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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 79/No. 43 November 30, 2015
(lead article)
Paris, Washington use killings
in France to push Mideast war
Step up attack on rights after Islamic State brutality
Sipa via Ap images
French fighter planes during November airstrike on Islamic State bases
in Raqqa, Syria. U.S., French and Russian governments are using Islamic
State terror attacks to escalate war moves.
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
AND JOHN STUDER
“France is at war,” President Francois Hollande said to a rare joint
session of the French Parliament at the Palace of Versailles Nov. 16. He
spoke in response to the indiscriminate killings in Paris carried out
three days earlier by agents of the reactionary Islamic State.
Hollande laid out a program of war measures in Syria; a call for
Washington and Moscow to subordinate their political differences and
join in leading a “grand” and “single coalition” against the Islamists;
and for a series of attacks on political rights and the rights of Arabs
and Muslims in France. He got a standing ovation from legislators of all
political parties, who joined him in singing the national anthem.
Rulers in Washington, London and other imperialist capitals joined in
denouncing the assaults and proposing new attacks on workers’ rights in
their own countries.
Pointing to Islamic State’s responsibility for blowing up a planeload of
Russian tourists in Egypt Oct. 31, Moscow joined France in bombing
Raqqa, the de facto capital of the IS “caliphate” in Syria, beginning
Nov. 16.
IS suicide bombers stormed the Bataclan concert hall in Paris Nov. 13,
gunning down 89 people attending a performance by U.S. rock band Eagles
of Death Metal. Others wearing bomb belts detonated themselves outside
Stade de France soccer stadium where the French and German national
teams were playing. Assassination squads fired point blank into several
nearby restaurants and bars. IS says eight of its members were involved.
The anti-working-class jihadists killed more than 130 people, wounding
over 350.
Islamic State issued a statement celebrating their assault as “a blessed
battle.” They said they attacked the soccer match because the teams
represents “crusader nations” and workers and youth at the Bataclan were
“pagans gathered for a concert of prostitution and vice.”
The brutal IS terror attacks, the imperialists’ steps to take advantage
of them to push for wider war and moves to slash political rights are
blows to the working class.
While many workers are drawn into the patriotic orgy whipped up by the
propertied French rulers, some are opposed. “I’m worried that a whole
community is going to get blamed for this,” Farid Borsali, 46, an auto
assembly worker and general secretary of the CGT union at the Peugeot
plant in Poissy outside Paris, told the Militant. “We need to try to
unite workers, not let ourselves be divided.”
The overwhelming majority of Muslims oppose the Islamic State attacks.
This is “bad for the people who died and bad for my religion, Islam,”
said Samir Amer, 41, who was born in Morocco and also works at the auto
plant. “Now people who see me going to the mosque — and I have a beard —
are going to think I’m like the people who did this.”
Seven of the attackers were killed — six by blowing themselves up, one
in a shootout with police — and a cross-border manhunt is on in France,
Belgium and beyond.
This was the second deadly terror assault in Paris this year. In
January, two Islamist thugs shot up the offices of satirical magazine
Charlie Hebdo, killing 13 cartoonists and others, and another killed
four shoppers in the Hyper Cacher kosher market in a Jewish district.
While President Barack Obama joined French officials in denouncing the
killings, he chose not to adjust his schedule to visit Paris. He
stressed he continues to oppose deploying more U.S. ground troops in
Syria and Iraq, saying instead Washington’s military would step up bombing.
There are growing calls among Republicans and Democrats alike for a more
robust U.S. military response.
Obama should shift from a “consistently underpowered” military course
“by deploying more Special Operations forces” to work with Arabs and
Kurds moving to take IS-controlled Raqqa, to join with Iraqi and Kurdish
forces to push toward Mosul in Iraq, and to directly supply more
weapons, the Washington Post said Nov. 16.
Ignored amidst imperialist leaders rushing to profess solidarity with
France’s rulers is the loss of 44 lives in double suicide-bombing
attacks targeting Arabs and Muslims in Beirut, Lebanon, the day before
the Paris attack.
Hollande declares state of emergency
Hours after the assault Hollande declared a state of emergency, allowing
police to search homes without a warrant, impose curfews and place
anyone authorities consider “dangerous” under house arrest. Some 1,500
French troops were deployed in Paris. Street demonstrations were banned
until at the earliest Nov. 19.
Hollande, leader of the Socialist Party government, announced he was
reasserting French control over its borders, tossing aside free movement
between countries in Europe established by the European Union.
France has one of the largest Arab and Muslim populations in Europe, a
product of the workings of its colonial empire and imperialist wars.
During the 1950s and early ’60s, French troops fought a bloody but
unsuccessful war against a popular revolution in Algeria, and conducted
fierce repression on the Algerian community in France.
Syria’s borders were drawn in secret negotiations for control over the
region between Paris and London a century ago after the overthrow of the
Ottoman Empire. France got what became Syria and Lebanon, while the U.K.
got Iraq, Jordan and Palestine.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Nov. 16 that 23 people
had been arrested in 168 raids overnight and another 104 put under house
arrest. “This is just the beginning,” he added. Dozens of Belgian police
and armed commandos surrounded houses in the overwhelmingly Arab
district of Molenbeek in Brussels the same day.
Some 30,000 cops imposed border controls at the country’s 285 road,
rail, sea and air checkpoints in an operation authorities say will last
at least through the conclusion of the U.N.-sponsored climate conference
scheduled to open in Paris Nov. 30.
French officials have not yet said whether they will ban a Nov. 29
demonstration called by trade union and other groups to press for
stronger protection of the environment.
Government figures called for stepped-up spying on mosques and Arab
communities and discussed new restrictions on the 10,000 or so people in
French spy agencies’ “S files.”
Rulers across Europe seized on the developments in France to shift the
debate on how to handle the tens of thousands of refugees streaming in
from the deepening war and social disaster in Syria.
While the majority of the Islamic State murderers were either French
citizens or residents of Belgium, there is evidence that one of them
entered Europe by joining refugees crossing into Greece.
Markus Söder, the Bavarian finance minister and member of the Christian
Social Union, one of the parties in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition
government, called for federal police to impose controls on all border
crossings with Austria. If not, he threatened, Bavaria would take
matters into its own hands.
Demands for a halt to acceptance of Syrian refugees in the U.S. swelled
as well. Within a few days of the attacks in Paris, the majority of
state governors, including both Democrats and Republicans, called for
shutting the program down.
In Washington, New York and other cities authorities beefed up police
patrols, increasing inspections of buses, trains and passengers’ bags.
On the CBS news program “Face the Nation” Nov. 15 New York City Police
Commissioner William Bratton described the Paris attacks as a “game
changer” for the cops.
With 2,000 police already deployed in special counterterrorism units,
the city is fielding a new antiterror squad, Bratton and Mayor Bill de
Blasio said the next day. The first assignment for the 560-member
Critical Response Command, armed with heavy equipment, is to stake out
the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square.
CIA Director John Brennan said restrictions on data collection and
electronic spying have made it “much more challenging” to track
potential terrorists. “I do hope this will be a wake-up call,” he said
Nov. 16.
The vast majority of the victims of Islamic State murder, torture and
oppression are Arabs and Muslims in IS-controlled areas. The reactionary
outfit seized parts of western Iraq and Syria during the nearly
five-year-long civil war in Syria. Paving the way for its emergence was
the political exhaustion of the bourgeois nationalist forces that arose
throughout the Mideast after World War II, combined with betrayals of
worker and peasant struggles by Stalinist parties in the region. The
Arab Baath Socialist Party, led since 1970 by Hafez al-Assad and since
2000 by his son Bashar al-Assad, imposed a brutal capitalist regime,
backed by Moscow.
Origins of Islamic State
In response to growing protests in 2011 demanding an end to Assad’s
dictatorial rule, the regime cracked down with arrests, bombings,
starvation sieges and use of chemical weapons. Since then some 250,000
people have been killed and more than 11 million — half the country’s
population — have been driven from their homes.
Islamic State stepped into this vacuum, seizing territory and imposing a
bloody rule wherever they took control.
Washington views IS as an obstacle to its efforts to enforce a semblance
of stability in the region and protect U.S. imperialist interests.
Since August 2014 a U.S.-led coalition has conducted some 8,000
airstrikes — the vast majority by Washington — against Islamic State in
Iraq and Syria.
The Institute for the Study of War, which advocates stronger U.S.
intervention in Syria, recently called for loosening the rules of
engagement, not worrying so much about killing civilians.
Moscow began airstrikes in Syria at the end of September, purportedly
against Islamic State but instead concentrating its bombings to prop up
Assad’s tattered regime, targeting opposition groups in western Syria
fighting to end his rule.
France is now moving to play a larger role, pressing the Obama
administration to work with Moscow to concentrate their fire against
Islamic State.
Derek Jeffers in Paris contributed to this article.
Related articles:
Socialist Workers Party demands Washington get troops, warplanes out of
the Middle East
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