We must mourn all victims. But until we look honestly at the violence we export, nothing will ever change.
Any time there is an attack on civilians in the post-9/11
West, demagogues immediately blame it on Muslims. They frequently lack
evidence, but depend on the blunt force of anti-Muslim bigotry to bolster their
accusations. Actual evidence, on the other hand, shows that less
than two percent of terrorist attacks from 2009 to 2013 in the E.U.
were religiously motivated. In 2013, just one percent of the 152 terrorist attacks
were religious in nature; in 2012, less than three percent of the 219 terrorist
attacks were inspired by religion. The vast majority of terrorist attacks in
these years were motivated by ethno-nationalism or separatism. In 2013, 55
percent of terrorist attacks were ethno-nationalist or separatist in nature; in
2012, more than three-quarters (76 percent) of terrorist attacks were inspired
by ethno-nationalism or separatism. These facts, nonetheless, have never
stopped the prejudiced pundits from insisting otherwise. On Friday the 13th of
November, militants massacred at least 127 people in Paris in a series of
heinous attacks. There are many layers of hypocrisy in the public reaction to
the tragedy that must be sorted through in order to understand the larger
context in which these horrific attacks are situated — and, ultimately, to
prevent such attacks from happening in the future.
RIGHT WING EXPLOITATION: As soon as the news of the attacks broke, even though there
was no evidence and practically nothing was known about the attackers, a Who’s
Who of right-wing pundits immediately
latched on to the violence as an opportunity to demonize Muslims and refugees
from Muslim-majority countries. In a disgrace to the victims, a shout chorus of
reactionary demagogues exploited the horrific attacks to distract from and even
deny domestic problems. They flatly told Black Lives Matter activists fighting
for basic civil and human rights, fast-food workers seeking liveable wages and
union rights, and students challenging crippling debts that their problems are
insignificant because they are not being held hostage at gunpoint. More
insidiously, when evidence began to suggest that extremists were responsible
for the attacks, and when ISIS eventually claimed responsibility, the
demagogues implied or even downright insisted that Islam — the religion of 1.6
billion people — was to blame, and that the predominately (although not
entirely) Muslim refugees entering the West are only going to carry out more of
such attacks.
CLAMPDOWN ON MUSLIMS AND REFUGEES: Every time Islamic extremists carry out an attack, the
world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are expected to collectively apologize; it has
become a cold cliché at this point. Who benefits from such clampdown on Muslims
and refugees? Two primary groups: One, Islamic extremist groups themselves, who
use the clampdown as “evidence” that there is supposedly no room for Muslims in
the secular West that has declared war on Islam; and two, Europe’s
growing far-right, who will use the attacks as “evidence” that there is
supposedly no room for Muslims in the secular West that should declare war on
Islam. Although enemies, both groups share a congruence of interests. The
far-right wants Muslims and refugees from Muslim-majority countries (even if
they are not Muslim) to leave because it sees them as innately violent
terrorists. Islamic extremists want Muslim refugees to leave so they can be
radicalized and join their caliphate. More specifically, to name names, ISIS
and al-Qaeda will benefit from the clampdown on Muslims and refugees, and
Europe’s growing far-right movement will continue to recruit new members with
anti-Muslim and anti-refugee propaganda. ISIS has explicitly stated that its
goal is to make extinct what it calls the “grayzone” — that is to say, Western
acceptance of Muslims. The “endangerment” of the grayzone “began with the
blessed operations of September 11th, as those operations manifested two camps
before the world for mankind to choose between, a camp of Islam … and a camp of
kufr — the crusader coalition,” wrote ISIS in its own
publication.
 |
| An excerpt from ISIS’ own publication (Credit: Iyad El-Baghdadi) |
Demonstrating how right-wing and Islamic extremist logic
intersect, ISIS actually favorably cited the black-and-white worldview shared
ironically by both former President George W. Bush and his intractable foe,
al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. ISIS wrote: “As Shaykh Usamah Ibn Ladin said,
‘The world today is divided into two camps. Bush spoke the truth when he said,
“Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Meaning, either you
are with the crusade or you are with Islam.'” By making ISIS go viral, we are
only helping them accomplish their sadistic goals. In the meantime, France’s
extreme right-wing National Front party stands to gain in particular. The party
— which was founded by a neo-Nazi and is now led by his estranged daughter
Marine Le Pen — constantly rails against Muslims, whom it hypocritically characterizes as Nazi
occupiers. In 2014, a Paris court ruled it
was fair to call the National Front “fascist.” Before the Paris attacks, Le
Pen’s extreme-right movement was France’s second-largest party. Now it may
become the first.
THE MASSACRES THAT ARE IGNORED: There are hundreds of terrorist attacks in Europe every
year. The ones that immediately fill the headlines of every news outlet,
however, are the ones carried out by Muslims — not the ones carried out by
ethno-nationalists or far-right extremists, which happen to be much more
frequent. Yet it is not just right-wing pundits and the media that give much
more attention to attacks like those in Paris; heads of state frequently do so
as well. Minutes after the Paris attacks, Presidents Hollande and Obama addressed
the world, publicly lamenting the tragedy. Secretary John Kerry condemned them
as “heinous, evil, vile acts.” Notable was the official silence surrounding
another horrific terrorist attack that took place only the day before. Two ISIS
suicide bombers killed at least 43 people and wounded more than 230 in attacks on
a heavily Shia Muslim community in Beirut on November 12. President Obama did
not address the world and condemn the bombings, which comprised the worst
attack in Beirut in years. In fact, the opposite happened; the victims of the
ISIS attacks were characterized in the U.S. media as
Hezbollah human shields and blamed for their own deaths based on the
unfortunate coincidence of their geographical location. Some right-wing pundits
even went so far as to justify the ISIS attacks because they were assumed to be
aimed at Hezbollah. Nor did the White House interrupt every news broadcast to
publicly condemn the ISIS massacre in
Turkey in October that left approximately 128 people dead and 500 injured at a
peaceful rally for a pro-Kurdish political party. More strikingly, where were
the heads of state when the Western-backed, Saudi-led coalition bombed a Yemeni wedding on September
28, killing 131 civilians, including 80 women? That massacre didn’t go viral,
and Obama and Hollande did not apologize, yet alone barely even acknowledge the
tragedy. Do French lives matter more than Lebanese, Turkish, Kurdish, and Yemeni
ones? Were these not, too, “heinous, evil, vile acts”?
ODDLY FAMILIAR: We have seen this all before; it should be oddly familiar.
The reaction to the horrific January 2015 Paris attacks was equally
predictable; the knee-jerk Islamophobia ignored the crucial context for the
tragic attack — namely the fact that it was was the catastrophic U.S.-led war
on Iraq and torture at Abu Ghraib, not Charlie Hebdo cartoons, that radicalized
the shooters. Also ignored was the fact that the extremist attackers were
sons of émigrés from Algeria, a country that for decades bled profusely under
barbarous French colonialism, which only ended after an even bloodier war of
independence in 1962 that left hundreds of thousands of Algerians dead. After
the January Paris attacks, leaders from around the world — including officials
from Western-backed extremist theocratic tyrannies like Saudi Arabia — gathered
in Paris to supposedly participate in a march that turned out to actually be a
carefully orchestrated and cynical photo op.
And not only are Muslims collectively blamed for such attacks; they, too,
collectively bear the brunt of the backlash. In just six days after the January
attacks, the National Observatory Against Islamophobia documented 60
incidents of Islamophobic attacks and threats in France. TellMAMA, a
U.K.-based organization that monitors racist anti-Muslim attacks, also reported
50-60 threats. Once again, mere days before the January Paris attacks, the
global community largely glossed over another horrific tragedy: The slaughter
of more
than 2,000 Nigerians by Boko Haram. The African victims didn’t get a
march; only the Western victims of Islamic extremism did.
WESTERN CULPABILITY: A little-discussed yet crucial fact is that the vast, vast
majority of the victims of Islamic extremism are themselves Muslim, and live in
Muslim-majority countries. A 2012 U.S. National Counterterrorism Center report found
that between 82 and 97 percent of the victims of religiously motivated
terrorist attacks over the previous five years were Muslims. The West
frequently acts as though it is the principal victim, but the exact contrary is
true. Never interrogated is why exactly are so many refugees fleeing the Middle
East and North Africa. It is not like millions of people want to leave their
homes and families; they are fleeing violence and chaos — violence and chaos
that happens to almost always be the result of Western military intervention.
Western countries, particularly the U.S., are directly responsible
for the violence and destruction in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and
Yemen, from which millions of refugees are fleeing:
- The illegal U.S.-led invasion of Iraq led to the deaths of at least one million people, destabilized the entire region, and created extreme conditions in which militant groups like al-Qaeda spread like wildfire, eventually leading to the emergence of ISIS.
- In Afghanistan, the ongoing U.S.-led war and occupation — which the Obama administration just prolonged for a second time — has led to approximately a quarter of a million deaths and has displaced millions of Afghans.
- The disastrous U.S.-led NATO intervention in Libya destroyed the government, turning the country into a hotbed for extremism and allowing militant groups like ISIS to spread west into North Africa. Thousands of Libyans have been killed, and hundreds of thousands made refugees.
- In Yemen, the U.S. and other Western nations are arming and backing the Saudi-led coalition that is raining down bombs, including banned cluster munitions, on civilian areas, pulverizing the poorest country in the Middle East. And, once again — the story should now be familiar — thousands have been killed and hundreds of thousands have been displaced.
Syria is
a bit more complicated. Many refugees in the country, which has been torn apart
by almost five years of bitter war, are fleeing the brutal repression of the
Assad government. Western countries and their allies, however, share some of
the blame. Allies such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey have greatly inflamed the
conflict by supporting
extremist groups like al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra. And it should go
without saying that millions of Syrian refugees are fleeing the very same
terror at the hands of ISIS that the group allegedly unleashed upon Paris. By
suppressing Syrian and Iraqi refugees fleeing the ruthlessly violent extremist
group, France and other Western countries will only be further adding to the
already shocking number of its victims.
DISLOCATING THE BLAME:
When the U.S. and its allies bomb weddings and hospitals in Yemen and Afghanistan,
killing hundreds of civilians, “Americans” doesn’t trend globally on Twitter.
Yet when Parisians are allegedly killed by Islamic extremists, “Muslims” does.
The imperialist West always try to dislocate the blame. It’s always the
foreigner’s, the non-Westerner’s, the Other’s fault; it’s never the fault of
the enlightened West. Islam is the new scapegoat. Western imperial policies of
ravaging entire nations, propping up repressive dictators, and supporting
extremist groups are conveniently forgotten. The West is incapable of
addressing its own imperial violence. Instead, it points its blood-stained
finger accusingly at the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and tells them they are
the inherently violent ones. Unfortunately, tragedies like the one we see in
Paris are daily events in much of the Middle East, no thanks to the policies of
the governments of France, the U.S., the U.K., and more. The horrific and
unjustifiable yet rare terrorist attacks we in the West experience are the
quotidian reality endured by those living in the region our governments
brutalize. This does not mean we should not mourn the Paris attacks; they are
abominable, and the victims should and must be mourned. But we should likewise
ensure that the victims of our governments’ crimes are mourned as well. If we
truly believe that all lives are equally valuable, if we truly believe that
French lives matter no more than any others, we must mourn all deaths equally.
THE DANGERS OF HABIT: We know the responses to attacks like these. Great danger
lies in them continuing on the same way. Governments are going to call for more
Western military intervention in the Middle East, more bombs, and more
guns. Hard-line right-wing Senator Ted Cruz immediately demanded airstrikes with more
“tolerance for civilian casualties.” Naturally, the proposed “solution” to
individual acts of terror is to ramp up campaigns of state terror. At home,
they will call for more fences, more police, and more
surveillance. Immediately after the Paris attacks, France closed its
borders. In the U.S., as soon as the attacks were reported, the NYPD
began militarizing parts
of New York City. The hegemonic “solution” is always more militarization, both
abroad and here at home. Yet it is in fact militarization that is the cause of
the problem in the first place. At the time of the atrocious 9/11 attacks,
al-Qaeda was a relatively small and isolated group. It was the U.S.-led war in
and occupation of Iraq that created the conditions of extreme violence,
desperation, and sectarianism in which al-Qaeda metastasized, spreading
worldwide. The West, in its addiction to militarism, played into the hands of
the extremists, and today we see the rotten fruit borne of that rotten
addiction: ISIS is the Frankenstein’s monster of Western imperialism.
Moreover, Western countries’ propping up of their oil-rich
allies in the Gulf, extremist
theocratic monarchies like Saudi Arabia, is a principal factor in
the spread
of Sunni extremism. The Obama administration did more than $100 billion
of arms
deals with the Saudi monarchy in the past five years, and France has
increasingly signed
enormous military contracts with theocratic autocracies like Saudi
Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. If these are the strategies our governments
continue to pursue, attacks like those in Paris will only be more frequent. The
far-right will continue to grow. Neo-fascism, the most dangerous development in
the world today, will gain traction. People will radicalize. The incidence
of attacks inspired by ethno-nationalism or far-right extremism, already
the leading cause of European and American
terror, will increase even further. The pundits will boost anti-Muslim
bigotry and feed the anti-refugee fervor. In doing so, they will only make
matters worse. The Paris attacks, as horrific as they are, could be a
moment to think critically about what our governments are doing both abroad and
here at home. If we do not think critically, if we act capriciously, and
violently, the wounds will only continue to fester. The bloodletting will
ultimately accelerate. In short, those who promote militarist policies and anti-Muslim
and anti-refugee bigotries in response to the Paris attacks are only going to
further propagate violence and hatred. If the political cycle is not changed,
the cycle of violence will continue.
Ben Norton is a politics staff writer at Salon. You can find
him on Twitter at@BenjaminNorton.
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