Current Al-Jazeera (Arabic) Online Poll

Have the Arabs shown the desired solidarity with the victims among the refugees in the region due to the cold front?

So far, 97% have voted no.

الحرب على الإرهاب

AN EXCELLENT ANALYSIS

سلامة كيلة

عدنا إلى أجواء الحادي عشر من سبتمبر/ أيلول سنة 2001، وعادت الحرب على الإرهاب هي التي تحكم الأجندة العالمية. وبدل أميركا صرنا في فرنسا، على الرغم من الفارق الكبير بين حجم العمليتين. وبدل القاعدة صرنا في داعش التي تتخذ الملامح نفسها. لكن، باسم مختلف. ويعود الحديث عن التطرف الإسلامي، والتعصّب النابع من العقيدة نفسها. ومن ثم، يلتمّ زعماء العالم في باريس، لعقد تحالف ضد الإرهاب. 
لكن، منذ أشهر والتركيز الإعلامي والسياسي يميل نحو "محاربة الإرهاب"، أي داعش بالتحديد، التي باتت "القوة الثالثة" (أو ربما الرابعة) في العالم. كما أصبح تنظيم القاعدة هو هذه القوة بعد العملية "الخارقة" التي قام بها، والتي سمّاها "غزوة مانهاتن". لهذا، دعت الإدارة الأميركية، منذ مدة، إلى عقد "تحالف ضد داعش"، وشكلته بمشاركة نحو أربعين دولة، وهي تخوض "حرباً ضروساً" ضده، شملت آلاف الطلعات الجوية، وعشرات آلاف الصواريخ، فقتلت منه ما يقارب الألف عنصر. وفي ظل حربها الجوية هذه، توسّع وتمدّد أكثر ممّا كان، حين بدأت الحرب ضده. 
أدين طبعاً كل إرهاب، وكل عملية قتل بسبب المعتقد أو الرأي، وأظن أن الإرهاب ينمو "على هامش" السياسات الإمبريالية، وليس بعيداً عنها. وشرحت ذلك مراراً. كما أشرت إلى أنه ليس فعلاً ذاتياً، على الرغم من أن هناك بيئةً توجِدُ فئات مهيأة ذاتياً لذلك، لكنها تحتاج إلى "محرّك"، و"محرّض"، لكي تستطيع العمل. وحينها، يمكن إيجاد كل المبررات الدينية، واختلاق الفتاوى، أو الارتكاز على تاريخ مشوّه، أو حتى صحيح. 
ما يهمّ هو ليس هذا تماماً، فالإرهاب وُجد في كل العصور، واتخذ الأشكال نفسها، وقام على التبريرات نفسها. وكان دائماً مجال استغلال من دول في صراعاتها العالمية. لكن، ما يهم، وما يجب أن نتمعّن فيه، أننا عدنا لتكرار وضع بداية الألفية الجديدة، أي الحرب على الإرهاب، التي كانت تهدف، بالضبط، إلى احتلال أفغانستان والعراق. وأثيرت الضجة حول "الإرهاب الإسلامي" في هذا السياق، لنجد أن تنظيم القاعدة يختفي من أفغانستان بعد احتلالها، و"ينزرع" في العراق بعد احتلاله. فقد قام بـ"مهمته التاريخية" هناك وهنا. ثم مع نهاية العقد الأول، بدا أن الحرب على الإرهاب انتهت، خصوصاً بعد إنجاز الإرهاب "مهمته" في العراق. وأكمل باراك أوباما الأمر بـ"قتل" أسامة بن لادن، لكي يعلن نهاية ظاهرة الإرهاب. بقي التنظيم في اليمن، وظهر في مالي، لكنه لم يعد مجال اهتمام لا الإعلام ولا الساسة. 
إذن، لمَ هذه العودة؟ 
بين نهاية الاهتمام بالإرهاب والعودة إلى الاهتمام به، تقع الثورات التي طالت البلدان العربية. هل يذكر أحد، الآن، أن ثورات قامت، وأن بعضها لا يزال قائماً، وأنها في كل الأحوال مستمرة؟ 

يأتي طغيان التركيز على الإرهاب على حساب الثورات هذه، حيث بدأت تُعتبر جزءاً من الإرهاب، أليس ما يجري في ليبيا إرهاباً؟ وما يجري في اليمن تمدداً لتنظيم القاعدة؟ وما يجري في سورية هو سيطرة داعش والنصرة وجيش الإسلام؟ والآن، بات الإرهاب عالمياً. إذن، لنتكاتف ضد الإرهاب. هكذا يقول العقل الإمبريالي بالضبط. وهو يقول ذلك لخنق الثورات، وسحقها تحت يافطة محاربة الإرهاب. وهذه اليافطة تهيئ لترتيب العلاقات مع كل النظام القديم في مواجهة الثورة. هذه هي المرحلة الثانية في "الالتفاف" على الثورات، كانت الأولى تتمثل في توافق النظام القديم و"الإخوان المسلمين"، وفشلت، بالضبط لأن الشعب مصمم على الاستمرار إلى أن يحقق مطالبه، التي تقتضي إسقاط النظام، وليس لا الشخص ولا السلطة فقط، بل النظام الاقتصادي السياسي بمجمله. 
الآن، بعد الفشل، دخلنا في التفاف آخر، هو "الحرب ضد داعش". هكذا هو الأمر بالضبط. 

History did not start in Paris on Sunday

By David Hearst

A nation in trauma struggles to invest meaning in a national tragedy. The number of coffins demand it, but numbers alone can not do it. Upwards of 4 million people came out onto the streets of France to answer it, and the question still remains unanswered. What were the deaths of 17 people, five of them chosen randomly, about?

Press freedom? Then what were the foreign ministers of Egypt, Bahrain, and Algeria doing there? Why was anyone joining hands with King Abdullah of Jordan, who has just sent a journalist to 15 years hard labor? And what about Benjamin Netanyahu, who, under his time in office, has killed more journalists than any nation bar Syria?

The French Republic? But the gunmen were French. Paris was not invaded by aliens, body snatchers, barbaric Arabs attacking peaceful Europeans in their place of work. The gunmen were born and educated in France. They spoke French without an accent, and one spoke Arabic with a heavy one.

A clash of civilizations? The cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were not freedom fighters for secularism, patrolling the borders of freedom on behalf of satire and the Republican right to blaspheme. Charlie Hebdo was losing readers when it came up with their publishing coup.

The cartoons were unfunny. They were ugly physically and ugly mentally, but the images proved to be more powerful than the small magazine that published them. They flungCharlie Hebdo centrifugally away from its humanist roots into another orbit entirely. Charlie Hebdo became the poster boy for a binary mental model where "European values" are in opposition to, and threatened by, a retrograde Islamic world, of which the jihadis are just the most violent and visible element. The left of 68, became the plaything of the extreme right.

History did not start on Sunday in Paris, much as the world's liberal press wanted it to. The scenes in Paris reminded The Guardian's Natalie Nougayrède of the liberation from the Nazis in 1944, another binary mental model where the French are liberated from barbarians (all the work of Paul Webster, her former colleague who revealed France's complicity with the Holocaust deleted from The Guardian's memory banks).

The history of France's involvement in the Middle East goes back longer than that, and one glimpse of the brutality and barbarism of that colonial past can be seen in a stamp issued in 1922, which actually commemorates the beheading of Moroccan muslims, and shows their heads lined up on a wall.

Decolonization did not bring disengagement. Arab dictators served many functions but one of their most important was as Western proxies, freelance torturers who offered Western intelligence services the bonus of deniability. In Tunisia, the torture was carried on the basement of the Ministry of Interior, right next to the French embassy. This cozy arrangement between civilized Europe and barbarian Arab was disturbed, temporarily as it turned out, by the Arab Spring, and France knew that, which was why the gut reaction of its Foreign Minister at the time was to offer Ben Ali the equipment of the French riot police.

François Hollande is, sadly, four square behind Arab dictatorship, and the foreign ministers of those dictatorships were in the front two rows of the march on Sunday. David Cameron, Barack Obama, and Angel Merkel still harbor doubts about the wisdom of appearing on the same platform as Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. But Hollande did not. He had lunch with him. He called the man who planned and executed the worst massacre of civilians in modern history a partner. He said that an Egypt which is still detaining tens of thousands of political prisoners, among them dozens of journalists, is in transition. It "was respecting the Road Map, permitting full success for Egypt."

France under Hollande is as interventionist in the Middle East as America was under Bush. Hollande's defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, has been pushing for months to muster support for a second Western intervention in Libya.

He said in Niamey after meeting Niger's president, Mahamadou Issoufou:

"Libya is chaos today and it is a breeding ground for terrorists that threaten the stability of Niger and, further afield, France. We think that the moment has come to ensure that the international community tackles the Libyan problem."

French troops are mustering on Libya's southern border.

France in the last 14 years has gone backwards and the one person who sees this is not a French socialist, but a Gaullist, Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister who rightly opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and earned France international opprobrium for doing so.

He wrote in Le Monde the few words of wisdom to appear in that newspaper:

"Western interventions are systematic: they appeared to be independent operations driven by various ambitions, but they have succeeded in a singular result: the emergence of an elusive jihadist enemy and the collapse of states and civil societies in the region.We now know some of the operations that heralded all this: the operation in Libya in 2011 and its implosion since that date has transformed the country into a terrorist landmark in the Sahara; and in the Sahel, in particular in Nigeria bordering Cameroon and Chad where Boko Haram is extending its barbarous grip. But these wars always nourish new wars, each time larger, each time increasingly impossible. They nourish terrorism among us with promises of eradicating it. [The truth is] we will only overcome jihadism there and terrorism here by bringing concrete solutions to the crises in the Muslim world, which are at the same time territorial, social, political and economic - conflicts that we simplify by seeing only the Islamist symptom. The spirit of war is a trap. It is a cycle that is driving us every day toward a war that is out of control. In the name of our democratic values our duty is to resist the spirit of war. The only victory the fanatics could hope for is to convince us that we are carrying out a total war; to lead us into a cul-de-sac of force we believed to be a short cut."

If there is a history which France shares with the Middle East, there is also a common geographical space. There is no more pressing reminder of this than the figures released by the International Organisation of Migration.

2014 saw the largest wave of mass migration since the Second World War, with wars in Syria, Libya and Iraq, and instability in the Arab world causing the displacement of 16.7 million refugees. Double that number are internally displaced in the Arab world. Forty-five thousand of them risked their lives by trying to cross the Mediterranean and the number of dead rose to over 3,000.

The refugee problem has only been worsened by the xenophobic nationalism inside Egypt, which has turned on the 300,000 Syrians welcomed before the military coup.

And so we return to the men with whom Hollande was linking arms on Sunday. Are they the answer or the problem? Is Sisi a "new Martin Luther" for telling the clerics of Al-Azhar University, an ancient center of Islamic learning in Cairo, that Islam needs a religious revolution? Or is he a despot who will use any cause to perpetuate his vicious rule.

For if anyone is capable of creating more recruits for radical Islam, it is the supresser of democratic political Islam. Sisi, if we let him, will break the state of Egypt as swiftly and surely as civil war in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq have now. And then we would have not thousands of IS fighters, but tens of thousands of IS fighters. On Europe's doorstep.

Fourteen years into this cycle of intervention and terrorism, the penny should at last have dropped. It did not in Paris. After the gunmen went after cartoonists; they went after Jews. After that Muslims are next, in schools, in demonstrations, on the streets, in their mosques. And it's only a matter of time before all the collective rage and hatred and feeling of mutual collective threat will express itself in bombs. Not the bombs that go off in the Metro, but the ones that drop from French fighter jets.

Centuries of colonial and post-colonial military intervention have created two sorts of victims: those who have names and faces -- fallen soldiers, executed hostages, the editorial staff ofCharlie Hebdo -- and those who are just numbers -- millions of Algerians, Moroccans, Iraqis, Syrians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Libyans and Palestinians. One belong to a bubble called defending freedom. The other belongs to the chaos and barbarism of the Arab world. We actually live in one world, with one history, and one geography. A Europe that has participated in every western military intervention in the last two decades may just be about to find this out.

This article was first published on the Huffington Post on 13th January 2015.

It’s Not About Islam; It Never Was

War Begets War

By Ramzy Baroud

CounterPunch

It is still not about Islam, even if the media and militants attacking western targets say so. Actually, it never was. But it was important for many to conflate politics with religion; partly because it is convenient and self-validating.

First, let’s be clear on some points. Islam has set in motion a system to abolish slavery over 1,200 years before the slave trade reached its peak in the western world.

Freeing the slaves, who were owned by pagan Arab tribes, was a recurring theme in the Koran, always linked to the most basic signs of piety and virtue:

“The charities are to go to the poor, and the needy, and those who work to collect them, and those whose hearts have been united, and to free the slaves, and those in debt, and in the cause of God, and the traveler. A duty from God, and God is Knowledgeable, Wise.” [Al-Koran. 9:60]

It is unfortunate that such reminders would have to be regularly restated, thanks to constant anti-Islam propaganda in many western countries. The outlandish and often barbaric behavior of the so-called Islamic State (IS) has given greater impetus to existing prejudices and propaganda.

Second, gender equality in Islam has been enshrined in the language of the Koran and the legacy of the Prophet Mohammed.

“For Muslim men and women, for believing men and women, for devout men and women, for truthful men and women, for patient men and women, for humble men and women, for charitable men and women, for fasting men and women, for chaste men and women, and for men and women who remember God often – for them has Allah prepared forgiveness and great reward.” [33:35]

Third, the sanctity of life is paramount in Islam to the extent that “…if any one slew a person (..) it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.” [5:32]

Still, this is not about Islam. This is about why Islam is the subject of this discussion in the first place, when we should be addressing the real roots of violence.

When Islam was introduced to Arabia many centuries ago, it was, and in fact remains, a revolutionary religion. It was and remains radical, certainly the kind of radicalism that, if viewed objectively, would be considered a real challenge to classism in society, to inequality in all of its forms, and more importantly, to capitalism and its embedded insatiability, greed and callousness.

To avoid a rational discussion about real issues, many make non-issues the crux of the debate. So Islam is discussed alongside IS, Nigerian tribal and sectarian conflicts, Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, immigration issues in Europe and much more.

While much violence happens across the world in the name of Christianity, Judaism, even Buddhism in Burma and Sri Lanka, rarely do entire collectives get stigmatized by the media. Yet, all Muslims are held directly or otherwise accountable by many, even if a criminal who happened to be a Muslim went out on a violent rampage. Yes, he may still be designated as a “lone wolf”, but one can be almost certain that Muslims and Islam somehow become relevant to the media debate afterwards.

In their desperate attempt to fend off accusations, many Muslims, often led by credible intellectuals and journalists have, for nearly two decadesstaged a counter effort to distance Islam from violence and to fight the persisting stereotype. With time, these efforts culminated into a constant stream of collective apologies on behalf of Islam.

When a Muslim in Brazil or Libya reacts to a hostage crisis in Sydney, Australia, condemning violence on behalf of Islam, and frantically attempting to defend Islam and disown militancy, and so on, the question is, why? Why does the media make Muslims feel accountable for anything carried out in the name of Islam, even by some deranged person? Why are members of other religions not held to the same standards? Why aren’t Swedish Christians asked to explain and apologize for the behavior of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, or Argentinean Jews to explain the daily, systematic violence and terror carried out by Jewish extremists in Jerusalem and the West Bank?

Since Francis Fukuyama declared the “End of History” in 1992 – reveling that free markets and “liberal democracies” will reign supreme forever – followed by Samuel Huntington’s supposed contrasting, but still equally conceited, view of the “Clash of Civilizations and the need to “remake the world order”, a whole new intellectual industry has embroiled many in Washington, London and elsewhere. Once the Cold War had triumphantly ended with an inflated sense of political validation, the Middle East became the new playground for ideas about dominion and military hardware.

Since then, it has been an all-out war, either instigated by or involving various western powers. It was a protracted, multi-dimensional war: a destructive war on the ground, an economic war (blockades on the one hand and globalization and free market exploitation on the other), cultural invasion (that made westernisation of society equivalent to modernity); topped with a massive propaganda war targeting the Middle East’s leading religion: Islam.

The war on Islam was particularly vital, as it seemed to unify a large range of western intellectuals, conservative, liberal, religious and secular alike. All done for good reasons:

- Islam is not just a religion, but a way of life. By demonizing Islam, you demonize everything associated with it, including, of course, Muslims.

– The vilification of Islam which morphed into massive western-led Islamophobia helped validate the actions of western governments, however violent and abusive. The dehumanization of Muslims became an essential weapon in war.

– It was also strategic: hating Islam and all Muslims is a very flexible tool that would make military intervention and economic sanctions possible anywhere where the West has political and economic interests. Hating Islam became a unifying rally-cry from advocates of sanctions on Sudan to anti-immigrant neo-Nazi groups in Germany, and everywhere else. The issue is no longer the violent means used to achieve political domination and control of natural resources, but, magically, it all was reduced to one single word: Islam; or, at best, Islam and something else: freedom of expression, women rights, and so forth.

Thus, it was no surprise to see the likes of Ian Black commenting in the Guardian, hours after gunmen carried out a lethal attack in Paris against a French Magazine on Wednesday, 7 January with the starting line: “Satire and Islam do not sit well together…”

Not a word on the French military and other forms of intervention in the Middle East; its destructive role in Syria; its leadership role in the war in Libya; its war in Mali, and so on. Not even a word on François Holland’s recent statement about being “ready” to bomb Libyan rebels, although it was made only few days earlier.

Sure, the pornographic satire of Charlie Hebdo and its targeting of Prophet Mohammed was mentioned, but little was said, by Black, or the many others who were quick to link the subject to “7th century Islam”, to the hideous wars and their horrible, pornographic manifestations of torture, rape and other unspeakable acts; acts that victimized millions of people; Muslim people. Instead, it about western art and Muslim intolerance. The subtle line was: yes, indeed, it is a “clash of civilizations”.

Did any of these “intellectuals” pause to think that maybe, just maybe, the violent responses to demeaning Islamic symbols reflect a real political sentiment, say for example, a collective feeling of humiliation, hurt, pain and racism that extend to every corner of the globe?

And that it is natural that war which is constantly exported from the West to the rest of the world, could ultimately be exported back to western cities?

Is it not possible that Muslims are angered by something much more subtle and profound than Charlie Hebdo’s tasteless art?

Avoiding the answer is likely to delay a serious attempt at finding a solution, which must start with the end of western interventionism in the Middle East.

Bad signs from Paris and Khartoum

By Rami Khouri

Two things happened in Paris and Khartoum this week that portend bad times ahead for the Arab region and for relations between Arab and Muslim-majority countries on the one hand, and America Europe on the other.

The more dramatic development was the massive solidarity march in Paris to uphold values such as freedom of the press and expression and condemn the two terror attacks in Paris by four radicalized, socially alienated French citizens who had joined militant Islamist networks.

The second, and in the longer term the more significant development, was the announcement that Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir had submitted his candidacy for re-election to a five-year term in elections set for April 13.

These two developments capture two of the three main reasons that have seen many parts of the Arab region become sinkholes of political violence, extremism, sectarianism and state fragmentation or collapse – most frightfully captured in the ISIS reality and the threats it poses in the region and abroad.

These two main reasons are the control of Arab state power structures by military establishments at the service of individuals or families; and the militarized interventions in the Middle East by Western powers (alongside parallel military or diplomatic interventions by countries such as Russia, China, Iran and Turkey). The third reason for chronic stress, waste, militarism and national incoherence is the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict, which only had faint echoes in Paris.

If we were to identify a single foundational reason for the problems and instabilities of the Arab world, it must be the continuing legacy of mostly incompetent military officers who seize control of governments and remain presidents for life. This process hollows out the indigenous governance systems of countries, undermining competent personnel, and replaces them with systems that favor the mediocre friends and cousins of the great leader. It also redirects security systems to domestic control rather than protecting the nation; it promotes corruption that ultimately translates into socio-economic stagnation and massive disparities; and it creates conditions of conflict and dependence on foreign powers that ultimately gives an opportunities for those powers to intervene at will in the region, including by attacking and removing regimes that are identified as undesirable.

This is why the single most important priority across the Middle East is to figure out how to make the transition from this kind of top-heavy autocratic power structure to more democratic and participatory governance systems that tap the creativity, commitment and energy of all citizens.

Indirectly, the terrorism in Paris by radicalized young French Muslims includes causal factors that touch on Western actions in the Middle East (especially in Iraq) and the growth of cult-like criminal groups such as ISIS whose birth and growth were incubated in the repression and jails of Arab dictatorships.

So this week’s focus in Paris on fighting “Islamic terror and extremism,” or other enemies with similar names, with a combination of police actions and appeals to “moderate Muslims” to take more vigorous cultural-religious measures to reduce youth radicalism is likely only to intensify existing stresses and further alienate youths who are potential recruits to radical groups. This is because Western governments continue to work closely with Arab and other states whose autocratic policies contributed to the birth of the radicalism now being targeted by the West. This means the grassroots drivers of terrorism in the Middle East will remain unchanged.

Also, the West has focused excessively on religion in this equation, rather than addressing the more significant socio-economic and political forces that transform slightly directionless young men and women into hardened killers. This is likely to aggravate the divide that plagues all concerned. This divide is also deepened by developments such as Omar Hassan Bashir’s announcement that he will perpetuate his presidency that started when he seized power in a military coup in 1989 – a quarter of a century ago.

Sudan’s presidential election will be only the second since that time. It perpetuates the illusion of popular participation in choosing a government, which we see in societies across the region. The most farcical case was the recent re-election of Algerian President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika, who is so ill that he never appears in public and essentially fronts for the military’s control of power in the country, which has lasted since the 1960s.

So this has been a bad week in the continuing saga of an Arab world in search for decency, democracy and development, which remain elusive despite the proven thirst for these things across the region. The Arab autocracies cement themselves by satisfying the Western tendency to use militarism as the main way to fight terror. We have witnessed this again in the past week. Meanwhile, dictators such as Bashir ignore the West and single-handedly perpetuate their own incumbency at home by fighting and destroying any credible opposition.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly byTHE DAILY STAR. He can be followed on Twitter @RamiKhouri.

Tunisia still on the brink

Four years after Ben Ali's ouster, the same dynamics that radicalised the killers of Paris are present in Tunisia.

By Mark LeVine

The timing couldn't be more tragic, or more fitting. Three of the four Jewish hostages killed by Malian-French extremist Amedy Coulibaly at the kosher supermarket in Vincennes, were Tunisian citizens. [And why were they buried in Israel??]

Only a week before the fourth anniversary of Ben Ali's ouster, with hopes for a new Tunisia cresting after the successful presidential vote, the deaths of these citizens at the hand of a Muslim religious fanatic was a sober reminder of the problem of extremism waiting in the wings inside Tunisia as well.

In particular, the son of the chief rabbi of Tunis, 21-year old Yoav Hattab stands out, a photo of him proudly showing off the inked forefinger that confirmed he'd voted in the elections evoked the kind of past, present and future that Tunisia has long hoped to show the world.

Tunisia has long been home to multiple communities, not only Phoenicians, Romans and Vandals during antiquity; Muslim refugees from the early Reconquista and the Norman conquest of Sicily made it their home, as well as Jews and the indigenous Amazigh communities. In the modern era, well over 100,000 northern Mediterraneans lived in Tunis by the end of the 19th century.

A cosmopolitan past

Back then, Tunisia was a site of immigration, compared with the depressing site of so many young men today desperate to head north. The home of the Arab world's first constitution, in 1861, Italians comprised some of the most important officials in the pre-colonial Court. This cosmopolitan history is one that Tunisians celebrated.

Will Tunisia pass the transition test?

Tunisia's location and proximity to Europe, its need to play off various greater powers against each other, has ensured that the country would have multiple political economies in which official rulers would both need and compete with the informal economic and political networks that long connected Tunisia to the rest of the Mediterranean.

The struggle to control the flows of people, wealth and commodities moving in and out of the country has long characterised a primary challenge for Tunisian leaders, who themselves have long fallen prey to capturing whatever they could of that wealth for their own personal gain.

Such corruption is in no way unique to Tunisia. As the sociologist Charles Tilly succinctly put it, state-making as an enterprise is one of the greatest examples of organised crime imaginable. The more local economies and polities become globalised, the more opportunities exist for elites in and outside of official structures and institutions of governance to harness them.

Yoav Hattab and his generation and cohort of Tunisians - well educated, fluent in several languages, able to travel regularly to Europe and beyond - represent a very different experience and promise of globalisation.

The strength of the creatives behind the Jasmine Revolution and most of the other uprisings that followed, came from their ability to create their own networks outside of anyone else's technological, ideological or political control.

Their skills allowed them to outsmart sclerotic leaders like Ben Ali, Mubarak and other ageing despots, at least for a time. But whether in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, or any other Arab country, they are too removed from the flows of economic and political power to transform the more basic political economy of their countries, at least in the short term.

Deep web of corruption

One of the celebrated sparks of the Tunisian revolution was the publication of "TuniLeaks", which released WikiLeaks files describing the "web of corruption" surrounding Ben Ali and particularly the family of his wife, Leila Trabelsi. The dynamic of control over both security services and much of the economy allowed for a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the president and his family and associates at precisely the moment that neoliberal policies that brought similar results on a global scale were being implemented not merely in Tunisia, but around the world.

The dynamic of control over both security services and much of the economy allowed for a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the president and his family and associated at precisely the moment that neoliberal policies that brought similar results on a global scale were being implemented ...

It is crucial to keep this in mind as we consider the possibilities for Tunisia's future; the country's corruption was not unique or representative of some inherent failure in the society to modernise.

Indeed, the World Bank published a report in March of last year explaining how Ben Ali regime gamed the entire political, economic and judicial system of their country to enrich themselves.

What made the Ben Ali system work so efficiently for 20 years was not just control over the security services, systematic repression and a permissive and even cooperative international environment. As Beatrice Hibou demonstrates in her magisterial book, The Force of Obedience (published just as the Tunisian revolution erupted), the techniques of domination practised by the government were embedded in the most everyday economic mechanisms such as in the tax system and industry.

Jump ahead four years and perhaps the main challenge facing Tunisia is that despite the political revolution that has now been fully institutionalised, the deeper political economy of the country has yet to be reshaped to foster more democratic, sustainable and distributional networks, institutions and relationships.

Interim President Moncef Marzouki at least understood this, which is why he focused on a populist agenda of reform based around one of the few discourses that can challenge such a system; a fully institutionalised human rights regime as a guiding principle of political and economic life.

Levers of power

But today the president is one of the stalwarts of the Ben Ali regime - Beji Caid Essebsi and his Nidaa Tounis party democratically control the levers of power. And with them many figures from the past will re-ensconce themselves in the democratic present - this time in the guise of "technocrats" with the administrative expertise to "reform the system" from within.

With the interior ministry and security services remaining a bastion of the old system, corruption increased during the transition period, and with unemployment and other economic woes a "profound threat" to the chances for development and meaningful and widely distributed growth, it's hard to see how the new government will do better than the clearly handicapped transitional regime. 

Indeed, the basic problem at this start of a new era in Tunisia is that the transitional government failed to prosecute most Ben Ali figures for the massive corruption they engaged in, thus ensuring that they return to continue the same behaviour as soon as they are able.

The same dynamics of unemployment, marginalisation and lack of a future that helped radicalise the killers of Paris, is also quite present in Tunisia, which accounts for the rapid rise of extremism under the democratic transition, including the disproportionately large participation of young Tunisians in jihadist activities in Iraq and Syria.

Nothing should take away the so far singular accomplishment of the Tunisian revolution - the first youth-led movement to topple a dictator in the Arab world in memory, and so far the only one to shepherd a peaceful transition to a different political system.

But as the election results demonstrate, if progressive forces cannot develop a narrative that both helps Tunisians understand how much deeper the system they need to replace is, and gives them a strategy and a sense of hope that it can be changed, the victory of January 14, 2011, will remain incomplete, and likely tragically so.

Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern History at University of California, Irvine, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Lund University. His new book is One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States, co-edited with Ambassador Mathias Mossberg.

Charlie Hebdo: A journey from anti-colonialism towards Islamophobia

France has a long and time-honoured tradition of satirical media to which Charlie Hebdo firmly belonged. But it came a long way from its roots in the radical French left to supporting NATO intervention, opposing Palestinians and taking on Islam.

 By: Alain Gresh

The story of Charlie Hebdo cannot be understood without understanding something about France’s long-standing tradition of satirical press. The cradle of this kind of magazine, the French Revolution paved the way for the genre to be born in 1789 – earlier than in other European countries.

Charlie Hebdo's impertinence, which is sometimes of little consequence, embodies the spirit of the times

It has often been subversive, left-wing, hostile to the established order and sometimes vehemently anti-colonial. Its influence was even greater given that the majority of the population at the time did not know how to read or write. Its reach extended beyond political life and was used by political forces of all persuasions. In the 1930s, fascists and Nazis also used cartoons as a weapon against the left, the revolutionaries and Jews.

The magazine Hara-Kiri was first published in its weekly form in 1969. It was a counterpart to the monthly edition of Hara-Kiri which had existed since 1960 and was banned on several occasions, in particular due to its anti-colonial stance.

In November 1970, the front-page of the weekly version following the death of General de Gaulle read, “Tragic Ball in Colombey [where de Gaulle was born]: one dead”. Ten days earlier, nearly 150 people had been killed in a fire in a nightclub Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, causing emotions to run high across France, and the publication wound up banned by the Minister for Home Affairs.

To sidestep the ban, it became Charlie Hebdo, but was forced out of print in December 1981 through lack of readership. This period at the publication had been largely characterised by a form of political indifference; riding on a taste for provocation and a desire to shock, rather than any specific ideas.

Where to now for France? An interview with Alain Gresh

The weekly publication was re-launched in 1992 under Philippe Val. It maintained its provocative stance, and initially identified with the causes of the radical left. But it came to a significant ideological turning point at the end of the 1990s. Philippe Val supported NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and adopted an anti-Palestinian position during the Second Intifada. From then on it took on Islam, which was seen as a fundamental threat.

In November 2002, the columnist and philosopher Robert Misrahi published an opinion piece entitled Intellectual Courage praising Oriana Fallaci’s work, The Rage and The Pride. In it, he wrote that, “Oriana Fallaci demonstrates intellectual courage […] Not only does she protest against murder in the name of Islam […] she also protests against the element of denial in European opinion, whether Italian or French, for example. We are unwilling to see, nor to condemn clearly the fact that it is Islam that has gone on a crusade against the West and not the contrary.”

(It is important here to remember that Oriana Fallaci compared Muslim immigrants in Italy to rats.)

One example, of many others, of this Islamophobia was the 2006 publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in Denmark. It was in March of that year that Philippe Val, along with Bernard-Henri Lévy, Caroline Fourest and Antoine Sfeir signed The Twelve’s Manifesto: standing together against the new totalitarianism, published in L’Express. It stated that, “after having conquered fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, the world faces a new, totalitarian global threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists and intellectuals call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunities and secularism for everyone.”

The manifesto caused several members of the team to resign and the magazine underwent many internal crises. Charlie Hebdo, which claimed to stand for freedom of the press, fired one of its star cartoonists – Siné, on false accusations of anti-Semitism. Siné founded the newspaper Siné-Hebdo taking with him a significant proportion of the Charlie Hebdo readership. It is not surprising that on being elected as the President of France in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy pushed Philippe Val towards taking the helm at France-Inter. The path from the left to Sarkozy was a long one, however.

Charlie Hebdo can certainly not be reduced only to this tendency towards Islamophobia. The magazine attacks all kinds of religious symbols, all religions and all political institutions. And this is also probably why many French people identify with the magazine despite not necessarily reading it. Its impertinence, which is sometimes of little consequence, embodies the spirit of the times.

Obviously, too, to criticise the magazine is by no means to provide the slightest excuse for the criminal act to which it fell victim and for the assassinations that bloodied France. And the murdered journalists themselves would probably have been very surprised to see such an outpouring of support for their magazine, from those they mocked incessantly, from Nicolas Sarkozy to François Hollande, and many autocrats along the way.

It's not about free speech, it's about murder

By Azmi Bishara

Self-confident peoples and cultures cannot be threatened by cartoons or words, nor manipulated by tyrannical regimes.

The Arabs as a nation, and many Arabs as individuals, are victims of some of the most horrific crimes - in Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere.

And as Syrian refugees die silently from lack of shelter from the cold, Arabs and Muslims find themselves being blamed because certain individuals carried out an attack on the offices of a satirical journal in Paris, killing editors and cartoonists who worked there.

But Arabs and Muslims heard the news of this attack in the same way everybody in France did, or saw it like them on television. They have no other link to the incident.

I usually hesitate to express a position whenever a crime like this occurs. Rushing to state a position means that one has been blackmailed into consenting that all of us Arabs and Muslims must indeed rush to defend themselves as though we are suspects.

Moreover, my position on such crimes is well known and unequivocal. In effect, the more condemnations are made by Arabs and Muslims, the more this reaffirms the supposed link between ourselves and the assailants.

Yet silence becomes problematic when there are people justifying the attack by citing the background of the perpetrators and the responsibility of the West for what is happening in the Arab world, or when there are people who justify it by arguing that those who insult Islam and its Prophet should be punished - even when just such people may claim on a different day that the whole thing is a conspiracy, and that rushing to claim that the perpetrators are Muslims is part of a diabolical plot or even just plain racism.

Silence becomes problematic when there are people justifying the attack by citing the background of the perpetrators.

There are always some who see the timing as explanation enough for the alleged conspiracy - with questions like, why has this happened at this time in particular, and who stands to benefit?

There are those who find proof of conspiracy in the presence - or absence - of cameras at the scene, or even the presence or absence of Jewish individuals.

Such people are ever ready to prove their "theses" or refute them when needed, using the same arguments either way.

Killing civilians is a crime that can never have a tenable link to other crimes in which the civilians in question are not involved.

This applies even if the killers are victims of those crimes - though in most cases, the killers have nothing more than psychological or emotional connections to them. In either case, murdering innocent civilians is a crime.

This is my position. It may not satisfy some people, who may argue that the attack was not a random attack on civilians, not this time, but rather that it was committed in order to punish offenders who had affronted what Islam and Muslims hold sacred.

This claim is consistent with elements of the narrative that prevailed in the aftermath of the attack in the West, which holds that the killing was a deliberate assault on freedom of speech itself by enemies of democracy and free speech.

Islam, the Arabs and free speech

Meanwhile, the hypocrisy shown by some Western intellectuals and politicians does not help repudiate the metaphysical justifications of those who condone such attacks.

Ultimately, however, the issue is not free speech and the assault on free speech. The issue is reprehensible murder, whether free speech is involved or not.

People who justify such attacks respond by arguing that there is no free speech in France itself when it comes to incitement against Jewish people or denying the Holocaust.

The lines have been blurred between free speech - on subjects such as religion, religious communities, certain groups of people, ethnicities, and their revered symbols too, which democracy is supposed to guarantee - and hate speech. But the line between them is not so thin, and a sound mind can indeed tell the difference.

On the other hand, the Arabs have been living in recent decades under regimes that assassinate their opponents because of their opinions, or at best, jail them, for what the regimes often claim is treason, lese majeste against monarchs or presidents, or even for "weakening the national spirit".

And ever since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his public call for the assassination of Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie for what he wrote in his novel The Satanic Verses, we have been unable to ignore the debate in the West regarding religious-political death sentences in response to free speech and expression.

The real problem here lies in the belief that responding to what is free speech to others, and provocation or even incitement for some individuals, is murder. Let us assume that what the French magazine published was itself in breach of free speech and was in fact an affront to religious beliefs.

Then what actually taints these beliefs more, trivial expression or the blood of the innocent victims who were murdered? At its core, this is about the scale of moral values.

In our countries, there are governments that jail, torture and kill people for expressing themselves freely.

In our countries, there are governments that jail, torture and kill people for expressing themselves freely. In our countries and in our cultural context, individuals have emerged from among both the victims of the regimes and others who justify the murder of people who insult their beliefs through free speech and expression.

The need for critical reflection

The other problem is that many among such people do not make the distinction, to begin with, between critical discussion and incitement, and academic research and insulting the sacred.

It is time to ask ourselves, can cartoons that insult the prophets of all religions, including the prophet of Islam, truly undermine the stature of these prophets? Can a frenzied pastor in the United States who wants to burn the Quran truly undermine the Quran itself?

Are such events a worthy cause for millions of people to rise up and damage their future, their plans, their relations with other nations and peoples? To be sure, such events have mobilised more demonstrations and raids against embassies than Israel's assaults on al-Aqsa Mosque and settlement building in Jerusalem ever did, or the bombing of Baghdad and Aleppo.

I remember that during the original controversy over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, the Syrian regime staged angry demonstrations which culminated in a march to the Danish embassy in Damascus. This was during a period of political isolation of this regime in the West.

The message was that the regime could inflame the passions of the public against the cartoons just like it could control them at will. The same regime sent more or less the same message when it allowed jihadists to cross into occupied Iraq after 2003.

Self-confident peoples and cultures cannot be threatened by cartoons or words, nor manipulated by tyrannical regimes or extremist individuals to turn cartoons or even hate speech to a main issue that marginalises major crimes against humanity - despotism, occupation and discrimination policies, and even the racism that attemts to legitimise hate speech.

This is an edited translation from our Arabic edition.

من واشنطن- الإسلام والغرب وقيم الحرية

فلنتذكر هبة ورفح وننسَ شارلي

وائل قنديل

إذا كانوا كلهم "شارلي"، فليس أقل من أن نكون جميعاً هبة عبد الغني، أول شهيدة سورية للعاصفة الثلجية في مخيمات النزوح من إرهاب بشار الأسد.

ونكون رفح المصرية التي تعمل سلطة الانقلاب على إزالتها من الوجود، بتدمير مبانيها وتشريد أهاليها وذبح الحياة فيها، قرباناً للمنطقة العازلة التي تحلم بها "إسرائيل"، وتفرضها واشنطن استحقاقاً لا بد من أدائه، قبل أن تمنح جنرال مصر علامة النجاح في امتحان مؤتمر المنح مارس/آذار المقبل.
ونكون ذلك الطفل الفلسطيني الذي قتلته ثلوج العاصفة "زينة" في مخيم اللاجئين في طولكرم، ولم تكلف وكالات الأنباء نفسها عناء ذكر اسمه، شهيداً لبرودة الضمير العالمي.
ونكون، أيضا، فتاة شبرا التي افترسها شرطيان اغتصاباً في سيارة رسمية، وأثبت الطب الشرعي الجريمة، بعد تحليل عينة من السائل المنوي على ملابس الضحية، وتبين أنها متطابقة مع عينة أحد رجلي الأمن المتهمين (مع الاعتذار للرجولة)، وعلى الرغم من ذلك، قرر القضاء إخلاء سبيل مرتكبي الجريمة.
فلنتوقف عن الاستسلام لمناحة "شارلي" التي تخفي وراءها أكثر مما تظهر بكثير، وتتحول، بمرور الوقت، إلى فرصة استثمارية صهيونية قلباً وقالباً، حتى يخال المتابع أن كل هؤلاء الزعماء والقادة الذين هرولوا إلى المبكى الباريسي إنما جرى استخدامهم، فيما خدم بعضهم طوعاً، في تظاهرة يقودها بنيامين نتنياهو ضد "الإسلام المتطرف عدوه وعدو حلفائه المشترك".
لنخرج، إذن، من سرادق العزاء الفرانكفوني، ونتذكر قائمة همومنا وقضايانا الحقيقية، خصوصاً بعد أن قررت فرنسا مواراة قضية الاعتداء على المجلة الساخرة الثرى، في تعجل لافت لا يترك فرصة للتحقيق في الجريمة وسبر أغوارها، وكأنها اكتفت باستعمالها سطحياً لصناعة حشد دولي، لا يختلف عن ذلك الذي استقال بسببه وزير دفاع فرنسا، جان بيير شوفمنان، في الحرب الأميركية الأولى لتدمير العراق، مطلع تسعينيات القرن الماضي، والذي سمّاه في كتابه الوثيقة "الدرس الافتتاحي للنظام العالمي الجديد".
ولن تكون قد استهلكت كميات أكثر من المعقول من "نظرية المؤامرة"، إذا أنت حذفت اسم العراق ووضعت ليبيا، ورفعت واشنطن وأدخلت باريس، وسحبت "غزو الكويت"، وأضفت "غزوة شارلي إيبدو"، وأنت تقرأ المشهد الجنائزي المبالغ فيه حد العبط، المتجسد في احتفاء نخبة الدولة العميقة التونسية بأحد ضحايا المتجر اليهودي، واعتباره رمزاً تونسياً بكت عليه أكثر مما بكت على شهداء الثورة التونسية، ثم، في نهاية المطاف، قررت عائلته دفن جثمانه في القدس المحتلة، باعتباره مواطناً صهيونياً.
جدير بالثوار المصريين أن يكسروا طوق الحزن الباريسي المفروض على الجميع، بقوة ترسانة الميديا العالمية، ويتذكروا أنه قبل أحد عشر يوماً من ذكرى ثورة الخامس والعشرين من يناير/ كانون الثاني، عادت مصر بكامل هيئتها إلى سجن دولة حسني مبارك، بعد أن قرر قضاء مبارك، أمس، فتح الطريق له ولولديه لكي يعودوا إلى منتجعاتهم، بعد أن أعادهم قبل شهر ونصف الشهر إلى مقاعدهم.
حري بالجميع أن يتمردوا على قرار حشرهم في ملاهي شارلي الحزينة، ويلتفتوا إلى ما كانوا قد بدأوه من جهود أثمرت الكثير على طريق التوحد والاصطفاف، على الرغم من نشاط قطاع الطرق الملحوظ لوأد أي بصيص فرصة للالتقاء على أهداف ثورية عامة، تتجاوز مهارشات صغار الباعة الجائلين الذين "يسرحون ببضاعة باعوكم".
كما أنه جدير بكل صاحب ضمير وإحساس في هذا الوطن العربي، وفي العالم، أن يتذكر أنه، وهو يغوص في مقعده الدافئ، متابعا أخبار شارلي عبر التلفزة، هناك مئات الآلاف من العرب يواجهون الموت وحدهم في مخيمات النزوح واللجوء السورية والفلسطينية والعراقية، ليس بفعل مؤامرة الشتاء البارد فقط، وإنما نتيجة جريمة النظام الرسمي العربي ضد الربيع.

Glenn Greenwald on How to Be a Terror "Expert": Ignore Facts, Blame Muslims, Trumpet U.S. Propaganda

Democracy Now!

"Who are the so-called terrorism experts? In the wake of the Paris attacks, the corporate media has once again flooded its news programs with pundits claiming authority on terrorism, foreign policy and world events. We discuss the growing and questionable field of "terrorism experts" with three guests: Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-founder of The Intercept; Lisa Stampnitzky, social studies lecturer at Harvard University and author of "Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented 'Terrorism'"; and Luc Mathieu, foreign affairs reporter for the French newspaper Libération....."

VERY GOOD!

Reporters Without Borders on Witnessing the Paris Massacre Aftermath & Press Freedom After Charlie

Democracy Now!

"The group Reporters Without Borders is condemning what it calls the "presence of 'predators'" in Sunday’s march over the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The group says it is "appalled by the presence of leaders from countries where journalists and bloggers are systematically persecuted" such as Egypt, Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia joined other Arab and Muslim countries in condemning the attack at the same time as it faced global outrage at the public lashing of jailed blogger Raif Badawi. On Friday, Badawi received the first 50 of 1,000 lashes as part of his punishment for running a liberal website devoted to freedom of speech in the conservative kingdom. One cartoon shared on social networks shows a pencil being flayed by whips. Amnesty International considers Badawi a prisoner of conscience who is being punished for creating an online forum for debate. We are joined by two guests from Reporters Without Borders: Program Director Lucie Morillon, who attended Sunday’s march and was at the site of the Charlie Hebdo attack shortly after it occurred; and Delphine Halgand, U.S. director of Reporters Without Borders....."

في العمق-الدور السياسي لمراكز الأبحاث الغربية

اطفال سوريا يقتلهم الثلج - الرسام عماد حجاج

Syrian Children Dying in the Snow Blizzards

Netanyahu defies French pleas to push Zionist agenda

By Jonathan Cook

The Israeli prime minister was reportedly asked to avoid Sunday's march in Paris, out of a fear he would use the occasion to exploit divisions in French society.

It was hardly surprising that France's president, Francois Hollande, is understood to have implored Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu not to participate in Sunday's mass march in solidarity with the victims of last week's killings in Paris.

Netanyahu was probably the least welcome of the 40 world leaders who participated in the rally in the French capital to demonstrate their outrage at an attack that left 17 people dead, including four French Jews.

According to Israeli media, Hollande's advisers had urged 

Netanyahu was probably the least welcome of the 40 world leaders who participated in the rally.

Netanyahu not to come, concerned that he would exploit the visit - and the deaths - to increase divisions in French society.

They had good grounds for concern. Shortly before he set off for Paris, Netanyahu issued a statement saying Israel would welcome with "open arms" any French or European Jews choosing to move to Israel.

Earlier, he tweeted: "To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home."

Netanyahu also declared on Saturday that he would be convening a special ministerial committee this week to investigate ways to encourage Jewish migration from France and from other European countries.

Meanwhile, in a coup for the Israeli prime minister, it was announced that four Jewish men killed at the HyperCacher supermarket in Paris on Friday were being flown to Israel for burial in Jerusalem on Tuesday. None of them were Israeli citizens.

The four will be officially recognised as "terror victims", possibly entitling their relatives to large payments from the Israeli government.

Zionist anthem
Hollande's concerns were doubtless fuelled by Netanyahu's behaviour at a ceremony for the victims of an attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012.

On that occasion, Netanyahu called on Jews to leave France for Israel and then burst into a rendition of the Zionist anthem "Am Yisrael Chai", or "The people of Israel live". Hollande was reportedly incensed, saying Netanyahu had used the event "as an election rally".

This time, presumably in response to Hollande's rebuke, Netanyahu did slightly temper his language during his speech at the Great Synagogue in Paris. Conceding that Jews had a right to live in France, he also averred: "Jews today have been blessed with another right, a right that didn't exist for previous generations: The right to join their Jewish brothers in our historic homeland - the land of Israel." Hollande had, by then, left the building.

The clear implication of Netanyahu's statements has been that France and other western states are not doing enough to protect their Jewish populations from violent extremism, and that Israel is the only safe haven for Jews.

But it would be wrong to view this as some kind of ideological aberration on Netanyahu's part. Most other Israeli politicians joined him in urging French Jews to move to Israel.

Yair Lapid, seen as a centrist politician, said: "I don't want to speak in terms of Holocaust, but … European Jewry must understand that there is just one place for Jews, and that is the State of Israel."

European Jewry must understand that there is just one place for Jews, and that is the State of Israel. - Yair Lapid

In fact, the effort to bring Jews to Israel is at the core of Zionist thinking, and widely supported by the Israeli Jewish population. Aliyah, or "ascension", the Hebrew word for Jewish immigration, connotes an almost-divine obligation on Jews to live in Israel.

Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, it should be remembered, used even more inflammatory language in 2004, warning that France was in the grip of "the wildest anti-semitism", and calling on Jews to flee France.

"If I have to advise our brothers in France, I'll tell them one thing - move to Israel, as early as possible. I say that to Jews all around the world, but there [in France] I think it's a must and they have to move immediately."

Financial inducements
Similarly, Israel has tried to exploit economic crises in countries with significant Jewish populations to encourage them to emigrate. In 2001, when the Argentinian financial system collapsed, Israel offered each Jew there a $20,000 cheque - should they make a new life in Israel.

That was in addition to the inducements Israel offers as standard to Jewish immigrants: large sums of cash, tax breaks, subsidies, as well as special access to grants and loans.

The extraordinary lengths Israel is prepared to go to encourage Jews to come to Israel - including, it seems, even actions designed to fuel anti-semitism - were suggested by Raanan Rein, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, in a book on Israel's relations with Argentina.

According to Rein, in 1960, David Ben Gurion, Israel's prime minister, welcomed the possibility that Israel's kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann - in violation of an extradition agreement with Buenos Aires - might fuel hatred of the country's Jews.

"If there is anti-Semitism," he told a journalist, "they [Argentina's Jews] can immigrate to Israel."

Analysts and observers have pointed out that Netanyahu, Israeli politicians more generally and organisations such as the Jewish Agency, which oversees immigration to Israel, may equally be provoking hatred - inadvertently or otherwise - that strengthens Jewish immigration.

Few deny a connection between Israel's intensifying belligerency, especially its repeated attacks on Gaza, and verbal and physical attacks on Jews in Europe.

More specifically in France, reports of attacks on Jews over the past decade have been well-publicised, including by the Jewish Agency, even though a significant proportion have turned out to be false.

Weakening Jewish communities
France, with half a million Jews, has the largest Jewish population outside the US and Israel. According to figures from the Jewish Agency, 7,000 immigrants arrived from France in 2014, triple the number in 2012. Israel's minister for immigrant absorption, Sofa Landver, has predicted that more than 10,000 will immigrate this year.

In hailing her ministry's successes last month, Landver said the government would continue "to promote the ingathering of the exiles, a vision that has accompanied the people of Israel since the state's establishment".

In contrast, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, head of the European Jewish Association, noted that Netanyahu's efforts risked "severely weakening and damaging Jewish communities that have the right to live securely wherever they are".

In more graphic terms, Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev argued: "By encouraging mass emigration, Israeli politicians could very well be helping terrorist fanatics finish the job started by the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators: making France Judenrein."

Netanyahu’s assumptions, he added, "can only invigorate jihadists and spur them to adopt similar tactics in other European countries".

So why is Jewish immigration so important to Israel that it is prepared to endanger the very Jews it claims to protect?

The reason is illustrated in the efforts of Netanyahu and the Israeli right to pass a basic law defining Israel as "the nation-state of the Jewish people".

Goals of Zionism
The aims of such legislation, echoing the major goals of Zionism, are several and related:

* To consolidate Israel's long-standing efforts to claim it is the state of all Jews around the world, conflating Judaism with Zionism and helping to silence critics of Israeli policy as anti-Semites.

* To implicate all Jews in Israeli actions to Judaise territory that was seized from Palestinians, as part of Israel's efforts to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state.

* To recruit more Jews to counter the so-called "demographic threat" posed by the Palestinians' higher natural growth rate, which threatens to create a Palestinian majority in the combined area of Israel and the occupied territories.

* To bolster a self-serving narrative of Israel as being on the frontlines of the clash of civilisations, in which the future of the Judeo-Christian west is threatened by a bloodthirsty Islamic east.

It was therefore entirely predictable that Netanyahu used his speech in Paris on Sunday to again characterise the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, and Lebanon's Hizballah as being no different from militant jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group (IS, formerly known as ISIS), which were implicated in last week's attack.

They all, he said, wanted to "impose a dark tyranny on the world".

"Those who slaughtered Jews in the synagogue in Jerusalem [in November] and those who slaughtered Jews and journalists in Paris belong to the same murderous terror organisation," Netanyahu claimed.

An analyst on Israel's Channel 2 news described last week's attacks in Paris as "France's 9/11".

It is worth recalling that Netanyahu let slip in the immediate wake of the attack on the World Trade Centre his real view of that event - it was "very good" for Israel because it would generate sympathy for its war against the Palestinians.

Fallacy of safe haven
Haaretz columnist Ansel Pfeffer noted this narrative worked to Netanyahu's benefit, allowing him to refuse "to make meaningful concessions to the Palestinians since Israel is on the frontline facing the onslaught of radical Islam, and any ground given will immediately be used to launch further attacks".

Another Israeli analyst, Orly Noy, took the same view: "This helps Netanyahu promote a worldview in which there is no national conflict, no occupation, no Palestinian people and no blatant disregard for human rights."

Butm as Pfeffer further observed, Netanyahu's narrative that all Jews should come to Israel depends on a central fallacy: that Israel is a safe haven. In fact, statistically Jews are far safer in France than in conflict-plagued Israel.

It also forgets that at least some of Israel's power on the international stage has depended on the influence of international Jewish lobbies to pressure politicians and the media through their activism.

This was a point Rabbi Margolin alluded to. "The Israeli government must recognise this reality and also remember the strategic importance of the Jewish communities as supporters of Israel in the countries in which they live."

It might be worth Netanyahu pondering that a United States and a Europe without organised Jewish lobbies aggressively promoting Israel's interests would be less reliable allies than they have been until now.