The Paris massacre and its fallout

WHEN French President Francois Hollande issued a declaration of war against the self-styled militant Islamic State group in the aftermath of the recent bloody attacks in Paris, he perhaps forgot that France has been at war with these terrorists for over a year. Ever since France joined the US-led coalition last year, the French air force has been regularly bombing targets in Syria.

And before this campaign, French forces have been active in Libya and Mali. So while I was horrified by the slaughter IS, also known by its Arabic acronym Daesh, has carried out in Paris, I was hardly surprised. In politics, just as in physics, Newton’s third law of motion applies: to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In politics, the reaction is not as immediate or as easily quantifiable as in physics, and can come in a different form, and may take years, but sooner or later, it does surface.

Thus, much of the mayhem and madness we witness in the Middle East is happening as a result of Western policies and wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, to mention only a few Muslim states. By upsetting the delicate balance between Shias and Sunnis, the Americans and their allies have triggered a violent sectarian conflict in which the two sides are backed by Saudi Arabia and Iran respectively. IS can trace its beginning to the early days of the Syrian civil war when jihadists were openly supported by the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and several of the Gulf states.

None of this is meant to justify or defend the bloody campaign carried out by IS; the idea is to explain the context in which this violence is taking place, as well as the birth and startling growth of the jihadist movement. Beginning life as Al Qaeda in Iraq during the American occupation, it earned a fearsome reputation for the bloodbath it triggered against Shias, as well as its attacks on American and Iraqi forces. The Americans responded by killing its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian petty criminal who drew a rebuke from the Al Qaeda leadership for his excessive violence. After his death, he was replaced by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. By the time the Americans pulled out, Al Qaeda in Iraq was seen as a spent force.

However, when the civil war in Syria broke out, the organisation gained a toehold there and soon became the dominant force among the various groups fighting the Assad regime. Following a split with Al Qaeda, Baghdadi renamed his group the Islamic State after it swept across the border and captured Iraq’s second biggest city of Mosul. He also announced he was the caliph of all Muslims. In Mosul, the jihadis grabbed a rich haul of American arms including tanks and heavy artillery. They also looted the Iraqi state bank of a billion dollars.

Since then, they have been highly effective in their recruitment drive on social media that has attracted thousands of young Muslims from around the world. A significant number of these came from France and Belgium. When the fighting in Syria drove hundreds of thousands to seek asylum in Europe, there is little doubt that several IS militants joined them to gain entry into countries like France.

As it is, France is home to the biggest concentration of Muslim migrants in Europe. A large number of them, especially the young, feel marginalised and discriminated against. Unemployment is very high, and they mostly live in bleak, depressing council flats that have come to resemble vast ghettos where the police are reluctant to enter. From time to time, riots erupt, and there are well-meaning vows to improve conditions in these depressed areas. But little actually happens, and young Muslims lose whatever hope for the future they might have had.

Many turn to crime, and when they are arrested and jailed, they come across members of jihadist organisations, and are recruited to their cause. Others are radicalised on the internet. Few, it would seem, are influenced in mosques that are now heavily monitored by security services.

There has been much criticism of French and Belgian intelligence services for letting several of those involved in the Paris massacre slip though their fingers, even though they had been on the anti-terror radar. They are also accused of ignoring warnings of an impending attack. But the truth is that terror threats are now so common that it’s hard to react to each one received from friendly intelligence agencies. And there are now literally thousands of suspects on the watch-lists maintained by security services, making it impossible to monitor every one of them. Prioritising them is essential to allocate resources, and often, somebody deemed to be a low risk individual turns out to be a key figure in an attack.

In the wake of the Paris attacks, French leaders have promised to tighten up security laws. Already, a three-month state of emergency is in force. Borders have been sealed, and the Schengen agreement that permits the free movement of EU citizens and those with Schengen visas has been suspended. It is very likely that the agreement might well be scrapped.

Suddenly, it’s a very different Europe, with fear and anger stalking the land. Angela Merkel and her generous open-door policy for asylum seekers stand repudiated. If anything, the reaction in the US has been even more extreme than in France, with 24 governors announcing they will not permit Syrian asylum seekers to be settled in their states. A bill has just been passed in the House of Representatives, calling for rigorous scrutiny of asylum seekers. Extreme rhetoric bordering on racism is being heard from Republican presidential candidates.

And for those of us who seek to justify the Paris killings, here’s a question: had a group of, say, Christians carried out a massacre in Lahore on the scale Paris has witnessed, what would have been the reaction of the public and the state?
By Irfan Hussain Dawn.com
http://www.dawn.com/news/1221523/view-from-abroad-the-paris-massacre-and-its-fallout

Paris attack suspect Salah Abdeslam 'escapes in BMW towards Germany' as Belgium police arrest 16 people - live ...

Telegraph.co.uk‎ -

... as search for Paris attacks fugitive Salah Abdeslam and 'several others' goes on - latest.

More: Paris Attacks & Genesis of Terrorism

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The five pillars of Islamophobia

Vague categories like ‘extremist’ and ‘radicalisation’ are trawling Muslims in a very large ‘counter-terrorism’ net.

The status of Muslims in the west is under threat. The increased prevalence of anti Muslim hate crime is only one of the more visible consequences. In the UK, Muslim schoolchildren are suffering a ‘backlash’ of abuse, according to the teaching unions; Muslim women are the victims of more than half of Islamophobic attacks, says Tell MAMA.

Though violent crimes against Muslims are understandably a key issue for Muslims and the anti-racist movement, it would be a mistake to think that Islamophobia is just a problem of racism by a small minority on the streets, or those on the fringes of politics. In fact it is deeply embedded in our politics and society, and a more serious problem than many writers have recognised. Moreover, while most accounts of Islamophobia suggest that anti-Muslim racism is simply a matter of prejudice, which may have social consequences, it needs to be understood as more than a problem of racist ideas.

Obviously these are a key part of Islamophobia but to be effective such ideas need to be practically developed—to be actively produced, spread and institutionalised in new policies and practices. Anti-Muslim racism is sustained by what we call the ‘five pillars’ of Islamophobia.

Legitimate targets?

The first and most important is the institutions of the state—most notably the sprawling ‘counter-terrorism’ apparatus, the key nexus of institutions and practices which targets ‘extremists’ and those said to have been ‘radicalised’. The imprecision with which these concepts are defined and operationalised in official discourse, together with the routine practices of the police and intelligence services, means that many thousands of people, including non-Muslims, are regarded as a legitimate targets for suspicion, surveillance and intelligence-gathering.

Some academic authors see the state as progressive, or at least neutral, and capable of helping challenge anti-Muslim racism by creating spaces for Muslim cultural and civic engagement. But in our view the state is not neutral. Counter-terrorism policy disadvantages Muslims (and others) through exceptional legislation, pre-emptive incapacitation and intelligence and surveillance. And the counter-terrorism apparatus has spread from its traditional home in the police and intelligence services to occupy almost every branch of the state, from schools and universities to libraries.

A relatively new front in the war to drive Muslims from the public sphere is the NGO sector. The Charity Commission, headed by the neo-conservative Lord Shawcross, has presided over a significant increase in investigations of Muslim charities. The think tank Claystone reported that the Charity Commission had marked 55 British charities with new issue code ‘extremism and radicalisation’, without the organisations’ knowledge, and that Muslim charities were disproportionately affected.

Further right

The other four pillars of Islamophobia are social or political movements which bolster the state or push it further right—social movements ‘from above’, as the sociologists Laurence Cox and Gunvald Nilsen put it. By this they mean the ‘collective agency of dominant groups’.

The first is the most well known—the far right. Its traditional representatives in neo-fascist parties have all taken an anti-Muslim turn, but they have been joined in recent years by a plethora of new parties (such as the Sweden Democrats, the Danish People’s Party and UKIP in the UK), street movements such as the English Defence League, PEGIDA in Germany (and the UK, Austria, Denmark, Norway and Sweden) and the ‘counter-jihad movement’, which operates in almost every EU country, as well as in the US.

The far right is not neatly bounded and there are all sorts of overlaps with other strands of the social movements from above, which are themselves interpenetrated. They include the neo-conservative movement, strongly active in the EU as well as in the US, its country of origin; the Zionist movement; and a number of left/liberal currents such the pro-war or ‘decent’ left. All three are transnational movements from above and have connections to groups further to the right, as well as to the more mainstream conservative movement and indeed right-wing, neo-liberal think tanks.

These social movements, though divided on some matters, do work together—in combination with the state—to produce, reproduce and enact anti-Muslim racism, in the process putting in place the policy frameworks and practical arrangements which ensure the subordination of ordinary Muslims.

Take the neo-conservative Henry Jackson Society, a think tank which brings together key US and UK neo-conservatives, including William Kristol and Richard Perle. Among the key financial backers of the HJS has been the Conservative peer Stanley Kalms, the former treasurer of the Conservative Party and life president of DSG International (formerly Dixons). Kalms is a prominent member of Conservative Friends of Israel, though in 2009 he flirted with UKIP. He has supported the Henry Jackson Society and its predecessor the Centre for Social Cohesion through his Traditional Alternatives Foundation and the Stanley Kalms Foundation, and his links with more mainstream conservatism are illustrated by his financial backing for the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Centre for Social Justice.

Kalms appears to have quite ‘radical’ views on Muslims and Islam. According to Tony Lerman, the writer and ‘lapsed’ Zionist, Kalms was present at a meeting on 17 November 2006 where he said: ‘Most Muslims didn’t want to integrate ... Ultimately they would line up behind the fundamentalists.’ Social movements from above, including the far right and elements of the neo-conservative and Zionist movements, play an important active role in fostering anti-Muslim racism.

We will not turn back the tide of Islamophobia only by confronting the threat of UKIP in politics, or the EDL and other parts of the transnational ‘counter-jihad movement’ on the streets. We also need to focus our attention on elements of the (also transnational) neo-conservative and Zionist movements which provide information, ‘research’ and advocacy which can drag the state and politics to the right and sharpen Islamophobic polices, as we have seen in the UK with the revision of the ‘Prevent’ programme in 2010 (drawing on the material of the neo-conservative Centre for Social Cohesion) and in the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015.

Dissent criminalised

Most importantly, we need to understand that it is the state itself and its machinery of surveillance and repression that is at the forefront of ensuring that Muslims are collectively pushed to the edge of public life with extremely serious short-, medium- and long term consequences for democratic politics. The intention seems clear: dissent, whether by Muslim organisations, social movements or trades unions, is criminalised to protect our rulers from pressure from below.

It is a sad commentary on the state of hysteria about Islam in the UK today that even documenting evidence on Islamophobia is seen as evidence of ‘extremism’ or ‘radicalisation’. Simply in writing this article we have potentially entered what the police have called the ‘pre-criminal space’, which is enough to warrant unwelcome attention from the intelligence and policing agencies—never mind those of conservative newspaper columnists.
"The five pillars of Islamophobia" by Tom Mills and David Miller, opendemocracy.net
This article is based on a paper delivered at the Understanding Conflict conference at the University of Bath, 8-11 June 2015.

Paris attacks: Jean-Marie Le Pen says French terror attacks were work of western intelligence

The Charlie Hebdo massacre may have been the work of an “intelligence agency”, working with the connivance of French authorities, according to Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far right Front National.

In an interview with a virulently anti-western Russian newspaper, Mr Le Pen, 86, gave credence to conspiracy theories circulating on the internet suggesting that the attack was the work of American or Israeli agents seeking to foment a civil war between Islam and the west.

His comments – only partially retracted in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde today – provoked outrage amongst French politicians. They will also infuriate Marine Le Pen, his daughter, and successor as leader of the FN, who has been trying to distance the party from her father’s extreme and provocative remarks.

Mr Le Pen stood down as FN leader three years ago but remains President-for-life. He made the comments in an interview with Komsomolskaïa Pravda , a newspaper which had already blamed the United States for the terrorist mayhem in France.

Charlie Hebdo: Mourning in Paris

“The shooting at Charlie Hebdo resembles a secret service operation but we have no proof of that,” the newspaper quoted Mr Le Pen as saying. “I don’t think it was organised by the French authorities but they permitted this crime to be committed.  That, for the moment, is just a supposition.”

To justify his comments, Mr Le Pen pointed to the fact that one of the Kouachi brothers, who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre, left his identity card in a crashed getaway car. He compared this to the “miraculous fact” – beloved by conspiracy theorists – that one of the passports of the 9/11 hijackers was found on the ground in New York after two planes collided with the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in 2001.

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Mr Le Pen made two other provocative remarks in the interview. He said that the 1,500,000 who marched “against hatred” in Paris last Sunday were not “Charlies” but “Charlie Chaplins” (ie clowns). He also said that there were 15,000,00 to 20,000,000 Muslims in France – three or four times the generally accepted figures of 5,000,000 people who are practising Muslims or have Muslim backgrounds.

In an interview with Le Monde today, Mr Le Pen repeated his suspicions about the identity card but said he “could not recall” talking about “secret services” to the Russian newspaper.

Mr Le Pen’s original quoted remarks run directly counter to the official line of his daughter and his party. They have suggested that the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket are the final proof that France faces an  “enemy within”, which has been created by immigration and open EU borders.

Conspiracy theories of the kind espoused by the elder Le Pen sprang up on the internet within hours of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. They have been repeated in recent days by some – not all - young Muslims in France,  torn between identifying with the Kouachi brothers and insisting that they were stooges of the French authorities, Washington and Israel.

The  French “pope of conspiracy theories”, Thierry Meyssan, now based in Damascus, insisted that the Charlie Hebdo massacres were “ordered by US neo-cons and liberal hawks”. An American conspiracy site, McLatchy, has claimed that the Kouachi brothers were working for French intelligence.

By John Lichfield, independent.co.uk