Saturday, January 11, 2014

Weekend Update

The big news of the week was the massacre in the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, where ten journalists (mostly cartoonists) and two police were gunned down. This was followed by a shooting of a police officer at Montrouge, and an attempt to take hostages at a kosher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes, resulting in four more deaths (five counting the assailant). French officials hunted down and killed the two Charlie Hebdo shooters, but the story doesn't end there. Whereas mass shootings by non-Muslims in Europe and America (including one in Norway in 2011 that killed 77 people) are typically treated as "lone wolf" aberrations, any such violence committed by Muslims automatically triggers a chain reaction where all the usual reactors resume the positions they took after 9/11, mostly to escalate US, European, and Israeli violence against Muslims. The effect is much like watching a train wreck, where no matter how clear every detail seems, one is helpless to prevent or even affect the crash.

The most immediate response has been a huge outpouring of racist rhetoric from Europe's right, especially from the strategically placed, shamelessly opportunistic Marine le Pen. And as rightists almost reflexively respond, this has already resulted in a number of attacks against mosques in France. Meanwhile, more respectable elites have tended to the propaganda campaign. In particular, Charlie Hebdo has become an icon of free speech, championed by people who spend billions of dollars every year to shape public discourse to advance their own agendas. Over the longer term they will use this attack as an excuse to launch -- actually, to continue -- many more of their own. Moreover, those attacks -- indeed, this week's mosque attacks -- will scarcely raise a ripple in the western press, or a twinge of conscience in the belligerent elites.

Needless to say, this kneejerk reaction is insane. If, say, one suffers and barely survives a heart attack, the normal response is to take a look at your own life and see you can do better -- stop smoking, eat differently, exercise more, take a daily aspirin, whatever. It's not to go out and bomb Afghanistan, or burn down a convenient mosque. And this is not because you feel personally culpable for the heart attack. It's more because the only change you can make is to yourself. Yet terror attacks, which for nearly everyone are mere impersonal news, are never allowed to evoke a moment's self-examination. There's a complex psychology behind this, but it's ultimately because the elites (especially the right-wingers who predominate) have something to hide, and much to fear if this is ever discussed rationally.

The attackers in Paris, for instance, identified themselves as affiliated with Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda was effectively invented in the 1980s when the United States recruited Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to raise an Islamist army ("the mujahideen") to sabotage the Soviets in Afghanistan. The US was arguably naive to do so, but American Cold Warriors had often (and successfully) used religion against "Godless Communism," and colonial powers had routinely recruited Islamic clerics to help control the masses -- in fact, the US used Iranian clerics to organize the mobs that helped overthrow Iran's democracy in 1953. So what could go wrong? (This was, after all, the Reagan administration, where naivete was little less than a worldview.)

When recruited by the US, the Saudi monarchy and Pakistan's Islamist dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq built their Afghan war machine with the clerics they had in hand -- the fundamentalist Wahhabi and Deobandi sects, militantly orthodox especially in their excoriation of heretics (especially Shiites) and used to using their religious beliefs as a platform for war -- nor did they limit their scope to Afghanistan: since its founding, Pakistan has been obsessed with India, while Saudi Arabia was locked in a long struggle with secularizing, socialist, and nationalist forces throughout the Arab world. It was only a matter of time before the muhahideen turned their venom against their patrons, especially the infidel ones.

Still, jihadism was never more than a sliver movement within Islam. If you read Gilles Kepel's definitive history of jihadism up to 2000 (Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam), you will see that before 9/11 the movement had largely burned itself out. In that context, 9/11 was a "hail Mary pass" -- an effort not to strike the enemy so much as to provoke a monster, which would then invade the Land of Islam and drive the faithful to take up arms. Thanks to the ignorance and ego of GW Bush, Bin Laden was successful in his provocation. His only disappointment was in how few Muslims rose to fight alongside him. But a small number did, joining the ranks of those caught up in local wars -- some like Iraq the result of US imperial adventures, others like Syria only slightly removed -- adding a religious fire to those conflicts. And very rarely, as in Paris last week, the blowback comes home.

All this has been plainly obvious for many years, even as a succession of presidents (and both apologists and antagonists) have been oblivious to the consequences of their actions. And by consequences I don't mean the rare blowback event -- I mean the obviously direct consequences of aerial attacks and covert operations, of sanctions and propping up cruel dictators, of repeatedly proving to the world that US leaders have no respect for foreign lives, least of all Muslim ones. There are a great many reasons why the US should withdraw from such behaviors. Fear of reprisal (of blowback) is a relatively minor one, but even it isn't as silly as refusing to do the right thing, and insisting on repeating past mistakes, for fear of looking like you're giving in to terrorism. Elites like to brand terrorists as cowards, but the real cowardice is failing to do the right thing for fear of looking weak.

Only by changing our ways will this problem ever go away.

Some more links and comments follow (some on other topics):

  • Juan Cole: Sharpening Contradictions: Why al-Qaeda attacked Satirists in Paris: This is a variant, or complement to, my argument above. I'll add one small note on return on investment. Al-Qaeda sacrificed three (maybe five, or a bit more) fighters on this operation. How many people they killed may matter as a provocation, but this isn't a war of attrition. So it really comes down to recruitment: how many new fighters will flock to Al-Qaeda after this? That, in turn, depends on how many Muslims are alienated by France's reaction (and any other countries where right-wingers use this to try to advance). The number doesn't have to be very big to make the action worthwhile. But also understand that they're starting from a deficit, because this act itself is as offensive to most Muslims as it is to everyone else.

    The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam. France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world (ex-Soviet ethnic Muslims often also have low rates of belief and observance). Many Muslim immigrants in the post-war period to France came as laborers and were not literate people, and their grandchildren are rather distant from Middle Eastern fundamentalism, pursuing urban cosmopolitan culture such as rap and rai. In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France.

    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. [ . . . ]

    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.

  • Teju Cole: Unmournable Bodies: Since the massacre, I've seen many Charlie Hebdo cartoons in my twitter feed -- a good many offensive, stupid, or both. I have no idea how representative they are -- I've read that the magazine is non-partisan, analogous to Mad in the US, so there must be a mix (if not a balance) of views. And I know there's no lack of offensive and/or stupid cartoons on the right in America, and that (especially where Obama is concerned) these all too frequently slump into blatant racism. Of course, if you go back in history you can find even worse: see, for a relevant example, the cartoons reproduced in John W. Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War for shockingly racist depictions of Japanese during WWII -- war always brings out the worst in people. None of this is meant as excuse: as Hamas put it in their PR reaction: "differences of opinion and thought cannot justify murder." But we shouldn't forget that Charlie Hebdo wasn't singled out for attack because it represented a free press; it was singled out because it had allowed itself to become a propaganda organ in a virtual war against (at least one strain of political) Islam.

    More than a dozen people were killed by terrorists in Paris this week. The victims of these crimes are being mourned worldwide: they were human beings, beloved by their families and precious to their friends. On Wednesday, twelve of them were targeted by gunmen for their affiliation with the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Charlie has often been aimed at Muslims, and it's taken particular joy in flouting the Islamic ban on depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. It's done more than that, including taking on political targets, as well as Christian and Jewish ones. The magazine depicted the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost in a sexual threesome. Illustrations such as this have been cited as evidence of Charlie Hebdo's willingness to offend everyone. But in recent years the magazine has gone specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations, and its numerous anti-Islam images have been inventively perverse, featuring hook-nosed Arabs, bullet-ridden Korans, variations on the theme of sodomy, and mockery of the victims of a massacre. It is not always easy to see the difference between a certain witty dissent from religion and a bullyingly racist agenda, but it is necessary to try. Even Voltaire, a hero to many who extol free speech, got it wrong. His sparkling and courageous anti-clericalism can be a joy to read, but he was also a committed anti-Semite, whose criticisms of Judaism were accompanied by calumnies about the innate character of Jews.

    This week's events took place against the backdrop of France's ugly colonial history, its sizable Muslim population, and the suppression, in the name of secularism, of some Islamic cultural expressions, such as the hijab. Blacks have hardly had it easier in Charlie Hebdo: one of the magazine's cartoons depicts the Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira, who is of Guianese origin, as a monkey (naturally, the defense is that a violently racist image was being used to satirize racism); another portrays Obama with the black-Sambo imagery familiar from Jim Crow-era illustrations. [ . . . ]

    But it is possible to defend the right to obscene and racist speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech. It is possible to approve of sacrilege without endorsing racism. And it is possible to consider Islamophobia immoral without wishing it illegal. Moments of grief neither rob us of our complexity nor absolve us of the responsibility of making distinctions. The A.C.L.U. got it right in defending a neo-Nazi group that, in 1978, sought to march through Skokie, Illinois. The extreme offensiveness of the marchers, absent a particular threat of violence, was not and should not be illegal. But no sensible person takes a defense of those First Amendment rights as a defense of Nazi beliefs. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were not mere gadflies, not simple martyrs to the right to offend: they were ideologues. Just because one condemns their brutal murders doesn't mean one must condone their ideology.

    Rather than posit that the Paris attacks are the moment of crisis in free speech -- as so many commentators have done -- it is necessary to understand that free speech and other expressions of liberté are already in crisis in Western societies; the crisis was not precipitated by three deranged gunmen. The U.S., for example, has consolidated its traditional monopoly on extreme violence, and, in the era of big data, has also hoarded information about its deployment of that violence. There are harsh consequences for those who interrogate this monopoly. The only person in prison for the C.I.A.'s abominable torture regime is John Kiriakou, the whistle-blower. Edward Snowden is a hunted man for divulging information about mass surveillance. Chelsea Manning is serving a thirty-five-year sentence for her role in WikiLeaks. They, too, are blasphemers, but they have not been universally valorized, as have the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.

    Since the attacks, money has poured into Charlie Hebdo, and with all the publicity the next press run will be bumped from the usual 60,000 to one million copies.

  • Michael S Schmidt/Matt Apuzzo: Federal prosecutors recommend charges against ex-CIA chief David Petraeus: Allegedly, Petraeus disclosed top-secret files to journalist Paula Broadwell, who was sleeping with him as well as writing a fawning hagiography. The key point here is that Obama and Holder have prosecuted leakers to an unprecedented degree, so what kind of favoritism would it be if they let Petraeus off the hook? A pretty obvious one, I'd say. But much as I'd like to "send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison," I'd rather see pardons for Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and all the others who have been or would be prosecuted for disclosing what the CIA and NSA has been doing with our tax dollars. The difference is that Petraeus didn't do the public any favors with his leaks. He did them purely as an act of self-promotion -- coincidentally his only real accomplishment during his long tenure in the Army and at the CIA.

  • Other Charlie Hebdo links:

    • Mat Taibbi: Cartoons Are Worth Fighting For: "The answer here isn't more self-censorship, but standing on the principle of everyone learning to calm down, get a life, and tolerate the occasional weird idea." Yes, but tolerance, while vastly preferred over intolerance, isn't the real goal. The goal should be to get to a just and equitable society, and to do that we need to get to the truth. Free speech and a free press are necessary to facilitate that.
    • Diana Johnstone: What to Say When You Have Nothing to Say?: "Along with taking innocent lives, they have surely deepened the sense of brutal chaos in this world, aggravated distrust between ethnic groups in France and in Europe, and no doubt accomplished other evil results as well."
    • Tariq Ali: Maximum Horror: "Charlie Hebdo sees itself as having a mission to defend republican secular values against all religions. It has occasionally attacked Catholicism, but it's hardly ever taken on Judaism (though Israel's numerous assaults on Palestinians have offered many opportunities) and has concentrated its mockery on Islam. French secularism today seems to encompass anything as long as it's not Islamic. [ . . . ] Defending its right to publish, regardless of consequences, is one thing, but sacralising a satirical paper that regularly targets those who are victims of a rampant Islamophobia is almost as foolish as justifying the acts of terror against it. Each feeds on the other."
    • Arthur Chu: Trolls and Martyrdom: Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie: "Shooting people is wrong." But that doesn't mean that the people who shouldn't be shot are all right. (For some reason that is a principle a lot of Americans have trouble with: we live in a society that seems to want to settle every dispute with a gun, somehow believing that problems go away when you kill the people most identified with them.) Interesting factoid: "They're only even called Charlie Hebdo as an inside joke after the original publication, Hara-Kirk Hebdo, got shut down for mocking former President Charles de Gaulle immediately after his death."
    • Josh Marshall: Is There a Future for French Jewry? There are about 600,000 Jews in France. In 2013 a bit more than 3000 emigrated to Israel (at least according to the figures here). After events like the attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris last week, as well as "a series of attacks on French Jews over recent years," Israeli sources expect more to emigrate to Israel next year. Marshall somehow took the bait and is projecting the collapse of the entire community. This is a meme that pops up every few years -- see Tony Karon: Where do France's Jews Belong?, published in 2004 when Sharon was offering French Jews a safe haven in the midst of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. One thing that's missing here is stats on the other side of the coin: I've seen estimates that over 700,000 Israelis have moved abroad, and while the US and Germany (!) are the most frequently cited destinations, France cannot be far behind. (Most of the Israeli jazz musicians I'm familiar with live abroad, and France is a popular base.)
    • More Guns: The Cure-All? After 9/11, I remember Eric Raymond arguing that we should allow passengers on airplanes to carry guns so they could defend themselves, as if the hijackers wouldn't have been the first to take advantage of that option. So no surprise that someone should come forward with the idea that if only the office workers at Charlie Hebdo had been packing heat . . . (not that the dead police weren't). No need to read this article for that, but you might be interested in how a Kansas gun shop owner was shot dead and robbed. Steve M. also pays more attention to David Brooks' take on Charlie Hebdo than you should.
    • Philip Weiss: Don't let's go to the war of civilizations again: "Speaking of double standards, our obsession with radical Islam overlooks the incredible peacefulness of most Arab societies [ . . . ] and the wide destruction we've wrought in the Middle East. Steve Walt used to keep a counter on how many Muslims we've killed -- over 200,000 Muslims a few years ago. Bill Kristol and George Packer and Roger Cohen seem to think the answer is to undertake actions that will kill more, because we are now in a civilizational clash. That will just radicalize more Kouachis and make us all more unsafe."

  • Israel links:

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Max Blumenthal: Politicde in Gaza: How Israel's Far Right Won the War: In a scholarly journal, with footnotes, a first draft at the history of the 2014 war. Sample quote:

    With rocket sirens sounding around the country, calls for genocide by Israeli public figures grew more frequent and forceful. Moshe Feiglin -- one of ten deputy speakers of the Knesset so extreme that Likud employed a series of legal tricks to boot him from its 2009 electoral list -- issued a detailed plan to "exterminate" or "concentrate" all residents of Gaza.57 Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of the religious nationalist settlement, Kiryat Arba, issued an edict declaring that Jewish law supported taking "crushing deterring [sic] steps to exterminate the enemy."58 Meanwhile, Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer on Arabic literature at Bar Ilan University, opined in an interview on the day after the bodies of the three Israeli teens were found that the only way to deter young Palestinian men from militant activity was to rape their sisters and mothers. "It sounds very bad, but that's the Middle East . . . [y]ou have to understand the culture in which we live."59

    Incitement at the top emboldened Israeli teens flooding social media to spin genocidal fantasies of their own. David Sheen, an independent Israeli journalist, translated dozens of frightening Twitter posts by adolescent Israeli women alternating between revealing selfies and annihilationist rants. "Kill Arab children so there won't be a next generation," wrote a user called @ashlisade.60 Another teenage female Twitter user, @shirzafaty, declared, "Not just on summer vacation we hate stinking ugly Arabs, but for the rest of our lives."61 On a mortar shell that was to be launched into a civilian area in Gaza, a young Israeli soldier complained about a boy-band concert that was scrapped because of the fighting: "That's for canceling the Backstreet Boys, you scum!" he wrote.62

  • Stephen Kinzer: Joining the military doesn't make you a hero: Certainly one reason not to join the military. Of course, there are many more.

Miscellaneous tweets:

  • Tom Hull: Re Voltaire on Jews, Maher on Muslims, note how people who lose their religion still feel most confident dumping on others' beliefs.
  • Max Blumenthal: Netanyahu wants Jews to leave France and move to the nation he describes as the key target of anti-Semitic terror: [link]
  • Matt Haig: Rupert Murdoch thinks all Muslims should apologise for terrorism. So on behalf of white people, I'd like to apologise for Rupert Murdoch.
  • Max Blumenthal: Netanyahu could not address the Paris killings without mentioning Hamas and Hezbollah and insinuating some connection [link]
  • Matt Taibbi: Bush was like an ordinary mean Republican politician with a tiny FunnyBot hiding in his frontal lobe.
  • Matt Taibbi: I think Bush's paintings are kind of cute. It's like art for dogs or some thing.

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