It is incendiary to name Islam as a culprit in (such) atrocities: perhaps a 10th of France’s population is Muslim or descended from those who have arrived from the shores across the Mediterranean. Speaking frankly about Islam’s role in inspiring terrorist bloodshed would elicit cries of Islamophobia and intolerance, bigotry and even racism (as though a belief system could be congenital), all liberal bêtes noires as shameful as they are misbegotten.
Complicating matters, apologists would say, is that the West is hardly blameless. The United States continues to wage a murderous drone campaign against those it designates “terrorists” in countries across the Islamic world; and this on the heels of its disastrous unprovoked war against Iraq, and a 13-year occupation, surely soon to be proved fruitless, of Afghanistan. France is a former colonial power with deep footprints in the Muslim world; its own bloody 132-year sojourn in Algeria, for example, still bears bitter fruit in that country. And plus, there are lots of peaceful Muslims. So maybe it would be easiest and most politic to ignore Islam’s role as a material element in the “horrific shooting” that took so many lives in Paris just now.
To do so might be easiest and it certainly is the most politically expedient, but the rank cowardice implicit in such a decision cannot fail to provoke outrage. The attackers left no doubt about what drove them, and they can cite scriptural sanction for their savagery: the Quran (33:61) warns that those who insult Islam — and, as riots in the Middle East over Danish cartoons in 2006 showed, satire, in the eyes of too many Muslims, equals insult — “shall be seized and slain (without mercy).” Salman Rushdie, despite a fatwa ordaining his murder (for his 1988 novel “Satanic Verses”), has so far escaped this fate; the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh (for his film “Submission,” documenting violence against women in the Muslim world) was not so lucky.
There are many other well-known examples. The point is, Islam is implicated in all. The “holy” texts of Islam, regardless of interpretation, offer literal justification to those who wish to commit violence in the name of the faith; and religious extremism, by far mostly Islamist, has been, since 2001, the main cause of terrorism across the world.
Faced with this uncomfortable but persistently deadly reality, what should we and our politicians (and pundits) do? For starters, we need to cease granting religion — and not just Islam — an exemption from criticism. If we do not believe the fables foisted on us (without evidence) by the faithful, we need to say so, day in and day out, in mixed company, and especially in front of children (to thwart their later indoctrination). We must stop according religion unconditional respect, stop deferring to men (and mostly they are men) who happen to preface their names with the titles of reverend or rabbi or imam, and de-sanctify the sacred, in word and deed.
Laughable absurdities — be they virgin births, parting seas, spontaneously burning bushes — deserve not oblique pardons (“We don’t have to take everything in the Bible literally”), but outspoken ridicule; courses in “religious studies” in campuses across the country might better be referred to as “lessons in harmful superstition, dangerous delusion, and volitional insanity.”
Sorry, hashtag activism won’t do. To avert more deaths, we have to stand up in real — and sometimes risky — ways to noxious ideologies masquerading as salvific faiths. Pundits need to overcome their fear of being labeled “politically incorrect” and speak their minds. Politicians must come clean with their electorates and state, simply, “With Islam, we have a problem.” Better still, “We have a problem with religion. Let’s figure out how we are going to deal with it.”
From Yascha Mounk, at Slate: Immigrant issues in Europe will just get worse.
The long-term consequences of Wednesday’s events are likely to be disastrous. The attack on Charlie Hebdo will further entrench the terms of a confused European debate about Muslim immigrants — one in which both the “accusers” and the “defenders” of Islam are painting in dangerously broad brushstrokes. While the European far right points to Islamic terrorism to exclude and malign all Muslims, the European left responds by refusing to recognize how fundamental a challenge Islamic terrorism represents (or that it is inspired by Islam at all). Both sides fail to realize that two seemingly opposite sentiments can stand side by side: the conviction that Muslims should become full and equal members of European democracies and the unabashed determination to defend those democracies against Islamic fundamentalism.
Even before Wednesday’s attacks, tensions between “natives” and “Muslim immigrants” — a telling juxtaposition, since a majority of Europe’s Muslims were in fact born on the continent — were at a boiling point. In France, fears about Islam have been at the center of political debate for the past year, helping far-right political parties attract unprecedented support.
Leading French intellectuals have begun to join the anti-Islamic bandwagon. For the past several weeks, French papers have been consumed with a protracted debate about “Submission,” a new novel by Michel Houellebecq — one of France’s most celebrated writers — which landed in French bookstores on Wednesday. Set in 2022, its protagonist is François, a literature professor who converts to Islam to practice polygamy, rises to the French presidency, and rules the republic according to the dictates of Sharia.
That is just the kind of scenario that adherents of Pegida, a self-styled alliance of “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West,” claim to be resisting in neighboring Germany. For months they have been taking to the streets of Dresden to protest immigration in general and the growing influence of Muslims in particular. Though they say that they defend universal values, their chants of “We are the People” betray how exclusionary their conception of nationhood really is. They are signaling that they will never consider Muslims as true Germans. …
Those who advocate for a more diverse Europe … rightly lament that there’s a lot of prejudice against Muslims, but they wrongly infer that we should refrain from criticizing any manifestation of Islam—and consequently deny that there is anything Islamic about the kind of terrorism that has just left a Paris magazine’s offices riddled with bullets.
The terrorism of ISIS and al-Qaida no more defines Islam than the Crusades or the Inquisition define Christianity. But just as no historian can make sense of the nature of the Crusades without grappling seriously with the religious beliefs of their protagonists, so too it is impossible to make sense of Islamic terrorism without taking seriously the religious motivations of those who perpetrate it.
From Jytte Klausen, at Foreign Affairs: The war against jihadists just racheted up.
The death toll makes this week’s attack the most significant on French soil since the Nazi occupation — a huge milestone in al Qaeda’s campaign against the West. It is part of a long line of plots to kill media figures for their symbolic value in the West as paragons of free speech and to some Muslims as examples of the evil of secularism.
The French line on the attack is that it was a unique incident carried out by professional terrorists, assumed to have learned their skills in Syria. The three men identified by the French police as the gunmen are the stuff of French nightmares. All three spoke in French, and, exiting the scene of their crime, they told bystanders to tell the media that they came from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
It is not necessarily contradictory to say that the attackers were from AQAP and that they had picked up their skills in Syria, where most fighters are presumed to be allied with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) or smaller al Qaeda–affiliated groups. The Yemen-based AQAP is known to have sent fighters to Syria. And al Qaeda, facing competitive pressure from ISIS, was surely desperate for a victory. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the killings in France could be an attempt to remind the world that al Qaeda is still relevant.
Indeed, some commentators had predicted just such an outcome and had even gone so far as to say that al Qaeda faced sure decline with ISIS on the scene. But the U.S. government was never keen to discount the al Qaeda threat. And the reality is that the rise of one organization is not tantamount to the decline of the other. Rather, today there are simply far more trained killers, from more groups, on the loose in western Europe than at any previous time in al Qaeda’s 20-year history of menacing the West. …
This week, the war with the jihadists ratcheted up. And much of the media reacted in fear. The Associated Press quickly removed all content from its website featuring pictures of Hebdo’s pages. It is safe to expect the managers and owners of other publishing companies and the news media to follow suit. But that is the wrong reaction. Al Qaeda, ISIS, and any number of other groups continue their war against the West, but there is not a trained team of assassins from al Qaeda lurking in every parking lot. The French are right. It was a unique attack. The proper response to the challenge of transnational terrorism is to increase domestic security and information sharing among governments about citizens traveling to Syria and Iraq. Europe’s open borders require a security infrastructure to match.
From the editors of the Guardian: This is a crime, not an act of war.
If the world learned one thing from George W Bush, it was that it is a terrible mistake to confuse a crime, however monstrous, for war. After 9/11, the belligerent rhetoric of the war on terror fostered deluded ideas of a “victory,” legitimized the torture that still stains America’s moral standing and licensed ruinous misadventures overseas. In this difficult hour for France, and Europe more widely, a calmer fury must prevail.
In the wake of the devastating assault on Charlie Hebdo, some voices, not only on the right, are claiming that France is in a state of “war.” …
But this is not the tenor of the overall reaction in France. That has been characterized by an admirable calm. The language is of national unity and resilience in the face of an act of hatred and intolerance aimed at one of the pillars of democracy and the Republic: freedom of speech. …
But Wednesday’s attack was not something that happened only to France. Solidarity towards Charlie Hebdo has been flowing in from all parts of Europe, and beyond. But alongside this welcome and necessary – even indispensable – reaction is a darker side. It will fuel the dangerous rightwing populism that echoes in the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece and in the angry mobs on the streets of Dresden. It’s not only France that must remain steady under pressure.
From Paul Hockenos at Aljazeera: The attack threatens the quality of democracy.
Beyond its effects on the media and free speech, the Charlie Hebdo attack could not have come at a worse time in Europe. Amid growing anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic sentiment across the continent, Wednesday’s bloodbath is likely to lessen the quality of European democracy. European policymakers, media and people must work to ensure that this assault doesn’t lead to countermeasures and scapegoating of French and European Muslims. Setting in motion a sequence of events that would make the world’s democracies less liberal, less free and less heterogeneous is an ultimate victory for illiberal extremists.
In fact, that is exactly what happened in the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11. The George W. Bush administration’s reactions to the attack led to torture, the Iraq War, racial and religious profiling and illegal spying on the American public. But none of these measures addressed the causes of extremism. Instead, the United States’ ill-conceived “war on terrorism” helped fuel its expansion and anti-American sentiment around the world.
Doubling down on the protection of our freedoms and civil liberties is the greatest blow we can deliver to extremists — Islamic and otherwise. Our anger and disgust at the murder of Charlie Hebdo editors and cartoonists must be channeled into a rational, constructive, effective response.
This has to happen on different levels. It’s not going to be easy, for example, to counter the shrill voices of Europe’s populist Islamophobes in political parties, the media and beer halls. The bloodshed in Paris plays right into their hands at a time when they are in ascendance. …
Unlike anti-Semitism, there’s no popular taboo against Islamophobia. Most European societies are only now beginning to recognize Islam and the growing number of Muslims in their midst. After the terrorist bombings in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005, many European countries began engaging with their Muslim communities to bridge the gap of ignorance and otherness between their Muslim and non-Muslim communities. In Germany, for example, a German Islam Conference was held with the aim of achieving “a better religious and social integration of the Muslim population and a good cooperation between all people in Germany, regardless of their faith.” …
To be sure, the majority of Muslims in Europe are peaceful, law-abiding citizens who share much with their neighbors in Paris, Frankfurt and Oslo — more than they do with Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. But Europe’s political elites must go one step further by taking on extremists across the spectrum. An action-reaction spiral of violence will undermine the hard-fought achievements of European civilization — the very qualities that attract Muslims from conflict-affected countries to go to Europe seeking safety and better opportunities.
From John Cassidy at The New Yorker: This is not a ‘clash of civilizations.’
At times like this, inevitably, there is a tendency to view things in Manichean terms, and to suppose that we are engaged in a “Clash of Civilizations,” with us on the one side, and the Muslims — wherever they are — on the other. But to interpret things in such black-and-white terms is to distort reality. Although Islam largely missed out on the Reformation and the Enlightenment, a point frequently made by its critics, it is far from a monolithic religion. And many ordinary Muslims, rather than being on the side of the jihadis, are taking up arms against them, and sometimes paying with their lives. In Iraq, the Iraqi, Kurdish, and Iranian soldiers battling ISIS are mostly Muslims. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the government forces fighting jihadis are also almost all Muslims.
On top of this, most of the victims of jihadi atrocities are Muslims. In Iraq last month, more than eleven hundred people were killed in acts of terrorism and violence, including nearly seven hundred civilians. It’s fair to assume that almost all of them belonged to the Islamic faith. The 141 victims of the terrible Taliban attack on a school in Peshawar, in December, were Muslims. The same is true, to cite a more recent and largely unnoticed example, of the 30 people killed by a suicide bomber in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, on Tuesday. And, as we now know, one of the French policemen killed outside the Charlie Hebdo offices was a Muslim named Ahmed Merabet, and one of those killed inside the building was a copy editor named Mustapha Ourrad, who was of Algerian descent.
In many ways, the rise of jihad is as much a civil war among Muslims as it is an East–West confrontation: the great divide runs across religions and societies, as well as between them. After an outrage such as the one we have just witnessed in Paris, that can be hard to remember, but it mustn’t be forgotten. John Kerry, in remarks he delivered at the State Department immediately after the attack, struck the right tone. “Today’s murders are part of a larger confrontation, not between civilizations, no, but between civilization itself and those who are opposed to a civilized world,” Kerry said. “The murderers dared proclaim, Charlie Hebdo is dead. But make no mistake, they are wrong.”
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