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charlie hebdo
Where Were the Post-Hebdo Free Speech Crusaders as France Spent the Last Year Crushing Free Speech?
It's been almost one year since millions of people - led by the world's most repressive tyrants - marched in Paris ostensibly in favor of free speech.
Jan 08, 2016
It's been almost one year since millions of people - led by the world's most repressive tyrants - marched in Paris ostensibly in favor of free speech. Since then, the French government - which led the way trumpeting the vital importance of free speech in the wake of the Charlie Hedbo killings - has repeatedly prosecuted people for the political views they expressed, and otherwise exploited terrorism fears to crush civil liberties generally. They have done so with barely a peep of protest from most of those throughout the west who waved free speech flags in support of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.
That's because, as I argued at the time, many of these newfound free speech crusaders exploiting the Hedbo killings were not authentic, consistent believers in free speech. Instead, they invoke that principle only in the easiest and most self-serving instances: namely, defense of the ideas they support. But when people are punished for expressing ideas they hate, they are silent or supportive of that suppression: the very opposite of genuine free speech advocacy.
Days after the Paris march, the French government arrested the comedian Dieudonne M'bala M'bala "for being an 'apologist for terrorism' after suggesting on Facebook that he sympathized with one of the Paris gunmen." Two months later, he was convicted, receiving a suspended two-month jail sentence. In November, on separate charges, he was convicted by a Belgian court "for racist and anti-Semitic comments he made during a show in Belgium" and was given a two month prison term. There were no #JeSuisDieudonne hashtags trending, and it's almost impossible to find the loudest post-Hedbo Free Speech crusaders denouncing the French and Belgian governments for this attack on free expression.
In the weeks after the Free Speech march, dozens of people in France "were arrested for hate speech or other acts insulting religious faiths, or for cheering the men who carried out the attacks." The government "ordered prosecutors around the country to crack down on hate speech, anti-Semitism and glorifying terrorism." There were no marches in defense of their free speech rights.
Read the full article at The Intercept.
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In Retrospect: A Year of Sharpening Contradictions
Dec 30, 2015
Note: The horrific murder of 12 persons and the wounding of 11 in the attack on the staff of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo by terrorists on January 7 this year was followed on the evening of 13 November by six coordinated attacks, killing 130 people, including 89 at the Bataclan theater.
The first of these sanguinary attacks was inspired by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. Until November, this group was the most determined and successful in attacking and getting up attacks on the West, including the underwear bomber of 2009 over Detroit. It was also AQAP literature that helped convince the San Bernadino killers to shoot up their workplace. The latter were also seeking to contact al-Qaeda in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra or the Nusra Front).
The Saudi-led war on the Zaidi Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen has unleashed AQAP, which has al-Mukalla but also now the city of Zinjibar in Abyan province. The Houthis aren't dangerous to the US or Europe, but AQAP is a proven menace. The Saudis & allies have apparently invested almost nothing in curbing Yemen's al-Qaeda compared to their massive bombing campaigns and troop intervention against the Houthis.
As for the Nusra Front or al-Qaeda in Syria, it is a formal ally of the Saudi-backed Army of Conquest. Some of the 30 CIA-vetted Syrian rebel groups to whom the Saudis are used to provide T.O.W. anti-tank rockets, by now mostly hard line Salafis or Muslim Brotherhood, have occasionally had tactical field alliances with al-Qaeda. It wouldn't be fair to say that the US is supporting al-Qaeda in Syria (again, it is implicated in radicalizing the San Bernadino two). But let us say that it is allied with allies of al-Qaeda, making the same mistake as in the 1980s, when it supported Salafi Mujahidin allied with Arab al-Qaeda against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Despite the hype about Daesh, other al-Qaeda offshoots remain very dangerous, but AQAP and the Nusra Front are being ignored, or in the case of the latter, even indirectly supported by the US and its allies.
The Nov. 13 Paris attacks appear to have been inspired by Daesh (ISIS, ISIL), though the shadowy, tiny networks of radicals in the Brussels and Paris slums likely did not actually need much encouragement to attack the French capital. France has been a significant player against the radical groups in West and North Africa, and had been bombing Daesh in Iraq alongside the US. It had intelligence of a Daesh assault on France last summer and so started bombing al-Raqqa, the Daesh capital in northeastern Syria, in September, in hopes of disrupting the planning process. They were too late.
As horrid as the Paris attacks were, they were the work of a tiny, tiny group of European Muslims. Almost all European Muslims oppose such violence (3/5s of French Muslims are secular-minded and not religious). European Muslims until 2015 were responsible for relatively little terrorism in Europe compared to separatist groups or the white supremacist far right. In 2011 Anders Breivik, a far right Islamophobe, killed 77 people in Norway, far outstripping the per capita toll taken by the Nov. 13 gang in Paris.
Part of the backlash to the two big Paris strikes, by AQAP and Daesh, in 2015 was the rise of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, which demonizes Muslims in general, speaking of excluding them from the United States and closing mosques. Trump and his followers are falling for the trick of "sharpening contradictions," a key technique of insurgencies, as I explained after Charlie Hebdo:
[These attacks] were in my view a strategic strike, aiming at polarizing the French and European public.
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.
This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th century. Decades ago I read an account by the philosopher Karl Popper of how he flirted with Marxism for about 6 months in 1919 when he was auditing classes at the University of Vienna. He left the group in disgust when he discovered that they were attempting to use false flag operations to provoke militant confrontations. In one of them police killed 8 socialist youth at Horlgasse on 15 June 1919. 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.
The operatives who carried out this attack exhibit signs of professional training. They spoke unaccented French, and so certainly know that they are playing into the hands of Marine LePen and the Islamophobic French Right wing. They may have been French, but they appear to have been battle hardened. This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call themselves by this anagram term deriving from wordplay involving scrambling of letters). Ironically, there are reports that one of the two policemen they killed was a Muslim.
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.
"Sharpening the contradictions" is the strategy of sociopaths and totalitarians, aimed at unmooring people from their ordinary insouciance and preying on them, mobilizing their energies and wealth for the perverted purposes of a self-styled great leader.
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.
For those who require unrelated people to take responsibility for those who claim to be their co-religionists (not a demand ever made of Christians), the al-Azhar Seminary, seat of Sunni Muslim learning and fatwas, condemned the attack, as did the Arab League that comprises 22 Muslim-majority states.
We have a model for response to terrorist provocation and attempts at sharpening the contradictions. It is Norway after Anders Behring Breivik committed mass murder of Norwegian leftists 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.
Let me conclude by offering my profound condolences to the families, friends and fans of our murdered colleagues at Charlie Hebdo, including Stephane Charbonnier, Bernard Maris, and cartoonists Georges Wolinski Jean Cabut, aka Cabu, and Berbard Verlhac (Tignous)- and all the others. As Charbonnier, known as Charb, said, "I prefer to die standing than to live on my knees.".
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After Paris, Rights Groups Warn Against Knee-Jerk 'National Security' Overreach
'Whilst closed oppressive societies breed hatred and barbarism, open reflective states built on rights, freedoms and the rule of law ultimately prevail.'
Nov 16, 2015
As some European leaders pitch a reactionary response to Friday's brutal attacks in Paris, human rights and civil liberties groups are warning against the expansion of surveillance and other government powers under the guise of "national security."
On Monday, French President Francois Hollande announced that he would propose a bill to extend the country's state of emergency by three months as the manhunt for suspects spreads across Europe. The bill would also implement changes to the French Constitution that would strip citizenship of convicted terrorists, increase surveillance, and employ "more sophisticated methods" to curb the weapons trade.
Also on Monday, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the UK would add 1,900 new security and intelligence staff--and that he would consider speeding up a vote on the controversial Investigatory Powers Bill, introduced to Parliament earlier this year, which would allow unprecedented mass surveillance of internet users.
"I am determined to prioritize the resources we need to combat the terrorist threat," Cameron said.
In the U.S., meanwhile, CIA director John Brennan warned that the Paris attacks should serve as a "wake-up call" to surveillance opponents and criticized "a number of unauthorized disclosures, and a lot of hand-wringing over the government's role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists."
But as critics pointed out, Friday's attacks were carried out despite the fact that France passed an expansive surveillance law earlier this year following the January shootings at Charlie Hebdo magazine headquarters and other sites. Further, French police stated over the weekend that at least one suspect in Friday's attacks had been known to them for some time--yet these safeguards were apparently insufficient in thwarting those plans.
As British human rights lawyer David Allen Green explained on Twitter, "Not a single person calling for more legal powers for security...can explain how those powers would actually prevent atrocities."
"France *already* had the state surveillance powers which the UK security lobby are now urging. The Paris atrocities still happened," Green wrote.
European human rights group Liberty added, "The French authorities are no doubt right to look to the country's security and there must be unity and cooperation amongst all democratic nations of our shrinking planet. But that unity ultimately comes from shared values and security from the knowledge that whilst closed oppressive societies breed hatred and barbarism, open reflective states built on rights, freedoms and the rule of law ultimately prevail."
The Investigatory Powers Bill, which has been dubbed a "Snooper's Charter" by its opposition, would require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to keep records of every website visited by users for up to a year. It would also explicitly legalize bulk collection of user metadata and remote hacking of computers and cell phones worldwide in cases of threats to "national security."
Digitalcourage, a German privacy rights organization, criticized the use of tragedies such as Paris to push for surveillance measures. "Already the first voices are raised that are trying to exploit the attacks for their own political agenda," Digitalcourage said. "Grief and anger are understandable emotions. But they must not be abused."
Immediate calls for "retention and more monitoring is not only irreverent, it also [puts] us and many others in a difficult position. We find the knee-jerk demands for more control and supervision inappropriate," the group said.
Open Rights Group, a UK-based civil liberties organization, told Wired on Monday, "Our response to these attacks is utter horror but our actions must be well thought out and considered. The Investigatory Powers Bill is one of the most important Bills that this parliament will pass and it is vital that it is scrutinized and debated properly."
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