[Peace-discuss] the attack on Charlie Hebdo

Sat Jan 10 10:52:20 EST 2015

No,

It is from a friend of mine ( John Reimann ) who lives in Oakland Ca..

An interesting guy. He was a Union Carpenter who was expelled from the Carpenter’s so called Union when he organized and led a wildcat strike in opposition to a concessionary contract that was negotiated without a vote by the membership.

His father ( who died in 2009 at the age of 102 ) had to flee Nazi Germany in 1933 / 1934 because he was a Left-wing Jew who was the publisher of a Left-wing newspaper ( Die Rote Fahne – The Red Flag ).

John self-published a 13 page booklet with many photos several years ago called : “ The New Apartheid – The Rise of Zionism and the Israeli State “

David J.

From: Stuart Levy [mailto:stuartnlevy at gmail.com] 
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2015 9:30 AM
To: David Johnson
Cc: Stuart Levy; Peace Discuss
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] the attack on Charlie Hebdo

"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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