[Peace-discuss] the attack on Charlie Hebdo

[Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss]

"Racist bullies like those who drew those cartoons for Charlie Hebdo and 
reactionary Islamic fundamentalist terrorists actually rely on each 
other. They would find it much more difficult to exist if the other side 
didn't.”

Yes yes yes.   A good article which makes this point is this from Juan Cole:

http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-satirists.html

some quotes -
> Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall 
> of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to 
> ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start 
> creating a common political identity around grievance against 
> discrimination.
> This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th 
> century. [...] For the unscrupulous among Bolsheviks–who would later 
> be Stalinists– the fact that most students and workers don’t want to 
> overthrow the business class is inconvenient, and so it seemed 
> desirable to some of them to “sharpen the contradictions” between 
> labor and capital.
> Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, then led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, deployed 
> this sort of polarization strategy successfully in Iraq, constantly 
> attacking Shiites and their holy symbols, and provoking the ethnic 
> cleansing of a million Sunnis from Baghdad. The polarization 
> proceeded, with the help of various incarnations of Daesh (Arabic for 
> ISIL or ISIS, which descends from al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia). And in the 
> end, the brutal and genocidal strategy worked, such that Daesh was 
> able to encompass all of Sunni Arab Iraq, which had suffered so many 
> Shiite reprisals that they sought the umbrella of the very group that 
> had deliberately and systematically provoked the Shiites.
> The only effective response to this manipulative strategy (as Grand 
> Ayatollah Ali Sistani tried to tell the Iraqi Shiites a decade ago) is 
> to resist the impulse to blame an entire group for the actions of a 
> few and to refuse to carry out identity-politics reprisals. 
>
> We have a model for response to terrorist provocation and attempts at 
> sharpening the contradictions. It is Norway after Anders Behring 
> Breivik 
> <http://www.juancole.com/2011/07/when-extremism-learns-to-blow-things-up.html> 
> committed mass murder of Norwegian leftists 
> <http://www.juancole.com/2011/07/white-terrorism-in-norway.html> for 
> being soft on Islam. The Norwegian government launched no war on 
> terror. They tried Breivik in court as a common criminal. They 
> remained committed to their admirable modern Norwegian values.
>
> Most of France will also remain committed to French values of the 
> Rights of Man, which they invented. But an insular and hateful 
> minority will take advantage of this deliberately polarizing atrocity 
> to push their own agenda. Europe’s future depends on whether the 
> Marine LePens are allowed to become mainstream. Extremism thrives on 
> other people’s extremism, and is inexorably defeated by tolerance.
>


On 1/10/15 6:58 AM, David Johnson via Peace-discuss wrote:
>
> A posting on a list-serve I am on that I thought you might find 
> interesting.
>
> David J.
>
> “ I agree with the condemnation of both the racist imagery of Islam as 
> well as of all religious fundamentalism, Islamic and otherwise. It 
> also seems to me that we can't make sense of this situation without 
> some review of history. Why did these brothers who apparently were 
> responsible for the attack on Charlie Hebdo turn to Islamic 
> fundamentalism and terrorism as a means of expressing their anger 
> against Western imperialism's interventions in the predominantly 
> Islamic world?
>
> First there was the increased role of these reactionary forces - 
> especially al Qaeda - in Afghanistan, mainly through the support of 
> the CIA and their counterparts in Pakistan, in the struggle against 
> the Soviet Union's role in Afghanistan.
>
> Islamic fundamentalism also got a huge boost with the rise of Khomeini 
> to power in the late '70s. That occurred through the triumph of 
> counter-revolution in a revolutionary situation, following the fall of 
> the Shah. That counter-revolution involved a classic case of the role 
> of Stalinism, through the Tudeh Party.
>
> At the same time, we saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 
> decline of an independent role of the working class.
>
> I remember when I was in Egypt getting lectured by a guy who was 
> clearly some sort of fundamentalist about how the United States 
> government "hates" muslims. When I replied by outlining all the crimes 
> of the US government against non-Muslims (Native Americans, African 
> people, Latin Americans, Vietnamese, etc. as well as workers in the 
> USA), and that it had nothing to do with hating Muslims per se, this 
> guy was caught up short. At the end of the conversation, he commented 
> that I had "entered into his head." (I was later told that that means 
> more or less that I'd made a serious impression on him.)
>
> But on a wider scale, who is there to put this sort of perspective 
> forward? Does the "representatives" of the US working class - the 
> labor leaders? Don't make me laugh.
>
> The other point is this: Racist bullies like those who drew those 
> cartoons for Charlie Hebdo and reactionary Islamic fundamentalist 
> terrorists actually rely on each other. They would find it much more 
> difficult to exist if the other side didn't.”
>
> John
>
>
>
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