Palestinian Pundit

Sunday, January 11, 2015

IN SOLIDARITY WITH A FREE PRESS: SOME MORE BLASPHEMOUS CARTOONS

A GREAT POST
By Glenn Greenwald

(Scroll down for more new posts)

Defending free speech and free press rights, which typically means defending the right to disseminate the very ideas society finds most repellent, has been one of my principal passions for the last 20 years: previously as a lawyer and now as a journalist. So I consider it positive when large numbers of people loudly invoke this principle, as has been happening over the last 48 hours in response to the horrific attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

Usually, defending free speech rights is much more of a lonely task. For instance, the day before the Paris murders, I wrote an article about multiple cases where Muslims are being prosecuted and even imprisoned by western governments for their online political speech – assaults that have provoked relatively little protest, including from those free speech champions who have been so vocal this week.

I’ve previously covered cases where Muslims were imprisoned for many years in the U.S. for things like translating and posting “extremist” videos to the internet, writing scholarly articles in defense of Palestinian groups andexpressing harsh criticism of Israel, and even including a Hezbollah channelin a cable package. That’s all well beyond the numerous cases of jobs being lost or careers destroyed for expressing criticism of Israel or (much more dangerously and rarely) Judaism. I’m hoping this week’s celebration of free speech values will generate widespread opposition to all of these long-standing and growing infringements of core political rights in the west, not just some.

Central to free speech activism has always been the distinction between defending the right to disseminate Idea X and agreeing with Idea X, one which only the most simple-minded among us are incapable of comprehending. One defends the right to express repellent ideas while being able to condemn the idea itself. There is no remote contradiction in that: the ACLU vigorously defends the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, but does not join the march; they instead vocally condemn the targeted ideas as grotesque while defending the right to express them.

But this week’s defense of free speech rights was so spirited that it gave rise to a brand new principle: to defend free speech, one not only defends the right to disseminate the speech, but embraces the content of the speech itself. Numerous writers thus demanded: to show “solidarity” with the murdered cartoonists, one should not merely condemn the attacks and defend the right of the cartoonists to publish, but should publish and even celebrate those cartoons. “The best response to Charlie Hebdo attack,”announced Slate’s editor Jacob Weisberg, “is to escalate blasphemous satire.”

Some of the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo were not just offensive but bigoted, such as the one mocking the African sex slaves of Boko Haram as welfare queens (left). Others went far beyond maligning violence by extremists acting in the name of Islam, or even merely depicting Mohammed with degrading imagery (above, right), and instead contained a stream of mockery toward Muslims generally, who in France are not remotely powerful but are largely a marginalized and targeted immigrant population.

But no matter. Their cartoons were noble and should be celebrated – not just on free speech grounds but for their content. In a column entitled “The Blasphemy We Need,” The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat argued that “the right to blaspheme (and otherwise give offense) is essential to the liberal order” and “that kind of blasphemy [that provokes violence] is precisely the kind that needs to be defended, because it’s the kind that clearly serves a free society’s greater good.” New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait actually proclaimed that “one cannot defend the right [to blaspheme] without defending the practice.” Vox’s Matt Yglesias had a much more nuanced view but nonetheless concluded that “to blaspheme the Prophet transforms the publication of these cartoons from a pointless act to a courageous and even necessary one, while the observation that the world would do well without such provocations becomes a form of appeasement.”

To comport with this new principle for how one shows solidarity with free speech rights and a vibrant free press, we’re publishing some blasphemous and otherwise offensive cartoons about religion and their adherents:

And here are some not-remotely-blasphemous-or-bigoted yet very pointed and relevant cartoons by the brilliantly provocative Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff (reprinted with permission):

Is it time for me to be celebrated for my brave and noble defense of free speech rights? Have I struck a potent blow for political liberty and demonstrated solidarity with free journalism by publishing blasphemous cartoons? If, as Salman Rushdie said, it’s vital that all religions be subjected to “fearless disrespect,” have I done my part to uphold western values?

When I first began to see these demands to publish these anti-Muslim cartoons, the cynic in me thought perhaps this was really just about sanctioning some types of offensive speech against some religions and their adherents, while shielding more favored groups. In particular, the west has spent years bombing, invading and occupying Muslim countries and killing, torturing and lawlessly imprisoning innocent Muslims, and anti-Muslim speech has been a vital driver in sustaining support for those policies.

So it’s the opposite of surprising to see large numbers of westerners celebrating anti-Muslim cartoons - not on free speech grounds but due to approval of the content. Defending free speech is always easy when you like the content of the ideas being targeted, or aren’t part of (or actively dislike) the group being maligned.

Indeed, it is self-evident that if a writer who specialized in overtly anti-black or anti-Semitic screeds had been murdered for their ideas, there would be no widespread calls to republish their trash in “solidarity” with their free speech rights. In fact, Douthat, Chait and Yglesias all took pains to expressly note that they were only calling for publication of such offensive ideas in the limited case where violence is threatened or perpetrated in response (by which they meant in practice, so far as I can tell: anti-Islam speech). Douthat even used italics to emphasize how limited his defense of blasphemy was: “that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended.”

One should acknowledge a valid point contained within the Douthat/Chait/Yglesias argument: when media outlets refrain from publishing material out of fear (rather than a desire to avoid publishing gratuitously offensive material), as several of the west’s leading outletsadmitted doing with these cartoons, that is genuinely troubling, an actual threat to a free press. But there are all kinds of pernicious taboos in the west that result in self-censorship or compelled suppression of political ideas, from prosecution and imprisonment to career destruction: why is violence by Muslims the most menacing one? (I’m not here talking about the question of whether media outlets should publish the cartoons because they’re newsworthy; my focus is on the demand they be published positively, with approval, as “solidarity”).

When we originally discussed publishing this article to make these points, our intention was to commission two or three cartoonists to create cartoons that mock Judaism and malign sacred figures to Jews the way Charlie Hebdo did to Muslims. But that idea was thwarted by the fact that no mainstream western cartoonist would dare put their name on an anti-Jewish cartoon, even if done for satire purposes, because doing so would instantly and permanently destroy their career, at least. Anti-Islam and anti-Muslim commentary (and cartoons) are a dime a dozen in western media outlets; the taboo that is at least as strong, if not more so, are anti-Jewish images and words. Why aren’t Douthat, Chait, Yglesias and their like-minded free speech crusaders calling for publication of anti-Semitic material in solidarity, or as a means of standing up to this repression? Yes, it’s true that outlets like The New York Times will in rare instances publishsuch depictions, but only to document hateful bigotry and condemn it – not to publish it in “solidarity” or because it deserves a serious and respectful airing.

With all due respect to the great cartoonist Ann Telnaes, it is simply not the case that Charlie Hebdo “were equal opportunity offenders.” Like Bill Maher, Sam Harris and other anti-Islam obsessives, mocking Judaism, Jews and/or Israel is something they will rarely (if ever) do. If forced, they can point to rare and isolated cases where they uttered some criticism of Judaism or Jews, but the vast bulk of their attacks are reserved for Islam and Muslims, not Judaism and Jews. Parody, free speech and secular atheism are the pretexts; anti-Muslim messaging is the primary goal and the outcome. And this messaging – this special affection for offensive anti-Islam speech – just so happens to coincide with, to feed, the militaristic foreign policy agenda of their governments and culture.

To see how true that is, consider the fact that Charlie Hebdo – the “equal opportunity” offenders and defenders of all types of offensive speech -fired one of their writers in 2009 for writing a sentence some said was anti-Semitic (the writer was then charged with a hate crime offense, and won a judgment against the magazine for unfair termination). Does that sound like “equal opportunity” offending?

Nor is it the case that threatening violence in response to offensive ideas is the exclusive province of extremists claiming to act in the name of Islam. Terrence McNally’s 1998 play “Corpus Christi,” depicting Jesus as gay, wasrepeatedly cancelled by theaters due to bomb threats. Larry Flynt wasparalyzed by an evangelical white supremacist who objected to Hustler‘s pornographic depiction of inter-racial couples. The Dixie Chicks weredeluged with death threats and needed massive security after they publicly criticized George Bush for the Iraq War, which finally forced them to apologize out of fear. Violence spurred by Jewish and Christian fanaticism is legion, from abortion doctors being murdered to gay bars being bombed to a 45-year-old brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza due in part to the religious belief (common in both the U.S. and Israel) that God decreed they shall own all the land. And that’s all independent of the systematic state violence in the west sustained, at least in part, by religious sectarianism.

The New York Times‘ David Brooks today claims that anti-Christian bias is so widespread in America – which has never elected a non-Christian president – that “the University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality.” He forgot to mention that the very same university just terminated its tenure contract with Professor Steven Salaita over tweets he posted during the Israeli attack on Gaza that the university judged to be excessively vituperative of Jewish leaders, and that the journalist Chris Hedges was just disinvited to speak at the University of Pennsylvania for the Thought Crime of drawing similarities between Israel and ISIS.

That is a real taboo – a repressed idea – as powerful and absolute as any in the United States, so much so that Brooks won’t even acknowledge its existence. It’s certainly more of a taboo in the U.S. than criticizing Muslims and Islam, criticism which is so frequently heard in mainstream circles –including the U.S. Congress – that one barely notices it any more.

This underscores the key point: there are all sorts of ways ideas and viewpoints are suppressed in the west. When those demanding publication of these anti-Islam cartoons start demanding the affirmative publication ofthose ideas as well, I’ll believe the sincerity of their very selective application of free speech principles. One can defend free speech without having to publish, let alone embrace, the offensive ideas being targeted. But if that’s not the case, let’s have equal application of this new principle.

ناشطون لمحمود عباس: أهل غزة واليرموك أَولى بالتضامن

أثارت المشاركة المرتقبة، للرئيس الفلسطيني محمود عباس، في تظاهرة باريس، اليوم الأحد، للتنديد بالاعتداءات التي وقعت في فرنسا الأيام الماضية، وراح ضحيتها 17 شخصاً، موجة من الاستنكار والغضب في صفوف رواد مواقع التواصل الاجتماعي، الفلسطينيين. ولم يكن الاعتراض على المشاركة بحد ذاتها، فالحوادث التي طالت فرنسا مدانة عند الفلسطينيين. لكن عدم قيام عباس بالتضامن مع غزة، بذات الطريقة، ومنع التظاهرات في الضفة المحتلة خلال العدوان على القطاع، وقمع إحدى التظاهرات المؤيدة لفلسطينيي اليرموك في سورية، هو ما أثار غضب الفلسطينيين. وذكرت وكالة الأنباء الرسمية "وفا"، أنّ عباس وصل إلى باريس للقاء الرئيس الفرنسي فرانسوا هولاند، والمشاركة في المسيرة الجماهيرية التي تقام في المدينة، بمشاركة العديد من قادة العالم، للتنديد بالاعتداءات الأخيرة التي استهدفت فرنسا، والتضامن مع الضحايا. وكتب المحلل والكاتب السياسي، فايز أبو شمالة، على صفحته في "فيسبوك"، أنه "من عجائب السياسة الفلسطينية، أنّ محمود عباس يشارك في مسيرة ضد الإرهاب في باريس، في الوقت الذي منع خروج أي مسيرة فلسطينية ضد العدوان الإسرائيلي الإرهابي على قطاع غزة". أما أستاذ العلوم السياسية، بجامعة الأمة في غزة، عدنان أبو عامر، فكتب بلغة أهل الشام: "آن أوان بق البحصة"، ليكمل بالعامية: "يعني سيادة رئيسنا المبجل سيصل فرنسا لتقديم التعازي، صاحب واجب طلع، لكن الـ2200 شهيد في غزة ما كانوا يستاهلوا منك زيارة تعزية؟.. طيب شو أحكي، لساني مش مطاوعني! حدا يحكي عني..". من ناحيته، كتب رئيس "المرصد الأوروـ متوسطي لحقوق الإنسان"، رامي عبده، على صفحته عن الزيارة قائلاً: "هذا الصباح يستحث الخطى إلى باريس، رئيس، يقدم شعبه مئات الشهداء في كل مواقع تواجده من غزة مرورا بالقدس واليرموك وعرض البحر! يسابق الزمن جنباً إلى جنب، وكتفاً بكتف مع المجرم، نتنياهو ليقدم العزاء في ضحايا حادثة باريس المدانة، لكن لم يسجل له أن وقف جنباً إلى جنب، مع طفل جائع، يقهره البرد، في اليرموك أو غزة!". وأضاف عبده: "لم يسجل له أن وقف كتفاً بكتف مع أسرة شهيد، لم يسجل له أن زار بيت شهيد أو أسير أو جريح". ومن المتوقع أن يشارك رئيس حكومة الاحتلال بنيامين نتنياهو في ذات التظاهرة، بعد أن استغل الهجوم بطريقة فاضخة لدعوة يهود فرنسا وأوروبا إلى الهجرة إلى إسرائيل، لأنها، حسب زعمه، الأكثر أماناً. وفي صفحته على "فيسبوك"، قال الكاتب الفلسطيني عباد يحيى: "بما أن مؤسسات المجتمع المدني والبلديات وفعاليات سياسية وأهلية دعت لمظاهرة بمباركة وتوجيه من السلطة للتضامن مع "فرنسا الصديقة ضد الإرهاب"، يمكن أن يحمل بعض المتظاهرين لافتات ضد الاعتقال على خلفية قضايا الرأي والتعبير، وتطالب بإطلاق سراح المعتقلين لدى السلطة على تهم إطالة اللسان والتطاول على المقامات العليا". وأضاف يحيى، أنّ هذه دعوة بناءة للمشاركة، وبكل الأوجه مهمة ومفيدة خاصة أنها ستحظى بتغطية صحافية وإعلامية واسعة. مختتماً تدوينته بالقول: "مقاتلة السلطة في فضاءاتها وخطاباتها .. عبادة". ومن المفارقات، أنّ الرئيس عباس تفاخر بعد العدوان على غزة في عدة لقاءات صحافية، أنه منع خروج تظاهرات في الضفة الغربية تضامناً مع القطاع الذي تعرض لأقسى عدوان على مدار 51 يوماً.

ABBAS AT THE PARIS MARCH!!

ABBAS AT THE PARIS MARCH!!

Charlie Hebdo: Paris terror can be traced back to Algeria in 1954

For Algeria remains the most painful wound within the body politic of the Republic – save, perhaps, for its continuing self-examination of Nazi occupation – and provides a fearful context for every act of Arab violence against France. The six-year Algerian war for independence, in which perhaps a million and a half Arab Muslims and many thousands of French men and women died, remains an unending and unresolved agony for both peoples. Just over half a century ago, it almost started a French civil war.Maybe all newspaper and television reports should carry a “history corner”, a little reminder that nothing – absolutely zilch – happens without a past. Massacres, bloodletting, fury, sorrow, police hunts (“widening” or “narrowing” as sub-editors wish) take the headlines. Always it’s the “who” and the “how” – but rarely the “why”. Take the crime against humanity in Paris this week – the words “atrocity” and “barbarity” somehow diminish the savagery of this act – and its immediate aftermath.
We know the victims: journalists, cartoonists, cops. And how they were killed. Masked gunmen, Kalashnikov automatic rifles, ruthless, almost professional nonchalance. And the answer to “why” was helpfully supplied by the murderers. They wanted to avenge “the Prophet” for Charlie Hebdo’s irreverent and (for Muslims) highly offensive cartoons. And of course, we must all repeat the rubric: nothing – nothing ever – could justify these cruel acts of mass murder. And no, the killers cannot call on history to justify their crimes.
But there’s an important context that somehow got left out of the story this week, the “history corner” that many Frenchmen as well as Algerians prefer to ignore: the bloody 1954-62 struggle of an entire people for freedom against a brutal imperial regime, a prolonged war which remains the foundational quarrel of Arabs and French to this day.
The desperate and permanent crisis in Algerian-French relations, like the refusal of a divorced couple to accept an agreed narrative of their sorrow, poisons the cohabitation of these two peoples in France. However Cherif and Said Kouachi excused their actions, they were born at a time when Algeria had been invisibly mutilated by 132 years of occupation. Perhaps five million of France’s six and a half million Muslims are Algerian. Most are poor, many regard themselves as second-class citizens in the land of equality.
Like all tragedies, Algeria’s eludes the one-paragraph explanation of news agency dispatches, even the shorter histories written by both sides after the French abandoned Algeria in 1962.
For unlike other important French dependencies or colonies, Algeria was regarded as an integral part of metropolitan France, sending representatives to the French parliament in Paris, even providing Charles de Gaulle and the Allies with a French “capital” from which to invade Nazi-occupied north Africa and Sicily.
More than 100 years earlier, France had invaded Algeria itself, subjugating its native Muslim population, building small French towns and chateaux across the countryside, even – in an early 19th-century Catholic renaissance which was supposed to “re-Christianise” northern Africa – converting mosques into churches.
The Algerian response to what today appears to be a monstrous historical anachronism varied over the decades between lassitude, collaboration and insurrection. A demonstration for independence in the Muslim-majority and nationalist town of Sétif on VE Day – when the Allies had liberated the captive countries of Europe – resulted in the killing of 103 European civilians. French government revenge was ruthless; up to 700 Muslim civilians – perhaps far more – were killed by infuriated French “colons” and in bombardment of surrounding villages by French aircraft and a naval cruiser. The world paid little attention.
But when a full-scale insurrection broke out in 1954 – at first, of course, ambushes with few French lives lost and then attacks on the French army – the sombre war of Algerian liberation was almost preordained. Beaten in that classic post-war anti-colonial battle at Dien Bien Phu, the French army, after its debacle in 1940, seemed vulnerable to the more romantic Algerian nationalists who noted France’s further humiliation at Suez in 1956.

French military police drive through Algiers during the insurrection (Keystone/Getty Images)
What the historian Alistair Horne rightly described in his magnificent history of the Algerian struggle as “a savage war of peace” took the lives of hundreds of thousands. Bombs, booby traps, massacres by government forces and National Liberation Front guerrillas in the “bled” – the countryside south of the Mediterranean – led to the brutal suppression of Muslim sectors of Algiers, the assassination, torture and execution of guerrilla leaders by French paratroopers, soldiers, Foreign Legion operatives – including German ex-Nazis – and paramilitary police. Even white French sympathisers of the Algerians were “disappeared”. Albert Camus spoke out against torture and French civil servants were sickened by the brutality employed to keep Algeria French.
De Gaulle appeared to support the white population and said as much in Algiers – “Je vous ai compris,” he told them – and then proceeded to negotiate with FLN representatives in France. Algerians had long provided the majority of France’s Muslim population and in October 1961 up to 30,000 of them staged a banned independence rally in Paris – in fact, scarcely a mile from the scene of last week’s slaughter – which was attacked by French police units who murdered, it is now acknowledged, up to 600 of the protesters.

A crowd of Algerian demonstrators outside Government House, carrying Charles de Gaulle posters during the Algerian war of independence in 1985 (Getty Images) Algerians were beaten to death in police barracks or thrown into the Seine. The police chief who supervised security operations and who apparently directed the 1961 massacre was none other than Maurice Papon – who was, almost 40 years later, convicted for crimes against humanity under Petain’s Vichy regime during the Nazi occupation.
The Algerian conflict finished in a bloodbath. White “pied noir” French colonists refused to accept France’s withdrawal, supported the secret OAS in attacking Algerian Muslims and encouraged French military units to mutiny. At one point, De Gaulle feared that French paratroopers would try to take over Paris.
When the end came, despite FLN promises to protect French citizens who chose to stay in Algeria, there were mass killings in Oran. Up to a million and a half white French men, women and children – faced with a choice of “the coffin or the suitcase” – left for France, along with thousands of loyal Algerian “harki” fighters who fought with the army but were then largely abandoned to their terrible fate by De Gaulle. Some were forced to swallow their own French military medals and thrown into mass graves.

Algerian rebels training to use weapons in 1958 (Getty Images)
But the former French colonists, who still regarded Algeria as French – along with an exhausted FLN dictatorship which took over the independent country – instituted a cold peace in which Algeria’s residual anger, in France as well as in the homeland, settled into long-standing resentment. In Algeria, the new nationalist elite embarked on a hopeless Soviet-style industrialisation of their country. Former French citizens demanded massive reparations; indeed, for decades, the French kept all the drainage maps of major Algerian cities so that the new owners of Algeria had to dig up square miles of city streets every time a water main burst.
And when the Algerian civil war of the 1980s commenced – after the Algerian army cancelled a second round of elections which Islamists were sure to win – the corrupt FLN “pouvoir” and the Muslim rebels embarked on a conflict every bit as gruesome as the Franco-Algerian war of the 1950s and 1960s. Torture, disappearances, village massacres all resumed. France discreetly supported a dictatorship whose military leaders salted away millions of dollars in Swiss banks.
Algerian Muslims returning from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan joined the Islamists in the mountains, killing some of the few remaining French citizens in Algeria. And many subsequently left to fight in the Islamist wars, in Iraq and later Syria.
Enter here the Kouachi brothers, especially Chérif, who was imprisoned for taking Frenchmen to fight against the Americans in Iraq. And the United States, with French support, now backs the FLN regime in its continuing battle against Islamists in Algeria’s deserts and mountain forests, arming a military which tortured and murdered thousands of men in the 1990s.
As an American diplomat said just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States “has much to learn” from the Algerian authorities. You can see why some Algerians went to fight for the Iraqi resistance. And found a new cause…

I am not Charlie Hebdo, By Azmi Bishara

لستُ شارلي إيبيدولستُ،
أنا ضد القتل والإرهاب في فلسطين وسورية والعراق ومصر.
أؤمن بالحق في مقاومة الاحتلال والظلم والاستبداد.
وأمقت العنصرية والطائفية.
أرتعد حين أفكر بأطفال سورية في هذا البرد القارس.
أعارض قتل المدنيين في أي مكان.
أدين قتل اي صحفي ورسام كاريكاتير مهما قال أو فعل. فالكلام يرد عليه بالكلام والرسم بالرسم، أما التشهير والتحريض على القتل فهي في نظري جنايات وقضايا للمحاكم.
لا أعتبر الاساءة الاستفزازية للأديان دليلا على تحضر أو تقدم.
أنا عربي، أنا إنسان.
لستُ شارلي إبيدو، ولا أشبهها ، ولست بحاجة أن اتشبه بها أو انضم لناديها لكي تقبلني أوروبا أو أثير إعجاب أي كان.

My Translation:

I am not Charlie Hebdo....

I am against killing and terror in Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Egypt....

I believe in the right to resist occupation, injustice and tyranny....

And I detest sectarianism and racism....

I tremble when I think of Syrian children (dying) in this record cold storm....

I oppose killing civilians anywhere....

I deplore killing any journalist or cartoonist regardless of what they have said or done...

For speech is to be responded to by speech and cartoons by cartoons....

But incitement to commit murder is a crime which in my view should be referred to courts....

I do not consider inflammatory insults to religions as a sign of civilization or progress...

I am an Arab and a human....

I am not Charlie Hebdo nor look like it.....

I have no need to be like it or to belong to its club.....

In order for Europe to accept me or to impress anyone.

Je Suis Hypocrite

MURDER IN PARIS

By Eric Margolis

Have the long-feared lone wolf attacks, possibly threatened by al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, begun? The twin massacres in Paris suggest that the Mideast’s mayhem and mass killings are again spilling over into Europe.

Paris remains in chaos. Its Peripherique ring highway is still closed, producing traffic madness across the capitol. Some 60,000 troops and police saturated Paris. As I write, there are reports of a new attack in Montpelier, in southern France.

I visited the Paris office of the French satirical magazine, “Charlie Hebdo,” while on tour for my last book. It was located on a non-descript street of the non-chic 11th arrondisement, a popular venue for youthful Parisians.

“Charlie’s” brilliant cartoonists were rapier sharp and merciless. They went looking for controversy and notoriety –and found it. Previous death threats and a past fire-bomb attack culminated on Wednesday in a commando-style assault by two masked men with AK-47’s, crying out “Charlie is dead!” Indeed, eight or more of its staff, a visitor, and two police guards were killed and others wounded.

The Muslim world and its leaders were special targets for “Charlie.” The magazine had a modest circulation. Like a right-wing Danish newspaper in recent years, the left-leaning “Charlie” provoked outrage and fury across the Muslim world.

In Islam, it is strictly forbidden to depict the Prophet of Islam. Doing so is one of the most serious provocations against Islam and a certain way to infuriate even moderate Muslims – though in no way does doing so justify violence. But many Muslim don’t think this way.

These mocking western media portrayals of the prophet were seen by many Muslims as part of a growing attack on Islam by the western world that began with George Bush’s invasion of Iraq – the Pandora’s box that has indirectly led to many of these outrages.

Shortly after the “Charlie” outrage, a French policewoman was gunned down and a Kosher food store seized by another attacker. Four people there may have died when it was stormed by French elite special police, the Gendarmerie Mobile.

The two men who attacked “Charlie” were cornered on Friday in a printing plant northwest of Paris. They chose to go down with guns blazing. The horror shows in Paris was over.

France has particularly suffered from the growing tensions between the West and Islam because it has Europe’s largest Muslim population – some 6.5 million people of North African and Black African origin as well as Europe’s largest Jewish population.

Making matters worse, most of France’s Muslims are third class citizens marginalized by French society and discriminated against, living in poverty with no prospects for their futures. They have become an angry, dangerous, alienated sub-class seething with resentment and prone to criminality. The French-born men of Algerian origin men who killed “Charlie Hebdo” came from there. The food market attacker was of black African origin.

Until recently, Islam meant little or nothing to young French of Muslim origin. Islam was the antique faith of their grandparents’ Africa. But the destruction of Iraq, Syria and Libya by the western powers released fanaticism and anarchism from out of the burning Mideast, and fury against the western powers, notably the United States and France.

To put things in context, France has emerged as one of the most active interveners in the Muslim world, conducting military operations in Libya, Mali, Chad, Ivory Coast, Central African Republic, Djibouti, Abu Dhabi, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Critics accused France of a new era of Mideast and African colonialism.

As France increasingly wages small wars in the Muslim world, Islamophobia is surging in France, propelled by continued immigration and the rapid rise of the hard right National Front.

I interviewed its founder, former paratrooper Jean-Marie Le Pen, 16 years ago. He claimed, “immigration equals invasion.” Muslims, said Le Pen, had to be expelled before taking over France.

Today, the National Front is led by his softer-spoken heir, daughter Marine. Her party is benefitting from the collapse of the French left and its much derided leader, President Francois Hollande. The National Front may actually win the next elections in 2017.

The “Charlie” massacre is a boon for all anti-Islamist and neo-Nazi parties across Europe. Islamophobia, the hallmark of most rightwing parties, is our era’s version of 1930’s anti-Semitism.

When Muslims kill, the crime become a political cause celebre that we call by the nonsense term “terrorism.” When Christians, like Norway’s Anders Breivik, massacre 77 schoolchildren, it’s just a crime by a madman. Western politicians have cynically used Islamophobia to advanced rightwing political agendas and curtail freedoms.

There has been a spate of attacks in France during recent months by individual Muslims who were either demented or crazed by ISIS internet propaganda. They, and the Paris attackers, have inflicted untold damage on their fellow Muslims.

Ominously, the leader of ISIS has called for waves of “lone wolf” attacks against Europe in revenge for its military interventions in Iraq and Syria. French security officials are deeply concerned by this threat. This week’s Paris attacks could be an opening salvo.

“The “lone wolf” attackers will be our versions of US drone attacks,” in the words of one jihadi.

France remains in shock. Those lamenting freedom of press should not forget western attacks on al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad and against Serb, Iraqi and Libyan TV.

Let us also recall the sage words about free speech by US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter: freedom of speech is not absolute. It does not permit a person to yell “fire” in a crowded movie theater.”

But nothing justified this week’s savagery in Paris.

Charlie Hebdo: 'Us or them'

The danger in blaming Muslims for the Charlie Hebdo massacre and other atrocities is that we shirk any responsibility.

Rachel Shabi

In the face of terrible deaths, at a time when we are so destructively polarised, this must be said bold and up front and repeatedly: No cartoonist deserves to be killed, ever. No innocent person shopping for kosher food deserves to be terrorised and murdered, either. All of those tragic deaths in France last week, including those of a policeman and policewoman, and numbering 17 in total, all of them are horrendous and incomprehensible.

In the face of this terrible killing spree in France, at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and then at a kosher supermarket, the overwhelming reaction is revulsion. But at the same time, there's a need to respond in other ways as well, to frame a discussion that can prevent this tragedy leading to even more tragedies, or being spun out to lash out at other innocent people. And here is the trouble with the backlash that has already begun, and the demands that have being made in the name of "solidarity".

Listening Post - The reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attack

France today stages a unity march, an attempt to help heal a wounded nation, amidst a much wider discussion of the need to stand together in the face of terror.

But within that discussion, there has been a distinct fundamentalism - for example, in the insistence that to support Charlie Hedbo's right to publish, we must reprint and replicate their work.

It's an unnecessary conflation of two things: support for the right to do something and actually doing the thing. It should, of course, be possible to express disgust at the murders fully, without having to endorse certain types of offensiveness.

And the French magazine, while broad-spectrum in its religious targets, has undeniably focused its gaze on France's Muslim minority in a racist manner, in recent years.

Hierarchies of control

There is, for media, a responsibility (the abrogation of which clearly does not invite murder) to not be tone deaf about the environments we live in: about ignored hierarchies of control; about powerless minorities and colonial heritage and migration and foreign policy; about how things feel when you are stigmatised, marginalised and scapegoated; about what it's like when you don't have a voice or much representation in the mainstream; and when the majority culture insists that equality and liberty await all those who just learn to be more like the majority.

If we don't create the space to say these things without casting those that do so as fanatical supporters of murder, then what is this limitless freedom of expression we keep insisting we are firmly on the side of?

The demand that we all respond in a mass, uniform way also makes a basic error about how unity works - which is to forget that it can only survive if there are spaces between us; solidarity and common ground take hold because of the existence of a spectrum in thought and experience, and not despite these things.

The danger in blaming Muslims for such atrocities is that we shirk any responsibility. And the harsh reality is that the French killings, just like previous terror atrocities in Britain, just like the European self-proclaimed jihadists that go and fight for the death cult ISIL, are all homegrown.

Deadly terrorism seeks to stamp out the possibility of difference - which is why, in condemning outright those atrocities in France, we need also to keep insisting on and cherishing our diversity.

Meanwhile, equally fundamentalist is the predictable casting of blame at Muslims and their "backward" culture, painting this as a "clash of civilisations" and insisting that all Muslims repeatedly apologise for the slaughters in France. The now routine insistence that all Muslims apologise for all such atrocities has spawned a spoof Muslim iCondemn phone app for such eventualities - a curious development, since we have been led to believe that Muslims don't actually have a sense of humour.

'Civilised v barbarian'

The ridiculous "civilised v barbarian" argument has been skilfully taken apart by others - its false premises, hypocrisy and misguided superiority complex rigorously deconstructed.

But there's grave danger in this sort of "us or them" thinking - not just in thephysical attacks on mosques and Muslims in France, which have already begun and which are obviously bad enough.

We - not just Muslim society, but our societies - are accountable. We, not just the fanatics that recruit to and commit mindless terror, are bound up in the causes and the context in a way that makes it not just insulting but actively counterproductive to single out Muslims as bearing sole responsibility both for the crimes and for their prevention.

If we don't own this terrible reality collectively, we won't be able to find a way out of it collectively, either - and that means we won't be able to find a way out of it at all.

Rachel Shabi is a journalist and author of Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab Lands.