Background And Perspectives Of The Paris Attacks 2015

Did we not see how some of the worst war-mongerers and enemies of journalism and free speech in their own countries tried to step to the front of the “Je suis Charlie” demonstration in order to snatch it away from the French people?¹

There is not really much to be proud of in this affair - neither of French satirical tradition, nor of the bloody French revolution (with its mythical propaganda of “freedom, brotherhood, equality”).

There is nothing to be proud of a crime in the name of Islam and the holy Prophet ﷺ. In any case “to avenge the Prophet” is not the way of Prophet ﷺ himself.² What happened to the Charlie Hebdo magazine and its staff and the other victims on this day is unacceptable and wrong (a sin)³, but it did not come completely out of the blue.^a8 Or was it maybe a ploy engineered by the Deep State⁴ in order to unleash more of its intimidation and destruction on the Muslim Ummah (community of the Muslim Nation)?

He never killed anyone. Only, after God's command to defend his peace sanctuary, under attack by the pagans of Makkah, did he pick up arms. These defensive battles lasted a total of six days in his life and the number of dead from both sides was less than 300. Peace was his goal, which he achieved by developing alliances between Madinah's Pagans, Jews, and Christians…”

First off, what is the advice from traditional Islam^ti to everyone in face of provocations and malignment of the sacred symbols of Islam, especially Prophet Muhammad ﷺ - upon be peace and blessings?

Furthermore, and this is the main part, we will present here some quotes from the articles of eight renowned journalists and activists for a better world such as Jeremy Scahill^a1, David Hearst^a2, Yvonne Ridley^a3, Corey Oakley^a4, Seumas Milne^a5, Tithi Bhattacharya & Bill V. Mullen^a6, Chris Hedges^a7, and last but not least Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad^a9 and Shaykh Hamza Yusuf^a8, which include correct and thorough background information for the Paris attacks on Jan 7, 2015 (2015-01-07).

These articles are recommended reading for everyone who wishes to make sense out of the events of these and the following days regarding terrorism in general and the evolving propaganda machine in particular. Keyword “Manufacturing Consent”⁵
Subtitles and emphasizes are from the editor.

How To Effectively Confront This Terrorism

Jeremy Scahill⁶: “The only way we're ever to be able to effectively confront this kind of terrorism is to take away the justification or the motivation.”⁷

“If we (governments, responsible entities in the West) want to confront this, we (the West) have to understand our own role in this.” (The drone-bombings of innocents, the slaughter of Gaza, the torture of Abu Ghaib, etc.)”⁸

2. The Advice Of Traditional Islam

Imam ash-Shaʿrāwī, may Allah have mercy on him, was asked for his opinion regarding a book that one of the mockers of Islam had written and that had generated a lot of discussion in the 1990s.

{ It has been sent down to you in the Book that when you hear Allah’s signs being rejected and mocked at by the people, you must not sit with them until they start talking about other things. If you do, you are just the same as them. Allah will gather all the hypocrites and disbelievers into Hell. } Sura 4:140

And implement the sincere advice of ʿUmar, may Allah be pleased with him: ‘Put falsehood to death by being quiet about it, and do not chatter about it lest the malicious come to know of it.’

3. An Act Of Violence

(seekershub.org) Scorning the Prophet

goes beyond free speech – it’s an act of violence
Sh Abdal Hakim Murad
(http://seekershub.org, http://www.telegraph.co.uk)

So it would be easy to dismiss this [attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris] as yet another tragic case of fringe elements trampling on the teachings of the mosques [which forbids vigilantalism and the killing of innocents]. Globally, Muslims admit that such lawlessness is an increasing worry…

But there is more at stake here. Charlie Hebdo, like the Danish magazine Jyllands-Posten several years ago, did not simply publish images of the Prophet

. That, on its own, would probably have occasioned little comment. The difficulty lay in the evident intention to mock, deride and wound. To portray the Prophet

naked, or with a bomb in his turban, was not the simple manufacturing of a graven image. It was received, and rightly so, as a deliberate insult to an already maligned and vulnerable community.

Scorn towards despised minorities is a hazardous business. During the days of Nazi terror, cartoons supplied a key weapon of anti-Jewish polemic. To laugh at the Prophet, the repository of all that Muslims revere and find precious, to reduce him to the level of the scabrous and comedic, is something very different from “free speech” as usually understood. It is a violent act surely conscious of its capacity to cause distress, ratchet up prejudice and damage social cohesion.

• It is time for every good willing citizen in our societies to find out whether existing Western legal precepts can be used to protect any religious community from abuse, so that ”the community would have shown that it is determined to enjoy the protection of (the) country’s laws.”

Also this quote by Imam Zaid Shakir:
• ”Mockery of entire groups has effectively been criminalized in Western societies. One would think thrice before publicly mocking Jews, African Americans, homosexuals or many other groups.
Yet when it comes to Muslims, all bets, and societal protections are off.”
(seekershub.org) Mockery by Imam Zaid Shakir, (seekershub.org)

5. History Did Not Start in Paris on Sunday

“For if anyone is capable of creating more recruits for radical Islam, it is the supresser of democratic political Islam. Sisi, if we let him, will break the state of Egypt as swiftly and surely as civil war in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq have now. And then we would have not thousands of IS fighters, but tens of thousands of IS fighters. On Europe's doorstep.”¹¹

6. Postscript on Charlie Hebdo

- expired link (before 2023-02-03) sandala.org → Postscript on Charlie Hebdo
Hamza Yusuf on January 19, 2015, sandala.org

“While the ’whole’ world is mourning the cartoonists who made their livelihoods as equal opportunity denigrators, perceiving this as an attack on freedom of expression, there is an aspect of this that is disturbing. The West displayed no moral outrage over the countless lives of innocent and honorable people whose only crime was being at home when a drone, intentionally or not, bombed them out of existence. No one is shedding tears over the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians, and many others in the Muslim world who were killed due to Western misadventures in the region. The Brookings Institution has noted that for every drone strike that has occurred, ten or so civilians have died. More people, many of them civilians, have been killed by U.S. drone strikes than were killed on 9-11.”¹²

“The murders of Charlie Hebdo’s staff were a crime; they were wrong, plain and simple. But lest we forget, the people at Charlie Hebdo knew exactly what they were doing…”¹³

… “Just for a moment, let us imagine that this incident had been about twelve murdered black Nigerian cartoonists instead of white French ones…”

7. Freedom of speech -x- Paris massacre

xL =broken link 2020-10-03: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com; Freedom of speech had nothing to do with the Paris massacre
Yvonne Ridley, Friday, 09 January 2015, middleeastmonitor.com

Faux Pas Of Mocking The Dead
“Back in July 2013, when nearly 50 Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Cairo were massacred as they held a peaceful sit-in demanding the reinstatement of ousted President Mohamed Morsi, the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo set about mocking the dead with a particularly savage front page,”¹⁴

“Somehow I don't think anyone … would find it funny if a similar cartoon was drawn poking fun at those slain in the editorial offices at the” Charlie Hebdo magazine headquarters.

Responsible Free Speech
“What the more pompous, intellectual elite in the West forget,” is that the 'right to free speech' “comes with a degree of responsibility.” It is not to denigrate, humiliate or debasing the other.

Therefore it has become clear that those attacks have “absolutely nothing to do with an attack on free speech.”

Reviewing The Context
“Yes, the Paris murders were an outrage, but we need to keep them in context and perspective. It was certainly shocking but not, I would venture to suggest, as shocking as the massacre of 513 Palestinian children by Israel ¹⁶ in its latest war against the civilians of Gaza (2014). Nor was it as shocking as the hundreds, possibly thousands, of peaceful protestors mown down by Egyptian security forces at Al-Nahda and Rabaa Al-Adawiyya Squares in August 2013. Not as shocking, that is, unless you believe that not all humans are equal or that human rights only belong to specific places and people dependent on ethnicity or nationality.”¹⁷

West's Perceived Love For Its Liberties
“The West might love its acclaimed freedoms and liberties (which, remember, are being eroded with each new piece of legislation) but it is clear that with its unconditional support for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and other tyrannical regimes, it doesn't want democracy breaking out in the Middle East any time soon.”

Violence -
“The continued meddling and determination to snuff out the embryonic flames of the Arab Spring has led some to believe that the only way to bring about freedom and liberty is through violence.¹⁸

“What happened … was the continuation of American and European injustices that have roots in Palestine and neighbouring countries in the region where literally millions have been killed, injured and displaced in the name of the West's much-vaunted freedom and liberty.”

“The only way forward now is through dialogue, otherwise it is clear that things are going to get much, much worse for all of us, wherever we live and however, or even if, we pray. It is time for less, not more extremism.”

8. Charlie Hebdo and the hypocrisy of pencils

This picture evokes the idea that “in the face of a medieval ideology (which) only understands the language of the gun, the West – the heroic, Enlightenment-inspired West – responds by reaffirming its commitment to resist barbarism with the weapons of ideas and freedom of expression.”

“Reality could not be more at odds with this ludicrous narrative.
For the last decade and a half the United States¹⁹ has rained violence and destruction on the Arab and Muslim world with a ferocity that has few parallels in the history of modern warfare.²⁰

It was not pencils and pens – let alone ideas – that left Iraq, Gaza and Afghanistan shattered and hundreds of thousands of human beings dead. Not twelve. Hundreds of thousands.” - 100s of 1000s, 300.000 ~ …²¹

To all those victims – “what but cruel mockery is the contention that Western “civilisation” fights its wars with the pen and not the sword?”

“Of course the pen has played its role as well.” (This refers to) “the pens that signed the endless Patriot Acts, anti-terror laws and other bills that entrenched police harassment and curtailed civil rights. The pens of the newspaper editorialists who whip up round after round of hysteria, entrenching anti-Muslim prejudice and making people foreigners in their own country. But the pens of newspaper editors were strong not by virtue of their wit or reason, but insofar as they were servants of the powerful and their guns.”

“The idea that Muslim outrage at vile depictions of their religious icons can be evaluated separately from the persecution of Muslims in the West and the invasion and occupation of Muslim countries is the product of a complete incapacity to empathise with the experience of sustained and systemic oppression.”

“In the days ahead … Western politicians who lock up their own dissidents and survey the every movement of their citizenry will go on waxing lyrical about freedom of thought… while also demanding “that we accept that white Westerners, not Muslims, are the real victims of this latest political drama.”

9. Paris is a warning: there is no insulation from our wars

“The official response to every jihadist-inspired terrorist attack in the west since 2001 has been to pour petrol on the flames.”²²

“Instead of simply standing with the victims – and, say, the vastly larger numbers killed by Boko Haram in Nigeria – the satirical magazine and its depictions of the prophet Muhammad ﷺ have been elevated into a sacred principle of western liberty.”

However it is now obvious that “what is hailed by white France as a colour-blind secularism that ensures equality for all is experienced by many Muslims as discrimination and denial of basic liberties.”

The reality, as one of (Charlie Hebdo's) former journalists put it, has been an “Islamophobic neurosis” that focused its racialised baiting on the most marginalised section of the population.²³

Freedom Of Expression Not So Free
“For all the talk of freedom of expression being a non-negotiable right, Holocaust denial is outlawed in France, and performances by the antisemitic black comedian Dieudonné have been banned.” Any criticism of ’Israeli’ i.e. Zionist policies towards the occupied Palestinians will be maligned as ’Anti-Semitism.’ But this labelling is fast losing its hold.

Used To Discipline The Powerless
“But without the war waged by western powers, including France, to bring to heel and reoccupy the Arab and Muslim world, last week’s attacks clearly wouldn’t have taken place… A form of violent fundamentalism fostered in the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan 30 years ago has blown back into western heartlands.”

The former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who led opposition to the Iraq war, this week described ISIS as the “deformed child” of western policy. The west’s wars in the Muslim world “always nourish new wars” and “terrorism among us”, he wrote, while “we simplify” these conflicts “by seeing only the Islamist symptom”.

Used To Justify More Military Intervention
But there will be those “who will use the latest attacks to justify more military intervention. Given what has taken place over the past decade, Europeans are fortunate that terrorist outrages have been relatively rare. But a price has been paid in loss of freedoms, growing antisemitism and rampant Islamophobia. So long as we allow this war to continue indefinitely, the threats will grow. In a globalised world, there’s no insulation. What happens there ends up happening here too.”

10. Rewinding the Battle of Algiers

Similarities
In the classic 1966 film Battle of Algiers, Ali, a young, illiterate, unemployed bricklayer and draft dodger is (recruited by) a member of the Algerian FLN.

Ali (the Algerian) and Cherif Kouachi²⁴ “were both working class young men, recruited in jail, and they were both motivated to fight the imperial West.” … Cherif had studied the “images of the U.S. war in Iraq and … of U.S. political torture of prisoners.” (He) said, 'It was everything I saw on the television, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, all that, which motivated me.'”

“We want to make the simple point that while the terms of imperialism have changed since the so-called ’colonial era,’ the historical conditions that produce anti-imperialism remain largely the same. Across the global south, especially, the historical pull of what Tariq Ali calls ’foot soldiers’ to the disasters of Western imperial wars remains as permanent as the name Paris.”

The Bankrupt Rhetoric Of The ‘Civilized West’
“In the wake of the brutal assault upon the journalists at Charlie Hebdo we should be reflecting, not as François Hollande and other world leaders advise us to, on the attack on free speech, but on two things:

“To the first: the end of the anti-colonial era was followed immediately by the not so rosy dawn of neoliberalism.²⁵ This has left the Arab and Muslim working classes of the world in a tight squeeze: caught between an ideological war on “Islam”, waged by the likes of George Bush and Tony Blair, and a brutally violent global regime of labor discipline, wealth extraction, employment contingency and proletarian precariousness. Before he took up Kalashnikovs against Charlie Hebdo, Cherif Kouachi worked as a pizza delivery man, shop assistant and fishmonger.”

“To point two: enter this past week’s narrative of Enlightenment renewal.²⁶ It is precisely to offer ‘freedom without bread’ that neoliberal statesmen and blood- soaked tyrants like Benjamin Netanhayu linked arms in the French dusk, to chase into dark corners of history ‘unruly’ disturbances …”²⁷

“Al Qaeda and ISIS²⁸ are not fighting for a world free of oppression and exploitation. They are reactionary sectarian groups, themselves the fruits of Western imperialism, who seek to replace it with other authoritarian alternatives.”²⁹

The presence of Guantanamo, the realities of the endless wars in the Middle East, the brutal drone strikes — all help fertilize the ground for recruiting the dispossessed to such organizations because they are the ones who face the real devastating consequences of such policies and wars.

We understand that Charlie Hebdo had a history of mocking the powerful. …The other strain present in the magazine, that of racism and Islamophobia, did nothing to shake the powerful whom these journalists may have truly despised. Instead, such racist images had the effect of mocking the powerless and strengthening the tendencies and ideas in French society that kept the powerful in power.³⁰

11. Another Cartoon

By the Jordanian cartoonist Omar Al Abdallat on freedom of speech, using a classic comic trope of the TV frame, inside & out.

12. Other Articles

! xx was formerly on this site - The Anger of Europe’s Young Marginalized Muslims
Abdelkader Benali, Jan. 13, 2015

This article is - as expected - too focused on a personal description of the problem, not one word on the (Imperialist) interventions by the arrogant powers in muslim countries.

This is true to a point, although someone with faith and taqwa will certainly - with the help of God - be able to avert this threat.

13. Other Resources

It’s him!↩
Avenging the Prophet Who Banned Revenges, Abdul Malik Mujahid “The Prophet banned revenge as he built his peace sanctuary in seventh-century Madinah, establishing instead the rule of law.↩
It is Haram (forbidden) to carry any external jihad into the countries of a treaty and also without any Muslim authority in place. More on this topic: Fatwa Against The Targeting Of Civilians, Shaykh Muhammad Afifi al-Akiti On the wayward ’authority’ Daesh, NOT ’IS’ see: This is Not the Path to Paradise! Response to Daesh, Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah ↩
while sacrificing the cartoonists as collateral damage,↩
Manufacturing Consent ↩
Who is Jeremy Scahill? His latest book is “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (2013). The main premise of the book is Obama’s continuation of Bush’s doctrine that “the world is a battlefield” and relying on missiles and drone strikes, JSOC to carry the bulk of the covert operations and targeted killings of suspected terrorists.”↩
of people who are not already so committed.↩
Jeremy Scahill, TheIntercept.org↩
“an absurd misrepresentation or imitation of something; make a mockery of: make (something) seem foolish or absurd.” Apple Dictionary; So basically it’s a lie against which not many can “keep a cool head”.↩
Dystopia: an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. The opposite of Utopia. (Apple Dictionary)↩
And: “Is Sisi a “new Martin Luther” for telling the clerics of Al-Azhar University, an ancient center of Islamic learning in Cairo, that Islam needs a religious revolution? Or is he a despot who will use any cause to perpetuate his vicious rule.”↩
“Take a look at the Wikipedia page that lists the drone strikes on Pakistan alone since 2004; and keep in mind that drone strikes are also waged against people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Algeria, Iran, Libya, and Somalia.”↩
“Today, much of the Western world expresses its moral outrage in solidarity over the murder of twelve people who knew the risks of provoking angry extremists yet argued, “These people want to frighten us into respecting their religion; therefore we will not be frightened”; and so they continued to poke fun at that which Muslims hold most sacred. This was not done in the long-standing Western tradition of satire, which takes aim at the powerful to empower the powerless; these cartoonists engaged in mockery for the sake of mockery and had no higher purpose. They suffered the fate of a man who gratuitously calls another man’s mother a whore and is surprised when that man stabs him. Pope Francis said it well: If a close friend “says a swear word against my mother, then a punch awaits him,” he explained. “One cannot provoke; one cannot insult other people’s faith; one cannot make fun of faith.” This is a man who believes in “turning the other cheek,” yet true to his Argentinian roots, he displays classic Latin attitude toward the dishonoring of one’s mother. For Muslims, the Prophet ﷺ reminded us, “None of you truly believes until I am more beloved to him than his own parents.” Hence, to slander our Prophet ﷺ is a greater injury than an attack on our mothers. If the Pope will punch someone, even his close friend, should he insult his mother, then what are we to expect from uneducated and volatile street urchins with the same sense of honor?”↩
Their front page had the caption: ‘The Qur'an is sh*t, it doesn’t stop bullets.’↩
“Freedom and liberty in the West are actually becoming something of an illusion. At the moment, new regulations and laws are being introduced aimed specifically at Muslim communities across America and Europe,” but “these new laws could just as easily be used against environmentalists…”↩
… over 2000 other victims, most of them civilians. What are European governments doing about this? Are we in Europe welcoming “Israel” into the league of civilized nations with close economic, military, scientic, cultural contacts? How can this be just and fair? See also French president asked Netanyahu not to attend Paris march ↩
“Furthermore, all of these awful deaths are dwarfed by the 1.5 million (!) and rising killed since George W Bush and Tony Blair unleashed Shock and Awe on the people of Iraq in 2003. Their war was based on the lies and deception of a handful of men who tried to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction when their real motive was regime change and lucrative business contracts.”↩
It isn’t; violence hasn’t worked for the West, despite its repeated wars and drone massacres, and it will not work for those who brought death and destruction to the Charlie Hebdo office.”↩
“backed to varying degrees by the governments of other Western countries.”↩
incl. Uranium depleted ordinance↩
f.ex. Iraq Body Count 2003-2013: 132,764 acc. to iraqbodycount.org ↩
“That was true after 9/11 when George Bush launched his war on terror, laying waste to countries and spreading terror on a global scale. It was true in Britain after the 2005 London bombings, when Tony Blair ripped up civil liberties and sent thousands of British troops on a disastrous mission to Afghanistan.”↩
“This wasn’t just ‘depictions’ of the Prophet ﷺ, but repeated pornographic humiliation.”↩
who will lead a murderous attack on the journalists at Charlie Hebdo,↩
“Quickly, Arab nationalism gave way to Gulf capitalism; the always bourgeois PLO gave way to the neoliberal Palestine Authority. Simultaneously, the Arab working- class suffered a set of quintessential neoliberal losses compounded by what might be called the economic shock doctrine brought on by the likes of World Bank and IMFthat came with the end of colonialism and the beginning of the neoliberal era. Thus, before any fruits of decolonization could be fully enjoyed, the working class of the global south found itself living under a newly configured or neo-colonial imperialism in which one time Arab national leaderships became neoliberal partners with their former adversaries in the West.”↩
Jeremy Scahill has rightly called the ‘unity march’ in Paris last Sunday a ‘circus of hypocrisy.’↩
…like the Occupation of Palestine, the catastrophes of global uneven economic development, the assymetrical loss of Black and Brown life across the planet (from Ferguson to Nigeria), the gutting of freedom of speech in the unified western campaign against ‘whistle blowers’ like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Glenn Greenwald, not to mention the 15 dead journalists, most of them Muslim, some deliberately targeted by Israel, as the Israeli state admits, in this summer’s Gaza massacre.↩
See: This is Not the Path to Paradise! Response to Daesh (not: ”IS/ ISIS”) LINK by Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah ↩
It is precisely because such reactionary outfits like Al Qaeda perhaps appear as fighters against Western imperialism to the likes of the Kouachi brothers that we should discuss the context of racism and imperialism that helped recruit them. ↩
The authors argue that “the third path out of this tragedy … is the only resolution to this question that we should endorse: the path taken by the millions who made the Arab Spring.” ↩