I was going to send some sort of New Years greeting later today, if I could
have figured out what to write that would not have sounded too pessimistic.
But all I kept thinking was that probably 2016 would be worse than 2015 and
that I hope people can find some joy and pleasure in their lives. This post
sounds as if Chris Hedges wrote it so in comparison, mine is mild, I guess.
There are still a lot of people around with fighting spirit and if they keep
doing what they're doing, they will, I hope, continue to slow our march to
death and devastation.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2015 11:02 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: In Retrospect: A Year of Sharpening
Contradictions
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 ontheater.
Wednesday, December 30, 2015 by Informed Comment In Retrospect: A Year
of Sharpening Contradictions by Juan Cole
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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
The first of these sanguinary attacks was inspired by al-Qaeda in theParis.
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 arent dangerous to the US or Europe,
but AQAP is a proven menace. The Saudis & allies have apparently
invested almost nothing in curbing Yemens 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 wouldnt
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
Part of the backlash to the two big Paris strikes, by AQAP and Daesh,deliberately and systematically provoked the Shiites.
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 Bolshevikswho would later be Stalinists the fact
that most students and workers dont 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
Sharpening the contradictions is the strategy of sociopaths andParis.
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.
Europes future depends on whether the Marine LePens are allowed to
become mainstream. Extremism thrives on other peoples 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
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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 arent dangerous to the US or Europe,
but AQAP is a proven menace. The Saudis & allies have apparently
invested almost nothing in curbing Yemens 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 wouldnt
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
Part of the backlash to the two big Paris strikes, by AQAP and Daesh,deliberately and systematically provoked the Shiites.
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 Bolshevikswho would later be Stalinists the fact
that most students and workers dont 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
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.
Europes future depends on whether the Marine LePens are allowed to
become mainstream. Extremism thrives on other peoples 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
