Charlie Hebdo

Hollande’s got one thing right: These people are cowards. People who kill people are cowards. Torturers are cowards. Bush and Cheney are cowards. Obama’s a coward for not calling out both Islamic terrorists, and their torturers, as cowards.

These extremists can employ only fear. Making fun of them is something that they can not tolerate, as it is the most effective weapon against them. While these deaths are tragedies, of course. We should honor the efforts of Charlie Hebdo, and others, who hold extremists and terrorists in the proper light: comical misfits having limp tantrums in an effort to get their own way.

The inequities of the modern world need redress. This fact is simply a propaganda point for these power-hungry, fake-religious organizations, not a justification.

I agree with every word of Chris Bertram’s statement.

“We also need to remember that most of the victims of Muslim extremism are other Muslims.”

Indeed.

Context about CH : some of the people killed there were part of French daily furniture. First time I saw Cabu was in a kid show, 30 years ago. Saw the first Wolinski strips in papers I didn’t understand. It’s a part of childhood that goes away.

P.S. What I mean, is that ordinary muslims should start to make it clear that not only do they not condone what the radicals do, but that they identify more with the general community than they do with the radicals who claim to be from the same religion. They really need to make it absolutely clear which side they are on in this. When they do that, they should get the support they deserve.

What I hate about this, beyond the obvious (loss off life …), is how this event will retroactively justify Charlie Hebdo’s style of arrogant islamophobic superiority. (I don’t know how many have followed this very long running controversy — I recommend the texts by Mona Chollet, if your read French, for context: http://lmsi.net/L-obscurantisme-beauf .)

Even just writing this here will appear as if I’m blaming the victims, which I’m not. They had the absolute right to their editorial line, and my agreement or disagreement are irrelevant.

Maybe that’s these people’s ulterior goal, I often think.

Ironically, IS has damaged themselves in Germany immensely by attacking Kurds. There have been running battles between Kurds and Islamic extremists in Germany, so that has contributed to a more vocal split within the German Islamic community.

P.S. With regard to MPAVictoria’s point about Timothy McVeigh, no Timothy McVeigh was not a Christian terrorist, but a terrorist who happened to be Christian, but this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/19/presidential-poll-atheists_n_5353524.html
suggests that America still has a problem with Religious bigotry.

Did Timothy McVeigh claim to be acting on their behalf?

Charles Taylor would be a better example: should everyone who has watched Pat Robertson’s network (or donated to his university or his charities, or voted for him) email a brief apology to the Hague?

Of course ‘Muslim elites’ (in these countries that have been attacked) should dissociate themselves from the violence and explain the reasons such acts don’t represent mainstream thought, or have widespread support. And they have done this, consistently, over the past decade – afaict.
If someone carries out violent acts in the name of an ideological, political, religious tradition that you have a strong association with, then it’s up to your political elites to explain forcefully why it’s inexcusable. The Irish political class (and various religious leaders) had to do this vis a vis the IRA (to varying levels of outrage) and it was right and proper that they did. The ordinary wo/man on the street, on the other hand, doesn’t really have any such obligation.
Unfortuantely, this *is* the way this ‘conflict’ has been framed, both by the far right and radical Islamists – as a world wide religous war. Stupid as that may be, there it is. People involved in this ‘conflict’ are borrowing from very specific historical, religious and political ideas; a global Muslim community in opposition to Western oppresion, much as the IRA took from political and ideological traditions with deep roots in Irish history . If you want to defeat these people, then you have to openly reject their nonsense.
Also bear in mind Merkels words against pegida. Does anyone think she was wrong to say it so forcefully and clearly ? Of course not, it’s her responsibility.

Scott Roeder (assassin of George Tiller) or James Charles Kopp (assassin of Barnett Slepian) might be better examples of “Christian terrorists” in the US. They were certainly using violence to terrorize abortion providers in support of an anti-abortion agenda that grew out of religious conviction. I haven’t seen any calls for the rest of us to picket their churches, or the churches of their supporters, nor do I think there should be such calls. It shouldn’t be incumbent on everyone else to prove that they don’t speak for us via such picketing.

Ronan,

Did the English political elite ever have to explain forcefully why the violent acts of their ideological, political, religious tradition perpetrated on the Irish were wrong?

#2 “…an odd way to characterize acts that involve exposing oneself to danger.”
#3 “What fear did these attackers fail to overcome?”

The short answer is, they fear exposing themselves to an even greater danger.

The stated reason they killed was to avenge Mohammed because the press had printed caricatures of the Prophet. I see two possible reasons here, not mutually exclusive: 1. The killers are in religious practice, and performing dhikr to attain fana. 2. And/or, the killers want to continue political jihad.

But, in the first case, it is possible for them to learn that other religious practices are able to attain spiritual enlightenment alongside the continued existence of those who oppose or caricature your scriptures, your hadith. You don’t pay attention to them. You must be stronger and braver, because this is more difficult.

It is also possible for them to know that their own religion, Islam, has moderate teachings too, you are not required to kill anybody, and that Western democracy allows freedom of speech and freedom of religion, to practice that way, and to continue in coexistence with others.

And in the second case, the killers are guerrillas hiding in a liberal democracy (France) until they can take sudden, violent advantage against unarmed people. Now yes, there is a modern view that would justify guerrilla warfare against an overwhelming oppressor, plus there is lots of Bob-Dylanesque romanticization of the “outlaw” in the West. But most other people think it is braver to argue your point of view in a nonviolent discussion, and to listen to the viewpoints of others, and to try to come to an agreement that includes everybody, by obtaining concessions from everybody, realizing that freedom of speech and freedom of religion are concessions that we already adhere to.

In either case, therefore, whether as religious or political practice, this is a cowardly act.

At some point I think that non-Muslims ought to give continuous verbal support to moderate Muslims who want to live together with everybody else, and you can start by calling this killing what it is: spiritual, emotional, and intellectual cowardice.

You know what makes more sense that asking random Muslims to declare that they don’t support radical militants? Asking the U.S. and EU nations to stop supporting the Saudi monarchy because it plays an enormous roll in disseminating and funding militant religious radicalism abroad. That might, like, actually make some kind of tangible difference.

Do people really not understand the difference between a political elite and a random person ?

#31 From BBC reports of the news

16:52
Hassan Chalghoumi – an imam of the Paris suburb of Drancy, visited the site of the attack at Charlie Hebdo headquarters.
Of the attackers, he said: “Their prophet is Satan. There is no connection between the Islamic faith and this minority.”

I think there have been many others.

I dont think is necessary to call for anybody to do what decent people, freely, will do.

I can see asking local political elites in Parisian Muslim communities to say something about these kinds of attacks, Ronan, but I just doubt it will serve any useful purpose. The bigots will blame all the Muslims anyway and the militants will continue to be able to draw support from transnational networks and find disaffected local youths who won’t care what the local community leaders have to say. There’s an analogy here to the continuing failure of respectability politics for African American communities–what the local preachers have to say doesn’t do one whit to stop the emergence of the next Ismaaiyl Brinsley or the shooting of yet another Michael Brown. The problem rests with another set of political elites than the local ones.

The greatest enemy of equal rights, of humane refugee and immigration policies, of peace and understanding between human beings, is not any Western government, nor many non-Western governments, but people like these three gunmen.

As to some of the comments in this thread, it is important that acts like this are openly and vehemently condemned within Muslim communities for three reasons.

First, open and vehement condemnation is needed to combat the perverse and barbaric ideology that people like these gunmen use to motivate and justify their actions, and that serve as a point of coordination for such people to connect, combine and develop resources and capabilities, and finally devise plans and execute them.

Second, cooperation from those within Muslim communities is needed to prevent these attacks from occurring. If extremist elements are taking root, if extremist elements are recruiting, and if extremist elements already exist, intelligence must be gathered so that, if necessary, preventive action can be taken.

Third, open and vehement condemnation weakens the support that bigoted anti-Muslim groups and ideologies might draw from an event like this.

In the ideological space, what extremists like these gunmen want to create is the perception of a clash of civilizations, encouraging persons to choose sides as the gunmen see them. Ironically, anti-Muslim groups contribute energy to the establishment of the perception, aiding the terrorists.

The counterattack in the ideological space must be: this is not a clash between civilizations, but a clash between civilization and the uncivilized, between those who value human life and those who out of ignorance and savagery desecrate themselves and brutalize others.

And while I do not wish to exaggerate this attack, which will hopefully remain an isolated incident, dwarfed in human cost by the annual toll of motor vehicle accidents and ordinary murder, it is worth remembering that the lines between many who celebrate these three gunmen and seek to emulate them, and the offices of newspapers everywhere, would be thin indeed were it not for aggressive counterterrorist efforts in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq, and in other places around the world.

I mean, I agree with your main point, but I really think the distinction is a big FAIL in most cases.

I see at the NYT that a bunch of people want the paper to publish the cartoons mocking Mohammed, seemingly in blissful ignorance of CharlieH’s cartoons, for instance, showing Jesus sodomizing the good lord and such. I’d love to see their reaction to that! I mean, the piss christ seemed to many to be beyond the beyond.
The particular strain of Islam that the killers adhere to is easy to locate. It is the state ideology of Saudi Arabia. And as long as we have a discussion in which, vaguely, these radical Moslems have to be repressed, and we pretend that we don’t see that our ally and the elite in the Gulf states finance and nourish this kind of shit – because we love their oil and their “moderation” – we will get nowhere.
There were millions of Moslems in Europe in the sixties and seventies. It was in the eighties, when the Saudis, under the blessing of the anti-communist West, started a mass global campaign of building mosques, that the terrorism started. It is happening in Bosnia today, for instance – the takeover of mosques by other Moslem believers by the Saudi-financed Wahabists. The interconnection between the Saudis and the financial and political elites seems to be too strong to be penetrated, but someday questions will have to be asked about why this has been going on. I’m not a big subscriber to the terrorist export industry, which is mostly bogus, but I think Sarah Ehrenfeld is right, here: http://acdemocracy.org/their-oil-is-thicker-than-our-blood/

Instead of racist hysterics that lay out ultimata for Muslims a la @37 and defend Christendom’s bloody performance as anti-terrorism, shouldn’t a little common sense be used? Gunmen supposedly shouting “Allahu akbar” doesn’t make them Muslims. Government agencies or rightist militant groups are entirely capable of performing this deed to advance a new military intervention or anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim legislation, either in their own persons or by false flag recruitment. I can’t but think anyone who dismisses this possibility is letting their prejudices show.

But, if it did happen that the individuals were Muslims ordered by a jihadi group to undertake this provocation, then the most likely aim was to portray the indiscriminate response against Muslims as indiscriminate hatred of Muslims. That’s a very difficult argument to refute, which means a serious desire to thwart the assassins’ will means keeping a cool head.

And, on a personal level, a desire for simple justice for murder victims, really does imply a concern for who actually did it. Using an atrocity to make political points like a Jerry Coyne (who managed to use dead bodies for a shot at… Ben Affleck!) or Lubos Motl, demeans the victims. Why add insult to such a grave injury?

“As a non-Muslim, I’d like to apologize to Muslims for the non-Muslims demanding that all Muslims should apologize for the attacks today.”

-John Scalzi on twitter about 15 minutes ago.

Steve Johnson, here’s a better, non-nutter link: from the EU https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxoYWlkZXJub3Rlc3xneDo3NDEwMDI3NjViZTNjODZm

By the way, I’ve had Bosnian friends who have been complaining about the Saudi financed attempt to take over and build mosques in Bosnia, and it is no joke. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130801242

I would bet a large sum of money that when these killers are caught, you will find a money trail that eventually goes back to the Gulf states – although of course from “private” donors there.

Ronan, just to be clear I was responding mainly to reason.

Muslims “should really make it absolutely clear which side they are on”? Fuck you, that’s what side I’m on. Not a helpful comment, Greg. Never mind. I apologize.

It’s personal to me because my wife is Muslim. I have two small children who will be raised in the Muslim tradition. Will this responsibility be passed on to my children as well? Will my wife and kids have to make public displays of contrition and condemnation to appease their local communities? Will they have to prove which side they’re on? How exactly will they prove that? To whose satisfaction? Is there ever a point where it’s a settled matter, or do they have to prove it every year, like your car passing its safety check?

“(Fwiw I’m not proposing anything like that in this case, just find the comment bizarre.)”

You find MY comment bizzare? And not the one how this could totally just be a false flag operation by the French Gov’t? Sheesh people are weird.

stevenjohnson @43: Instead of racist hysterics that lay out ultimata for Muslims a la @37 and defend Christendom’s bloody performance as anti-terrorism….

37 points out that one of the reasons condemnation is important is that it undercuts a narrative promoting division between Muslims and others. This helps undermine the perverse ideologies that support attacks like this, while also undermining the ability of bigoted anti-Muslim groups to use this attack as propaganda. There isn’t any ultimatum, and there certainly isn’t any racist hysterics.

Instead there’s simply practical reasoning about how open and vehement condemnation in Muslim communities connects to a broader strategy to combat violent extremism as well as religious bigotry.

Government agencies or rightist militant groups are entirely capable of performing this deed to advance a new military intervention or anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim legislation, either in their own persons or by false flag recruitment. I can’t but think anyone who dismisses this possibility is letting their prejudices show.

One of my points at 37 is, again, that open and vehement condemnation within Muslim communities undercuts those who will use this as part of an argument for the types of legislation you name.

But the absurd conspiracy theories you list as possibilities are indeed possibilities, as is the possibility that this is all part of a Martian plot to weaken Earth until all the pieces are in place for the final attack. Nonetheless, life is short, and I don’t think dismissing such theories is a good indicator of prejudice. Your mileage obviously varies, and good luck with that.

@42
I’d like to apologize for the NAACP bombing, as a middle-aged, balding, white guy who doesn’t know crap about building bombs.

@55
As a liberal, I hereby denounce Stalin.

As a human being, I hereby apologize for these barbaric monsters.

#53 Andrew F

“stevenjohnson @43: Instead of racist hysterics that lay out ultimata for Muslims a la @37 and defend Christendom’s bloody performance as anti-terrorism….”

37 points out that one of the reasons condemnation is important is that it undercuts a narrative promoting division between Muslims and others. This helps undermine the perverse ideologies that support attacks like this, while also undermining the ability of bigoted anti-Muslim groups to use this attack as propaganda. There isn’t any ultimatum, and there certainly isn’t any racist hysterics.

Then we need to press hard for more media coverage of muslims who denounce the attack, and less emphasis on demands that muslims denounce the attack.

The actual demands give the impression that not enough muslims are denouncing it, while the lack of coverage of muslims who do denounce it also gives that impression. In both cases exactly the wrong impression that we don’t want.

#16 CJColucci

Part of the problem is that there is no go-to spokesperson for sane Islam. Religious authority is decentralized; there is no Pope, no obvious person to call for comment, and few organizations with spokespeople who can command attention. In fact, a number of imams have spoken out, but this gets little media play because nobody had heard of these guys before. I don’t fault the media for this any more than I would fault the media for not giving big play to a Monsignor in Rochester who spoke out against clerical child abuse, but it does leave the unfortunate impression that there’s nobody out there doing what ought to be done.

Is this apologetics for the media? They don’t deserve it. They should publicize what’s there, and not publicize demands that random muslims should apologize and disclaim etc, which in fact is being done and not being adequately reported.

To the extent that the media is reporting the wrong things and making the problem far worse, this is directly the media’s fault.

I’m finding it hard to see past the immediate horror of ten, eleven or more human beings, journalists, gunned down like that in a West European capital city. Awful.

As a resident of a West European capital city, I sympathise, but I also wouldn’t be surprised to to learn that across the world those who react in this way are in the minority.

One of the things I really liked about the editorial board of CharlieHebdo is that they were serious about the freedom of expression. When the French government wanted to ban a demonstration against them for their Mohammed cartoons, Charb opposed the government – he really was for freedom of expression. The massacre of the cartoonists and editorialists is truly maddening as well as so incredibly sad.

For those who are interested, there is now a much better and more complete picture of what happened this morning. See for example Le Monde: http://www.lemonde.fr/attaque-contre-charlie-hebdo/article/2015/01/07/comment-s-est-deroulee-l-attaque-contre-charlie-hebdo_4550930_4550668.html#xtor=RSS-3208
Among other things, this makes it clear that the first reports, suggesting a high degree of preparation and intelligence, were greatly exaggerated. In fact, the attack seems more opportunistic – the attackers first went to the wrong building.
French police claim to know who the alleged perpetrators are:
See http://www.metronews.fr/info/attentat-a-charlie-hebdo-les-trois-suspects-ont-ete-identifies/moag!6R1qjYdgLbxjQ/

LWA @63: I was tempted after 9-11 to fix the blame on poverty in the 3rd World, believing that the attackers were impoverished radicals seduced by money.

Actually, the second half of this sentence doesn’t follow from the first. Why are impoverished people the only ones likely to be incensed by the spectacle of large-scale poverty? It’s perfectly possible, after all, to care enough about injustice to other people that one (foolishly) resorts to violently protesting it. Like most left-wing terrorists throughout history, in fact.

Krugman has mentioned several times that right-wingers sometimes bait him by saying, in effect: “Who are you to complain about class warfare when you’re one of the 1 percent?” Just goes to show how limited a moral imagination right-wingers (I don’t mean you, LWA) generally have.

On reflection, much of this comes down to whether you actually think the religion you profess is literally true or not. If yours is true, then by definition, that of others must be false.
This was the case for most of human history, and in most societies the punishment for blasphemy was death. I don’t know when the last such sentence was carried out in Europe (others may have a better idea) but it was certainly well into the seventeenth century. They found plenty of justification in the Bible for doing so.
The modern tendency, on the other hand, is to see religion as a kind of improving moral philosophy, which is valuable, but not necessarily literally true. Different faiths exist rather as different schools of philosophy do. We are therefore understandably frightened when we encounter people who act as though their religion is literally true, and as if its commandments are literally to be carried out.
This is the problem we have today with fundamentalists of all types, although, historically speaking, they are not the anomaly, we are.

Funnily enough (though not laugh out loud funny), when Anders Behring Breivik massacred those children in Norway a few years ago the internet was full of right wingers claiming it was a left-wing false flag operation.

“but was a deliberate act to provoke rightwing anti-muslim sentiment.”

Or it could have been a deliberate act to scare people into giving Islam more respect than they otherwise would. Terrify the media into self-censoring. That strikes me as entirely plausible, too.

Tabasco & Brett.
The alternatives seen to be not very likely. My reasoning is the attack was obviously carried out with a very high degree of copmtence, this wasn’t a couple of people who just got angry and decided to take action -it had a lot of planning and thought behind it.

We will just have to wait and see what is discovered of course.

I only wish it were a false flag operation, as that would discredit the far right segment that this was meant to provoke. But, the odds are against it.

75, undoubtedly all this is true. However, I can’t help but have a sick feeling that lately, western interventions – such as arming the syrian rebels, which is just a waystation to arming al qaeda and ISIS – are putting more ak 47s in the hands of more post-adolescent thugs. Under Fabius, france’s foreign minister, France has been pursuing a robustly neo-con policy in North Africa and the Middle east. It really is nutty. There’s no way that one can be non-porous and still be a democratic european country. One of the brothers who is alleged to have done this, Cherif Kouachi, already has been in jail for organizing a brigade to go to Iraq in 2005 and fight the occupiers. Now, the same groups are being aided in Syria by France and the US, in all practical terms, and the Gulf states, who claim to have stopped resourcing ISIS, are most likely still resourcing al qaeda in Syria.
I don’t at all get the false flag reasoning – everybody has known since the attempt to blow up Charlie hebdo in 2012 who their enemies are. Although it is true, the cartoon of jesus sodomizing the father did rile up catholics in the Manif pour tous group. What militarizes Moslems in Europe is not, from what I have read, oppressive conditions in the banlieu communities – it is very much what is happening in the rest of the world. I mean, perhaps a mastermind terrorist is getting the french to bomb Isis and arm “responsible” syrian rebels because he knows that this is the way to ultimate power, but I doubt it. A fucked up policy based on sunk costs and a refusal to look at what is happening in the Middle East is more likely to blame.

Nato defends TV bombing
Nato has defended its bombing of Serbia’s state television station, saying it was a legitimate target and a “ministry of lies”.

Al-Jazeera ‘hit by missile’
A US missile has hit the Baghdad offices of Arab news service al-Jazeera television, killing one member of staff and wounding another, the station reported on Tuesday

MPs leaked Bush plan to hit al-Jazeera
Two Labour MPs have defied the Official Secrets Act by passing on the contents of a secret British document revealing how President George Bush wanted to bomb the Arabic TV station, al-Jazeera.

“We need solidarity on a very large scale.”
Yes. In fact it is the best possible response to many of the problems we face.

J Thomas, you have proven in multiple threads that you are willing to argue any position regardless of the evidence so forgive me if I don’t bother with you tonight. Go troll someone else.

More generally, if anyone actually does believe this is a false flag operation I will happily give five to one odds for a bet to that effect up to 100 dollars. Money to be donated to a chosen charity. We can give it a 6 month time frame.
/my charity will be a local pug rescue group that does great work.

#80 MPAV

J Thomas, you have proven in multiple threads that you are willing to argue any position regardless of the evidence so forgive me if I don’t bother with you tonight. Go troll someone else.

You are the one who derides other people’s positions without ever stating your own. You make extreme claims with no evidence. For example that you know who did (and who didn’t do) this particular crime, when you have given no evidence whatsoever and no reasoning.

You are the troll.

“You are the troll.”

Both of our comments are out there for others to read. Let us just let other people decide who exactly is making claims without evidence sparky.

“it is worth remembering that the lines between many who celebrate these three gunmen and seek to emulate them, and the offices of newspapers everywhere, would be thin indeed were it not for aggressive counterterrorist efforts in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq, and in other places around the world.”

Yeah, we should stop complaining about civilian casualties and cheer for Western violence wherever it occurs.

And Syria? The Syrian security forces are by far the biggest killers of Islamic radicals in Syria. Should we applaud them too?

LWA, it might amuse you to learn just what it took to make Europe and the Americas into what it is today. Violence, lots of it: the heads of multiple kings, several civil wars, which combined into a Continent-wide conflagration. Even during the supposedly peaceful 19th century, revolutionary violence extracted a toll. But it was never necessary to resort to genocide: most people are unwilling to die for a lost cause.

Arabs and Persians are not different from us. They too have a history of liberal and revolutionary politics: Ataturk overthrew one self-described caliphate, and there is no reason liberals in Iran could not do the same. Afghanistan was run by the Communist Party before Islamists seized it and plunged it into the dark ages. Today it has a relatively democratic government. Pakistan was a hotbed of labor unionism, before decades of Islamist and military rule destroyed civil society. Palestinian terrorism used to be carried out by Stalinists, and now is conducted by Islamists.

Well it looks like we will get some answers soon….
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/paris-magazine-attack/paris-attack-suspect-dead-two-custody-u-s-officials-say-n281761

The Communist government lasted after the end of the USSR occupation, only falling when the money ran out. The Taliban and mujahadeen were somewhat popular, but the majority of their support came from outside Afghanistan. Besides, we shouldn’t let a Vendee or two deter us from our commitments to human rights.

There will be a small demonstration in support of Charlie Hebdo in Los Angeles at 6 pm tonight at the Figaro Restaurant in Los Feliz. For any CT commenters in LA.

False flag attacks are relatively rare. I think there is a good reason. Anyone holding a terrorist attitude thinks of and perhaps even does some planning for them. [I’m defining terrorist attitude, as holding some agenda (usually nationalist, but sometime ideological or religious) as far more important than human lives -even innocent lives.] But, the potential damage to ones cause of a botched false-flag operation (especially if it causes casualties and outrage, but the who-done it is obvious to the public) can be fatal to the oh-so important cause. So they aren’t attempted very often.

From MPA’s link in #89:

The Associated Press quoted Cherif Kouachi in 2008 as saying he’d been motivated by outrage at images of torture of Iraqi inmates at the U.S. prison at Abu Ghraib. “I really believed in the idea,” it quoted him as saying.

I find Scott Atran’s answer most plausible:

“If so many millions support jihad, why are only thousands willing to kill and die for it? We shall see that young men willing to go kill and die for jihad were campmates , school buddies, soccer pals, and the like, who become die-hard bands of brothers in a tragic and misbegotten quest to save their imagined tribal community from Crusaders, Jews, and other morally deformed, unrepentant, and therefore subhuman beings. It’s in groups that they find the camaraderie of a cause , however admirable or abhorrent, and the courage and commitment that come from belonging to something larger. Terrorists generally do not commit terrorism because they are extraordinarily vengeful or uncaring, poor or uneducated, humiliated or lacking in self-esteem , schooled as children in radical religion or brainwashed, criminally minded or suicidal, or sex-starved for virgins in heaven. Terrorists, for the most part, are not nihilists but extreme moralists— altruists fastened to a hope gone haywire. And there is basis for real moral grievance, whether one believes exclusively in secular human rights or in the religious ethics of the house of Abraham. There’s no excuse, “collateral damage” or otherwise, for the killing of innocents in Afghanistan , Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya, and elsewhere. But a divine justice that rewards the killing of innocents in the name of an eye for an eye, exalting death over life for its own believers, is the will to power of a cruel and sadistic Moloch that would leave the whole world blind.”

(also for anyone interested Olivier Roy’s ‘Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah’ makes similar arguments, which I cant really recall at the moment)

I have this rock that keeps away tigers. I mean do you see any tigers around? No? Then it must work!

> How would you find out how rare successful false flag attacks are?

It seems implausible that adding “and we have to pretend to be someone else the whole time” makes your operation more likely to succeed, wouldn’t you think?

So a comparison of rates of unsuccessful false-flag operations to unsuccessful non-false-flag operations is — absent evidence to support the otherwise-implausible claim that [see first para] — a pretty good [conservative] proxy for total false-flag operations to total non-false-flag operations, and for successful &c to &c.

Straightforward?

This is one of the dumber CT threads I can recall. Charlie Hotel would have at it unmercifully…

> Yes but how does your logic apply when considering my tiger repelling rock?

That logic gets you “insufficient data owing to low background rates of tiger attacks in [your location]”.

Other logic is less inconclusive: if we’re focussed purely on the practical we can estimate NPV of future tiger-attack costs and compare with the price you’re charging for the rock. If we’re more interested in theory we could look for other effects from the causative mechanisms, or how the rock works in tiger-attack-richer environments [including controlled studies].

Engels at 108′,

This was shaping up to be a pretty intelligent discussion until it took a wrong turn somewhere around Neverland and ended up looking like what I imagine a comment thread at Infowars would look like.

OC @69:

Even that seems too complicated by half, tho. This is one of the cases where the simple, they were fanatics, explanation seems far more plausible. It’s not as if fanatics are incapable of planning well.

ZM,

Yeah, I followed that on twitter a bit; it was really quite brilliant. Thanks for pointing it out.

Just a few days ago:
http://www.newsweek.com/940-cars-torched-france-new-year-celebrations-296360
“940 cars were set on fire across France by frenzied revellers as they welcomed the arrival of the New Year, according to France’s Interior Ministry.
…
Pierre-Henry Brandet, spokesperson for the Interior Ministry told French broadcaster BFM-TV that the car burning was most frequent in eastern France, as well as in the suburbs of Paris, particularly in the banlieues (ghettos) of Seine-Saint-Denis, which were the epicentre of riots protesting police brutality in 2005 resulting in the torching of more than 10,000 cars.”

Something’s rotten in the land of social democracy.

Maybe this is something similar to the workplace and school massacres of the late 1980s and 1990s in the US…

“We need to remember that most of the victims of extremists of this type have been everyday people who happen to be Muslims.”

True in general, but even in this particular case it is well worth remembering that one of the victim is Ahmed Merabe, a 42 year old policeman gunned down (and apparently later summarily executed) during the chase. I don’t know if he would have self-identified as muslim, but his name suggests it is at least plausible.

P.S.
Yes and more fingers needed to pointed at Saudi Arabia as the source of this plague.

#107 Collin Street

> How would you find out how rare successful false flag attacks are?

“It seems implausible that adding “and we have to pretend to be someone else the whole time” makes your operation more likely to succeed, wouldn’t you think?”

Not particularly relevant.

So a comparison of rates of unsuccessful false-flag operations to unsuccessful non-false-flag operations is — absent evidence to support the otherwise-implausible claim that [see first para] — a pretty good [conservative] proxy for total false-flag operations to total non-false-flag operations, and for successful &c to &c.

False-flag operations that fail to meet their official objectives can be almost as effective — or more effective, depending — as those that do. An unsuccessful attempt by arabs to attack the White House with poison gas might generate just the right amount of outrage, while a successful attempt might not only generate too much but also put the wrong person into the presidency.

Then there’s the question whether a particular group which is blamed for an attack makes a public denial. Would they say “We agree with the intent of whoever did this, and we would have been glad to do it, but in fact we did not do this one”? Or would they claim credit? We might estimate this by looking at how often more than one terrorist group claims credit for a particular incident. As far as I know, AQ stopped denying doing 9/11 after the first few months. But if they didn’t do it, still it would be a troubling tactical decision to admit not doing it.

They had been blamed for a previous WTC attack by egyptians, when the main connection was that one of the conspirators had attended an AQ infantry training camp. I haven’t heard that they denied that one. Iraq captured one of the conspirators and after interrogation Saddam speculated that it was done by Israel, USA, or factions in Saudi Arabia or Egypt. That is, he didn’t trust the cover story but he had no idea what the truth was.

Consider the Lavon affair, a failed false-flag operation with serious consequences. Apparently it failed because the leader of the group had been a double agent all along. Also it was done by egyptian jews recruited by Israel, who were not good at denying their involvement. Israel would have done far better to pretend to be an arab fanatical group and recruit arab fanatics who could then be caught to confirm the story. Israel publicly denied the attacks for 51 years.

I have no evidence how common it is for false-flag operations to “succeed” by being attributed to the wrong groups. I don’t understand why you would think you know.

But it seems to me that there is a lack of public demostrations from the moslem communities of condemnation for the attackers and their ideology.

Well, just as you were writing the seven largest French muslim organisations issued a joint statement “condemning in the sternest way” the “dreadful attack”, pointing out that such “abject and unjust acts” are “in no possible way a reflection of Islam”, urging “the Muslims of France to take part in the demonstration scheduled on Sunday in solidarity with the victims” and wishing for the “quick capture and sever punishment of the perpetrators” (my translation throughout).

I think the “Muslims-should-apologise” theme is a misunderstanding of what this incident is about. It’s not Muslim vs Christian, but devout believer vs blasphemer. Such distinctions (which occur in all monotheistic religions) relate to what is done, not who did it. Indeed, historically, monotheistic religions have punished blasphemy by their own communities at least as harshly, if not more so, than blasphemy by outsiders. So if people of Muslim extraction were working at the magazine, that only made it worse. We in Europe no longer kill people for “taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain” (Exodus, 20:7). Others do.
Incidentally, there was another shooting incident in Paris this morning, with one policewoman killed. At the moment, the police are saying that they don’t think there’s a connection with yesterday’s killings, but a large part of southern Paris has been shut down all morning.
http://www.franceinfo.fr/actu/faits-divers/article/derniere-minute-des-coups-de-feu-ont-ete-tires-ce-matin-porte-de-chatillon-dans-le-sud-de-paris-628399

Z @125
Good.

‘This is one of the dumber CT threads I can recall.’
‘You haven’t been reading CT much recently, have you Tyrone?’

The most acrimonious and emotionally charged CT debates are still an order of magnitude more erudite and polite than the same discussion would be at any other site.

“Islamophobia”? Is that like “an inordinate fear of communism”? An irrational fear of cockroaches? Rabies?

As for Islam, it is the most dangerous and culturally retrograde religion in the world today.

Islam is and always was more like a cult of war and murder than any other religion today, and because of that and because it is so widespread and has much greater access to funding and weapons than, say, Aum Shinrikyo, it is the most active immediate threat of mass violence anyone in the West faces.

But, sure, let’s spend nearly all our time worrying about Islamophobia, a largely imaginary disorder that, if it has killed anyone, is way behind the Muslim body count, even looking only at victims since 9/11.

By the way, historically, most of the victims of Christian religious extremism have been other Christians.

Nobody seems to think that makes historic Christian extremism less awful.

The aim of the “Islamophobic” parties in Europe is simply to end or severely limit Muslim immigration and deport dangerous Muslim fanatics.

It is not to kill anyone.

And who can blame them?

Comparing both ends and means, the so-called Islamophobes come out far more benign than the Muslims, and anyway they would not even exists were it for the constant attacks and other cultural horrors of the Muslims, both in Europe and elsewhere.

I’m pleased to say that here in Germany the Islamic community is taking my advice.
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/attacke-auf-charlie-hebdo-muslimische-verbaende-planen-kundgebung-a-1011926.html

Philo Vaihinger@131
I prefer to think of the Christian vs. Muslim comparison as Christianity simply having a several hundred year head start on being civilized. After all, what would the daily headlines look like in the Christian world circa 1450CE? It’s not like Christians would be massacring Jewish communities for bringing the plague on them or anything…

Give it another 600 years and the extreme factions of Islam will probably reach the current, entirely civilized, abortion clinic bombing-level of extreme Christian religious disagreement with other cultures and beliefs.

But for whatever part of that 600 years I am part of, I will continue to judge individuals based on their personal conduct rather than a stereotype based on the aberrant actions of an extreme minority.

Oh Philo… We were having such a decent conversation, excluding ridiculous conspiracy theories from the usual suspects, before you showed up. Be a dear and take your racism and fear somewhere else.

… who declared war on who? “From a religion”?? Which?

I see that as, simply, citizens telling citizens that we stand together with them, because some assholes may target them for their religion. Same as standing with the journalist of Charlie Hebdo for being attacked for their “blasphemy”.

JCF: What, would that be your response to someone who said someone had offered to “ride with them” and they hadn’t liked it? You’d ‘splain that their opinion didn’t respond to the good intentions of the person who’d offered, and it would be more polite of them to keep their bad feelings to themselves, and recognize that the white person’s feelings were more important?

And then you’d expect them to conclude that you don’t have anything in common with the people harassing them, and that your society respects them the same as everybody else?

Isn’t this one of those situations where the feelings of the actual people in the real situation are more important than vague feelings of praise for the idea of having good intentions?

@JThomas 61

Aspirationally, I don’t disagree with you. In a world in which journalism was much better done than it is, someone, and maybe lots of someones, probably would be thinking that a better effort to identify and publicize condemnation by sane Muslims of Muslim extremism is necessary precisely because otherwise people would think no sane Muslims are doing that. But in the journalistic world we live in, with its “opinions on shape of earth differ” reporting, such an effort is severely hampered by the absence of people in the Rolodex (am I showing my age) to call or official spokespeople well enough known that their comments automatically count as “news.”

“Especially when the potential chaperones use exactly the same argument as the people in countries with Islamist militias who think all women should be wearing headscarves.”

I am not sure I understand this. Would you mind expanding on it?

“Again, best way to show that is to offer your help openly to anybody in risk of being discriminated.”

I like this a lot.

““If you wear a headscarf, bands of roving young men won’t attack you, it’s just for your own protection.” “If you don’t go out without a non-Muslim escort, bands of roving young men won’t attack you, it’s just for your own protection.” Seems pretty similar to me. Or other countries: “If you go out without a male escort, . . .””

Ah okay. I would not assume that this is how someone would take a general movement show that the populace at large is not afraid of Muslims, however I guess neither of us is in a position to know for sure.

If an asset for a security agency or militant group recruits operatives while posing as a representative of another agency or group, that is a false flag recruitment. Any public actions carried out then would be false flag operations, as I understand it.

In a purely domestic context, a supposed militant turned while in jail might pretend not to be working for the police but someone else. This is commonly called provocation or entrapment. But I think that is essentially the same thing, making it useful to call the possibility “false flag” when uncertain of a purely domestic context.

we should not offer our help freely and without pressure to those of our citizens that may fear retaliation by other extremists idiots?

Sure. And we should think ahead of time about how it will look, and how the people we’re helping might feel.

But I’m repeating myself and you’ve told me a few too many times what I think.

#152 MPAV

I would not assume that this is how someone would take a general movement show that the populace at large is not afraid of Muslims, however I guess neither of us is in a position to know for sure.

For what it is worth I think JCF is more likely to be correct.

I feel kind of mean responding to you when everybody else is so polite. But this is better than your usual fare. You don’t know. You have no real basis to decide. This time you admit that, and then you present your unfounded opinion “for what it’s worth” with a smiley. Usually you splash your unfounded opinions over the topic and argue that they must be right just because.

This particularly clashes with my own style, which is to look for uncertainty, for ways that what people think might not fit the reality, and consider how we could find out more, and what we can do in the meantime that is unlikely to backfire in case we are mistaken. Then you reply that whatever you believe is obviously correct and only kooks would doubt it.

Oh well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emad_Salem
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/28/nyregion/tapes-depict-proposal-to-thwart-bomb-used-in-trade-center-blast.html?pagewanted=1

This is not the same thing, but I thought it was worth a look. As I interpret it, in 1993 there was a plot by some egyptians, maybe connected with MB, to do a bombing. One of them was an FBI spy who provided the FBI with lots and lots of info about them. The FBI plan was that their spy would give them inert ingredients to build the bomb with, and then they would try to set it off and the FBI would have indisputable evidence in court. But the FBI got into infighting among themselves, and the spy’s controller was demoted and the spy was fired. The terrorists then built the bomb with the correct ingredients and blew up a parking deck in the WTC. It would have been hilarious except for 6 dead and 1000 wounded etc.

“I feel kind of mean responding to you when everybody else is so polite. But this is better than your usual fare.”

Go troll someone else J.

Unless you are feeling brave then take up the bet I offered further up thread. Those pugs need your money.

“This particularly clashes with my own style, which is to look for uncertainty”
No. Your style is to play the devils advocate for any position regardless of a lack of evidence and then write thousands of words explaining why you are better than everyone else commenting here. Your comments in the consent, mansplaining and gun threads are proof of this to anyone who cares enough to go look.

#159 MPAV

Unless you are feeling brave then take up the bet I offered further up thread.

Sucker bet. You say there are basicly no false-flag operations. So you make a bet that would be a fair one if there was an 80% chance that the mass media do not announce that this particular incident was false-flag within 6 months.

But of course if most false-flag incidents go unreported in the mass media, it would be unlikely that this one does in 6 months.

I propose a better bet. You bet me 20 to 1 that this incident is not reported as false-flag in any of the traditional “secretive” websites like Stratfor within the next 2 years.

It has to be a traditional site, not one that I could get printed on, not that I would do that to win a bet.

If it is reported but essential details have been reliably falsified, that doesn’t count. So it has to be plausibly true, not Laurie Mylroie quality.

In case we disagree whether it’s plausible enough, ask some reputable person we agree about ahead of time to arbitrate? William Timberman? I suspect John Quiggen would be too busy, but of course anybody could be too busy, we’d have to ask.

“Yeah, that’s why I said Donald.”

You praised tough counterterrorism activities in Yemen and Syria and Iraq–given that much of that activity in Yemen has included drone strikes, it’s not at all clear that we haven’t increased hatred of the US with such activities. And mentioning Syria in this context is just weird–again, numerically the Assad regime is killing vastly more Islamic extremists than we are. In Iraq our invasion helped cause the plague of Islamic extremism in the region, and our current allies the Shiites there have committed so many atrocities against Sunnis it drove many Sunnis into the arms of ISIS.

In that comment you also said this–

“The greatest enemy of equal rights, of humane refugee and immigration policies, of peace and understanding between human beings, is not any Western government, nor many non-Western governments, but people like these three gunmen.”

Why talk like this? It’s obvious that Western actions, including Western abuses of human rights, have fueled Islamic extremism. People who join jihadist groups sometimes do so out of a misguided sense of moral outrage (others may do so simply because the thought of killing people in a supposedly noble cause excites them). Islamic extremism in turn incites more Western atrocities. I jump on you because you consistently downplay Western atrocities–in my opinion, attitudes like yours are part of the problem.

“I propose a better bet. You bet me 20 to 1 that this incident is not reported as false-flag in any of the traditional “secretive” websites like Stratfor within the next 2 years.”

I have never heard of that site. So it is unacceptable to me. 20 to 1 does not leave enough room with my limit of 100 dollars for much money for needy pugs. 5 to 1 is my offer.

“In case we disagree whether it’s plausible enough, ask some reputable person we agree about ahead of time to arbitrate? William Timberman?”
That would be fine with me. How about ten to one odds? William, if he agrees, can decided in 8 months whether there is credible evidence that this was a false flag attack or whether you were just making stuff up to be controversial.

Really almost regular commenter/contributor would be fine with me as a judge. RF, Lynne, Omega, geo, Marc, The Temporary Name, all would be fine.

Any of you interested/willing?

@Suzanne

Seems promising.

js.:

It’s certainly not my direct experience that non-Christian groups in the US (among one of which I was raised) have a word for the majority population that doesn’t signify “Christian.” (Obviously, those concepts don’t signify Christian to that small group of Christians who believe most members of Christian churches–and pretty much all members of some large churches–“aren’t really Christians,” but that’s after all a small group.)

It’s not my direct experience that those in the US who embrace the concept “Judeo-Christian,” or even “Judeo-Christian-Muslim,” such as George Bush, mean by that to exclude those who are called “the unaffiliated,” and so on.

I’m aware that the situation is different in the UK and other countries, who find it comical that the US is so religion-bound, as in France, where there’s a stronger tradition of secularism.

The situation in Australia may have been entirely innocent (I didn’t follow the links), but its similarity to the public pronouncements of Bush on the TV in the months after 9/11, was what struck me. The words, if not the situation and the person making the proposal, were almost identical. Obviously, I don’t know what went through the mind of every person in the country when they heard him make those remarks. I only know how they struck me, and a small number of other people whom I happened to be acquainted with.

“Really almost regular commenter/contributor would be fine with me as a judge. RF, Lynne, Omega, geo, Marc, The Temporary Name, all would be fine.”

Don’t take the bait, J Thomas!
Those guys are all in on it!

“Really almost regular commenter/contributor would be fine with me as a judge. RF, Lynne, Omega, geo, Marc, The Temporary Name, all would be fine.”

Yeah Im in. Although for the sake of declaring an interest I should say that I’ve already called it as ‘not a false flag operation.’
If Obama admits to it I might change my mind.

bianca steele,

I don’t think #illridewithyou should be compared to anything Bush said because it was just the spontaneous reactions of everyday people. In Australia it has mostly although not uniformly been seen as a good thing.

We have a policy of multiculturalism here, but there is also some ugly racism both in everyday ways that can be less obvious to white people, and in events like attacks or the Cronulla riots, and in politics. For instance our Attorney General last year wanted to reform our hate speech laws since he is of the view everyone has “the right to be a bigot” which should not be infringed upon. This was seen as directed at Middle Eastern/Islamic people – but Jewish groups got very cross too as well as the wider community and this reform was abandoned for the time being. Due to these things happening in Australia at times shows of public realm inter-racial solidarity are quite important .

Aljazeera has a post-colonial opinion piece by a Nazry Bahrawi from Singapore that criticises #illridewithyou as although being started in good will he sees it as participating in a tradition of identifying good Muslims from bad Muslims – as in the calls for Muslim leaders to show they are “good” by renouncing acts of violence. I don’t really agree with this view though – and there was a good article by Jenna Price in the women’s section of The Age responding to these sorts of criticisms:

“And here was an unusual moment in Australian political history – with hand wringers urging us not to use #illridewithyou because it colonised Muslims, placed white helpers at the centre, and patronised those who didn’t need help.
Now let’s make one thing clear before I proceed: it’s important to collaborate on any assistance. All of us have to listen and be guided about what makes our society the most civil it can be. And hand wringers, don’t turn this into an intellectual debate right now. Save it for later. This was straight from the heart and that’s a good thing.

While some of my best friends are handwringers — second guessing every reaction they have to these issues just in case it’s seen as disenfranchising — it’s actually not good enough to call out privilege when you see it. It’s time to call it in. Make it work for greater decency.

We should never wait for the opportunity to speak out in support of others.

…

You should never – ever – wait to speak out.

My four grandparents were all murdered by Nazis. Do you think they would have been reluctant to receive support from non-Jews? I don’t think so. Would they have thought that support was ‘patronising’? Doubt it.”

http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/illridewithyou-is-helping-attacks-on-it-are-not-20141216-1281fh.html

Ha. I came on here to comment @Omega Centauri that Juan Cole is making exactly the same case. I’m still not convinced—the it was well-planned, so it couldn’t have been pure fanaticism inference doesn’t make sense to me—but I see the argument.

I think it would be wrong to look at it as purely fanaticism with no strategic value. There’s always strategic value
ie

http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2015/01/08/how-not-to-respond-to-the-charlie-hebdo-attacks/

One aspect of this whole awful business that hasn’t got enough airtime is the possibility that this is Al Qaeda trying to regain market share, so to speak, from ISIS.

“Your ignorance should not be the determining factor here.”

Well considering the proposed bet involves me I think it should. I have never heard of this website and so am unable to judge its value. Rf has graciously offered to adjudicate and I trust their integrity. So how about we just allow rf to judge, in 8 months time and based on whatever evidence rf finds reliable, as to whether it is a reasonable claim that this was a false flag. If he finds your claim to be reasonable and backed up by evidence I will donate 100 dollars to the charity of your choice. If he finds that your claim was simply talk with no believable evidence behind it then you donate 20 dollars to a charity of my choice.

Under My Wing Pug Rescue would be my choice of charity. They are registered as a charity with the Canadian Rescue Agency.
http://undermywingpugrescue.com

No problem. Keep in mind though my evidentary standard, ie nothing less than an admittance of complicity by Obama.

A bit more on the radicalisation topic

https://acrossthegreenmountain.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/background-on-the-19th-network-paris-france-2000-2013/

which seems to support Atran’s position noted above (small networks of close friends from the same area) Also worth noting that a lot of them are from poorer areas, *normally* the demographics skew better educated/wealthier.

Have not seen much (hardly any) of the news coverage today, but did catch a glimpse of a television screen showing the windshield of a police vehicle with bullet holes. Depending on a lot of factors, and assuming these men were using AK-47s, the grouping of the shots and their location on the windshield seemed to me to indicate that at least one of the gunmen has had some amount of training with the weapon and its use in combat. The propitious timing of the attack, and their apparently fast movement away from the site of the attack while evading (apparently) close tracking, indicate either significant advance planning or remarkable luck.

Knowing so little about these men, and the facts surrounding the attack, it’s difficult to even speculate intelligently on the subject. My primary concern would be that the end phase of their plans might be the second option of these three types:

(1) Escape Europe, travel to an ongoing Islamist conflict.
(2) Execute a series of additional attacks, and die in glory.
(3) Vague plan to lay low and try to get somewhere, perhaps by connecting with like-minded souls who are willing to provide aid and comfort, and ultimately discreet transport.

Hopefully it’s 1 or 3, and I’d bet on 3 – though they may have stockpiled a few explosive devices and other weapons to cause problems upon being trapped.

The very little information I have points to this:

the gunmen have a fair understanding of tactics and a good familiarity with their weapons;
the gunmen have no strategic understanding or conception of their actions, which likely leaves them in some confusion as to what the end phase should be.

Donald Johnson @163, Fair enough and I do understand your view – I have a response in mind, but not the time to deliver it.

#186 MPAV

“You in particular have presented no credible evidence that it was not, even while you have claimed that you know it was not and that anybody who doubts your baseless claim is in tinfoil-hat territory.”

It is usually the one making the extraordinary claim that has to supply the evidence.

That old rotten chestnut. That false claim has caused a lot of trouble.

It is the responsibility of anybody who makes a claim to supply the evidence for his claim.

Isn’t that obvious?

What you have done without thinking was a kind of special pleading. “Hey, I believe it and a bunch of my friends believe it, so we don’t need no steeenking evidences! But if somebody doubts it, they’re making an extraordinary claim and it should be dismissed unless they have indisputable evidence against us.”

No. Bullshit. If you make a claim, and you have no evidence, then it is a claim without evidence no matter how many other people also believe it.

You claim you know why this attack happened and who planned it. I claim neither you nor anybody else has provided evidence yet.

Which one is the extraordinary claim?

But you can disprove my claim easily — just point to the evidence that I say you don’t have.

Sorry J I am too busy partying with Elvis and DB Cooper to respond to your trolling. I might have some time after a party with the reverse vampires later but no promises.

/we are through the looking glass here people.

Dance and dance some more J….

Trust not test.

#194 MPAV

Also I don’t test you to donate after I die because you have proven yourself to be dishonest.

That is a claim that definitely deserves evidence.

Will you give evidence for that? Your statement is personally defamatory and insulting.

Anyway J you obviously don’t want to actually make this bet so I would appreciate if you did not refer to me anymore in this thread.

Thank you.

No offense intended, but betting on the cause of these people’s deaths for rhetorical purposes wasn’t really the best idea in the first place.

#201

No offense intended, but betting on the cause of these people’s deaths for rhetorical purposes wasn’t really the best idea in the first place.

Agreed, but I once challenged somebody on CT to a bet and they ignored me. It didn’t seem right to just ignore her after I had done something similar. And I wanted to establish yet again that my claim is that we don’t know, not that I know. Someone else kept misquoting me about that.

There are already arguments about just how the attack fits into Al Qaeda’s global strategy.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2901892/ANALYSIS-Charlie-Hebdo-massacre-Al-Qaeda-s-bid-establish-global-terror-force-eclipsed-ISIS-asks-Michael-Burleigh.html

But Ronan’s idea implying that it could be a local group that doesn’t take orders from anybody is also plausible at this point.

MPA, J Thomas, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The bet should be that reasonably persuasive evidence of responsibility either by the French Government or by a right-wing, anti-immigrant, group emerges.

The loser must append: “[name of winner] is brilliant and I have been humbled in a prior argument.” to all comments for no period less than a year and to no less than 365 comments. The false flag narrative is really beyond silly. I suggest a bet be made and we move, or we simply move on.

Donald Johnson @163: You praised tough counterterrorism activities in Yemen and Syria and Iraq–given that much of that activity in Yemen has included drone strikes, it’s not at all clear that we haven’t increased hatred of the US with such activities.

The Yemeni tribes are another matter. Hatred by them may have increased, though since we’ve long been viewed as allied with their worst enemies we’ve never been on their Christmas card list. But more importantly, among the key players in AQAP – the bomb-makers and the operatives – an ideology has already taken root. Combined with sufficient support, those bomb-makers and operatives could cause quite a bit of damage in Europe and the US. They haven’t – and it’s because of aggressive efforts against them.

And mentioning Syria in this context is just weird–again, numerically the Assad regime is killing vastly more Islamic extremists than we are.

Aggressive counterterrorism isn’t simply about a body count, but to the extent Assad’s forces kill al Nusra and ISIL elements, that works to our favor. Of course one must consider the means by which Assad’s forces do so, and whether there is a credible alternative in place to Assad loyalists or Islamists in much of Syria.

In Iraq our invasion helped cause the plague of Islamic extremism in the region,

Well, first off, I was talking about CT efforts, which the 2003 invasion was not.

As to Islamic extremism in the region, it was a major problem long before 2003.

Why talk like this? It’s obvious that Western actions, including Western abuses of human rights, have fueled Islamic extremism.

That’s a very Western-centric view. In fact we really should separate the motivations of alienated immigrants to the West from those fighting a struggle for power in their home region.

The former, for the most part (there are some big exceptions), are a small percentage of those who fell off the normal track for advancement as one moves through life, cannot see any normal way forward to gain a position of respect and security, are filled with anxiety and anger, and are ripe for the plucking by extremist recruiters or propaganda material. The problem isn’t Western atrocities so much as it is despair at leading a successful life through the channels available to them.

The latter, those indigenous to the various regions in question, are fighting a power struggle at home. The US is hated because (i) it is the main actor in every fevered conspiracy theory that runs through these worlds like street food through a tourist, and most importantly (ii) the US is a vital component of order in the Middle East, especially with respect to the governments that Islamists most desire to overthrow. Their attacks on the US, and Europe, have underlying strategic considerations; the propaganda fluff that they feed to angry young men on the net, around the camp fires, is simply a way of selling a war undertaken for much more self-interested reasons. But they sell much more than anger at the US or Europe. They sell wages, and respect, the prospect of family and of an elevated status in a community. They sell an identity and a vision, as all good recruiters for causes do, and then they use these men and women for their own strategic purposes.

The wet dream of the Islamists, or to put it differently the strategic objective of Islamist terrorism directed against the West, is to cause the West to consider any “interference” with such extremist groups to be so costly in blood that the West will cease to do so. It’s quite the fantasy, but stupid wars often involve men in position of some power who imagine they are in possession of much more – and they perish when their dreams meet reality.

Islamic extremism in turn incites more Western atrocities. I jump on you because you consistently downplay Western atrocities–in my opinion, attitudes like yours are part of the problem.

They’re not, unfortunately – I wish they were, since they’d be easier to stop. Islamist extremists grow from the combination of well funded and radical streams of ideology, corrupt or failing governments, and economic and social hopelessness. The US and Europe can have some positive effect towards changing those things, but it will take decades, and we’re really side-players in that particular drama. In the meantime, we have to deal with actual threats – actual bombs being devised and tested for use on aircraft bound for Europe and America, actual mass casualty plots (by whatever means) being planned inside and outside targeted countries, and so forth, actual organized movements to defeat governments in that region and install themselves.

While we make what nudges we can to move policies in those regions in a good direction, we must deal with the threats facing us – and, relative to the insurgents and terrorists, better governments in the region.

And in the meantime, we will continue to degrade the capacity of these networks to organize, develop, and execute attacks abroad, of which this atrocity in France is but one example, on a smaller scale, of what they would like to do.

The strategic lesson that their leadership must learn is this: if you wish to succeed, you cannot attack the West, and you cannot offend their values to such an extent that they feel they must respond. If you do, your network will be destroyed, your power will be lost, you will lose respect, and you will bring ruin to any who are close to you. Those that learn this will survive, perhaps even thrive. Those that don’t will die.

Ronan(rf) at 185,

Thank you very much for the link. It was very an interesting article. It explains a great deal. I hadn’t been aware of this network based in the 19e arrondissement, although it was often said that this quarter was a hotbed of Islamic radicalism.

I think the main reasons why French jihadists tend to come from a lower socioeconomic strata than the Arabs are peculiar to the situation of immigrant and Beur youth in France. Their families are often very poorly integrated into French society. Many are economically marginalized and they are often physically alienated from the larger society.

You often hear them speak of “the French” in the third person. There are frequently problems of identity: Ils sont français et non français, arabes et non arabes.

There’s a really good film called “La Désintégration” that was recommended to me at the time of the Mohamed Merah affair that is about exactly the two disaffected young men who are being hunted at the moment. Luckily for me, it has subtitles in very easy to read French but, regrettably, not English.

I wrote more about the Merah affair here: http://preview.tinyurl.com/og3cqlw

French radio has just reported that there has been an exchange of fire at a building in the Seine-et-Marne (NE of Paris) and that two individuals, resembling the fugitives, are inside with hostages. We may therefore be at the end of the story, or very nearly do. It seems clearer and clearer that these are two (relatively incompetent) private operators, and that there are no big conspiracies to behind them
I will post more links in the hope that they will be useful, but, since the last one I posted is still in moderation purgatory after 24 hours, they may be a bit old by the time you see them.

Here’s the link for Bianca and anyone else interested in what some women wearing headscarves have to put up with. Seems that most people who see this tweet support Mariam but the fact that she is subjected to this is awful.

https://twitter.com/mariamveiszadeh/status/551339746631241728

“But Ronan’s idea implying that it could be a local group that doesn’t take orders from anybody is also plausible at this point.”

Just to be clear (Im rushing here so havent read beyond this yet, so someone has prob said it) my impression is that theyre linked to AL Q in Yemen. Which (afaik) would imply some level of independence on their part but also some level of centralised control.

“and that there are no big conspiracies to behind them”

Not necessarily true. There’s a potential that the big conspiracy is treating people like this as expendable munitions. Just enough encouragement and help to get the incident to happen, but not enough to risk being tied to them. You fire the bullet, and duck, you don’t push it all the way to it’s target, and plan on retrieving it after it strikes.

“Network”, “command structure”, “leadership” and similar words all take on different meanings in this context, as they do in criminal law. For instance, most countries define “organised crime” as crimes involving two or more people. You and your friend rob a bank? That’s “organised crime” (if the cops want to call it that). In fact, even continuing crime is – according to the handful of criminologists who have actually studied it, and not the FBI/police/Hollywood fantasy – rarely much more organised than your typical backyard barbecue group.

Likewise, “network” here can be taken to mean “talks to like-minded people”, and “linked to AQ” means “knew someone who knew someone who went to Afghanistan”. “Following AQ tactics” means “watches TV, surfs the net and has picked up a few tips”.

AQAP don’t only have a regional focus, afaik, they have planned and carried out attacks in the West. They have declared the West a legit target. The extent of ‘control’ they would have over the operation is probably limited, but it would take place under their general strategic outlook (ie @179) and would have some level level of ‘official support.’

just to say, 219 obviously isnt saying speculated links are accurate, I mean onviously we dont know. But AQAP arent only regionally focussed

#216 David

IIRC, “Al Qaeda in Yemen” is actually Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and is a relatively small group with a largely regional focus. It’s unlikely that they could (or would want to) conduct operations in Europe, and certainly not against a magazine that none of those in command could read.

The US-centric view I linked earlier has it that they want us to attack them in muslim countries so they will get more support at home. Also as ISIS gets more attention, AQ would want to do something to stay important. I think that’s possible. But just as the argument says that their motives are primarily about each other and not about us, the argument itself is part of a western argument about us, and not so much about them. If attacking them more brings them more support, maybe it would be a mistake to hit them harder. On the other hand, if we attack them hard enough to KILL THEM ALL and the dog they rode in on, then their own tactic was a mistake.

Maybe they try to manipulate us based on their fantasies about us, while we try to manipulate them based on our fantasies about them.

Anyone who thinks AQAP is regional and illiterate regarding western media may want to bing AQAP + Inspire…

Ronan

The link at 185 – with actual quotes from the people involved – says maybe 50 people from around the same area, some doing one thing (Algeria), others another, some studying etc. In short, about the level of organisation I would get if I were to chart just about any interest group at all. The link @222 is some wannabe speculating like some CT commenters. Worth spit all.

People hook up with other people with the same interests. That does not make them an organisation. In about three jumps you can go a long way from just about anyone (Brett Belmore’s wife’s cousins almost certainly know “terrorists” – members of the New People’s Army. So let’s arrest Brett). If you read the serious Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan blogs, you see the labels AQ or Daesh or Taliban attaching to uneasy coalitions with multiple aims, mostly very loosely organised. In many ways, their low level of organisation is a strength – there is no centre to disrupt. This is not to say they can’t do things, nor that their rhetoric does not inspire terrorism in the west. But that’s a policing problem, and the first best way to attack it is to have the best possible relations with the community.

I don’t think anyone believes AQAP is illiterate, and they certainly have an idea of the West, though it’s not necessarily more accurate than ours is of them. Information does not necessarily imply understanding, in either case.
But as several have said, we are arguing about the meaning of words here, and with radical political groupings throughout history, many of the words we use to describe formal western-style organisations are of limited use. (The classic example is the French Resistance, which was more of a state of mind than an organised movement, and whose various components had very difficult relationships with each other).
The practical question here is a slightly different one. Does anybody suppose that AQAP, or one of its leaders, ordered this operation to be carried out in France, and supported it, given that it has its hands full with other things at the moment? What’s been reported so far suggests not, but of course that may change.
Meanwhile, the French have said that there were no casualties this morning, and that the GIGN is trying to open negotiations with the Kouachi brothers. The latter, incidentally, seem to have had some “links”, albeit distant ones, with the presumed killer of the police woman south of Paris yesterday. Again, a lot is going to depend on the words you use and what you mean by them….

Things are looking pretty bad in Paris. I hope they can resolve this without anymore blood shed.

Val,

You find it troubling that a person disagrees with you, or that when they imagine themselves in a harassment victim’s place, they imagine a different reaction than you do? (Not that I see most of the people talking about this, thinking about the victims. They are thinking about the virtue of the people offering, pretty consistently.) I find your own reaction troubling. Just as I found the account of “I’ll ride with you troubling,” because my experience is different from yours.

I’ve already conceded that my reaction is based on similar calls–made by people, like George W. Bush, whose motives I don’t trust–and that I’m judging from afar. Because of this, and because this is OT, I’m not sure why you’re piling on at this point.

I do ride public transport, and if a person walked up to me and said “it’s not safe for you here, you know a lot of people hate you and want to attack you, I’m not like those other people, please let me stand next to you so you’ll be safe,” I would tell them to go away. I might, perhaps like the woman quoted above, say, “Oh no, I’m fine,” and edge away from them.

Maybe the level of harassment is SO great that every Muslim woman who ride the bus needs a small army, like Guardian Angels in New York, surrounding her. If that’s the case, people outside Australia probably aren’t aware things have gotten that bad, so maybe you should try to explain that.

#234 Donald Johnson

If there is actual evidence of Charlie Hebdo being a false flag operation, bring it forward. If there isn’t, then fine, note the (remote) possibility, but it’s not very interesting without evidence.

I see no evidence yet about who if anyone supported this particular attack.

I apologize for going on about it. I’ve tended to let this sort of thing happen sometimes when I point out a possibility in passing — look, here’s something we don’t actually know — and somebody announces that my possibility is actually impossible, can’t ever happen, no way, only an idiot Truther would imagine such a thing. So I ask for their evidence and it’s we don’t need any steenking evidence, it would be extraordinary if that came true so it needs extraordinary evidence but the other side is not extraordinary and needs no evidence whatsoever, it’s just true unless proven false beyond all possible doubt. And I let myself get trolled.

I’m going to make a solid attempt to respond less to idiots.

234 “If the leaders of ISIS and the Taliban and others were merely outraged by Western colonialism, it would be hard to understand why the bulk of their victims are their fellow Muslims.”

Not that hard, actually. It’s logical that the traitors, the fifth column, the renegade elements in your midst are more despicable than the natural enemies, who, after all, only pursue their natural interests.

Comede, fili indusia J.

And it looks like something awful is happening in Paris…

The best response I’ve seen to the treatment of Charlie–

why I am not charlie

Peter T @214: Ah. The endless urge to get into a pissing contest and win. No analysis, no attempt to understand, just “hit them until they die or cower away”. Same logic as Vietnam, Iraq, Cuba…Funny that often the same people who take this line brandish flags with “Live Free or Die” on them (not that Andrew F does anything so crass). No amount of failure teaches.

No, you’re taking a comment about one line of effort and wrongly interpreting it as a comment about what the overall strategy should be.

I distinguished between the motivations of the leadership (which are strategic), those who join existing organizations (like ISIS) from local populations, and those who live in the West and are disaffected.

I noted the lack of ordinary avenues for advancement and social hopelessness in the case of disaffected individuals in the West, and the same (in addition to corrupt and abusive political institutions) in foreign areas.

I noted the importance of fostering cooperation within Muslim communities in the West, both in terms of undercutting radical ideologies supportive of violence and in terms of intelligence collection.

However, there are existing networks abroad with significant expertise in explosives, substantial knowledge of relevant techniques of planning, organization, and execution, and an ideology and leadership supportive of terrorist attacks against US and European targets.

US ability to effect meaningful social and political reform in areas where these networks are centered is minimal without the deployment of resources for a time and at a cost that would be politically unacceptable to the electorate and that would divert resources from national objectives of greater priority. These networks are also centered in areas where the local government is unable or unwilling to control them.

Though countering these networks involves multiple lines of effort, many of which are non-violent, direct action is therefore a vital component to degrading their ability to mount attacks. Eliminating key nodes, or clusters of nodes, within the networks does effect an immediate reduction in their capabilities while also producing follow-on effects that further weaken the network and enable additional operations against it. There simply is no other way to achieve their reduction at an acceptable cost.

Violent, militarized non-state actors will be a persistent feature of the world for some time. In most cases, the leadership will care about their own power, prestige, and survival. There is therefore an opportunity for deterrence. Deterrence here requires the establishment of a strong belief that to adopt a strategy of violence against the US or Europe, or to take action that will draw the US and Europe into a conflict, is to ensure the failure and destruction of one’s organization, one’s self, and potentially many other things one cares about. Not all organizations that use terrorism also target the US and Europe. Some quite wisely have an explicit policy of not doing so, precisely because it would provoke a reaction contrary to their interests.

Direct action that has become necessary against existing networks should be leveraged where possible to contribute to the deterrence of other networks, or the future leadership of existing networks, from provoking the US into a conflict.

So Peter, I’m not interested in a pissing match. I’m interested in encouraging actors to better assess their options in pursuing their goals so as to reduce unnecessary future violence. This will not prevent the occasional person or group from terrorist violence within the West, but it will help prevent far more serious acts of violence that some non-state actors are quite interested in achieving.

Donald Johnson,

The 243 piece is so great—it’s what I’ve been wanting to read, pretty much. Thanks!

Thanks for those links Donald Johnson, they’re very good. I don’t know how I feel about it personally, mainly as I’ve not seen enough of the cartoons to form an opinion. I do think it’s a pity that the ‘debate’ has become one about free speech, rather than what it should be – law and order and protecting people from violence. This has suited both sides, the Al Qaeda faction and the anti Islam right who (over the decade) have used the rhetoric of free speech absolutism (which I generally agree with) as a soundbite cause in their moronic ‘civilisation war.’
This Joe Sacco cartoon is also alright

http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/jan/09/joe-sacco-on-satire-a-response-to-the-attacks

“I don’t know how I feel about it personally, mainly as I’ve not seen enough of the cartoons to form an opinion. ”

Same here, actually. But even if their opinions happened to match mine (and I read contradictory things about this), I don’t like that kind of humor. Which, it shouldn’t need to be said, doesn’t mean people should be killed because I disagree with them or how they express themselves.

I do hate the way, as the first link said, people advocating free speech are using this act in a paradoxical sort of way to say that people shouldn’t be offended by other people’s acts of speech. So we should have free speech, but we aren’t allowed to have negative reactions?

Sorry, but I thought 243 was long-winded, hand-ringing bloviation (admittedly I didn’t read it all, life is short). Ze’s right imo, another example could be John Yoo. Does he ‘exist on a different plane from physical violence’ because he’s never hit anybody (I assume)? Liberal BS.

Sacco’s cartoon was good though.

Streicher wasn’t executed for the pictures he drew though, otherwise the rest of the staff of der stuermer would’ve been executed as well (but I think you know that very well). The point made in the blog post still stands

Hollande is just speaking, and saying that “France has been attacked” three times in three days, including today’s hostage taking. He is praising the forces of order, whilst indicating that four people have died (presumably hostages at the supermarket).
Appeal for vigilance, calm and unity, and mobilisation and solidarity among the French.
He has asked all French people to join him in the demonstration planned for Sunday to be led by leaders of the main political parties, but to which the National Front has pointedly not been invited. A short speech, largely devoid of content.

I find it obnoxious to call the CH staff a bunch of racists, which is what the link in 243 does. (Demanding that people publish them is not justified, but pieces like this go beyond the general case to specific claims about the authors and their motives.) There is a temptation to squeeze alien events into familiar boxes: Muslims in France are a minority, thus cartoons mocking Islam are attacks on them, thus they are racist. Then, yet again, people like me have to point out that the same paper has attacked figures from all religions vigorously (a three way orgy for the holy trinity, for example); that there is a difference between making a point (you can’t proscribe what I can draw under death threats) and, say, writing a skinhead newsletter. And that the groups responsible for these atrocities are not representing disaffected peoples; they are themselves massacring minorities in places that they control, including an entire town in Nigeria by BH. If you’re talking about legitimate grievances, what offense did the people murdered in a Paris kosher grocery store commit, other than being Jews?
There are times where it’s worth not trying to point attention elsewhere (“why are you worrying about X when Y is worse?”) I think that this is one of them.

The question about whether to publish the pictures is a difficult one and I don’t have a firm perspective. The temptation is to say of course they should be! When someone tries to push you around it is human nature to say “Fuck you I will do what I want.” So the fact that these terrorists don’t want the cartoons published makes me want to publish them.

Is that a mature perspective though? Some of the cartoons do make gratuitous use of some pretty offensive ethnic stereotypes. They are so bad in fact that I would never share them outside of the context of this attack on CH. However, from my limited understanding the artists claim they were not attacking Muslims but rather Islam. In my mind people deserve respect but religion does not.

Anyway, tough question that I would suggest solving by publishing some of the cartoons that don’t make use of ethnic stereotypes but still contain an image of Mohammed. One in particular showed Mohammed with his head in his hands sayng “Why are some of my followers such jerks.”

Anyway that was a rambling.

That isn’t false flag. That is a sting operation. I have concerns about whether sting/entrapment operations don’t create problems that wouldn’t have developed otherwise, but they are a different bad thing. And can we please stop talking about the false flag thing. It seems to be a low enough probability that unless there is some particular reason to believe it, there isn’t a reason to talk about it. And if you don’t believe it is a low probability, expressly say so and explain why, or you’re trolling.

More on point, a key point of disagreement seems to be whether or not the cartoons are an important cause of the violence, or more of a pretext for the violence. I tend to think that if these cartoonists didn’t exist, radicalized Muslims would select other targets. Even if cartoons are one reason they are radicalized (an assertion that seems dubious) freaking out in a murderous rage about cartoons is a symptom of radicalization not a particularly enlightening cause.

Vox has some info from a call between the terrorists and a french tv station. Worth a read.

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/9/7522015/cherif-kouachi-terrorist-charlie-hebdo

For those who may believe, or pretend to believe, in the false flag theory:

How can anyone prove that the alleged killers, who believed themselves to have been recruited by an AQ group, had not really been recruited by the French security forces/US government/?

How can anyone prove that the alleged killers, allegedly dead, are not alive and well after a pretended death?

Over to you, J Thomas

What I was trying to get at is that, particularly with satire, you have to know context to understand it.

Why exactly are you assuming that Scott Long doesn’t know the context, or doesn’t understand it as well as you do?

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Twitter: “Wow. This is a great piece on Charlie Hebdo by Joe Sacco. Sharp, creative and beautiful. http://t.co/YvKi9Dozod“

“Oh, somebody already linked it. Never mind.’

Eh it was good enough to like to twice

Is this also “squeez[ing] alien events into familiar boxes”:

Assia is typically Parisian, in her dress, accent and lifestyle. But that did not prevent her from being reminded, at every turn, of her otherness. ‘Assia, what sort of name is that?’ people would ask her since she was a child. With its strong centralising traditions, France shuns expressions of difference, notably the hijab, but continues to treat French citizens of Muslim origin as foreigners. Second and third-generation citizens are still routinely described as ‘immigrants’. The message: don’t wear the hijab, you’re French; but don’t bother applying for this job if your name is Mohammed. ‘When my brothers were growing up,’ Assia told me, ‘they would be stopped by the police ten to fifteen times a day – on the bus, getting off the bus, on their way to school, on their way home. Girls weren’t stopped; only boys. The French are more comfortable with “Fatima” than with “Mohammed”.’ French women of North African origin are doing better than men – which in part explains why some of the unemployed men take to dominating their mothers and sisters, as if they were their property, their only property. Assia is one of many French Maghrébins who have found it much easier to live outside France.

#278 Drat … dropped the link. Google the title if interested.

#269 Stephen

How can anyone prove that the alleged killers, who believed themselves to have been recruited by an AQ group, had not really been recruited by the French security forces/US government/?

If you can get true information from AQ that they were AQ members following AQ plans, then you have it. Unless AQ itself is a false front for some western government etc. Or unless AQ is lying for their own reasons.

And of course some traveling AQ member could himself be a double agent and really take orders from someone else. Imagine for example that 9/11 was planned and paid for by AQ as a contingency measure, something they could do in some extreme crisis, and then somebody else figured out how to trigger it for just 4 planes but not the rest…. If there’s the chance that their electronic communications can be changed out from under them, so their agents actually follow somebody else’s orders, that would sure explain their fetish for courier messages.

How can anyone prove that the alleged killers, allegedly dead, are not alive and well after a pretended death?

Hey, why are you asking *me* these questions instead of the people who are sure they know it is not a false-flag thing? Ask them how they can find out whether they’re right.

Over to you, J Thomas

I pass. I couldn’t prove it was happening if it was — unless somebody gets clumsy or venal and reveals it. People find the question boring. They don’t want to think about it. It’s really none of our business. We need to give the various secret organizations their privacy.

Let’s talk about something else.

Bear in mind though that there have been plots broken up trying to stage ‘Mumbai style’ attacks in Europe over the past number of years as well , so it does fit in to changing attack methods aswell..

273, Sacco asks us to look up Maurice Sinet. The point being, I guess, that Sinet’s firing proves that Charlie Hebdo wasn’t as thoroughly free in satirizing the powerful as they claimed. But when I look up Maurice Sinet, what do I find? Why he has a site. Here it is: http://www.sinemensuel.com/ And he seems to be in mourning for the death of his friends. I don’t know, it seems to me that Sacco could have “looked it up” himself. One could do a long rap about Charlie Hebdo’s inability to see through its own anti-religious stance to the deeper levels of comedy involved in the use the West has made of one sect of Islam, the salafi sect dominant in Saudi Arabia. I’ve put up a little thing myself on my site concerning that: http://limitedinc.blogspot.fr/2015/01/reflection-after-solidarity-with.html It seems to me that Sacco’s implicit point – that two drug dealers who drifted through their twenties trying to be celebrities, and converted to a narrow sect of Islam, are representative of the Moslem community – is absurd. I might as well say that the guys blowing up abortion clinics represent the Christian community in the U.S. I appreciate Sacco saying I am not Charlie – I myself despise the new idea that I protest by identifying with an experience I don’t at all have – but I think he definitely doesn’t get it.

Gregory Johnson

https://twitter.com/gregorydjohnsen

is worth reading on the plausbility of an AQAP link

abbe faria – you’re probably right. It was more a stray thought on my part .. I think you’re probably closer to the truth.

“More on point, a key point of disagreement seems to be whether or not the cartoons are an important cause of the violence, or more of a pretext for the violence. I tend to think that if these cartoonists didn’t exist, radicalized Muslims would select other targets.”

I’d have to go back and read through the thread, but for me at least, that’s not the question. I don’t think the cartoons caused the violence. I’d listen to people like Scott Atran (mentioned way upthread) about the reasons why young men decide to become mass murderers. I doubt it’s because of some nasty cartoons. As you say, the cartoons are more of a pretext, I would guess.

For me the value of the cartoons and the reasons for the murderous attack are separate questions. From what little I’ve seen, I don’t think the cartoons (or that style of humor) have any value and no, I don’t think it helps to say that they attacked all religions equally (even if that is true, which as usual is a disputed claim). People should have the right to publish this material without fear of violence or state repression, but others have the right to denounce it as a pile of crap.

290 – I do. If Sacco was listing true offenses against Moslem belief, I don’t think charlie Hedbo would even count over the last couple of years. How about the destruction of the shrines to the Sufi saints in timbuctu? http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2012/06/2012630101748795606.html Or the blowing up of three mosques in Mosul by the Islamic state, a group to which the killers were allied? But apparently these don’t count as Muslims according to the penultimate frame in Sacco’s cartoon, which implies that Western journalists have been the main victim of the Islamic State – while all is hunky dory with “muslims”. It is that conglomerating term which, I think, ties Sacco to the very thing he is criticizing in Charlie Hebdo, which also seemed to see Muslims as some blank global other. It is a rather infuriating fiction, a critique vitiated by its own unconscious prejudice.

It seems to me that Sacco’s implicit point – that two drug dealers who drifted through their twenties trying to be celebrities, and converted to a narrow sect of Islam, are representative of the Moslem community – is absurd

Why would anyone think Sacco believes this? He thinks the cartoons are offensive to Muslims. He doesn’t think Muslims favour murder as retaliation. (They don’t, and no-one sane thinks they do.)

He explicitly says that there is something ‘deeply wrong’ with the murderers but explicitly advises against concluding that there is something deeply wrong with Muslims. This is in itself shows he does not think the first represents the second (in case there were there was any reason to attribute such a crazy view to him in the first place…)

Roger Gathmann: both of your responses to that cartoon just seem like strings of non sequiturs to me. Me, I thought it was a good cartoon.

I don’t think they are non-sequitors. Cartoons are always built on implications. The implication is pretty clear in Sacco’s cartoon. Charlie Hebdo offended “Moslems” – meaning apparently all Muslims. CH was operating within a context that is not too subtlely likened to cartoons of Jews in 1933. Then there is a final panel representing driving the “Moslems” into the sea.
Who is doing this driving?
Apparently white Westerners, no?
Now, of course, it would be a non-sequitor to say that CH was contributing to driving Muslims into the sea. They are just, like anti-semites in 1933, making fun of Muslims. And are afraid of being accused of being anti-semitic, hence the firing of Maurice Senet – which. as he doesn’t tell us, happened under another editorial board. But whatever.
My point is that this idea of “moslems” being driven into the sea ignores a number of things. First, it supposes that all muslims are offended by the caricatures in CH. This is I think wrong. It ignores the fact that the “muslims” who have been most driven into the sea and most wounded in their religious cult have been wounded by exactly the belief of the people who killed the CH staff. If one can imagine a Jewish group in 1933 that went around killing Hassid and destroying their temples, I think we would have a parallel – but that didn’t happen, and the parallel makes little sense. Except of course that we always have to reach for Hitler in order to find something “evil”. In general, if I boil Sacco down to his sequitors, his implicit accusation is that CH was especially anti-Muslim. And this we cant support.My counter accusation is not that Sacco ignored that CH supported “moderate Muslims” – a phrase that is ridiculous. My point is that Sacco is right that CH grouped all Muslims together, the first step in prejudice against Muslims, and b, that Sacco then proceeds to do the same thing – save for the nasty Muslims, who are left unexplained. He even seems to think all Muslims are opposed to the image of Muhammed, which one would think is an idea that was exploded long ago.(here’s a nice You tube about how pious images of the prophet are sold in the souk in Teheran). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxyFwf8gRzQ
I find it hard to take Sacco very seriously, with the dodging, the generalizing, and the exploitation of Maurice Senet without linking to his site.

‘Understanding’ is a two way street

Are power, discrimination and marginalization also “two-way streets”? I’m not trying to be facetious here, but there’s a reason that, e.g., it’s a bit odd to tell black people in the US that they really should be paying more attention to white people problems. It’s also pretty strange that you’d pick Ramallah of all places as a contrast class. What is that supposed to show exactly?

Engels at 296,

Unfortunately, my memory is dim and I’m too lazy to do much Googling but I am slightly familiar with the case because it got some coverage on a legal website that I like. I’ve never actually seen any Siné’s work (except the cats). I’ve certainly never seen any of his cartoons in Charlie Hebdo, a magazine that I’ve read only once and would never have bought again but for this tragedy. In any case, I don’t think the affair represents the hypocrisy you seem to think it does.

To begin with, I don’t think any of us could get Siné his job back, even assuming he wanted it, which apparently he doesn’t. He mentions on his blog that the French courts did give him some money in his suit against the magazine. I don’t remember what happened in the other suits and couldn’t find it on his website.

The one perfectly symmetrical, but truly ironic, thing—and something I never knew until I looked at his website— was that Siné received death threats from the Jewish Defense League, which is still today very active in Paris, especially during the recent riots.

The Sine Hebdo website brought back a few memories.The Jean Sarkozy affair seems to have been a very convoluted business with many different facets, at least some of which were obviously quite personal to the individuals involved. There were a lot of personalities at Charlie Hebdo and I gather from the press that, like reasonably famous people everywhere, they didn’t always get on perfectly with each other or with everyone in the circles in which they moved.

One of the things you might have noticed in their obituaries was that many of the victims at Charlie Hebdo were quite famous and beloved but mainly for things they did away from the magazine. Again, reading between the lines, many of these people moved in circles where personal friendships may have been called upon by prominent French Jews in this affair.

Another aspect was that the cartoon and the article were basically cheap shots at Jean Sarkozy for something very intimate and personal in his life that had nothing to do with politics or his father. I certainly have no idea how young Sarkozy feels about his Jewish ancestors (which he does, in fact, have) or his marriage but probably neither did Siné. Which made it a cheap shot as far as I was concerned.

Perhaps of even greater significance than the arguably anti-Semitic aspects of the cartoon was that Siné was very possibly on the wrong side of the line between satire and slander, especially because the cartoon was illustrating an article (which I’ve never read) that made claim about Jean Sarkozy’s reasons for the marriage and his alleged conversion. The lawyer’s website that had posts on the case that thought the article was significant because it seemed to be actually reporting on very specific facts about very specific people and therefore needed to be truthful. French defamation law is well beyond me but I believe it is not very forgiving. Much closer to the English model than the American.

As I say, I think a lot of people, including me, thought going after young Jean Sarkozy for something this personal was a seriously cheap shot—far beneath even the remarkably low standards of Charlie Hebdo—which is saying quite a bit. Jean Sarkozy is fair game for a lot of stuff, but this really was beyond the pale. I would certainly never have published that piece as described. I don’t know that I would have fired Siné for refusing to apologize but I don’t know that I wouldn’t, either.

Siné himself doesn’t seem to be holding a grudge. Neither does he seem to see himself as the victim of a double standard, as you seem to be painting him. He now has what appears to be his own extremely offensive rag and a blog to go with it. I’ve never read it but a quick glance at the website as I am writing this comment seems to confirm that Sine Hebdo is firmly in the grand and gratuitously offensive Charlie Hebdo tradition.

I wouldn’t ever subscribe to it but he says he’s totally skint, so I might buy a t-shirt if they come in a size extra-fat and he’ll send it to me in the states. If he’s got cat cartoons to sell, I might buy one. So there’s two ways to support the guy because, really, it’s true that you can’t go home again.

bianca steele @ 235
The interesting thing about your response is that I gave you an example of vile abuse that a woman wearing a headscarf was subjected to, and you haven’t acknowledged it. I also told you that I was subjected to extremely frightening threats of violence when I tried to intervene in a case where another woman was being subjected to racist abuse (for the record, it was on a tram, she was Asian, the abuse was racist and misogynistic, and I was also subjected to misogynistic abuse when I objected). Probably doesn’t take much imagination to understand that it was pretty horrible for all concerned, including me, but you have completely ignored that also.

It’s not the first time I’ve come up against this kind of refusal to acknowledge the reality of racist and sexist abuse, but I’m not going to try to argue about it with you any further. This stuff happens, but if you don’t want to acknowledge it, you probably won’t, no matter what I or anyone else say to you. But it’s definitely not off topic, and people like me aren’t trying to “chaperone” anyone, no matter what you may think. I was actually in fear of my life in the incident I talked about, and people have actually been killed for standing up to bullies. Calling us do-gooders, while offering no better solutions, just isn’t helpful.

Drawing some threads together, perhaps:
For fifty years there has been immigration into France from “Muslim” countries, initially the Maghreb (and especially Algeria). Most immigrants did not consider themselves “Muslims” in anything except a cultural sense. For the first half of that period, they generally integrated well, especially women, and moved up the traditional immigrant social ladder. Mixed marriages were common. In those days, there was little unemployment and the school system worked well. This changed with mass unemployment, harder-line government policies and the instrumentalisation of immigration as a threat, as well as lack of interest in educating the children. At the same time, poverty and violence in the Maghreb and elsewhere brought unprecedented numbers of new immigrants (2M over the last decade according to the government) mostly into poor areas where education and social services are stretched to breaking point, and which get little help from central government.
Over the last fifteen years, elite discourse in France, inspired very much by the US neoconservatives, has identified Islam and Muslims as a main enemy; On the Right, this is traditional racialism, on the Left it’s wrapped up with the rights of women etc. but amounts in practice to the same thing. Muslims are the only community in France which is systematically targeted this way, including by the media. As a result, an essentially secular, culturally Muslim but otherwise French, community has been in part successfully radicalised – one is tempted to say, radicalised by the very people who needed an enemy to fight against.
It’s not just Charlie either. Polemical articles and quite unpleasant cartoons stigmatising Muslims are quite common in the French media (“Le Canard enchainé” which should know better, is often disgraceful in this respect) and there have effectively been no sanctions. But nobody bothers attacking Christians, because few French people go to Church, and Jews (and most recently Roms, the new target) are effectively off limits. So the weakest, poorest and least educated section of French society is subject not only to economic and social discrimination, but also to official vituperation and unofficial mockery, and is confronted daily with stories of attacks by France on Muslim states, and grisly accounts of atrocities committed by Muslims, all over the world. I wonder how you and I would feel.
At this point, some idiot at the back gets up and says “this doesn’t justify killing people”. Please leave the room, because you haven’t understood the issue, which is not abstract moral justification, but concrete results – karma, if you like. If you do stupid things, shit happens. Stupid things have been done ….

“CH was operating within a context that is not too subtlely likened to cartoons of Jews in 1933.”

This I have to respond to, because it is an all too common sentiment, and it is almost precisely an inversion of the actual situation.

Excuse me, but who are the brownshirts here? The people who had thugs suddenly attack and murder them? Who are the brownshirts here? The people who are being censored by violence and intimidation?

Look at who is being attacked here. It is not the Muslims. It is anybody with the nerve to offend them. Yes, some of those attacked are Muslims themselves. Who offended the OTHER Muslims. They don’t even exempt their own from the terror, so don’t dream you can buy peace by converting.

Sure, it’s not all Muslims who are acting this way. “Merely” way too many of them for the situation to be stable. And, is there something about Islam that leads way too many Muslims to act this way, that seems to doom every society that ends up majority Muslim to being non-democratic and oppressive?

The forbidden question, I guess. We have to treasure every precious cultural flower, even as one of them is going around killing people, because looking too closely at the situation might offend somebody.

Maybe because it might offend somebody who’d drop by and gun you down? Looks like Stockholm syndrome is kicking in, and we’re all calling the religion of Boko Haram the “religion of peace”, because we don’t want to get peaced to death. Yeah, they’re the religion of “peace”, but by “peace” they don’t mean what we mean, they mean the peace of everybody submitting to them, so that they don’t have to go around killing everybody.

Look, I’ve known Muslims, even worked under them. Individually they can be, usually are, fine people. A gram of U235 isn’t terribly dangerous, either, it’s not even terribly radioactive, having a half life of 700 million years. Pile enough of it in one place, though, and you get a mushroom cloud.

Try that on for size: Some ideas are like a fissile element, harmless when few people hold them, and supremely dangerous if they become common. Some such ideas even call themselves “the religion of peace”, and kill you if you dissent too loudly from that description.

And Brett, I’ve worked with Americans, have American friends, and consider them mostly good people. But pile them all together and….

“Excuse me, but who are the brownshirts here?”

Who said anything about brownshirts? Someone said the cartoon are of the same nature as those in 1933 Germany. And you’re protesting against some other, imaginary, statement.

True, no one shot Streicher in 1933. This fact, however, is irrelevant to the question of alleged similarity of the cartoons then and now.

You may think Charlie Hebdo is on the side opposite the guys shooting people, and characters in their cartoons are the guys shooting people. Yet there is a plausible point of view where the situation is exactly reversed. Similarly, Streicher and his activities in 1933 could easily be (and were being, for sure) interpreted the same way you interpret Charlie Hebdo today.

One way to break out of the disagreement would be simply banning this sort of stuff. A compromise.

“Look at who is being attacked here. It is not the Muslims.”

Wrong.

#316 Marc

The idea of calling people murdered by religious fanatics the equivalent of Nazi propagandists is astonishingly offensive.

I’m breaking my resolution not to respond to this sort of thing, but there are a bunch I haven’t responded to, and just this once….

Do you believe that being murdered by religious fanatics washes away all your own sins?

“Do you believe that being murdered by religious fanatics washes away all your own sins?”

I thought he was being sarcastic, trying to demonstrate that anything even slightly controversial will make someone fly off the handle.

Sigh. I really need to think about all the ways my statements can be misinterpreted, as on this subject it’s pretty much a given that anything anyone says will be taken in the worst possible way. So, “legitimate grievances” and “Western oppression” would mean things like criminal invasions, bombing of civilians, land theft and all the other sorts of things that actually do motivate some people to become terrorists. Nasty cartoons, contemptible though they may be, are not on that list.

#321 Ze Kraggash

I thought he was being sarcastic, trying to demonstrate that anything even slightly controversial will make someone fly off the handle.

Good! I hope you’re right!

“Are power, discrimination and marginalization also “two-way streets”? I’m not trying to be facetious here, but there’s a reason that, e.g., it’s a bit odd to tell black people in the US that they really should be paying more attention to white people problems.”

Well, yes. Power, discrimination and marginalization do work in complicated ways. Of course they also fall primarily along specific cleavages (racial,ethnic, gender, class etc) but this wasnt the point I was making. The point I was making was such a banal one that I’d be surprised if anyone here would object. At times of political/ethnic polarisation everyone needs to take a step back, put away their (a lot of the time genuine) grievances for a second, and try to understand where the other side is coming from. In other words, don’t fall into Marcs ‘ familiar boxes’ (which I think was an astute phrase)
My problem was specifically with Shatz conflating things that don’t need to be conflated. Can I recognise the racism and discrimination in Europe and the problems it leads to without imainging everything is explicable by them ? Of course. Do I have to understand Tommy Robinson and the EDLs ideological posturing to understand the real grievances of the white working class? Of course not. And some of these problems have deeper, less local sources. Which leads to..

“It’s also pretty strange that you’d pick Ramallah of all places as a contrast class. What is that supposed to show exactly?”

It’s quite clearly not strange to pick Ramallah. Ramallah is the explanation for the phenomenon Shatz identifies, the growing anti semitism within certain segments of the Muslim population. The Israel/Palestine conflict is so clearly the fundamental cause of this anti semitism that the fact he hasn’t idenitified it is bizzare. Blaming ‘memorialising the Holocaust but ignoring crimes of colonisation’ makes about as much sense as identifying black history month as the source of white racism.
Anti semtisim is a real phenomenon in most Arab countries Ive lived in, to the same extent that anti Arab racism is in Israel, or racist xenophobia is in Europe. For too long ‘Zionism and US foreign policy’ has been allowed to fester as the main source of the underdevelpment in the Middle East (I think both are important sources, but..), and has created a virulent anti semitism. Much more than charlie hebdoe, the fact that they targetted a Jewish market is the worrying and inexcusable event in this situation.

(mitch, interesting comment above. Ill get back to it late, running out now)

Mitch Guthman @292 – interesting comment. Somewhat tangentially, and really not in opposition to a lot of what you’ve said..I think I generally (though not solely) see the world through a ‘materialist frame.’ That is to say, for example, if we see riots in the Banlieues the first order of explanation we should be looking at are material factors. (economic etc) If we see anti Muslim marches in Germany the same should figure strongly in our analysis. History matters, ethinicty, religion, culture – but they matter less, and matter in specific ways, at specific times * (normally subordinate to material factors)
As such, I don’t worry about the integration of ‘Muslim** immigrants’ on its own terms. All it would take is a little give and take on both sides. In the case of France there’s a need to relax the (admirable) politics of ‘aggressive seculariastion’ and pay attention to the political context of this moment. Integration has worked in the past, and will continue to work into the future.
The problem is that at this moment both extremes are polarising politics in places they don’t need to be polarised, and everyone else is playing their part (left victim politics against right wing small n nationalism) As a bog standard incrementalist liberal, I think the reply should be liberal in the best sense of that word..open minded, non ideological, restrained.
We need to dial back the hyperbole, dial back the self pity (on both sides) , and go about fixing the problems at the root of our current malaise (which are more resolvable than the ideological missionaries would allow us believe)

* this doesnt contradict my response to js above, which is talking specifically about people engaging in acts of political violence.
** for the sake of clarification, and to stave off the tedious ‘Muslims aren’t a monlith’ etc rhetoric (of course). This is shorthand, used in the context of this thread. Much like someone might use ‘white’ or ‘the west’ or ‘person of colour’. The terms are obviously so broad to be meaningless, but we cant caveat everything perfectly.

“So you’d have thought the phrase “that cause people astonishing offense” might be better…”

I’d think the phrase, “that people take astonishing offense at” would be still better, because it makes clear that “offense” is something happening in the head of the offended, not in ink on paper.

To let other people being offended veto your own expression, is to give the offended the power of censorship, to encourage people to be maximally offended by concepts they don’t want expressed. And that is exactly what is going on here: Muslims do not want people talking or writing against Islam, so they take offense at it, frequently violently.

These violent attacks are working. People are more and more fearful to say anything against Islam. You have to pretend it’s a religion of peace, you have to pretend it has nothing to do with the global epidemic of terrorism. You have to pretend, because if you don’t they’ll take offense, and Muslims taking offense means people getting killed.

And this makes it easier for Islam to spread, and increase it’s influence, and that is the purpose. To cow people into letting the “religion of peace” spread unopposed.

And how can you fight it, except by establishing the principle that we don’t care HOW “offended” you get, you aren’t allowed to silence somebody, let alone kill them? We have to win this fight today, or tomorrow we’ll be faced with a much worse fight.

And winning it starts with shrugging off the temptation to self-censor in response to violence.

Yes it is.

Val,

I apologize for not noticing you were offering your experience as personal conversation, and for not engaging in personal conversation in response. If I’d recognized the anecdote as the most important part of the post, I’d have responded to it.

For myself, I’ve found it’s safe not to engage in personal conversation with people I barely know in public Internet forums. Ironically enough, it’s pretty much the same rule I use on the subway. In most cases, it works out okay. I’ve also found it’s best to assume the best of other commenters, not the worst. Those two rules work most of the time because most other people also assume the best of others, and if they can’t say something nice, say nothing at all.

[aeiou] F*ck Charlie Hebdoe.

Anyone Hector doesn’t like can’t be all bad….

“As a general point, this seems completely wrong. Imagine applying to a different situation”

I wouldnt say *completely wrong * but context dependant.

“Similarly, if there is indeed widespread and systematic marginalization of Muslim communities in France”

Well, that depends on the specifics. Certainly not equivalent to the treatment of African Americans under Jim Crow (I would think) Probably not even the equivalent of the discrimination suffered by Catholics in Northern Ireland (which was a moment when aggravating political/ethnic divisons – and peacefully initially – was completly counterproductive)

“It’s the early ’60s in the (US) South, black communities are agitating for civil rights, Bull Connor is meeting protestors with dogs and fire hoses. Serious political polarization afoot! And now we say that both the black and white communities should take a step back and see where the other side is coming from? ”

Well, the civil rights movement did, no ? I mean they explicitly worked within the system. They explictly embraced non violence and being better than their opponents (that’s not to deny the threat of violence etc from other avenues didnt help the movement, plausibly it did) but the rhetoric and action was surely to some degree accommodationist?

” In any case, I’m hardly even forwarding a thesis here ”

Absolutely. I didn’t mean to target anything specifically towards you (I’m also thinking it through myself, in some part, so am not *trying* to sound dismissive – although perhaps it comes across like that) It was more in response to Shatz than anything else.(who I do like generally. He had an article that I linked to above about Breivik -again, I dont agree with all of it – that I think is more applicable when explaining *these specific* attacks)

The implication is that anybody satirizing Jews in Germany must be objectively helping the Nazis, right?

The panel shows a hook-nosed Jew counting money ‘in the entrails of the working class’ and asks whether that would have been ‘funny’ in 1933. Are you unable to distinguish (i) the specific question Sacco posed (ii) the ludicrous over-generalisation of it you have attributed to him?

But this is simply wrong. . …. Is there any evidence that the anti-immigration party, the one most opposed to “Muslims”, has ever used Charlie Hebdo? … they were opposed to the stunts of both Manif pour tous and the FN

There are various currents of Islamophobia in France and just because the FN doesn’t support a publication doesn’t mean it can’t be Islamophobic or even that it can’t unintentonally advance their agenda. This is not difficult.

The most scabrous sexual joke I’ve ever heard about Mohammed was told to me by a Turk, who would, if she lived in France, officially count as a Muslim.

This seems to be on the level of ‘gay people sometimes use the word ‘faggot” so it can’t be offensive / homophobic.

This is like saying Ha’aretz is a pro-Nazi paper because it criticizes Jews.

Don’t. Be. Ridiculous.

I would like to know more about Kurt Tucholsky, who, according to wikipedia, first: wasn’t a Jew at least since 1918 (but probably since 1914), and second: doesn’t sounds like someone who would engage in propagating ethnic stereotypes.

” This seems to be on the level of ‘gay people sometimes use the word ‘faggot” so it can’t be offensive / homophobic. ”

Making a joke about Mohammed isn’t perpetuating an ethnic stereotype, it’s attacking a specific historical figure (a political representation) It isn’t equivalent to printing a hook nosed Jew, or a black man falling out of a tree with a banana.

A woman has described her shock after being found guilty of a public order offence for telling David Cameron he had “blood on his hands“. Bethan Tichborne, 28, said initially she assumed her court summons was a bureaucratic error after she was arrested for protesting against cuts to disability benefits. But she was told by a district judge that her comments must have hugely insulted the prime minister…

“Should that extend to the recently-dead terrorists?”

“Speaking badly of” recently shot suspects isn’t seen as uncivil in the same way, but it generally means one or more of 1) you think that people won’t understand that criminals shooting people is very wrong unless you tell people that the criminals were bad; 2) you want to claim that an entire group of similar people is guilty of something because those people were; 3) you want to give some kind of long-distance diagnosis of why the crime occurred, without having any more information than what anyone can get from the news; 4) you are a victim of the crime or a friend or relative of one and you understandably need to react in this way. Unless anyone here is in case 4), which I doubt, then I think that again you’re better off not doing it.

… The rallies come ahead of a march expected to draw up to a million people on Sunday in which French president Francois Hollande will be joined by a host of world leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron.Others due to participate include Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and US attorney-general Eric Holder. The prime ministers of Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Spain and The Netherlands will also attend along with the presidents of Mali, Niger and Ukraine. Mr Hollande will also be joined by NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg…

And for those who can read German http://www.textlog.de/kurt-tucholsky.html

Charlie Hebdo to publish one million copies of next issue …Other media companies, including Le Monde and Vivendi SA’s Canal Plus, among others, have offered to help pay for the giant run, he said. Roughly €250,000 ($300,000) will come from a fund Google Inc. set up two years ago to settle a copyright fight with French newspapers, the fund’s director said…

@358 – yeah – if you ignore Roger’s argument entirely, then your ad hominem has merit.

‘I agree with Sacco’s general point but the analogy is off’ It’s good job he didn’t claim they were analogous then. (Btw ‘making a joke about Mohammed’ /= ‘intentionally and very publicly causing gross offence’ [to an already marginalised religious group]).

That’s not making a joke about Mohammed. that’s perpetuating an ethnic stereotype.

Mitch Guthman,

“. I think that unless the Islamic community in France can find a way to accommodate themselves to a French society that wants religion to be practed in the heart and in the home but not in public spaces, there terroristic attacks will only grow more intense and more frequent and the backlash from the host society will be harsher and more intolerant as well.”

This is not the proper method of integration that has been found to work. Integration is not the same as assimilation – and assimilation is old fashioned from more racist times.

I read some things about settlement and integration last year – and for integration to work it has to be a two way process between both host society and immigrants .
The immigrants change the host society and the host society changes the immigrants too.

It is unfair to say only the immigrants have to change to suit the host society – and this sort of idea often underlies a bad settlement process which leads to marginalization and alienation instead of integration between the host society and immigrants.

French people can read An Apologie for Raymond Sebond by the French author Montaigne who says it is not enough to follow God in spirit – but you also need to in body – and then they can have this nice French example that sanctions practicing religion in public.

And the French people cannot complain with any true sense of justice about immigrants altering French culture since they were the ones with their colonialism who altered lots of the immigrants’ cultures in the first place.

Of course it is very wrong to kill people and quite tragic for the people whose lives are cut short and their grieving families.

But on the matter of the cartoons – I have not seen these ones – but during English colonialism in the Pacific the London papers’ cartoonists would draw horrible mocking cartoons of the Pacific Islanders and indigenous people , so such cartons can and have in the past acted as a tool of dehumanization and delegitimization of the world’s less powerful in a way that also gives support for the oppression of these less powerful people by Western societies’ powerful parliaments and armed forces and companies etc – and these powerful Western bodies I guess must have killed more Middle Eastern people in recent years than Middle Eastern people have killed Westerners .

just reading back on my 366, – that ‘Anyway’ might be construed as replying to ZM’s comment (or ‘dismissing it’, whatever) That wasn’t my intention ZM, it was just an add on to my comment 363 (I know these ‘clarifications of previous comments’ comments are tedious, so apologies to all)

2 cents: some of the insinuations about the essence of Islam I’ve seen here seem already seem awfully reminiscent of some of the ones that were being made here about the essence of Judaism not too long ago. Different commenters, different target, same mindset.

Also, while Germany in 1933 might be a bad analogy, it seems to me that a rough analogy to the attitudes of 19th century elites of Germany or Russia toward the “backward” ghetto Jews might be more fitting – bearing in mind that any analogy between two different places or times will be imperfect, hence the words “different,” “rough,” and “analogy.”

do you have any specific examples ? I dont mean that as a gotcha but I really dont see that many (any) comments that have essentialised Muslims.

ZM at 365,

You seem to be saying two totally incompatible things. One the one hand you say it’s wrong to kill but the bulk of your comments seems to suggest that the cosmic justice of anti-colonialism grants the colonized peoples a hunting license to kill anyone who dares to mock them. And, equally, you seem to be granting moral permission for indigenous peoples of former colonies to do the indigenous peoples of the colonizers the exact same thing that you argue was unjust in the first place. That strikes me as nuts and, more importantly, irrelevant in the context of a comment about what will happen in France if the current situation worsens.

I don’t think it’s axiomatic that the host society must always give way to the immigrants. Muslims are probably about 10% of the population of France. Yet, as a practical matter, they’ve imposed a very strict prohibition against blaspheming against Islam that is enforced at the point of a gun. The problem is what will happen if there are more incidents like this one. France has a very long, blood-soaked history of religious warfare.

In many ways, the point of the French Revolution was to free the country from the Church and the point of laïcité was to prevent the revival of the Church’s power and to allow people of different faiths or no faith to coexist in harmony. The state is neutral between religious. In France, the public spaces belong to all of the people, who are free to practice their religion in their hearts, their homes and their churches, synagogues and mosques but are forbidden to intrude upon the public sphere.

French wariness about public displays of the Muslim faith is flows, in no small part, from the fear of what will happen if the principle of laïcité breaks down. Right now, for example, the there is no established church in France even though probably 85% of the French are at least nominally Catholics. Based on things that Sarkozy said during his presidency, there is a nostalgia among conservatives for a greater, more formal role for the Church in French life. A conflict between the conservatives and Voltaire’s “missionaries of laïques” would be disastrous for the republic—but it would likely be fatal for French Muslims and Jews.

That is why I believe that the principle of the separation of civil society from the society religious is fundamental to the republicanism of France. France cannot survive as a republic without it. In the case of the French republic, the principle of laïcité evolved to free the country from the grip of a very power church.

Which brings us to my actual point, which was, in part, what might happen if the host society comes to view the immigrants as being essentially a 5th column that holds values that are antithetical and even dangerous to those of republicanism. All I’m saying is that the immigrants must accept the fundamental principles upon which their host society is founded and become French. I believe that, for their part, the Français de souche (indigenous French) must make that possible through investments in education, better housing and, most importantly, by understanding that égalité means hiring and promoting qualified people who just happen to be named Muhammad.

But I believe that Muslims must reject those Islamic sects such as Salafism that are incompatible with laïqué. In the way, people of all faiths can live together in peace and harmony.

There are various currents of Islamophobia in France and just because the FN doesn’t support a publication doesn’t mean it can’t be Islamophobic or even that it can’t unintentonally advance their agenda.

Islamophobic is a really poor word choice in these circumstances.

Wise words, ZM….

Ronan, I’m sure I could pick out better examples, but I’m afraid citing them would inspire responses, and I’m really not interested.

Ronan @363,366,367,368 I think we;re at cross-purposes. Sacco assumes (rightly imo) that the cartoons are offensive to Muslims. Roger pointed out (I think) that some Muslims have told him scabrous jokes about Mohammed. I replied that doesn’t necessarily mean such jokes would not be offensive to Muslims when told by an outsider in a mainstream mass publication, for similar reasons that the fact that some gays may use the word ‘faggot’ with familiars doesn’t mean the word wouldn’t be offensive to gays if the New York Times, say, started using in regularly. In addition to this, the offensiveness of what Charlie Hebdo was doing goes far beyond ‘telling jokes’ anyway, as I pointed out in my last comment. Anyway, Roger has greeted my responses with polite silence and I’m getting pretty tired of this anyway. It seems to me there are lots of obvious problems with what he wrote. Ymmv.

If being bombed and shot doesn’t give cause for rational fear of something, I’m not sure what does. What sort of event would – in your view – give rise to legitimate fear?

That’s not what Islalmophobic means. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia

Phobias being irrational fears, I would expect, and it not being particularly irrational to fear a group that kills people.

See #385, (and Islam isn’t ‘a group that kills people’, racist prick)

Do I want to spend the rest of my evening arguing about semantics with a racist grammar Nazi or do I want to go to bed? Tricky decision….

Colonisation was unjust – Europeans should have stayed in their lands. I wish the ending of The Tempest had influenced Europeans in the 1600s but it didn’t. Since the Europeans chose to change other cultures via colonisation (and two world wars etc) they cannot with any sense of justice object to migrants from those cultures changing European cultures.

ZM. You have a warped understanding of history. Muslims invaded Europe first and got as far as the Pyrenees and Vienna. Most the Middle East was never colonised. Most the bits that were got themselves invaded as Europeans who wanted to stay in Europe kept being forcibly migrated and sold as slaves by Barbary pirates (yeah, that’s the culture change you’re objecting to, supression of widespread sex slavery; the one you’re supporting is supression of free speech). BTW Turkey was the aggressor in WWI.

No. If I’m arguing that while they colonised the USA, and New Zealand, and Australia, they didn’t colonise Turkey, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia.

[aeiou] Engels,

Islam isn’t a race, you degenerate fuck. It also isn’t a religion that a Christian is bound to respect.

Abbe Faria,

“No. If I’m arguing that while they colonised the USA, and New Zealand, and Australia, they didn’t colonise Turkey, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia.”

Oh for goodness sake – Europeans certainly colonised more countries than the USA, New Zealand, and Australia.

What history books have you been reading to get this strange idea of some very small scale European colonialism and imperialism?

Oil resources in the Middle East were gained through imperial tactics – even in the post-WW2 era – see about the Suez intrigue , or the fall of the Iranian nationalist government caused by the CIA… And how do you think the national boundaries of countries in the Middle East were devised ?

I think this is more convincing on the role of race, Islam, ideology etc

http://tompepinsky.com/2015/01/10/on-the-racism-of-charlie-hebdo/

“hector – what kind of topics will you be blogging about ?”

Mostly Swedish bondage porn from what I understand.

“And how do you think the national boundaries of countries in the Middle East were devised ?”

I think the Ottoman Empire launched an Imperial war of aggression against Russia, France and the UK. And lost. Note which religious grouping was trying to expand into which continent (clue: Christians and Asia are the wrong answer), that’s not European colonialism.

Mitch Guthman,

“I don’t mean to misrepresent you but I don’t see how you’re explained what I see as contradictory positions. If descriptions of past injustices don’t equate to a license to get even, then I don’t understand why you have mentioned them. ”

I mentioned them because the Western countries need to be more proactive in reconciliation and contrition with the other countries they hurt in colonisation and imperialism and all the wars and so on. Instead they continue to exploit resources and labour if other countries, pretend their GHG emissions have gone down since 1990 when they gave gone up by 47% actually since they import more now, and continue to want high material consumption ways of life at the cost of people in poorer countries and the environment and future generations.

If I say France and other Western countries should acknowledge the wrongs they have done then this does not mean I have to support some sort of eye for an eye revenge tragedy leading to WW3 :/

“For a man with such deep concerns for how other cultures are treated, you seem remarkably cavalier about telling people in France that they should either refrain from blaspheming against Islam or prepare to die in the name of multiculturalism”

I am not a man with any deep concerns whatsoever since I am not a man – I am constantly surprised at how men seem to think women do not have initials. It is simple politeness to refrain from blaspheming against other people’s faith – are you really going to argue this is a vital part of French culture – if so I might point out it is an ugly one and maybe think of the Algerians.

I am very dubious the French State does not use metaphysics at all like that scholar said you quote – likely it’s just a neat trick of rhetoric – without invoking metaphysical concepts of good and bad and justice and mercy etc how does France manage to have any laws governing its people whatsoever?

“This is what makes it possible for people of different faiths to share a common space.
Without the carefully separated, neutral spaces afforded by application of strict laïcité conflict between different faiths and between church (probably the Catholic church) and state is inevitable”

You can quite easily have religious symbols in public spaces without generating great conflict like Australia does. It is very enjoyable to go to Chinese New Year celebrations in public in one month, a Christian water festival another, and then Diwali in another and so on. And since I had a subject on 20th c French history and the Avante Garde I am completely unpersuaded by your extravagant claim that this ban has erased all conflict over ethical behavior and right and wrong in France.

” France amy lose republicanism but the Muslims and the Jews will probably lose everything.”

Then you can counter this dark cloud by offering your support to Jews and Muslims in these grim times – I am sure they would appreciate it .

Mods, honest question: Do you want to do something about the flat out racism in this thread? See e.g. Brett Bellmore, passim, and some others too.

“I think the Ottoman Empire launched an Imperial war of aggression against Russia, France and the UK. And lost. Note which religious grouping was trying to expand into which continent (clue: Christians and Asia are the wrong answer), that’s not European colonialism.”

I tend to stay out of these sorts of threads because I don’t want to participate in rival displays of irrelevant self-righteousness, but that bit is a remarkable display of irrelevant and fictitious historiography.

#406 Mitch Guthman

If the history of colonial oppression or whatever isn’t being offered as a justification for these killings, then why exactly is it being discussed at all?

I haven’t heard anybody argue that the killers should get away with it. Everybody here agrees that they should be arrested and tried for their crimes if possible, and if they resist arrest too strenuously then it might be necessary to kill them during the arrest attempt. If they kill themselves while committing a crime, that prevents arrest but it could also be considered a self-execution.

It seems to me that the argument is more about what to do with the muslim immigrants who do not commit crimes. On the one hand we have the argument that they cause too much trouble and the trouble is their fault so we should have no sympathy for them. On the other hand there is the argument that we should look for ways to help them get along.

If muslim immigrants are the cause of the problem then it makes sense to drive them away or kill them. Eliminate the cause and the problem goes away. Short of that, we can wring our hands and complain that they are the problem and it’s all their fault and do nothing about it.

On the other hand if they deserve some tolerance while everybody learns how to get along, then perhaps we can avoid ethnic cleansing. That would be a good thing. Why do they deserve any tolerance, though, when the most obvious direct solution is to get rid of them? Colonialism is one possible reason they might be owed something. Particularly in France, some of the muslim immigrants are people who collaborated in colonialism and then felt unwelcome in their home countries when the French were driven out. If they can’t stay in France where should they live?

They might have a lot to offer but that’s hard to argue when there aren’t enough rewards to go around and whatever special talents they may have are going unused.

Punishing people who have not committed any crime because they share some sort of label with criminals, is called “collective punishment”. Most people agree that’s bad. Still if they are an effort to reach an accommodation with, it could be easier to get rid of them and whoever said they had a right to immigrate to your country in the first place?

It looks to me like mostly the arguments in favor of not ethnic cleansing them are that we ought to be good people and not evil people. The arguments in favor of ethnic-cleansing them point out that they are inconvenient and a bother, and some of them are criminals who very occasionally kill people, and being good instead of evil requires a certain degree of sacrifice which we can avoid by being evil instead. And we have a right to be evil to these people because they are poor and different from us and a few of them are criminals so we have the right to be afraid of them and angry at them.

And anyway a lot of muslims hate us. If they ever became rich and powerful how could we trust them to act in our best interest? So it makes a certain sense that we should do our best to keep all muslims poor and powerless so they can’t hurt us much. And since some of them will try to attack us stealthily when they can’t possibly win a fair fight, doesn’t it make sense we should spend whatever it takes to kill them first anywhere in the world we find them? And if it turns out that muslims hate us too much, isn’t it obviously best to kill them all?

The argument for evil seems so rational and so obvious. It isn’t racism or bigotry to do our level best to keep them down because they hate us, it’s just self-preservation. They don’t hate us more because we keep them down, they already hated us. There’s nothing else we can do, because they are such a threat. It simply does not make sense to be nice to the enemy. Because they are the enemy. The only reason to let muslims live is if they stop being muslims.

In the USA if we had this attitude toward the anti-abortion movement, when they bomb clinics and kill doctors we would find names of people who are in that movement and systematically remove their votes, and encourage them to leave the country, and we would make abortion drugs be non-prescription so anybody could buy them with no questions asked. But somehow we try to live with those people though they have no tolerance for us.

Fuck, again. First sentence is a quote from Abbe Faria, rest is me.

So Swedish bondage porn Hector? I bet you have a huge collection. You religious fanatics tend to love that kind thing.
/Not that there is anything wrong with that. I support everyone’s right to their own kinks as long as everyone involved is an adult willing participant.

Dude, Hector, I’m a “religious egalitarian” like you’re a Catholic. At least get your fucking insults right.

Word on the “street” was he was some weird kind of Anglican. I suppose I could be wrong.

ZM at 407,

It still seems to me that all of your concern about the wrongs of European’s is confusing. What does it mean to say that Western countries should “be more proactive in reconciliation and contrition with the other countries they hurt in colonisation and imperialism and all the wars and so on”? If it doesn’t mean an “eye for an eye” and a hunting license for previously oppressed peoples, what does it mean? It seems to me that all this handwringing about the misdeeds of the West is really a distraction from the real issue.

Yes, you’re right that generally speaking it is polite to refrain from crude attacks on people religious beliefs. But that doesn’t mean that the prohibition is absolute. The cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were believed in blasphmy as a positive good. Even in my country where blasaphmy against the fundamentalist Christian faith is punished (informally but often very harshly), there’s still an absolute right to publish. Murdering these artists and threatening any who blaspheme against Islam destroys that right.

I personally was not a fan of Charlie Hebdo. Over the years, I’ve seen a number of their covers, mostly because Arun Kapil frequently posted the most controversial ones on his website. I bought an issue last year, thumbed through it and didn’t enjoy it. I have written about some of the covers and I’ve been critical of them for being pointlessly offensive. What’s different now is that Islamists have murdered these cartoonists and threatened journalists and others who offend against their vision of Islam.

Several of the covers were gratitiously offensive. But many others, while equally offensive, made extremely valid points through satire and were effective in ways that a mere article could never be.

So, while blasphmy isn’t a part of French culture, it is nonetheless integral to satire. It is simply impossible to satirize a person without giving offense. It is impossible to satirize a religious without blaspheming.

It therefore seems clear to me that it a response to threats of murder against blasphemy that does not include more blasphemy in defiance of the threats is no defense at all. What matters is the right to publish blasphemy. If it exists only in the abstract and with the tacit understanding that the right won’t ever be exercised, then it really doesn’t exist at all and you will be living in a society in which the Islamists are in charge.

Finally, on the question of religion:

First, France, like the United States does in theory, derives its laws not by reference to God’s law but rather by enacting the community’s sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. People and societies can have values that reflect beliefs about justice and how they want to live that don’t require God’s blessing to have validity. Most of Western Europe is secular and humanistic in outlook. They have democracies and the social welfare state and that’s a whole lot better than anything that a theocracy has delivered.

Second, I don’t know much about Australia and it may indeed be a paradise of religious harmony. If it is, good on you but your country is very much an outlier in human history. The history of mankind has been a history of religious strife. A huge amount of the conquests and colonialism you decry was done as part of the struggle touched off by the reformation. Islam was an aggressive, colonizing religion that that fought with other religions for world domination. The Protestant Reformation ushered in centuries of unspeakable savagery that continue to this very day.

It is in the nature of organized religions—every religion believes it represents the one true God and, almost without exception, they’ve brought nonbelivers to the faith with fire and sword. In the end, only some version of laïcité can offer people of different faith the ability to share the public sphere without brutal oppression and endless bloodshed.

i give the Hector impression a 6 out of 10

[aeiou] ZM,

The only ‘reconciliation’ I want is for the nations of Africa and Asia to express some fucking gratitude to the countries that civilized them.

I like Muslims but I hate Islam. I hate it, hate it, hate it. It is a wicked creed that justifies the criminal, cut-throat and bully. I hate it.

Mitch Guthman:

There has never been true laicite in France – it’s a great idea and I would be all for it, but the crooked timber of humanity will not conform to it, cf. eg.:

French Muslims Find Haven in Catholic Schools

nb. : 8,847Catholic schools vs.4 Muslim schools

And anybody who will look up on Wikipedia:

“French law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools”

“Islamic scarf controversy in France”

“Islamic dress in Europe”

will see that the issue is much more complex than you make it seem.

I’m surprised by how much less I write when I ignore people who are stupidly wrong.

I want to compare the reaction in the USA to muslim terrorists versus anti-abortion terrorists. At first sight it seems disproportionate.

There have been close to 200 more-or-less successful bombings of abortion clinics, and a large handful of murders of abortionists beyond the occasional people severely injured or killed in bombings. But there’s hardly any outrage about this.

I think one reason is that lots of people have friends who are anti-abortion, while far fewer people have muslim friends. So it’s much easier to understand their outrage at murder of unborn children.

A second reason is that there are large, well-organized pro-life groups, and many of them have publicly announced that they do not condone violence against abortion clinics. Some of them say that they hope God will strike them down, but no reputable pro-life source tells people to do it. On the other hand, the main spokesmen for Islam, AQ and ISIS and some backwoods preachers in Iran, are widely reported telling people to kill blasphemers.

Then there’s the moral difference. Lots of people believe that MDs do not have any inherent right to commit abortions. There’s certainly nothing in the Constitution about it. But most of us agree that everybody has the right to say that the Pope is a pederast who defrauds hundreds of millions of poor people from their money because they are too stupid or ignorant to realize there is no God and the Pope has no relationship whatsoever with any God. Subject to libel laws etc. Similarly everybody has the right to say that Judaism as a religion is a fraud and a mockery that has caused untold harm and absolutely no good to anybody ever, that Moses while fictional was morally on a par with Hitler and Stalin, and King David was a bloodthirsty dictator who created a small empire — a vassal-state of Hiram of Tyre — that lasted 2 generations. Etc. It’s obviously wrong to punish people for practicing free speech, but it might be right, or at least understandable, to kill abortionists.

Also people have short memories. The last reported abortion bombings were in 2012 and no one was killed in any of the 2012 attacks. The last reported killing of cartoonists in France was just last week.

So it’s understandable that people would think of the two cases as very different. Muslems are the alien, other people while anti-abortionists are our own kind with a strong opinion. Muslims get upset when we ridicule their religion, while the pro-life movement is upset about the murder of innocents. (And anyway we never get upset when people ridicule our own religions.) The Pro-Life movement is widely reported to speak out against violence, while muslims are not widely reported to oppose violence but instead are widely reported to approve of their violence against us. The Pro-Life movement will evaporate when they win, and it won’t affect all that many people all that much, but Muslims will not stop trying to get other people to convert until everybody in the world is converted — like Christians or Mormons but with violence added.

So it’s understandable that we’d have a lot more tolerance for one than the other.

I get this great big urge to respond to stupid comments, and so far I’m mostly resisting it. Yay, me.

I know a lot of you have been very proficient at this for years, and it doesn’t seem like any big deal, but it’s a big deal to me. Thanks for your patience.

I’d point to the link @401 as the most sensible thing said on the topic of ‘Islam and racism.’

“As for determining whether a publication does or does not constitute an insult to a group, it seems to me a no-brainer that mass protests around the world should be taken as a strong clue, over the dubious intuition of some upper-class over-educated judges, who obviously have no idea.”

I’m surprised by you here Ze, as you usually are a man of some sense..but what if those protests are by the ‘upper-class over-educated judges’ ? If the protests are over some banal bit of offense taking ?Just with a different demographics protesting ? Which does happen, now and again ..

how can you expect me to judge a comment you have that’s in moderation ? perhaps that will be the convincing one, sure.
Watson’s comment is just four seperate comments put into four paragraphs which really make little sense when combined. If each para was a standalone comment that might be something. There could be something there to deal with. As is it’s just a succession of non sequiturs and generalisation. like someone rushing out a series of irrelevant historical facts at the end of a pub quiz. afaict

No, I don’t expect you to judge it until it emerges. Just letting you know to expect it.

I’ll be turning 56 next week, and if there’s one thing it took me a good long while to internalize as a cocky kid, it was that “I don’t understand that” does NOT mean, “That doesn’t make sense.” Perhaps we’re making a sort of sense that you’re so hostile to, you shy away from understanding it?

@445 – no it’s because ive rarely found you or Watson to argue in good faith or be interested in an actual conversation. Im sure some feel the same about my comments and ignore them for the same reasons..we can all make that choice. Time is limited and engaging with people you dont think are making a good faith effort is pointless.

J Thomas – his argument is specifically to CH, saying it was attacking ideas not a race. I think that’s true. And a good bit of the reaction to radicalised Islam *can* be seen as a response to an ideology rather than to a race/ethnicity. The concerns (as Watson does note, in fairness) are a lot of the time ideological.
That doesn’t mean that the position of Muslims in Europe isnt racialised in ways, just that calling everything ‘racist’ is imprecise and undermines actual racism.

undermines *IDENTIFYING* actual racism..undermining actual racism probably wouldnt be so bad.

“Back in the days when a lot of Americans treated the Irish rather like white southerners treated blacks after the war, it could be argued that wasn’t racism or maybe it was.”

Yeah, but there are two seperate but related things here, afaict (1) how the Irish were seen, which (afaik) could plausibly be seen as racist ie they were subjected to racist tropes/seen as biologically and intellectually inferior (2) how Catholicism was viewed, which was closer to an ideological threat to the Protestant norm.
Obviously both are releated and overlapped, but not entirely. They also existsed as seperate ‘concerns.’

@441 “but what if those protests are by the ‘upper-class over-educated judges’ ”

Anything is possible, but like I said: a very strong clue. If you want it to sound more ‘scientific’: for this sort of laws, they’d do better deciding based on the spirit of the law and empirical evidence, rather than legalistic logic.

455 – yeah, but a lot of the protests arent ‘bottom up displays of outrage’ , theyre manipulated by ‘upper-class over-educated judges’..just those ‘upper-class over-educated judges’come from within Islam.

457 “theyre manipulated by ‘upper-class over-educated judges’..just those ‘upper-class over-educated judges’come from within Islam.”

Most emotional responses are manipulated by someone. But that still requires genuine emotional response from a large number of people; I don’t think you could seriously argue that all those protests are manned by paid provocateurs.

459- I would guess reactions fall into 3 main categories. People who get very offended for reason X, people who think it’s politically correct radical Islam gone mad, and pretty much everyone (90%) else who either don’t care, who are offended but not so much, who are offended at the offence taken by the offended, or who just want everyone to give it a rest.
Logically, your argument would seem to to imply that anyone who could raise a posse should be seen as representative of situation Y and placated immeditately and completly. Always. Isnt that just going to lead to the twitterfication of the world?

Well, we’ve just had French schoolchildren singing the “Marseillaise”, the most violent and bloodthirsty national anthem in the world, and a bunch of elderly politicians talking about defending the values of the Republic (when their own abandonment of those values is largely responsible for this mess) and defending liberty of expression, (when they are busy passing laws to limit it). Altogether a depressing afternoon, but not really a surprise when you consider a hermetically-sealed political class, essentially ignorant of the realities of life, and speaking almost exclusively to each other.

Freedom of speech (even freedom of satirical cartoons) and freedom to practice religion are non-negotiable necessities.

It’s not that simple. The people who killed a bunch of journalists in France this week thought they were practicing their religion.

Maybe this has already been said (I haven’t read the whole thread), but that’s okay, because it can’t be repeated too many times: “Freedom to practice religion” should be “non-negotiable” only insofar as you can practice your religion while leaving me alone to practice mine, where mine may be a different religion from yours or the total lack of anything that you would recognize as religion at all.

Freedom from other people’s demands made in the name of religion, and from harms done in the name of religion, is as non-negotiable as freedom to practice. You can’t hang virgins in the public square just because you think your deity demands it. You can’t make me refrain from sexual practices that you think your deity disapproves of. You can’t shoot people just because you think your deity demands it. You can’t (or shouldn’t be allowed to) take away my rights to full citizenship because you think your deity disapproves of me.

And so on, and on, and on. We have a long way to go.

@JamieM: Notice how all those rights existed in the US for a considerable time, and gained currency in the Arab world (and other areas) during the 1930’s and 1950’s. What we’re facing today is the aftermath of the bourgeois revolution, which secured those rights, but ultimately foundered and experienced a crisis. If you aren’t willing to die for freedom of speech, don’t be surprised that others aren’t. It’s not because we’ve not spent enough words on the difficulties of these freedoms that people don’t see them as compelling as they once were.

Looks like the war continues. I expect we’ll see a fair number of attacks on media outlets that go beyond saying “we are Charlie”, and actually dare to do what Hebdo got attacked for. Well, perhaps not so many, because not so many are actually doing that.

So, what time zone is “moderation” in?

#464 JanieM

Freedom from other people’s demands made in the name of religion, and from harms done in the name of religion, is as non-negotiable as freedom to practice.

How should that apply in the USA about abortion? Should your religious demand get to decide whether other women can have abortions?

Feminism is not exactly a religion because it’s mostly secular. But should your opinion about patriarchy determine how other women get along with men etc?

I think the question of where my rights begin and yours end has not been decisively answered yet. Libertarians tend to have very strong opinions about it, and I only partly accept their answers.

In a republic, we usually want the laws to reflect some sort of prevailing morality. We sort of want that not to be religious because we don’t want religions to have too much control. But when we point to moral values as a basis for the laws that we will enforce, we can hardly insist that those moral values have to be disconnected from religion.

It’s a mess.

That was @467

JanieM @464: That’s a very cogent and eloquent statement of the standard liberal understanding of freedom of speech and religion. There’s an intricate and powerful critique of that position in Stanley Fish’s There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech … and It’s a Good Thing Too and The Trouble with Principle. FWIW, I’ve reviewed both books, here (http://www.georgescialabba.net/mtgs/1994/01/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-s/print/) and here (http://www.georgescialabba.net/mtgs/2000/04/the-trouble-with-principle-by/print/).

geo, thanks for the links. I’ll check them out. I should have added a sentence to my comment to recognize that my formulation wasn’t all that much simpler than Lee’s; freedoms often clash, and that’s where the hard decisions can (or should) be found.

Even so, I think it’s important to keep making the point, because it’s all too easy to talk about freedom “of” religion without paying any heed to freedom “from” it. My perspective on this has been sharply informed by the fact that I’m gay. And female.

J Thomas 467 – The fact that there might be a double standard on anti semitism (I don’t know if there is, but let’s assume so) I dont think is necessarily relevant.
As I said above (but didn’t elaborate on, as I agree with Rich that it isn’t the right time), what CH did wouldn’t necessarily be my preference. I’d prefer people to step back a little from these extreme positions and not try to aggravate the situation. CH *weren’t* passive victims , though they were victims, they were political actors making a political point. Of course that doesn’t justify violence.
Also the people who murdered in Paris weren’t mindless fanatics, they had political goals . (1) to try to silence criticism of radical Islam. (2) to help recruit for radical Islamist causes. Equally the people who organise marches against Mohammed cartoons arent the aggrieved masses, theyre dedicated ideologues with specific political goals. So everyone here is playing their part, to a degree. People shouldn’t ignore the politics at the heart of all of this.
Also, as mentioned above, drawing a picture of Mohammed is not (by nature) engaging in racist or ethnic stereotyping. It’s attacking a specific political idea. It’s an ideogical cause, not a ‘racist’ one. Afaik depicting Mohammed is a contested topic within Islam, so represents not just a contest between western secularism and Islam, but between various schools of thought within Islam.
I don’t know what all of this has to do with the civil rights movement. There, it seems, they worked with the groups commited to non violence and sidelined the extremists. The situations don’t really map though, so im not sure of what point the comparison serves.
On the specific questions of the limits of free speech, how we should accomadate different belief systems/cultures in secular societies, race based discrimination etc , I think theyre slightly different questions. Related, in a lot of ways, but not dominant, I dont think. I dont have firm opinions on all of them, and I dont think this is really primarily about any of those topics.(from my POV anyway)
There are a lot of other questions attached to this of course, it’s complicated and I dont really know how I feel about all of them.* But I think it confuses what this was (a terror organisation commiting murder for political reasons) by conflating it with a series of second order issues (integration, race based discrimination, free speech etc)

* Obviously I’m not saying others shouldnt talk about them, just that I dont have clear opinions.

geo,

FWIW, after many years thinking about it, I believe Fish’s analysis is correct as far as it goes, but then he gets up to the point of something like it really just depends on who has the power, and that’s okay because religion is pretty much what Lee Arnold says it is. People whose religion says they shouldn’t mix with the general population, don’t. People whose religion allows them to, do. No one gets into a position of power and suddenly learns an “esoteric” religious fact about firing all the women in management, or something.

Bianca #465: “religion should have nothing to do with everyday life”

This appears to be another misunderstanding. A “language game” (Wittgenstein) is not “just a matter of speech”; it is the direct opposite. If the cultural customs of the “form of life” (Wittgenstein, again) are not supported, or even forbidden, by the polity, then the correct route is conversation and the process of redress through democracy. I already choose freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Perhaps it might be made easier to understand by quoting Wittgenstein, where he uses “Christianity” because it is the form he himself chose, for reasons he explains:

“Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.”

Here, in a brilliant description of what it is, Wittgenstein also manages to state the bottom line: you don’t get to judge another.

Lee, is it possible I misunderstood you because I interpreted “esoteric” as “spiritual” or “visionary”?

Explanation: “Esoteric” seems to imply “not known to everybody, even within the religion,” something that adds meaning to people’s lives if they have time to study it. It definitely doesn’t mean basic ethics, how to treat people, which seems to be what you’re getting at in your Wittgenstein comment, which I admit I didn’t fully understand.

bianca @482: then he gets up to the point of something like it really just depends on who has the power

I think that’s right. In one of the essays in her Don’t Think, Smile, Ellen Willis seems to me to get beyond that point. Forgive me for linking to my own stuff again, but I tried to acknowledge that in a review of her book: http://www.georgescialabba.net/mtgs/1999/10/don-t-think-smile-notes-on-a-d/print/.

WT @485: That may be the best comment I’ve ever seen about Fish.

Bianca, sorry, I was using “esoteric” to refer to the path of mystical practice.

If your belief means hurting others, isn’t it just easier to rule it out of bounds?

You’re talking in circles, or playing word games, or something. Of course “we” (if we’re the ones with the power to do so) can rule “hurting others” out of bounds; that’s exactly my point. (Never mind that it is often not easy to agree on what is harmful and what isn’t.)

But if someone’s own beliefs about what their deity demands include what you and I would consider to be the hurting of others, then it’s really just a word game to say that they have “freedom of religion.” It’s not “freedom” (as most people understand it) if it only applies as long as it’s the part of their religion that Lee A. Arnold and JanieM approve of.

Having lived through at least seven statewide referenda/people’s vetoes on my status as a full-fledged citizen in the past twenty years, I can tell you that most people don’t know a thing about Stanley Fish or pareto efficiency, but they can be quite vocal about their belief that I should be prevented from, or penalized for, doing things that violate their religious beliefs. And a great many people think that it does constrain their freedom of religion if I try to stop them from acting on that belief.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t rule “hurting others” to be out of bounds. I’m objecting to your blithe assertion that that doesn’t constrain freedom of religion. People get to define their own religion; whether they then get to practice it fully is a separate question.

And Muhammed’s story! Someone should make a motion picture

It’s been done.

J Thomas 481 – Yes, but easier said than done (And I dont know how you do it) My only point was the context is so different that the comparison doesn’t explain much. The attacks shouldnt (I dont think) *primarily* be seen in the domestic politics of France , but in the political contests in the Middle East and North Africa.(and other places) It isn’t the militant wing of a French Muslims civil rights movement, but an ideological struggle primarily not happening in the west.
I agree that *at home* the best course is not to see it (as per Watson) as a civilisational clash, or frame it in terms of a battle for secularism and free speech, but as a criminal matter. Also not to scapegoat and harden specific ‘Muslim communities’.
I dont think you can really do anything about attacks like at CH though. They serve a specific purpose, so will happen regardless.

So should people be freely able to draw and publish homophobic cartoons?

Yes.

1. When I write about “hurting others” as something we can rule out of bounds, I don’t mean hurting people’s feelings. I don’t believe we have a right not to have our feelings hurt. What a morass that would be.

2. Lee, maybe I’m misreading you, but it seems like you’re trying to get out of recognizing that the idea of freedom of religion for everyone carries a contradiction at its heart. You can’t bear to say it’s an impossible ideal, so instead you’re saying that we’ll define “religion” in such a way that our arrangements don’t appear to constrain it.

But this is the same redefinition circus you’re critiquing Lee for.

Collin — I don’t think so. Lee seems to be saying that religion isn’t really religion if he says it isn’t, regardless of what the believers who hold a given religious belief say it is; more specifically, he seems to be saying that religion isn’t really religion if it requires hurting other people (however you want to define hurt).

I’m not saying that hurt feelings aren’t hurt feelings; I’m just saying that hurting people’s feelings shouldn’t be punishable by law. He seems to be claiming that he’s the one who gets to define religion; I’m not claiming the right to define what “hurt” is, I’m just stating my own belief about what kinds of “hurt” should be out of bounds. Homophobic cartoons hurt. I would be the last person to deny it. But that doesn’t mean I think they should be banned.

Of course I’m not a Muslim and it seems like nobody else here is either

If one were, this thread would make for some unpleasant reading (and not in a good way), but still, I wouldn’t be too quick to assume.

#505

Hurting people’s feelings isn’t punishable by law.

Except when it is.

And another thing! I suppose these big rallies are nice if they make everybody feel better, but I’m wondering if there’s anything concrete they are intended to accomplish. To keep speech free? To keep murder illegal? To keep veils illegal? To encourage the magazine to double down on publishing stupid, gratuitously offensive crap?

JanieM@494: most people don’t know a thing about Stanley Fish

This is shocking. Can it really be true?

And another thing! I suppose these big rallies are nice if they make everybody feel better, but I’m wondering if there’s anything concrete they are intended to accomplish. To keep speech free?

Absolutely. Some of the biggest asshole politicians on the planet are on this march. Putting people like Netanyahu, Lavrov, Orban, Davutoglu, Bongo and King Abdullah in a position where to sate global opinion they’re compelled to march down Boulevard Voltaire for free speech is very politically constructive – even if they don’t believe it.

Ronan(rf) is also right that the attacks (and insults to Islam) are just going to keep happening again and again. The two worries are the far right response – either within the political system (National Front) or insurectionist (Breivik) – or that they inflame religious/race riots. Trying to get popular opinion to shut these out is important.

It’s nice they invited Stoltenberg along though. If there’s anyone who demonstrates that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ it’s got to be NATO’s Secretary-General. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t carry a sword. Or even a gun.

Classic Terry Eagleton review of The Trouble with Principle:

It is one of the minor symptoms of the mental decline of the United States that Stanley Fish is thought to be on the Left. By some of his compatriots, anyway, and no doubt by himself. In a nation so politically addled that ‘liberal’ can mean ‘state interventionist’ and ‘libertarianism’ letting the poor die on the streets, this is perhaps not wholly unpredictable.

Stanley Fish, lawyer and literary critic, is in truth about as left-wing as Donald Trump. Indeed, he is the Donald Trump of American academia, a brash, noisy entrepreneur of the intellect who pushes his ideas in the conceptual marketplace with all the fervour with which others peddle second-hand Hoovers. Unlike today’s corporate executive, however, who has scrupulously acquired the rhetoric of consensus and multiculturalism, Fish is an old-style, free-booting captain of industry who has no intention of clasping both of your hands earnestly in his and asking whether you feel comfortable with being fired. He fancies himself as an intellectual boot-boy, the scourge of wimpish pluralists and Nancy-boy liberals, and that ominous bulge in his jacket is not to be mistaken for a volume of Milton. […]

@JanieM: all the links to georgescialabba.net were redirected to some “this domain is for sale” page when I was using my ISP’s default DNS service. I checked the domain with whois and saw that it is paid up through 2017. After I switched my DNS to Google’s service, 8.8.8.8, the links resolve correctly.

The Eagleton review was rousing all right, but pretty vulgar. This seems to me the essence of his case: “The essays in The Trouble with Principle deal with racism, pornography, abortion, free speech, religion, sexual discrimination, in fact most of the stock-in-trade of enlightened US academia. This, on any estimate, is a pressing agenda; but it does not betray the slightest sense that there is anything else in the political universe worth discussing. With typical American parochialism and self-obsession, Fish’s book is silent about famine, forced migration, revolutionary nationalism, military aggression, the depredations of capital, the inequities of world trade, the disintegration of whole communities.”

In other words: 1) writing about some things and not others obviously means that you believe those other things are not worth discussing; and 2) because Fish does not write about political economy or foreign policy, he obviously has the same opinions about those things as Donald Trump.

Not Eagleton at his best.

Thanks again, Matt.

Actually, although it’s not a movie, there is kind of a precedent. I haven’t read it.

Oh, come on. 434 is STILL in moderation? Are you waiting for the U235 to decay?

I’m afraid yesterday’s march came over as a an expression of solidarity among everyone who wasn’t an excluded, poor immigrant from a ghetto. It was almost entirely middle class, educated, and largely (though to be fair not exclusively) white. Ethnic minorities were featured to the extent that they were well integrated into French society.
I don’t know how far all this was intended (the march was organised at very short notice and soon got out of the organisers’ control) but both it, and the glutinously sentimental live concert that followed, where white celebrities from the media congratulated each other about how brave they were being, seem to me to have done a lot more harm than good, if you take the longer view.
Meanwhile, there were some ghastly PR moments which were clearly not designed, but happened because of the failure of the organisers and the media to understand what this episode is all about. The worst I noticed was a placard-bearing representative of a Jewish organisation wearing a “Je suis Charlie” cap, shaking hands with a police woman of African extraction while the media oohed and gushed over the solidarity on display. I suppose that if you deliberately set out to inflame opinion among poor Muslim kids in the ghettoes, by suggesting that “Charlie” is run by the Jews (which it isn’t) and protected by the police (which it is) you couldn’t have done a better job.
This is not going to turn out well, I’m afraid.

I’m thinking, JanieM is right: legislating against insults, hurt feelings is a fool’s errand. That’s why “hate speech” is a misnomer. “Incitement of ethnic (etc.) hatred” would be a better framing.

“I wish it was surprising, but as always, it is the liberals’ positions that are most frightening.”

I’d be interested again in some evidence for this. I mean, if the scapegoats are Brett and Watson, then one is an anarcho captialist the other a communist. The vast majority of opinion here has been pretty much opposed to both of their perspectives afaict.
If the problem is the usual one from the left, that in reality all we are allowed critcise/debate are the holy trinity, US foreign policy/neoliberalism and American Christians..then fair enough. But can we make this explicit so no one steps out of line ?

Ronan, that’s just what conservatives always says.

I do think the kind of mass display of solidarity that happened in France, while stirring and very understandable, is more or less what the attackers would want. To raise their attack to the level of an act of war.
Ideally, IMO, everyone would just go back to work, and the police would go about investigating a mass murder.

JPT- it is, but there is some truth to it, I think. I mean, seeing Islam everywhere,as some do, is stupid and redundant. Watson and Brett (and HSC) have their shtick and that’s fine, but they’re hardly representative of this thread.
But I dont think the opposite is much better, imagining some idealised ‘Muslim’ out there taking offence. Most of the strongest pushback against this violence will come from within ‘Muslim’ communities, most of the strongest criticisms of the way Islam is being used to justify violence comes from within the faith. I don’t see anything that’s been said on this thread that wouldnt be said 100 times over in the Banlieues, or wherever. (and the opposite, and evrything in between and nothing)

There is a big difference between criticism within the faith and pornographic pictures of Allah, or some moron on a blog spewing about how he likes Muslims but hates hate hates Islam.

Sorry, Muhammed, not Allah.

I really did try to proof that, but “though this” ought to be “and this”.

I disagree that the liberals aren’t much better. The liberals are much better. The conservatives are much worse.

Agree it’s essential to stop this being seen as a Muslim/Christian thing, although I fear that’s the way it’s going, in spite of the government’s efforts. Like most communities, you can divide French Muslims in all sorts of ways. There are those who are completely secular, those who are part of the business and political establishment, those well integrated but more traditional, recent immigrants who are not integrated at all, pious immigrants of all generations who genuinely abhor violence, Muslims of all sorts who see it as expedient to reject violence publicly, whatever they may privately feel, those who are desperate or angry but draw the line at violence, those that don’t ….. In other words, there’s nothing special about Muslims in France, and it’s not helpful to see them as a bloc, or to assume that they have collective causes, or that people necessarily act in their name. On average, Muslims suffer more official and unofficial discrimination than other groups, but many are prosperous and successful, and many more are essentially disadvantaged because they are poor and live in crap areas.
On the march, I think the effects will be felt for some time because, even if it was not the effect the killers wanted, it would certainly have confirmed their worst fears. An allegedly marginal publication which hardly anybody read and most people were apparently ashamed to be seen reading is attacked and people killed, and suddenly millions of French people are in the streets claiming to be “Charlie” and the dead journalists are treated as secular saints. So it turns out that the abusive attitudes of the journal are actually apparently shared by the French establishment and much of the population, behind a polite facade of tolerance and defence of free speech. That’ll go down well in Saint-Denis, whatever rationalisations are officially offered for it.
And, like the IRA, they don’t claim to represent their people (though the IRA saw themselves as defenders of the Catholics at the very beginning). They see themselves in a vanguard role, behaving righteously, punishing criminal blasphemers and representatives of a state that attacks Muslim countries. They don’t expect other Muslims necessarily to agree with them. But in their eyes they are right.
Getting out of all this may require more intelligence and political skill than the current government has yet displayed, and almost superhuman patience and judgement from a Muslim community which has no real central control.

“Agree it’s essential to stop this being seen as a Muslim/Christian thing, although I fear that’s the way it’s going, in spite of the government’s efforts.”

Nah. It’s a depressingly large subset of Muslims/everybody else including the rest of Muslims, thing. It just looks like a Muslim/Christian thing because anti-semites make excuses for the Jew killing aspect, and the western media mostly blow off the killing other Muslims part, though it makes up by far the majority of the killing.

The problem is, you can’t tell the snarks from the boojums until they kill somebody, and snarks ‘spontaneously’ (Like hell it’s spontaneous, but freedom of religion says you can’t arrest the Imams.) transform into boojums at some non-trivial rate.

Of course it’s not a Muslim/Christian thing. It’s mostly a middle-eastern anti-colonial/anti-western thing. The Algerian war of independence ended only in the 60s, Iraq was invaded and occupied in 2003 for 10 years, Palestine is still struggling. That’s the context, even if it’s often denounced as a long new crusade.

Ze @ 533
Perhaps lawyers here might be better able to advise, but I think legislation relating to prejudice and discrimination (including hate speech) relates to shared attributes such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, culture, religion, etc (at least here in Australia as far as I know). It’s never just about individual “hurt feelings” in the sense you and JanieM seem to be thinking.

There can be recourse for individual hurt feelings under other legislation such as bullying or defamation, and all kinds of settlements and judgements can include compensation for hurt feelings ( or ‘pain and suffering’ in general), but if it relates to discrimination it has to be on prohibited grounds – ie not just ‘you’re a pain in the neck’ but ‘you’re a pain in the neck because you’re Muslim, or female, or gay’ etc. The implication being that it is that attribute which makes you inferior and by extension, people with that attribute are inferior (and worthy of hatred in the case of hate speech).

That’s my amateur explanation – as I say, lawyers may explain it better, and more elegantly – but I think that’s right. The whole discussion over “hurt feelings” (or “offense” which is the debate we’ve had here) tends to be a diversionary tactic by the right, so beware.

..actually, it doesnt really support scepticism of such links. Just different ways of thinking about them.

js,

” It would be fun if someone did a Pasolini-style take on the life of Muhammad, but sadly that doesn’t seem like an imminent possibility.”

It is not about Muhammad but I just saw yesterday that Aeon magazine is showing The House Is Black (1962) by the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad on its website at the moment.
http://aeon.co/video/health/the-house-is-black-a-short-film-about-leprosy-in-iran-aeon/

It is a sort of short experimental poetic documentary film about lepers in a leper colony, and widely thought to be influential on the Iranian New Wave directors – Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us takes its name from one of her poems. One time at a screening Kiarostami sat in front of me and a friend who was doing her thesis on Italian films and politics, and Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque (Rabelais and his world ). But I don’t think I have seen any of pasolini’s films myself.

There are many interesting Iranian films, but the two I have seen by Majid Majidi would make me think he is not among the most thoughtful of the Iranian directors.

If you like films that are conscious about films and filmmaking – then you would find a plethora among Iranian films, for example – Once Upon A Time Cinema; Close Up; Salaam Cinema; Bread and Flower (A Moment of Innocence); The Apple; The Wind Will Carry Us; Shirin; This Is Not A Film…

If you are thinking of a very confronting film – then there is Two Legged Horse (written by Mohsen Makhmalbaf and directed by his daughter Samira) but just reading about that one and watching a couple of shorts was too much for me. It is about a poor homeless boy who is paid to help another boy who is wealthy but doesn’t have the use of his legs – and the wealthy boy turns the poor boy in to a horse for himself . Very awful.

I think it must be very hard for the Iranian directors these days – much worse even than the Iran-Iraq-war days (see Marriage of the Blessed).. Mohsen Makhmalbaf recently made a film about a dictator and his grandson after the collapse of his regime . At the start the dictator has the lights of the city all turn off for the amusement of his grandson – then they are on the run together with a bounty on his head

http://youtu.be/SbMOfJzqTtk

Interesting as well (I’ll stop posting links now)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/01/12/fundamentalist-wrath/

JanieM @ 560
Apologies JanieM I wrote that last bit in a hurry because I had just gone past my tram stop! Didn’t mean it to sound condescending.

For a bit of context, we had a big debate here in Australia about whether the words ‘be offended by’ should be in anti-vilification or anti-discrimination legislation. The key point was whether people should have the right to be protected from statements that were offensive because they referred to race/ethnicity etc, but by focusing on the seeming triviality of people being “offended” the right hoped to make the legislation look trivial and silly. The point of course is that the statements are offensive because they’re racist (or sexist or homophobic or whatever) but by focusing on the supposed trivia of “being offended”, the right wing opponents of the legislation turn the whole thing into a victim blaming episode and distract from the issues.

Val, I shouldn’t have been snarky. But I have had a lot of unpleasant conversations over the decades with people who assume that if I don’t agree with them, it can only be because I’m either too stupid or too ill-informed to come to the correct conclusion. So it’s a bit of a hair-trigger for me.

I don’t have the time (or probably the patience) to go much further with this. But I see laws like the ones you’re describing as a potentially slippery slope, and as a precedent or a tool that can cut both ways. I find it all to easy to imagine my country evolving in such a way that I am the one being silenced.

Part of the reason that Islamic states are in a worse situation is because of things like blasphemy laws and religious extremism.

@346: great post!

@562
Possibly we are actually in agreement, but anyway – the laws don’t protect people from being insulted or offended per se (nothing could do that, as I’m sure a brief reading of CT or any other blog with comments would show!). They protect people from being offended or insulted on the basis of race, ethnicity etc.

So you or I could say to each other ‘you’re stupid’ and apart from being uncivil, there’s not much we could do about it. But if I said to you, you’re stupid because you’re Jewish and Jews are stupid, or you said to me, you’re stupid because you’re female and females are stupid, that’s discriminatory. (On the other hand if I said to you, you’re stupid because you’re a yank, and you said to me, you’re stupid because you’re an Aussie, we might be insulted, but probably wouldn’t see it as discriminatory, because yanks and Aussies are in fact privileged groups in the greater scheme of things – so it’s about power and privilege, as ever, but anyway I’m sure you know all this anyway).

ZM #561: “If you like films that are conscious about films and filmmaking – then you would find a plethora among Iranian films…”

One of the greatest of such films, for all time, is by Kiarostami, and it is only 3 minutes long:

Brett – has your moderated comment you were talking about not come through yet ? why not copy and paste it in a new comment minus the link ?

Open letter by a Charlie Hebdo ex-staffer which is very critical of the magazine’s ‘growing obsession with Islam’ since 9/11:

http://www.article11.info/?Charlie-Hebdo-pas-raciste-Si-vous#pagination_page

Interesting as it is, this thread is moving slightly away from the subject, which is not discrimination, freedom of expression, insults or tolerance, but blasphemy, and how we deal with blasphemy in a post-religious society.
In theory, law exists to articulate and protect the norms of a society. Until modern times, all European societies had strict laws against blasphemy, usually with horrible punishments attached, as a way of upholding some of these norms. Those who ordered and carried out these punishments saw themselves as following the will of God, as set down by various accepted biblical scriptures. Sometimes individuals took the law into their own hands. So in 16th century France or England, for example, the concept of religious freedom (even of belief) was essentially meaningless, and even dangerous. Religious freedom only really becomes possibles as religious faith itself starts to decay. So what do you do when a small group feels very strongly that the law should still punish blasphemy, but the majority of the population no longer does. (I don’t think any of the Muslim religious leaders trotted out by the media has actually said they think blasphemy is a good thing). Some, at least, of the believers will take the law into their own hands.
To get a faint idea of what blasphemy once meant, think of human rights today, which has many of the characteristics of a secular religion. It has its texts and its exegesis, its radicals and its moderates, and, most of all its militants who identify those they see as human rights violators and demand that they be punished, and even killed. In some countries (the US for example) such people have been influential in foreign policy, and caused much death and suffering as a result, feeling all the time morally justified in what they are doing. The analogy is not exact, of course, but will give you some idea.
And ironically these two traditions have in fact merged – Coulibaly, the second killer, saw himself punishing France (and also Israel) for its human rights violations in the Middle East.

#580 BB

Ronan: I did, and it went into moderation. Then I tried posting half of it, thinking it was a length issue, and it went into moderation. Perhaps I’ll post it at my own blog, and just leave a link.

I’ve experimented with it some. Mostly what I’ve seen has been keywords. If you mention a gambling game, like pokRr, that will do it. Sometimes the name of a country, like Semalia.

If the first half didn’t post there was likely a word in the first half that did it.

My approach was to look for candidate words and post just the words I thought might have done it, and if it wasn’t any of those candidates then try others. Then rewrite without those particular words. I’ve seldom had more than two trigger words in one post.

I have never been moderated for a post that was too long, but sometimes for one that was too short or too soon after the one before that. But for those it gives an error message and refuses it, it doesn’t keep it hidden until a later time. So that’s a different result from the keyword moderation.

Link

engels, thanks for the link. I wonder how much the self-consciously secular–like Dawkins, too–have convinced themselves that there’s so little to fear from religious fundamentalism in more traditionally “European” religions, that they can use “Islam” as a synonym for “religious fundamentalism.” They seem to think that they can recreate (by using compulsion alone) the calm secular society of the mid 20th century, in which religious Islam–like the other big monotheisms–will have been neutralized.

David, your “Religious freedom only really becomes possibles as religious faith itself starts to decay” seems to contradict what others have said above about making sure Muslims know their own religion allows for non-fundamentalism, and religious freedom for all. Possibly you have a way to reconcile these (I think I know how they can be more-or-less reconciled from the side of those others, but your statement is very absolute).

BTW the other day I saw an (apparently) elderly woman in Muslim clothes and a black cloth with eye-holes over her face, accompanied by a teenage girl in western clothes, face and hair uncovered. I’m going to guess that the face cover was the woman’s preference.

Engels@583: not sure I can follow you here. The OED definition of racism seems accurate: “The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race”. This is trivially true of some anatomical and genetic characteristicss (skin colour being the one that some people are, for whatever reasons, obsessed with). The continued definition as “especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races” is fair enough. Racism, in that sense, is not biologically defensible with regard to existing populations: though I suspect that not many people would doubt that the races known as H. erectus, or H. neanderthalis, were in some ways inferior to H. sapiens.

But I cannot easily see why this is incompatible with what Brett Bellmore is saying with regard to qualities that are _not_ always different in every member of different races: that the different populations may differ statistically, but you cannot possibly treat individuals of one population as necessarily having qualities that, statistically, are more or less abundant in their population. For example: the ability to run short distances very fast does seem to be most highly developed in West African populations, but I have known West Africans whose diet has left them unable to run a hundred yards at all.

You say BB is a racist troll. For all I know, he may be: I haven’t followed his posting record. But even a racist may, from time to time, advance a coherent argument.

I agree with JPT @587. Wearing the Burqa should be seen as a personal choice rather than a political hot potato.. and most of the evidence I know shows that’s(personal cjoice) what it is, ie

http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/unveiling-truth-why-32-muslim-women-wear-full-face-veil-france

also, this is a pretty good book for anyone interested

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/do-muslim-women-need-saving-by-lila-abu-lughod/2008723.article

(I think it’s an interesting topic, but incredibly complicated and a bit of a minefield. Live and let live is a good starting ground, IMO)

Ronan(rf),

Except that wearing the burqa isn’t a just a personal choice in a society that has secularism as one of its foundational principles. This is an outward manifestation of religious belief that intrudes upon the public spaces that belong to everybody. In the context of French society, it is very much a political statement, in much the same way as saying that everyone in France is forbidden to blaspheme against Islam. It is very much a clash between the rights of individuals against the right of a state to organize its civil society along the lines that it feels are best.

I have noticed that a great many people in this comment thread have simply chosen to superimpose their own views of how a society should be run on France, rather than respect the choices that the French people have made.

Mitch – yeah, I was going to expand on that and say that the veil ban also makes sense in the specific political/historical context in France (I dont know enough about it though, so decided not to) I think though – and correct me if Im wrong – that the ban *also* has to be seen in the political climate of the present, which is a rise in opposition to Islam (for want of a better phrasing) So it’s implementation *isnt* entirely political neutral, it was implemented because of the rise of the far right and greater hostility to Muslims.
It’s not my cup of tea, personally, (leaving aside normative preferences i dont see how it’s enforceable, and it seems incredibly intrusive) but the French can of course do what they like

That’s clearly not Mitch’s point Rich. He isn’t ‘exoticising’ anyone.
And I’m really not sure how much value the rest of your comment ads, even relative to the (by your accounts anyway) usefulness of the rest of the thread.
I love these CT ad hominem drive bys. Where would we be without them.

I wonder why churches are allowed. You can’t see what’s going on in there. And they’re, like, IN YOUR FACE with the steeples and stained glass and such. The message to the thugs in the National Front is as plain as day.

Neither the turban nor the fez would be banned under French laws because they are not actually religious symbols or outward displays of faith.

It’s lovely when people who have no fucking idea what they’re talking about are so blithely confident.

J. Thomas at 598,

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make and, frankly, you seem like you’re being deliberately obtuse for your own twisted amusement. Consequently, I’m sure I will regret this but I would like to point out that the rights of any woman who is wearing a burqa or voile purely as a fashion statement and not a an outward manifestation of her faith wouldn’t really be terribly infringed.   Surely respect for the rights of an entire society to something that is foundational to it republican values would vastly outweigh the making of a fashion statement? 

If you have an actual point to make, I really wish you just get on with making it and stop trying to be clever.  

JS at 601,

Your comment implies that you believe yourself to have knowledge and expertise that I lack. Perhaps you could demonstrate same?

MG, I’d just suggest you go tell a practicing Sikh how a turban is “just a hat” and “not actually [a] religious symbol” and come back and let us know what he or she says.

The French law banning religious garb in state schools *does* ban turbans and yarmulkes. Gosh, how could this be? We were just told that they weren’t outward displays of faith. Can some expert on the exotic French people inform me further about their mysterious folkways?

You know, perhaps people could also inform me about why the poll tax in the U.S. was always considered to be racist. I mean, it affected everyone, right? There’s no mention of black people specifically anywhere in the old poll tax laws. Could someone educate me about that as well?

“In part, this was because Islam was never an organised state religion, ”

The Ottoman Sultan claimed to be the Caliph of all muslims…. So yeah no.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Caliphate

@MPAVictoria. Yes of course it did, but there was never the equivalent of the politico-religious hierarchies we saw in most of Europe. This was the state co-opting religion as an instrument.

David 606 – you might be right (re the IRA) I personally dont know.Once you get involved in the minute of the Republican movement it gets complicated, and quite strange, pretty quickly ie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_republican_legitimatism

(a lot it appears to depend on what Tom Maquire say. Scroll down)

Proyect linked to a collection of translations of the CH letter.
http://louisproyect.org/2015/01/13/charlie-hebdo-not-racist-if-you-say-so/

David, as a historical point you are correct, to some extent, maybe “historically” implies something like “with the exception of very recent times.” But you say,

blasphemy, historically, is only really seen as important when societies take religious faith very seriously, and see a challenge to religious faith as a challenge to society itself.

And I think it’s important that logically (if not, as I said, historically) this isn’t the case. For one thing, it’s entirely possible for people who are what I think you would call “secularized,” though still believing in some way, to take blasphemy pretty seriously. It’s just a step too far in the direction of causing offense about something important.

For another, here and in your earlier comment, you’re pretty much saying that people who tolerate others’ religions have weak faith. But that’s only true if faith is understood in a certain way. And the public existence of other faiths is only a challenge to faith if challenge is understood in a certain way. On the contrary, pretty much all religions have and continue to evolve in the direction of understanding other faiths as paths to the truth, and people of other faiths as deserving equal respect. And if the ultimate destination of that evolution, for some people, is secularism, then that’s the path France (like, for the most part, England) seems to have taken. From this point of view, it’s incomprehensible that France could be intolerant of any religion.

But also, how does that statement sound to someone who’s wavering on the verge of either radical Islamic separatism or reactionary Catholicism? To my ears, it’s indistinguishable from imaginable statements by reactionary Catholics about the need to enforce state religion.

#617 JanieM

“unlike in the United States, there is no state religion”

wtf?

Isn’t it interesting how perceptions differ….

JT,

There are two different laws.

Seems to me that very little of what Mitch Guthman has said makes much sense, so I’m not spending much time trying to figure it out. But what JanieM highlighted is really egregiously weird.

Rich Puchalsky at 608 and JS at 605,

Actually, I don’t believe any case have been brought about turbans so there isn’t any definitave interpretation yet but, as I read it, the 2004 law does not apply to turbans as such but only to those which are tied in a distinctive manner or have a peculier design that marks the wearer as a Sikh man.  A turban like any other worn on the Indian Subcontinent or in part of the Arab world would be treat as secular headgear and would not be prohibited.  Headscarfs are likewise permissible because they do not have outward religious significance.  Similarly, an observant Jew can wear a hat or a cap but not a headcovering that is an unmistakable religious symbol.  

There have been a number of different laws on the subject.  The 2004 law you’re looking at is part of the education code and only applies to schools.  The most generally applicable law was the 2010 “Burqa ban” which was based on secularism as “a way of living together”. http://preview.tinyurl.com/k28nxq3

Mitch, is the Pope’s hat a religious symbol? What about his ferula? Would he be allowed to parade in public in France while donning the (seemingly?) religious gear? Or would he need to discard any items of identifiable religious significance when in public in France?

> Seems to me that very little of what Mitch Guthman has said makes much sense

It’s pretty simple: society has people who think different things in it, and the best way to solve this problem — because apparently it’s a problem — is to force everyone to act in public as if they thought one particular thing, and confine their expressions of what they actually think to the private sphere.

It’s fairly likely that the “one particular thing” is also what he personally things, and it’s also fairly likely that he regards the “one particular thing” as in some way “normal” or a default, with other choices needing justification. [the two above are strictly-speaking orthogonal, but…]

How about this explanation

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2007/01/01/liberte-egalite-laicite/

primedprimate at 627,

Yes, the Pope would be able to wear his clerical garb and carry the symbol of his authority. The 1905 law allowed for clerics to wear religious costumes (if they wish) and for certain religious symbols to adorn the exterior of religious buildings.

Yes, the Pope would be able to wear his clerical garb and carry the symbol of his authority.

So mormon men — and boys! — can wear distinctive mormon garments in public but mormon women cannot.

Good to know!

Or what Janie said. If I saw significant of people numbers apparently believing what Mitch does, it would be a different story altogether.

@geo: I have read your above-linked reviews; IMHO they are awesome.

I’ve found I agree with you on pretty much everything . . . except on the relative merits of W. Shakespeares and G.B. Shaw!

Well, if it’s not actually in the written law, then it’s not a state religion. By definition. It’s true that the US by various measures is a more religious country than most (maybe all) European countries, but that’s an entirely different thing. And I think bianca steele’s last paragraph @636 is exactly right re why the US shouldn’t be thought of as having a state religion (beyond the obvious point that it doesn’t).

> I am surprised at the amount of push back this is getting here.

If you don’t understand something it’s probably because there’s something you don’t know.

In this context “state” means part of the state apparatus, which is to say the legal framework of the polity. Formal laws, either enactments or usage/common-law. Things that aren’t part of the state apparatus can’t be state things: they can be national things, because the “nation” is the population-of-the-polity, but they can’t be state things. Since the US state apparatus explicitly rejects the incorporation of christianity, it plainly can’t be a state religion properly so called.

Cricket is india’s national sport, dominates others in the public space, but it’s not treated any differently under law to any other sport played in india so it’s not india’s state sport.

This distinction between nation, state, and government is pretty important. Calling something a “state religion” when it’s not actually supported-and-encouraged by the state means that we lose the ability to distinguish the situation in the US from the situation in Malaysia or England.

Or these judges that may be denied pay
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/01/13/texas_south_carolina_consider_denying_pay_to_pro_gay_judges.html

I get the impression that some people on this thread are under the impression that laicite is mostly a mask for anti-arab racism. This is not right and flies in the face of my own experience. When I moved to the UK from France (15 years old) I was horrifed by the public displays of religion. I was also extremely embarassed that public figures would give expression to religious views when discussing issues that were obviously of general importance. That attitude is absolutely standard for many many people raised in a laic country.

I’ve somewhat molified my view about how egregious this sort of thing is on the grounds that the UK simply does not have this sort of civic tradition, and fighting for it here is probably a non-starter. However I still find french political culture superior because in the end, as I imagine most people on this thread would agree, the actual beliefs involved in all existing systematic religious systems are obviously wrong, and by and large invovle fairly backward ethical standards.

Anyway, to be clear, deep unease, even dismay at overt displays of religiosity (which the veil is) is an entirely predictable reaction that many brought up in french society would have. And I am not myself french, nor am i nor any of my family catholic, and I experienced genuine and deep contempt for the role christianity was allowed in public life/schools/politics when I first moved to the UK. Say what you like about whether this view was fair (maybe it was a tad excessive), it is just wrong to think that it had anything whatsoever to do with race. Now it is possible that some French sometime use this way of viewing the world so as to furhter anti-arab intentions, however this can obvioulsy not be the last word on the value or purpose of the principles of laicite more generally. There is simply no reason that a minority of racists should be taken as representative of laicite as historical and political project overall.

And Merv Griffin said that in the heart of Italy the people there are probably the least religious in the world.

geo @639: “On Sundays I rest, and don’t believe anything.”

Reminds me of the marriage counseling I had to undergo with my first wife. My wife insisted that I had a God complex. The counselor suggested that I start at the beginning.

“Well”, I said, “In the Beginning the Earth was without form, and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep . . . ”

Yeah, I know, this is a very serious thread. Forgive me.

And Sophia Loren said, “I don’t know about that.”

I think Blargle321 does a very good job of describing the traditional French approach to laicité – “secularism” isn’t really the same thing. When French political figures do overtly religious things, for example, they are roundly criticized. But two caveats.
These laws arose from a completely different context, where the enemy was the (white) Church hierarchy, who shared most of the same cultural references as their secular opponents. They were never intended to cope with a situation where a minority of the population have a different religion, a different perception of the role of religion in society, and a substantially different culture of origin.
Second, there are signs of an emerging Left/Liberal anti-Muslim trend in certain parts of French society. This comes out primarily in private conversations, but it’s not really fair to call it racialism – it’s an ideological issue, and is based on resentment about the alleged slowness of Muslim immigrants to assimilate into French culture, and to adopt secular, republican ideas. Ironically, this kind of attitude (whatever you think of its justification) is much easier to adopt and defend publicly than the traditional racialism of the Right. After all, who could be against more freedom for Muslim women? The fact that Valls’s speech yesterday declaring war on “radical Islam” was widely praised doesn’t help things either, but it is presumably intended to recapture some of the white working-class vote lost to the Front National, with a nod and a wink that of course a republican , not a racialist discourse will have to be used from now on..

“Seriously why is it so hard to believe that there are Arab communists, atheists in Iran, and feminists in Afghanistan who deserve our support against the barbarians of ISIS, murderers of al-Qaeda, and a resurgent Taliban?”

Yeah! Lets just train and arm the “good guys”! That’ll work for sure…..

Watson, you’re free to provide all the support you can afford to any foreign organization you sympathize with (except those you’re forbidden to support). What’s the issue?

Rich-“It’s an anti-arab racism system whether it was intended to be one or not. ” But that statement is totally imprecise if you compare it to the example you give! I have only a very vague idea what it is you are talking about when you indict the “system” as being anti-arab (despite the fact there are tons of racists in france, but I’m not denying this). You don’t mean all french laws and the whole of society are operationalised towards racist goals (this is demonstrably false), or all laws and social practices relating to secularism (again demonstrably false), you mean in this case just one specific law, namely the one relating to the veil in public. But even if this one law were as racist as you think it is, you have not made the case that this law is representative of an inherently corrupt ‘structure’. If you do want to worry about sucha strcture though the issue of the veil is a largely irelevant sideshow to things which actually matter such as: employment law, education, maintaing or improving welfare allocations and attempting to enhance the banlieus such that the discourse isnt all ‘knock em down’ or ‘escape from them at all costs’.

And I agree that the law targets some muslims, but I’m not convinced its becasue of a muslim problem, rather than because the veil make demands on believers which are at odds with an open society (as french tradition coneives it). A law banning any garment which by its nature aims at excluding some minority form the public sphere for religious reasons is a law which again, is sits very well with french tradition, it need not be inherently racist. Under French law you could still wear a cool ostentatious I’m religious outfit, and the law doesnt prevent you from doing so. But many french (including french muslims) don’t think the veil is a cool, I’m a muslim outift, they think it’s both a symbol and an instance of patriarchal oppression falsely pedaled in the name of a religion. This. is. anathema. to. french. republican. traditions.

David-lots of interesting things. I think you are obviously right about laicite arising in a very different context. I’d still be inclined to say that what needs to change in this new context is not a commitment to laicite per se, rather other concerns should be always forgrounded when we worry about issues of laicite wrt to marginalised populations. Now that citizens do not have a shared ethnicity as fall back once we chuck religion out the window, we have to make it the case that french arabs really do have some stake in society. I think this is super hard, but social progrmas, better transport links to the banlieus, quotas for young people from the banlieus in grandes ecoles, all these might help.

Ruch Puchalsky @665
You, on behalf of those Muslims who want to wear the veil?

Maybe not Blargle321, but me, yes, and indeed on behalf of those Muslim who want to wear the veil. Because there’s about 1500 of these (that law is about the full veil), making it about 0.0whatevs percent of the French Muslim population.

So, yes, you could say sideshow. Also “ridiculous Saudi invention not part of the maghreb traditions”. Also “recent dumb convert signature”. Also “saw it on TV”. But sideshow will do.

when I say ” internalised misogeny based on obviousy false cosmological beliefs “, I don’t meant to assert correctly so. I side with those who think it is not required by their religion.

Yabonn, just for the record I didn’t say CH’s writers were racist (or right-wing). From what I can tell (not having read it before, not being very clued up on French cultural life or reading French very well, etc) it seems to me they were at best somewhat reckless to the ways in which their style of humour could reinforce racist cultural themes. I think joining in the mainstream sacralisation of it now serves a right-wing agenda.

“The Prime Minister Manuel Valls made an impassioned attack on the comedian in the National Assembly on Tuesday. He called him a “peddler of hate and said there should be no confusion between the ‘impertinent’ satire of Charlie Hebdo and ‘anti-semitism, racism and negationism’.””

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/quenelle-comedian-dieudonne-arrested-for-apology-for-terrorism-9976667.html

yabonn: “Because there’s about 1500 of these (that law is about the full veil), making it about 0.0whatevs percent of the French Muslim population.”

But the principles of laicité make it very important that no one has to see one of these 1,500, right? It’s symbolically important. To the people who matter. Muslims may find it symbolically important that a Muslim woman can’t wear the veil if she wants to, but who cares. It’s weird that the more that people explain these strange, exotic, mysterious folkways of French laicité to me, the more it sounds like a bog-standard excuse for racism and nativism.

It’s weird that the more that people explain these strange, exotic, mysterious folkways of French laicité to me, the more it sounds like a bog-standard excuse for racism and nativism.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Backfire_effect

The pen is mightier than the sword – Wednesday edition Hollande sends air-craft carrier to Iraq

Maybe let a French woman of Algerian descent speak to the isssue:

yabonn: “It would have been shorter had you begun by this. Indeed, the natives’ customs are weird and unfathomable, they’ll try to find excuses for it , but it won’t fool our eagle eyed observer. So be it, expert.”

Americans have mysterious and unlike-anywhere-else customs of our own. One of them is called “sarcasm”. But I guess that people can’t handle this unusual American folkway, so I’ll state clearly that all of the explanations for why French secularism is so important perfectly illustrate the point of view that ethnic French beliefs about symbolic matters are important and others aren’t in France.

Yeah, France has often been held up as one of the success stories of ‘integration’ in Europe (with obvious unresolved problems and caveats)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/07/29/are-french-muslims-integrated-depends-on-what-you-mean-by-integration/

of course the reality is complex, as always.
It’s always a pity when the left adopts the manichean perspectives and simple stories of the far right.(well, not really that much of a pity tbh)

tub: “Let’s make the Kouachi brothers’ beliefs about symbolic matters important in France.”

Yeah, no racism there. Oh no there I go with the sarcasm again.

The article that Ronan(rf) links to says exactly what I’ve been saying:

This apparent paradox is caused by the word “integration,” which has taken on a very particular connotation in French political discourse. The social scientific definition of “integration” refers to a dual process whereby immigrants embrace and become invested in their new home and are, in turn, accepted as equals by those who were there before them. In French political discourse, however, the term “integration”generally loses the reciprocal connotation. Here, a “failure of integration”refers lopsidedly to the inability of immigrants to assimilate into local customs and attitudes, consequently retaining markers of social difference that set them apart.

They can be French if they are exactly like anyone else. But that’s not nativist at all!

As for the poll, what I see is a typical former colonialist country that is unwilling to treat the former colonized as equals, but has a soft spot for them as inferiors to be civilized.