The decline and fall of the Human Race is built into our genes. When
threatened, we do not hold out an Olive Branch. We strike back in
anger and fear. This has been our strength and this has been our
weakness. While some of us cry out for World Peace, our leaders are
in their places of leadership because they are among our most
aggressive people. Nations will never let down their borders.
Corporations will never turn to making peace. Religions will never
come to understand that they are not real. Our warriors, our great
leaders will use these differences to attempt to climb to the top of
the mountain. But the mountain top will never be achievable. Those
of us who recoil from the bully boy tactics of our national and
corporate and religious leaders will be swept along in the rushing
waters of self destruction.
But like the condemned prisoner, we live day to day, taking our meager
comforts where we find them.
What can we do about that which is out of our control? I see a day,
perhaps in my own lifetime, when our pensions will be seized, along
with the homes and possessions we can no longer afford. Like the
mounting millions of homeless people who travel the planet seeking
refuge, we will be taking our places in the line. And when the worm
turns and the killing of the Masters begin, we lovers of peace will be
unable to do anything other than watch.
Happy New Year!
Carl Jarvis
On 12/30/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In Retrospect: A Year of Sharpening Contradictions
Published on
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
by
Informed Comment
In Retrospect: A Year of Sharpening Contradictions
by
Juan Cole
• 0
Tweet
• 6
Share
• 0
Share
• 0
Share
• 0
Pin
• 0
• 0
Share
1 Comments
French soldiers patrol the area at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in Paris on
November 14, 2015. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
Reprint, revised
Note: The horrific murder of 12 persons and the wounding of 11 in the
attack
on the staff of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo by terrorists on January
7 this year was followed on the evening of 13 November by six coordinated
attacks, killing 130 people, including 89 at the Bataclan theater.
The first of these sanguinary attacks was inspired by al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. Until November, this group was
the
most determined and successful in attacking, and getting up attacks on the
West, include the underwear bomber of 2009 over Detroit. It was also AQAP
literature that helped convince the San Bernadino killers to shoot up their
workplace. The latter were also seeking to contact al-Qaeda in Syria
(Jabhat
al-Nusra or the Nusra Front).
The Saudi-led war on the Zaidi Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen has unleashed
AQAP, which has al-Mukalla but also now the city of Zinjibar in Abyan
province. The Houthis aren’t dangerous to the US or Europe, but AQAP is a
proven menace. The Saudis & allies have apparently invested almost nothing
in curbing Yemen’s al-Qaeda compared to their massive bombing campaigns and
troop intervention against the Houthis.
As for the Nusra Front or al-Qaeda in Syria, it is a formal ally of the
Saudi-backed Army of Conquest. Some of the 30 CIA-vetted Syrian rebel
groups
to whom the Saudis are used to provide T.O.W. anti-tank rockets, by now
mostly hard line Salafis or Muslim Brotherhood, have occasionally had
tactical field alliances with al-Qaeda. It wouldn’t be fair to say that the
US is supporting al-Qaeda in Syria (again, it is implicated in radicalizing
the San Bernadino two). But let us say that it is allied with allies of
al-Qaeda, making the same mistake as in the 1980s, when it supported Salafi
Mujahidin allied with Arab al-Qaeda against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Despite the hype about Daesh, other al-Qaeda offshoots remain very
dangerous, but AQAP and the Nusra Front are being ignored, or in the case
of
the latter, even indirectly supported by the US and its allies.
The Nov. 13 Paris attacks appear to have been inspired by Daesh (ISIS,
ISIL), though the shadowy, tiny networks of radicals in the Brussels and
Paris slums likely did not actually need much encouragement to attack the
French capital. France has been a significant player against the radical
groups in West and North Africa, and had been bombing Daesh in Iraq
alongside the US. It had intelligence of a Daesh assault on France last
summer and so started bombing al-Raqqa, the Daesh capital in northeastern
Syria, in September, in hopes of disrupting the planning process. They were
too late.
As horrid as the Paris attacks were, they were the work of a tiny, tiny
group of European Muslims. Almost all European Muslims oppose such violence
(3/5s of French Muslims are secular-minded and not religious). European
Muslims until 2015 were responsible for relatively little terrorism in
Europe compared to separatist groups or the white supremacist far right. In
2011 Anders Breivik, a far right Islamophobe, killed 77 people in Norway,
far outstripping the per capita toll taken by the Nov. 13 gang in Paris.
Part of the backlash to the two big Paris strikes, by AQAP and Daesh, in
2015 was the rise of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, which
demonizes
Muslims in general, speaking of excluding them from the United States and
closing mosques. Trump and his followers are falling for the trick of
“sharpening contradictions,” a key technique of insurgencies, as I
explained
after Charlie Hebdo:
[These attacks] were in my view a strategic strike, aiming at polarizing
the
French and European public.
The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its recruitment
pool
is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims
are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam. France is a
country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But
in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested
in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage
population in the world (ex-Soviet ethnic Muslims often also have low rates
of belief and observance). Many Muslim immigrants in the post-war period to
France came as laborers and were not literate people, and their
grandchildren are rather distant from Middle Eastern fundamentalism,
pursuing urban cosmopolitan culture such as rap and rai. In Paris, where
Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority
reject violence and say they are loyal to France.
Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of
disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic
Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a
common
political identity around grievance against discrimination.
This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th
century. Decades ago I read an account by the philosopher Karl Popper of
how
he flirted with Marxism for about 6 months in 1919 when he was auditing
classes at the University of Vienna. He left the group in disgust when he
discovered that they were attempting to use false flag operations to
provoke
militant confrontations. In one of them police killed 8 socialist youth at
Hörlgasse on 15 June 1919. For the unscrupulous among Bolsheviks–who would
later be Stalinists– the fact that most students and workers don’t want to
overthrow the business class is inconvenient, and so it seemed desirable to
some of them to “sharpen the contradictions” between labor and capital.
The operatives who carried out this attack exhibit signs of professional
training. They spoke unaccented French, and so certainly know that they are
playing into the hands of Marine LePen and the Islamophobic French Right
wing. They may have been French, but they appear to have been battle
hardened. This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the
defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European
society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda
recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in
the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call
themselves by this anagram term deriving from wordplay involving scrambling
of letters). Ironically, there are reports that one of the two policemen
they killed was a Muslim.
Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, then led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, deployed this
sort of polarization strategy successfully in Iraq, constantly attacking
Shiites and their holy symbols, and provoking the ethnic cleansing of a
million Sunnis from Baghdad. The polarization proceeded, with the help of
various incarnations of Daesh (Arabic for ISIL or ISIS, which descends from
al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia). And in the end, the brutal and genocidal strategy
worked, such that Daesh was able to encompass all of Sunni Arab Iraq, which
had suffered so many Shiite reprisals that they sought the umbrella of the
very group that had deliberately and systematically provoked the Shiites.
“Sharpening the contradictions” is the strategy of sociopaths and
totalitarians, aimed at unmooring people from their ordinary insouciance
and
preying on them, mobilizing their energies and wealth for the perverted
purposes of a self-styled great leader.
The only effective response to this manipulative strategy (as Grand
Ayatollah Ali Sistani tried to tell the Iraqi Shiites a decade ago) is to
resist the impulse to blame an entire group for the actions of a few and to
refuse to carry out identity-politics reprisals.
For those who require unrelated people to take responsibility for those who
claim to be their co-religionists (not a demand ever made of Christians),
the al-Azhar Seminary, seat of Sunni Muslim learning and fatwas, condemned
the attack, as did the Arab League that comprises 22 Muslim-majority
states.
We have a model for response to terrorist provocation and attempts at
sharpening the contradictions. It is Norway after Anders Behring Breivik
committed mass murder of Norwegian leftists for being soft on Islam. The
Norwegian government launched no war on terror. They tried Breivik in court
as a common criminal. They remained committed to their admirable modern
Norwegian values.
Most of France will also remain committed to French values of the Rights of
Man, which they invented. But an insular and hateful minority will take
advantage of this deliberately polarizing atrocity to push their own
agenda.
Europe’s future depends on whether the Marine LePens are allowed to become
mainstream. Extremism thrives on other people’s extremism, and is
inexorably
defeated by tolerance.
Let me conclude by offering my profound condolences to the families,
friends
and fans of our murdered colleagues at Charlie Hebdo, including Stephane
Charbonnier, Bernard Maris, and cartoonists Georges Wolinski Jean Cabut,
aka
Cabu, and Berbard Verlhac (Tignous)– and all the others. As Charbonnier,
known as Charb, said, “I prefer to die standing than to live on my knees.”.
© 2014 Juan Cole
Juan Cole
Skip to main content
//
• DONATE
• SIGN UP FOR NEWSLETTER
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
• Home
• World
• U.S.
• Canada
• Climate
• War & Peace
• Economy
• Rights
• Solutions
• Sanders Trounces Trump
• Election 2016
• Renewable Future
• Black Lives Matter
In Retrospect: A Year of Sharpening Contradictions
Published on
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
by
Informed Comment
In Retrospect: A Year of Sharpening Contradictions
by
Juan Cole
• 1 Comments
•
• French soldiers patrol the area at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in
Paris on November 14, 2015. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
• Reprint, revised
• Note: The horrific murder of 12 persons and the wounding of 11 in
the attack on the staff of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo by terrorists
on January 7 this year was followed on the evening of 13 November by six
coordinated attacks, killing 130 people, including 89 at the Bataclan
theater.
• The first of these sanguinary attacks was inspired by al-Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. Until November, this group
was
the most determined and successful in attacking, and getting up attacks on
the West, include the underwear bomber of 2009 over Detroit. It was also
AQAP literature that helped convince the San Bernadino killers to shoot up
their workplace. The latter were also seeking to contact al-Qaeda in Syria
(Jabhat al-Nusra or the Nusra Front).
• The Saudi-led war on the Zaidi Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen has
unleashed AQAP, which has al-Mukalla but also now the city of Zinjibar in
Abyan province. The Houthis aren’t dangerous to the US or Europe, but AQAP
is a proven menace. The Saudis & allies have apparently invested almost
nothing in curbing Yemen’s al-Qaeda compared to their massive bombing
campaigns and troop intervention against the Houthis.
http://www.commondreams.org/donatehttp://www.commondreams.org/donate
As for the Nusra Front or al-Qaeda in Syria, it is a formal ally of the
Saudi-backed Army of Conquest. Some of the 30 CIA-vetted Syrian rebel
groups
to whom the Saudis are used to provide T.O.W. anti-tank rockets, by now
mostly hard line Salafis or Muslim Brotherhood, have occasionally had
tactical field alliances with al-Qaeda. It wouldn’t be fair to say that the
US is supporting al-Qaeda in Syria (again, it is implicated in radicalizing
the San Bernadino two). But let us say that it is allied with allies of
al-Qaeda, making the same mistake as in the 1980s, when it supported Salafi
Mujahidin allied with Arab al-Qaeda against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Despite the hype about Daesh, other al-Qaeda offshoots remain very
dangerous, but AQAP and the Nusra Front are being ignored, or in the case
of
the latter, even indirectly supported by the US and its allies.
The Nov. 13 Paris attacks appear to have been inspired by Daesh (ISIS,
ISIL), though the shadowy, tiny networks of radicals in the Brussels and
Paris slums likely did not actually need much encouragement to attack the
French capital. France has been a significant player against the radical
groups in West and North Africa, and had been bombing Daesh in Iraq
alongside the US. It had intelligence of a Daesh assault on France last
summer and so started bombing al-Raqqa, the Daesh capital in northeastern
Syria, in September, in hopes of disrupting the planning process. They were
too late.
As horrid as the Paris attacks were, they were the work of a tiny, tiny
group of European Muslims. Almost all European Muslims oppose such violence
(3/5s of French Muslims are secular-minded and not religious). European
Muslims until 2015 were responsible for relatively little terrorism in
Europe compared to separatist groups or the white supremacist far right. In
2011 Anders Breivik, a far right Islamophobe, killed 77 people in Norway,
far outstripping the per capita toll taken by the Nov. 13 gang in Paris.
Part of the backlash to the two big Paris strikes, by AQAP and Daesh, in
2015 was the rise of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, which
demonizes
Muslims in general, speaking of excluding them from the United States and
closing mosques. Trump and his followers are falling for the trick of
“sharpening contradictions,” a key technique of insurgencies, as I
explained
after Charlie Hebdo:
[These attacks] were in my view a strategic strike, aiming at polarizing
the
French and European public.
The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its recruitment
pool
is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims
are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam. France is a
country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But
in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested
in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage
population in the world (ex-Soviet ethnic Muslims often also have low rates
of belief and observance). Many Muslim immigrants in the post-war period to
France came as laborers and were not literate people, and their
grandchildren are rather distant from Middle Eastern fundamentalism,
pursuing urban cosmopolitan culture such as rap and rai. In Paris, where
Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority
reject violence and say they are loyal to France.
Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of
disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic
Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a
common
political identity around grievance against discrimination.
This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th
century. Decades ago I read an account by the philosopher Karl Popper of
how
he flirted with Marxism for about 6 months in 1919 when he was auditing
classes at the University of Vienna. He left the group in disgust when he
discovered that they were attempting to use false flag operations to
provoke
militant confrontations. In one of them police killed 8 socialist youth at
Hörlgasse on 15 June 1919. For the unscrupulous among Bolsheviks–who would
later be Stalinists– the fact that most students and workers don’t want to
overthrow the business class is inconvenient, and so it seemed desirable to
some of them to “sharpen the contradictions” between labor and capital.
The operatives who carried out this attack exhibit signs of professional
training. They spoke unaccented French, and so certainly know that they are
playing into the hands of Marine LePen and the Islamophobic French Right
wing. They may have been French, but they appear to have been battle
hardened. This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the
defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European
society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda
recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in
the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call
themselves by this anagram term deriving from wordplay involving scrambling
of letters). Ironically, there are reports that one of the two policemen
they killed was a Muslim.
Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, then led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, deployed this
sort of polarization strategy successfully in Iraq, constantly attacking
Shiites and their holy symbols, and provoking the ethnic cleansing of a
million Sunnis from Baghdad. The polarization proceeded, with the help of
various incarnations of Daesh (Arabic for ISIL or ISIS, which descends from
al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia). And in the end, the brutal and genocidal strategy
worked, such that Daesh was able to encompass all of Sunni Arab Iraq, which
had suffered so many Shiite reprisals that they sought the umbrella of the
very group that had deliberately and systematically provoked the Shiites.
“Sharpening the contradictions” is the strategy of sociopaths and
totalitarians, aimed at unmooring people from their ordinary insouciance
and
preying on them, mobilizing their energies and wealth for the perverted
purposes of a self-styled great leader.
The only effective response to this manipulative strategy (as Grand
Ayatollah Ali Sistani tried to tell the Iraqi Shiites a decade ago) is to
resist the impulse to blame an entire group for the actions of a few and to
refuse to carry out identity-politics reprisals.
For those who require unrelated people to take responsibility for those who
claim to be their co-religionists (not a demand ever made of Christians),
the al-Azhar Seminary, seat of Sunni Muslim learning and fatwas, condemned
the attack, as did the Arab League that comprises 22 Muslim-majority
states.
We have a model for response to terrorist provocation and attempts at
sharpening the contradictions. It is Norway after Anders Behring Breivik
committed mass murder of Norwegian leftists for being soft on Islam. The
Norwegian government launched no war on terror. They tried Breivik in court
as a common criminal. They remained committed to their admirable modern
Norwegian values.
Most of France will also remain committed to French values of the Rights of
Man, which they invented. But an insular and hateful minority will take
advantage of this deliberately polarizing atrocity to push their own
agenda.
Europe’s future depends on whether the Marine LePens are allowed to become
mainstream. Extremism thrives on other people’s extremism, and is
inexorably
defeated by tolerance.
Let me conclude by offering my profound condolences to the families,
friends
and fans of our murdered colleagues at Charlie Hebdo, including Stephane
Charbonnier, Bernard Maris, and cartoonists Georges Wolinski Jean Cabut,
aka
Cabu, and Berbard Verlhac (Tignous)– and all the others. As Charbonnier,
known as Charb, said, “I prefer to die standing than to live on my knees.”.
© 2014 Juan Cole
/author/juan-cole
