Isolated Attacks In The West Cannot Be Confused With Islam

At the core of every discussion concerning terrorism in the West, as yesterday’s assault on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, lies a fundamental misgiving about Islam that is often shrouded in a calibration of the faith. This is first, demeaning and second, false.

In the wake of the attack in Paris, France, where Charlie Hebdo himself and his colleagues, including two police officers lost their lives, the term, ‘moderate Muslims’ has be slung around in the political discourse. Western politicians and journalists are calling on moderate Muslims to condemn the attackers. The intensions are well-meaning and there is absolutely no place for such attacks in any civilized culture.

However, the catastrophe inherent in the calibration of Islam must be examined for what it is. There is no such thing as a ‘moderate Muslim’. And the West does not have a Muslim problem. Nor does it have an Extremist Muslim problem. That goes to say there are no such people as Muslim extremists.

Would that be tantamount to a Muslim without a Quran?

As in a moderate Christian – a Christian who likes other people? In the same way that there are no such ‘Catholic moderates’ against the terrorist attacks by isolated Irish groups, like those of the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA or IRA for short) on British soil. The IRA too never spoke for Irish Catholics.

The existence of the IRA might highlight certain social and economic tensions within British society that informs its worldview. And while France does not have a problem with Islam in the sense that journalists in Europe and the U.S. would like us to believe – Islam does not stand on the brink of overthrowing the secular order in the West and establishing a caliphate there neither!

But, France obviously does have, first, a social problem – of racism and discrimination – against largely its people originating from former French Colonies in the Middle East and North Africa; most of whom have predominantly Islamic traditions.

Though France spins around the buzz words of Freedom and Liberty for all, its record in the past two centuries alone are contradictory. France basks in the cold shadows of outright discrimination against people living in France from its former colonies. That is no myth.

The ability of Western society to forget the past is like the amnesia that follows an accident – the body’s way of protecting itself against trauma. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s, as France tried to cling on to its African colonial possessions, political violence in France was far more common than today.

Muslim Algerian nationalists (their race and religion regarded as interchangeable by the French) bombed the mainland and killed officials and colonialists en masse in retaliation to several French brutalities encompassing more than one hundred years. The reaction of the state was shocking. In 1961, 12,000 Algerian immigrants were arrested in Paris and held in a football stadium. Many were tortured; more than three hundred disappeared. For days, bodies were found floating in the Seine.

After the French left Algeria in 1962, there was a period of relative peace. But Paris erupted again in the early 1980s as former French colonies in the Middle East fought bloody turf wars in the streets of the capital. From March to September 1982 alone, 17 people were killed and 160 injured in nearly 20 attacks. While Italy and Germany spent the postwar years tackling Marxist terror and Britain tried to pacify nationalism, France’s enemies were often ghosts of its colonial past – ghosts who may happen to be Muslims.

Describing the contemporary conditions of political and social relations – not religious – between France and the people it once colonized, raped, killed and duped, is more complex and more open to the charge of finding excuses, especially after the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

For what it is worth, the list of problems includes racism; strategic impoverishment; globalizational looting of resources by force; military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Mali; the banning of the Burka; and the widespread support of a now bastardly Israeli action in Gaza and the Left Bank against Palestinians.

Some of these, if not all are rightful excuses for the growth of terrorism, or even necessarily explain it –there is nothing sociopathic that operates beyond the bounds of reason in the recent terrorist attack on Hebdo! It can be explained and it has absolutely nothing to do with a religion that is called Islam.

‘Civility’ has never been a Western idea. It has not been achieved outside of Europe by any European – not in North Africa, nor have they achieved it in the Americas. We don’t talk often enough about those two inheritances that genuinely make the West the most brutal civilization the world has ever known. The first is the Enlightenment principles steeped only in what they think is (ir)rational. The second is the Christian-Mosaic principle of tit-for-tat. Both traditions inform the other, both have given rise to a culture that enslaves people who are not European.

In a sense, the West lost the war of ideas a long time ago simply because its inhabitants are trigger happy to enforce discrimination. Look at the United States and how it treats its African American populace. More recently, more than half a dozen white cops gunned down Black citizens for absolutely no law enforcement reason and walked away charge-free. That moral high ground in the West was never a won battle.

Hence, it is inescapable that aspects of French culture find themselves in timeless conflict with aspects of former French colonies’ cultures, some of which are Islamic, creating a tension occasionally exploited by those who are frustrated with French or Western hypocrisy and see no hope in sight.

Charlie Hebdo’s attitude towards religion tells us something about these tensions. The magazine comes from a Left-wing, republican, anti-clerical tradition that sees all faith as born of the same bigoted distrust of human freedom. Which is false.

When the French, and in fact most Europeans interchange race and religion so effortlessly, Hebdo’s cartoons aren’t just anti-Islamic, they are also racist! Faith, in the mind of Charlie Hebdo, needs to be put back in its box. But he puts a significant portion of the world – raped and duped through French colonial dominance and vituperation – in a box. The goal of those Mohammed cartoons was to mock Islam until it had become “as banal as Catholicism” has become in Europe – something no longer given special protection by political correctness, and something so reduced by satire that it could no longer engender extremism.

But the mockery can never be amusing to those who worship it. People who inhabit two different realities do not see the same image in the same way. The French see a joke. People from former French territories, who may be Muslim, see bad taste, or even blasphemy.

And while the Western liberal or, for lack of a better word, secularist, regards someone who actually believes in something as a fool, other people in the rest of the world, including Muslims, regard doubt and the arrogance of it in opposing faith as an incitement to violence. In a way, the decline of faith in European society concomitant with its neo-imperialist military efforts around the globe, and the rapid secularisation of its culture which it is intent on globalizing by force too, makes this conflict more – not less – likely to arise.

The West confronts bloodshed with indignant incomprehension, which is both stupefying and historically inconsistent. France remained stuck in Algeria for so long because first, it could not comprehend a future without a slab of North Africa as part of its territory and second, it could not believe that it wasn’t loved. It couldn’t understand when its offer of improvement was rejected by people who defined happiness or liberty in very different ways.

Back then, the French reacted to freedom fighters in Algeria with savagery and torture – torture not unlike that used by the USA’s CIA on recent detainees. Out of fear, France became everything the word uncouth connoted. It lost its sense of ‘civility’ if it had any. It forgot what it proclaimed, or it danced away to the hypocrite’s tune of shame.

The Hebdo attack must not happen again! But how?

There will be those who insist that Europe now has to make a choice between godlessness and faith. Both could have nothing to do with modernity and social advancement. Or they could. But this choice between secularism and conviction is false. It is perfectly possible for any society to inhabit both worlds at once – Africa did it before Europeans arrived in the 1700s – and even if the ‘two worlds’ were so strongly opposed, to compel anyone to choose between them is dictatorial.

But that wouldn’t be too hard fot the French kook – the proclivity for wackiness it continues to display in sovereign lands – in the Middle East and Africa.

The people of France have come out into the streets to state their support for free speech: good, even though that is tainted with a disdain for other people’s freedoms. The security forces will doubtless beef up their work to prevent a repeat attack: that is good. But a dramatic shift to authoritarianism would, again, be a contrary response to not only the attack on ‘Hebdo’s free mockery’ perhaps – but as well, a contradiction, or is it in agreement, of the so-called values of France that, like the war in Algeria, would only perpetuate the struggle for freedom of the marginalized peoples in France and the pseudo-French ‘territories’.

Let us please proceed with dialogue and support freedom, yes, but we must also be ready to take liberty all the way until it ends where other people’s freedoms begin. The world has never needed more conflict even though the track record of the West shows otherwise.