those who serve the most powerful factions or who endorse their orthodoxies are generally exempt.   More

 

Our Oldest Ally in the Middle East. . .

US urges Saudi to halt whipping of citizen journalist

The United States Thursday appealed to Saudi Arabia to annul a sentence of 1,000 lashes imposed on a Saudi rights activist and citizen journalist on top of a 10-year jail term.  Raef Badawi, 30, was sentenced on November 5 after questioning the Gulf kingdom's direction on the now-banned Liberal Saudi Network, which he set up… "Although Saudi Arabia condemned yesterday's cowardly attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, it is now preparing to inflict the most barbaric punishment on a citizen who just used his freedom of expression and information, the same freedom that cost the French journalists their lives," Reporters Without Borders program director Lucie Morillon said.  More

 

‘Dangerous Moment’ for Europe, as Fear and Resentment Grow

Anti-immigrant attitudes have been on the rise in recent years in Europe, propelled in part by a moribund economy and high unemployment, as well as increasing immigration and more porous borders. The growing resentments have lifted the fortunes of established parties like the U.K. Independence Party in Britain and the National Front, as well as lesser-known groups like Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the West, which assembled 18,000 marchers in Dresden, Germany, on Monday. In Sweden, where there have been three recent attacks on mosques, the anti-immigrant, anti-Islamist Sweden Democrats Party has been getting about 15 percent support in recent public opinion polls… “Large parts of the European public are latently anti-Muslim, and increasing mobilization of these forces is now reaching into the center of society,” Mr. Neumann said. “If we see more of these incidents, and I think we will, we will see a further polarization of these European societies in the years to come.” Those who will suffer the most from such a backlash, he said, are the Muslim populations of Europe, “the ordinary normal Muslims who are trying to live their lives in Europe.”  More

 

EUROPE’S LAPSE OF REASON

The gap between where Europe is and where it would have been in the absence of the crisis continues to grow. In most European Union countries, per capita GDP is less than it was before the crisis. A lost half-decade is quickly turning into a whole one. Behind the cold statistics, lives are being ruined, dreams are being dashed, and families are falling apart (or not being formed) as stagnation – depression in some places – runs on year after year… But for how long can this continue? And how will voters react? Throughout Europe, we have seen the alarming growth of extreme nationalist parties, running counter to the Enlightenment values that have made Europe so successful. In some places, large separatist movements are rising.  More

Mosques Attacked In Wake Of Charlie Hebdo Shooting

Several attacks on French mosques following Wednesday's brutal Charlie Hebdo shooting have added to the fear of retaliation against the country's Muslim population… Three grenades were thrown at a mosque in Le Mans, west of Paris, and a bullet hole was found in one of the mosque's windows, AFP reported.  A Muslim prayer hall in the Port-la-Nouvelle district in southern France also received shots shortly after evening prayers, while a blast erupted at L’Imperial, a restaurant affiliated to a mosque in the French village of Villefranche-sur-Saone. No casualties were reported at any of the attacks.  More

 

The U.S. is about as unequal today as the U.K. was during Downton Abbey

Though the trends were headed in the other direction, the wealth distribution of Lord Grantham’s Britain is remarkably similar to what we are seeing in the U.S. today. The income share held by the wealthiest Americans and Britons fell in the mid-20th Century, due to the destruction of property during the wars and the Great Depression, as well as high tax and inflation rates that gradually eroded their wealth. But today they have crept back up to what they were in the 1920s.  More