Lessons from the Paris attack

The initial shock from the Charlie Hebdo killings, which produced the knee-jerk ‘I am Charlie’ response in the west, has evolved into a less one-sided reaction. Many people are asking critical questions about the cartoons lampooning Islam, and interrogating the assertion: ‘You’re either with Charlie Hebdo, or with the terrorists’, which repeats George W Bush’s reaction to 9/11.
Many are questioning the argument that the attack wasn’t calculated murder, or akin to other recent terrorist acts; it was an assault on ‘western values’, ‘European freedom’, ‘democracy itself’; the targets could have been ‘you and me’; that’s why all freedom-lovers must declare: ‘I am Charlie’.
This is utter nonsense. The Algerian-French Kouachi brothers executed a well-planned operation, called out the names of the weekly’s cartoonists and killed them for what they self-avowedly had drawn or written. Al-Qaeda has since said it planned the attack.
The cartoonists’ murder was meant to smother free speech and must be unequivocally condemned. But it’s impossible to deny that most of the cartoons pertaining to Islam and Muslims which recently appeared in Charlie Hebdo were calculated to insult and provoke.
Defending free speech of course means defending speech you don’t agree with. But those who demanded that the Fourth Estate publish the Charlie cartoons as a litmus test of its commitment to freedom are hypocritical. They have every right to show solidarity with the victims by reposting the cartoons, but they must respect the right of others not to do so because they are aesthetically revolting, bigoted or incendiary.
Charlie Hebdo’s defenders say it has a history of lampooning all religions, including Christianity (although rarely Judaism), that fiercely irreverent satire is part of the French tradition, and that many Charlie cartoonists came from the secular Left. This defence isn’t very convincing although France does have a tradition of irreverence towards authority – as anyone acquainted with French society, culture and the media would know.
Many Charlie cartoonists started on the Left but evolved rightwards. They justified recent western interventions in the Arab world, without lampooning the European leaders complicit in them, who knowingly practised ‘extraordinary rendition’ of terror suspects to US authorities for torture.
In recent years, Charlie’s vitriol has been reserved overwhelmingly for Islam. This shows poor judgement in a situation where Muslims are a stigmatised minority which faces great discrimination in relation to the powerful White Christian majority.
A large number of French-speaking second-generation youth of Arab origin have been radicalised by the excesses of the ‘war on terror’, including the barbarity of Abu Ghraib. The New York Times has just reported at length on how the marijuana-smoking Kouachi brothers were first radicalised by Abu Ghraib, and later by the western interventions in Syria and Libya, which left these societies worse off than earlier.
This doesn’t justify or condone the Charlie attack, but puts it in context. The conflict today is not between Islam and democracy, so much as between two rival ideologies/forces contending for global domination: the American-led ‘war on terror’ in democracy’s name, and second, terror in the name of Islam.
The west has the upper hand here. In Europe, the anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic Far Right is growing fast, as is starkly evident in France, Germany and Britain. Under threat is not the freedom of expression of the majority, but of the religious minorities: they see #KillAllMuslims trending on Twitter and Islamophobia peddled as ‘European values’.
It’s time western Europe, which sees itself as secularism’s birthplace and its highest embodiment, asked itself some questions about how much separation it has really achieved between religion and politics. A few examples should suffice. In England, voluntary-aided schools run by religious communities get 85 percent of their funding from the state. About 6,700 Church-run schools get such finding, but fewer than 10 Muslim-run schools do. In ‘strictly secular’ France, one-fifth of all students go to religious community-run (mainly Catholic) schools, four-fifths of whose funding comes from the state.
In Germany, public funding is available to Christian schools and, since the war, to Jewish schools. But in France and Germany, no Muslim-run school is funded by the state.
Again, all the faith-related national holidays in western Europe are the holy days of one religion, Christianity. In most old European universities, the nomenclature of academic terms is derived from Christian beliefs/practices.
Many European countries don’t allow Muslims to build mosques in convenient locations or wear headscarves. Some don’t permit ritual (halal) slaughtering. In Denmark, Muslims find it difficult to bury their dead since the Lutheran Church owns all the cemeteries. Muslims must either send their dead back to their ‘home countries’ or negotiate their burial with local pastors in lands formerly reserved for non-believers.
There exists a long-standing social compact in western Europe, based on Christian culture. Jews, held in contempt for centuries, have been accommodated into it since the war, but Muslims are excluded.
Take the ghettoised Muslim-majority suburbs of Paris, where school-dropout rates are 36 percent and youth unemployment is 40 percent, four times the national average. Surveys show that people living here have a much poorer chance of landing jobs than inner-city dwellers with Christian names, regardless of qualification, merit or experience.
Many Europeans are unaware of this discrimination. Worse, they think Muslims are overrunning their societies. Recently, Fox-TV quoted an ‘expert’ saying that Birmingham (UK) has become a ‘no-go’ area for non-Muslims. In reality, only 22 percent of its population is Muslim.
Dangerous scare-mongering apart, many Europeans grossly overestimate the proportion of Muslims in their populations, says a Pew-Bertelsmann Foundation survey, quoted in The Economist (www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/01/daily-chart-2).
Muslims account for 7.5 percent of the French population, western Europe’s largest share. But in popular perception, they account for 31 percent. The respective percentages are 5 and 21 for Britain, 6 and 19 for Germany, and 2 and 16 for Spain. This disconnect indicates serious paranoia.
More frightening, a majority of French, (East) German, Spanish, Swedish and Swiss people believe that ‘Islam is not compatible with the west’. The percentage in France is 56; and in Britain only slightly lower, at 47. In Spain, it’s an alarming 65.
These are the same societies which encouraged immigration in the past because their populations were shrinking or getting too old to work. In most, the immigrants are ‘here’ (in Europe) because the Europeans had colonies ‘there’.
Many European countries, including France, criminalise Holocaust denial, but don’t punish celebration or whitewashing of their own brutal record as colonisers who killed more than the six million Jews that Hitler butchered, unforgiveable as that was.
These double standards should be candidly discussed to come to terms with the past, and deal wisely with the present and future. But these issues are erased from public debate whenever the question of religious extremism arises with episodes like Charlie Hebdo.
The usual response is to assert the superiority of ‘western values’ and Europe’s ‘secular culture”, or resort to draconian measures like the Patriot Act.
This vicious cycle must end. Instead of marching with the likes of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, western leaders and the public must reflect on how to break the cycle through non-discrimination and justice for all.
The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and rights activist based in Delhi.
Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in