Tariq Ali's Blog, page 6

After Paris

In the week following the atrocities, a wave of moral hysteria swept France. ‘Je suis Charlie’ became almost obligatory. The Hollande/Valls message was simple: either you were for the magazine or for the terrorists. Quite a few, now as in 2001, were for neither. These included Henri Roussel, the 80-year-old founder of Hara-Kiri, the title under which Charlie Hebdo was published before it was forced into a name change – it was banned by the French government for insulting the corpse of Charles de Gaulle. In a remarkable essay published in the Nouvel Observateur Roussel made two essential points. The first concerned French foreign policy:

I don’t much like it when a head of state speaks of the dead as heroes. It usually happens because citizens have been sent to war and not come back, which is rather the case with the victims of the attack on Charlie Hebdo. The attack is part of a war declared on France, but can also be seen in the light of the wars France has got itself involved in: conflicts where its participation isn’t called for, where worse massacres than that at Charlie Hebdo take place every day, several times a day, where our bombardments pile death on death in the hope of saving potentates who feel threatened and are no better than those who threaten them … If Obama had not held Hollande back, he would have gone after Assad in Syria, just as Sarkozy went after Gaddafi in Libya … with the result we’re familiar with.

The second was personal. Roussel knew all the victims well and this made him both angry and sorrowful. He denounced Charb for his recklessness:

He was the boss. Why did he need to drag the whole team into it? In the first attack on Charlie Hebdo in November 2011, the offices were torched after an issue was called ‘Charia Hebdo’. I quote what I said … in the Obs: ‘I think we’re ignorant and imbeciles who have taken a pointless risk. That’s all. We think we’re invulnerable. For years, decades even, we do provocative things and then one day the provocation comes back at us. It didn’t need to be done.’

It didn’t need to be done, but Charb did it again. A year later, in September 2012, after a provocation that put France’s ambassadors in Muslim countries in a state of siege … I asked Charb in the pages of the Obs: ‘To show, with the caption “Muhammed: A Star is Born”, a naked Muhammed praying, seen from behind, balls dangling and prick dripping, in black and white but with a yellow star on his anus – whatever way you look at it, how is this funny?’

I was sick of it. Charb told a journalist from Le Monde: ‘I have no kids, no wife, I prefer to die on my feet than to live on my knees.’ Cavanna, who feared death, wrote when he was Charb’s age: ‘Rather red than dead.’?? The reds are no longer red, the dead are still dead. Everyone has seen Charb’s last cartoon: ‘Still no attacks in France?’ And the jihadist in the cartoon, armed like the one who killed Charb, Tignous, Cabu, Honoré and the others, replies: ‘Wait! We’ve got until the end of January for New Year’s greetings …’ Have you seen Wolinski’s last cartoon? It ends: ‘I dream of returning to Cuba to drink rum, smoke a cigar and dance with the beautiful Cuban girls.’

Charb who preferred to die and Wolin who preferred to live. I blame you, Charb. Peace on your soul.

Roussel’s was a lonely voice and in response to complaints, including one from the publisher of Charlie Hebdo, the editor of Nouvel Observateur replied that after serious discussion it had been agreed that freedom of speech was best preserved by not denying it to those who disagreed with the mainstream narrative. Elsewhere three publishers who refused to display ‘Je suis Charlie’ on their websites were subjected to persistent questioning and bullying. It was reminiscent of the post 9/11 mood in this country (remember Mary Beard?), leave alone the States.

And what of the huge Sunday crowd convened by the president at the place de la République? The photo-op brigade at the front turned into a disaster when Netanyahu, waving triumphantly to onlookers, crashed his way to the front. The dignitaries he was so keen to join weren’t all that impressive: the puppet president of Mali; Angela Merkel, the Mother of Europe (her hands held in a way that suggested a mysterious Masonic signal); Donald Tusk, the Polish president of the Council of Europe. And, hurriedly summoned at the last minute to balance the presence of the Israeli leader, there was Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO leader, holding hands with the king of Jordan (both are Israeli supplicants). Sarkozy, placed in the fourth row, quickly began his own long march to the front, but by the time he got there the cameras had disappeared and the celebs soon followed suit. How many turned up in all? A million was the official figure. Eric Hazan, the waspish historian of Paris, used different criteria:

It was as big as the one on 28 April 1944, when Marshal Pétain attended the funeral service for the victims of Allied bombings at the Hôtel de Ville. War fever apart (the shouts of ‘To Berlin!’ in 1914), the great moments of unanimity have taken place at public funerals – like those of Victor Hugo, Pierre Overney, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Edith Piaf. Sunday’s demonstration is of the same order, the crowd is moved by sentiment and satisfied by coming together to express a vague desire for unity and reconciliation. As if the strength of the crowd was enough to mitigate the lack of a society that takes our common well-being as its goal.

Slowly, a more critical France is beginning to speak up. An opinion poll two days after the big march revealed a divided country: 57 per cent were ‘Je suis Charlie’s, but 42 per cent were opposed to hurting the feelings of minorities. Some of the latter might have been thinking of the blanket publicity for Michel Houellebecq and his new novel, Soumission, on TV and in print in the week preceding the attack on the magazine. Those with longer memories might have recalled Houellebecq’s statement in 2001, which laid the basis for the title of his latest offering: ‘Reading the Quran is a disgusting experience. Ever since Islam’s birth it has been distinguished by its desire to make the world submit to itself. Submission is its very nature.’ Replace the Quran with the Old Testament and Islam with Judaism and you would be locked up in France today, as some have been, including a 16-year-old schoolboy who parodied Charlie Hebdo. A satirical magazine, it appears, cannot be satirised. The double standards prevailing in France were made clear yet again when the Jewish Defence League, modelled on its US counterpart, was allowed to organise a demonstration under a banner – IMMIGRATION: REFERENDUM – which aligned it firmly with the extreme right in France and the rest of Europe.

In the Muslim world responses were varied. Even as Niger’s president, Mahamadou Issoufou, was marching in Paris, 45 Christian churches in his country were being torched and pastors’ homes targeted – the Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, was born in Niger and is an influential presence there, if only on video. Public funerals for the slain terrorists were held in Pakistan and Turkey (even though Islam expressly forbids funerals without a body). Two distinct narratives competed in Turkey. The president and his prime minister, just back from the Paris march, entered the realm of conspiracy satire by implying that the terrorist attack had been carried out by the French themselves, possibly aided by Mossad. The mayor of Istanbul backed them. These are Nato’s favourite Islamists and we can only speculate as to whether the leash will be shortened soon. The Turkish republican followers of Kemal Atatürk supported Charlie Hebdo unconditionally. Their daily paper, Cumhuriyet, published four pages from the new issue of Charlie Hebdo as an insert, but not the cover or drawings portraying the Prophet Muhammed. However two columnists on the paper reproduced the cover beside their pieces, enraging the government and its followers. Vans carrying the paper to distribution outlets were seized and Erdo?an also used the crisis as an excuse to crack down on local dissidents who had been rubbishing him on various websites.

Elsewhere the Sunni-Shia divide was highlighted when Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, used a TV address marking the anniversary of the prophet’s birth to denounce extremists within Islam (takfiris) who behead and slaughter their captives, claiming that their actions were much more dangerous for Islam than for anyone else. He had no such compunctions when the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa sentencing Salman Rushdie to death, and was still going on about it in 2006 on al-Jazeera. ‘If the faithful had carried out Ayatollah Khomeini’s injunction and killed the apostate Rushdie,’ he said on that occasion, ‘the Danish newspaper editor would never have dared to publish these cartoons.’ A naive view, but times have changed and the battle with Sunni extremism is now at its peak.

On the question of images there has always been a debate within Islam. The Quran itself contains warnings against the worship of idols and graven images, but this is taken straight from the Abrahamic tradition and the Old Testament. It’s a stricture on forms of worship. After all, images of the prophet were embossed on early Muslim coins to replace Byzantine and Persian potentates. A number of paintings by Muslim artists in the late medieval period depict the prophet with loving care. The Shia tradition has always ignored the supposed ban on images and portraits of Shia imams have never been forbidden. All the different schools of Sunni jurisprudence don’t agree on the question. It has only become a big issue since Saudi money pushed Wahhabi clerics onto the world stage to fight communism during the Cold War (with the total backing of Washington). Wahhabi literalism misinterprets the Quran and its hostility to images led the Saudi government to destroy the graves in Mecca of the prophet, his companions and his wives. There were no protests except by architects and historians who denounced the vandalism. One can only imagine the response in the world of Islam had the destruction of the graves been carried out, deliberately or accidentally, by a Western power.

We now know that the assault on Charlie Hebdo was the outcome of intra-Wahhabi rivalry. The attack has been claimed by Ayman al-Zawahiri as an al-Qaida initiative, organised by its section in the Yemen. There is no reason to doubt his assertion. His organisation has been outflanked and partially displaced by the Islamic State and a global act of terror was needed to restore its place as the leading terror group. As in other suicide-terrorism outings by al-Qaida, the act itself was well planned and predictably successful, and those who carried it out were duly sacrificed. Al-Qaida’s supporters will now boast that while their rivals kill other Muslims and accept Western largesse, they alone target the West and inflict damage. The fact that all these acts are inimical to the interests of European or American Muslims and benefit only the West seems to escape their attention.

David Cameron and other Western leaders insist, as they do after every outrage, that the problem is radicalised Islam and therefore the responsibility lies within the religion. (Why was Catholicism never blamed for the IRA offensives?) The real problem is not a secret: Western intelligence services regularly tell their leaders that the radicalisation of a tiny sliver of young Muslims (more work for the security services in Britain and France than for al-Qaida or ISIS) is a result of US foreign policy over the last decade and a half. Some of these Muslims have been happy to acquire new skills and priorities while fighting in Bosnia and, more recently, Syria.

The Extreme Centre: A Warning

Britain’s leading radical delivers an eviscerating attack on the indistinguishable political elite of the UK.





Published by Verso Books, January 2015.

What is the point of elections? The result is always the same: a victory for the Extreme Centre. Since 1989, politics has become a contest to see who can best serve the needs of the market, a competition now fringed by unstable populist movements. The same catastrophe has taken place in the US, Britain, Continental Europe and Australia.

In this urgent and wide-ranging case for the prosecution, Tariq Ali looks at the people and the events that have informed this moment of political suicide: corruption in Westminster; the failures of the EU and NATO; the soft power of the American Empire that dominates the world stage uncontested.

Despite this inertia, Ali goes in search of alternative futures, finding promise in the Bolivarian revolutions of Latin America and at the edges of Europe. Emerging parties in Scotland, Greece and Spain, formed out of the 2008 crisis, are offering new hope for democracy.

To purchase a copy of The Extreme Centre with 40% discount (paperback) and a free bundled ebook, visit the Verso Books website.

Tariq Ali: The single-formula approach on the currency union is dead in the waters of the Mediterrenean

SYRIZA will be the first party in Europe elected to power that has done so by challenging the extreme centre that rules Europe and its favoured economic system: a financialised neo-liberalism.

I nterview by Kostas Vlahopoulos and Thomas Giourgas for www.nostimonimar.gr

 

1. For the first time in Greek political history, a radical left party, SYRIZA, is the strong favorite to win the general elections taking place in January the 25th.  What kind of reaction do you expect from the neo-liberal Europe and in particular from Germany?

If SYRIZA wins it will mark the beginnings of a fightback against austerity and neo-liberalism in Europe. Two concurrent processes will be in motion from the beginning of the victory. There will be a strong attempt by the EU elite led by Germany to try and tame SYRIZA via a combination of threats and concessions.  The aim of this operation is simple. To try and split SYRIZA at a very early stage.

Secondly there will be a  high level of expectation from SYRIZA’s electorate and beyond.  Mass mobilizations will be extremely important to sustain the new government and push it to carry through the first necessary measures. The debt and the readjustment  measures must be repudiated immediately  before moving on to implement a plan that restores the social gains that have been achieved and are being dismantled by the Troika-led governments. The first three months will be decisive in terms of revealing the contours of the political and economic landscape envisaged by SYRIZA. Neo-liberalism can not be dismantled  overnight but the will to do so must be paramount. Bandwagon careerists must not be allowed to sabotage what can and should be done

2. Do you believe that -inside this tight European framework- a SYRIZA government will be able to put forward its political agenda and to implement the promised reforms as a first remedy to the growing humanitarian crisis? Which should be the main priorities and the style of governance by a SYRIZA government? Do you think that SYRIZA, and Alexis Tsipras as their leader, could reshape and redefine the sociopolitical conditions and direction of the country?

Implementation will take time. We know this from the South American experience, but a start has to be made and the leaders have to make sure that all that is being done is in the open. Transparency is a vital ingredient to mass mobilisation and politicization. The more public support that  is seen on the streets the more citizens in other EU countries will be inclined to support the Greek demands. Ultimately, in my opinion, if the EU elite/Troika refuse to make meaningful concessions then the only alternative is to defy them and if, as a result, Greece is expelled from the EU (something that would be unconstitutional) then Plan B has to be implemented. A SYRIZA government that allows itself to be effectively blackmailed by the EU will run the danger of being Pasok  Mark 2 and that would be a huge disaster for Greece and  Spain.  I don’t think this will happen and I think Alexis Tsipras will resist the EU apologists within his own ranks, but the pressure will be huge especially from the Germans  for whom the Monetary Union has acquired supernatural status. As the EMU is obviously not working it needs to be carefully dumped. The rise of German nationalism must be of concern to the elite and PEGIDA  is a clear warning.

Originally appeared on http://www.nostimonimar.gr/tariq-ali-...

France Tries To Mask Its Islamophobia Behind Secular Values

Pakistan-born British commentator Tariq Ali seldom minces words. As a political activist, journalist, writer and film-maker, he has cou­rted controversy and ruffled many feathers. But over the years he has also built up a huge base of followers and admirers much beyond London, where he stays. The firebrand leader of the 1960s campus movement, now all of 71, shows no signs of mellowing with age. In this interview with Pranay Sharma, he charateristically refuses to pull any punches, while talking of the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, the Islamophobia in the West and the ‘double standards’ Europe adopts while talking about ‘freedom of expression’.

The killing at Charlie Hebdo last week has led to worldwide condemnation while emphasising on the threat posed by radical Islam on France and other western democracies. How justified is that fear?

It has been going on since 9/11. The West ref­uses to address the causes. Any attempt to explain why is usually denounced and so it bec­omes civilisational, or good versus evil, or free speech versus barbarism. The fact is that the West has reoccupied the Arab world with disasters in Syria, Iraq and Libya where things are much worse than under the previous aut­horitarian regimes. This is the prime cause of the radicalisation of young Muslims. The Left is in a bad way or seen as part of the problem, so they go to the mosque, search for hardline solutions and are eager to be used by jehadis.

What is the context in which the Paris killing should be seen?

As I described above but vis-a-vis France, these guys were a pure product of French society. Unemployed, long-haired, into drugs, alienated till they saw footage of US torture and killings in Iraq.

So you think western interventionist policies in the Arab and Muslim world are responsible for radicalisation of sections of Muslims in Europe and the United States?

In my opinion, one hundred per cent.

How serious is Islamophobia in France and other European countries?

France is the worst in Europe and tries to mask it by proclaiming its secular values (sound familiar?), but these values don’t apply to Islam. In fact, French secularism means anything but Islam. And when satirical magazines taunt them, they react. It’s as simple as that.

Do you see this as a clash of liberal, western values against conservative, fundamentalist ideas?

No. I think democracy is on the decline in the West. Ruling parties are the same: neo-­lib­e­ra­lism at home and wars abroad. There is a volatility that I have not seen in Eur­ope since the ’60s and ’70s. This time it’s born out of despair, not hope, except in Greece and Spain, where new alternatives are emerging. A syriza (the radical left party) victory in Ath­­ens on January 25 would be a small step forward.

How should the idea of secularism in France be seen? Is mocking religious beliefs of others a key element of it?

It is, but it’s concentrated on Islam, a tiny bit on Catholicism, while Judaism is usually left well alone. Why not show Moses regularly gang-­raping Palestinian men and women? Just as an idea.

As a political activist, author and journalist, how do you see the idea of ‘freedom of expression’ in Europe and other western societies? Don’t they have ‘red lines’ which should not be crossed?

Of course they do. The press in most of Europe today has very clear lines. The diversity has gone and the bulk of the media are an essential pillar of what I have called the ‘extreme centre’—the ruling bloc in Europe. The uniform way in which the Euro-American liberal media attacked the Bolivarian governments was one indication. The defence of neo-liberalism and wars is another. The virtual exclusion of dissenting voices is common to most of the media. Even Germany has seen a decline and The Guardian in Britain has witnessed a coup on its op-ed pages. The (Julian) Assange and (Edward) Snowden stories were handed to them on a gold plate, but there is now a backlash, and self-congratulations on Snow­den will not suffice.

Some key players at Charlie Hebdo were part of the ‘Street Fighting Years’ of 1968. What do you have to say about the way they evo­­lved?

They evolved sharply to the right, like French society as a whole. A friend of mine recently wrote: “…did I ever tell you that Cabu gave me my first job when I was still at the lycee? For five months I was at Le Canard Enchaine; that was in the late ‘80s…. Then he relaunched Charlie Hebdo and I joined him for a while, but I never felt at ease with this team and I broke off with them during the war in Yugoslavia (obviously Charlie was in favour of the NATO intervention) and I moved to London…. Then by the late ‘90s Charlie became definitely a right-wing fanzine, always trying to please the establishment and in favour of ALL the colonial wars…. Cabu was an anarcho libertaire and Wolinski was not a bad bloke (a real artist)…the last time I saw him was many years ago at a stand at la fete de l’Humanite…always in solidarity with Cuba….” That was a long time ago. The only decent daily paper of record in France is the online Mediapart, which exposes graft and corruption in high places and is feared by the establishment.

While hundreds of thousands came out to join the rally against the Paris killing, there was hardly any protest visible on the death of 2,000 people at the hands of Boko Haram in Nigeria. What are the reasons for that?

Blacks killing blacks never bothers Europe. It’s a long tradition. The Belgian rulers killed bet­ween 10-12 million Congolese in the early 19th century. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a pamphlet denouncing the atrocities (Conrad wrote a novel) and there was a solidarity movement of sorts, but limited. Nowadays, the killings and drone attacks in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, Af-Pak are so common that the haramis of Boko Haram are used to show barbarism but not too much else…. Nigeria’s leader, Goodluck Jonathan, has a lot to answer for as well.

But the attitude that we talk about in France and other European countries is not against Muslims alone, it is against immigrants in general. Will this play an important role in the coming elections in the UK?

True, but Islamophobia is rife all over the continent and has to be distinguished from hos­tility to immigrants or the Roma who have been in Europe for over a thousand years! In Britain, the campaign mounted by the racist UK Independent Party is concentrated against European migration (Poles, Romanians, Alba­nians etc) and is part of their anti-EU stance. The extreme-centre parties are pandering to UKIP in the most shameless fashion.

Originally appeared on http://www.outlookindia.com/article/F...

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It was a horrific event. It was condemned in most parts of the world and most poignantly by many cartoonists. Those who planned the atrocity chose their target carefully. They knew that such an act would create the maximum horror. It was quality, not quantity they were after. The response will not have surprised or displeased them. They don’t care a damn for the world of unbelievers. Unlike the medieval inquisitors of the Sorbonne they do not have the legal and theological authority to harass booksellers or printers, ban books and torture authors, so they go one step further and order executions.

What of the foot-soldiers? The circumstances that attract young men and women to these groups are creations of the Western world that they inhabit – which is itself a result of long years of colonial rule in the countries of their forebears. We know that the Parisian brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi were long-haired inhalers of marijuana and other substances until (like the 7 July bombers in this country) they saw footage of the Iraq war and, in particular, of the torture taking place in Abu Ghraib and the cold-blooded killings of Iraqi citizens in Fallujah.

They sought comfort in the mosque. Here they were radicalised by waiting hardliners for whom the West’s war on terror had become a golden opportunity to recruit and hegemonise the young, both in the Muslim world and in the ghettoes of Europe and North America. Sent first to Iraq to kill Americans and more recently to Syria (with the connivance of the French state?) to topple Assad, such young men were taught how to use weapons effectively. Back home they got ready to deploy this knowledge against those who they believed were tormenting them in difficult times. They were the persecuted. Charlie Hebdo represented their persecutors. The horror should not blind us to this reality.

Charlie Hebdo had made no secret of the fact that it intended to carry on provoking believing Muslims by targeting the Prophet. Most Muslims were angry about this, but ignored the insult. The paper had reprinted the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons of Muhammad in 2005 – the ones that depicted him as a Pakistani immigrant. The Danish newspaper admitted that it would never publish anything similar depicting Moses or the Jews (perhaps it had already done so: it certainly published articles supporting the Third Reich), but Charlie Hebdo sees itself as having a mission to defend republican secular values against all religions. It has occasionally attacked Catholicism, but it’s hardly ever taken on Judaism (though Israel’s numerous assaults on Palestinians have offered many opportunities) and has concentrated its mockery on Islam. French secularism today seems to encompass anything as long as it’s not Islamic. Denunciations of Islam have been relentless in France, with Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, Soumission (the word Islam means ‘submission’), the latest salvo. It predicts the country being ruled by a president from a group he calls the Muslim Fraternity. Charlie Hebdo, we should not forget, ran a cover lampooning Houellebecq on the day it was attacked. Defending its right to publish, regardless of consequences, is one thing, but sacralising a satirical paper that regularly targets those who are victims of a rampant Islamophobia is almost as foolish as justifying the acts of terror against it. Each feeds on the other.

French law allows freedoms to be suspended under the threat of unrest or violence. Before now this provision has been invoked to forbid public appearances by the comedian Dieudonné (well known for making anti-Semitic jokes) and to ban pro-Palestinian demonstrations – France is the only Western country to do this. That such actions are not seen as problematic by a majority of the French people speaks volumes. It isn’t just the French: we didn’t see torchlight vigils or mass assemblies anywhere in Europe when it was revealed that the Muslim prisoners handed over to the US by many EU countries (with the plucky Poles and Labour-run Britain in the forefront) had been tortured by the CIA. There is a bit more at stake here than satire.

The smugness of secular liberals who talk of defending freedom to the death is matched by liberal Muslims who waffle endlessly about how what happened had nothing to do with Islam. There are different versions of Islam (the occupation of Iraq was used deliberately to trigger the Sunni-Shia wars that helped give birth to the Islamic State); it is meaningless to claim to speak in the name of a ‘real’ Islam. The history of Islam from its very beginnings is replete with factional struggles. Fundamentalist currents within Islam as well as external invasions were responsible for wiping out many cultural and scientific advances in the late medieval period. Such differences continue to exist.

Meanwhile, Hollande and Sarkozy have announced that they will lead a march of national unity (Cameron’s going along too). As a French friend wrote to me, ‘The idea of Charlie Hebdo provoking a “union sacrée” has to be one of the ironies of history that even the most cynical post-’68 libertarian anti-establishmentarian would have choked on in disbelief.’

This article originally appeared in the LRR

Charlie Hebdo Shooting: 12 Killed in Attack on French Satirical Magazine Known for Muhammad Cartoons

At least 12 people have been killed in a shooting attack on a French satirical magazine in Paris. Witnesses say masked gunmen entered the offices of the magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and opened fire. The dead include four cartoonists and two police officers. The magazine Charlie Hebdo has drawn multiple threats for its caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. In 2012, the magazine’s cartoon depicting Muhammad in pornographic poses helped spark protests across the Middle East. The outcry forced France to close embassies and other official sites in 20 countries. Charlie Hebdo has repeatedly claimed it publishes the cartoons as a defender of free expression and against religious extremism. We are joined by two guests: Robert Mahoney, deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists; and Tariq Ali, a British-Pakistani political commentator, historian, activist, filmmaker, novelist and an editor of the New Left Review.


Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: At least 12 people have been killed in a shooting attack on a French satirical magazine in Paris. Witnesses say masked gunmen entered the offices of the magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and opened fire. According to Agence France-Presse, two of the dead are police officers. A major police operation is underway in Paris—in the Paris area to catch the killers.

AMY GOODMAN: The magazine Charlie Hebdo has drawn multiple threats for its caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. In 2012, the magazine’s cartoon depicting Muhammad in pornographic poses helped sparked protests across the Middle East. The outcry forced France to close embassies and other official sites in 20 countries.

Charlie Hebdo has repeatedly claimed it publishes the cartoons as a defender of free expression and against religious extremism. Speaking at the scene of the attack, French President François Hollande said barbaric people had carried out “an attack on free speech.”

We’re joined now by two guests. Robert Mahoney is the deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. And Tariq Ali is with us, the British-Pakistani political commentator, historian, filmmaker, novelist, editor of the New Left Review.

Let’s go first to Robert Mahoney. What do you know about what’s taken place at this point, Robert?

ROBERT MAHONEY: Well, at this point, French media is reporting that two masked gunmen attacked the magazine in the heart of Paris, opened fire. We know officially that at least two policemen were killed, but now we’re getting reports that up to four journalists at Charlie Hebdo were killed, including some of their most famous cartoonists.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Robert Mahoney, in terms of attacks on journalists in Europe, this has to be, obviously, the worst of its kind, but could you talk about the climate generally there?

ROBERT MAHONEY: Yeah, this is unprecedented. I mean, Charlie Hebdo is a satirical magazine that’s been in trouble before. It was firebombed back in 2011 after it published a spoof edition, which it said was, quote, “guest-edited” by the Prophet Muhammad. It has angered sections of the Islamic community in France and beyond. And back in 2006, you may remember the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that were published in Denmark. Well, Charlie Hebdo reprinted those cartoons. So, for the last six years or so, it’s been in the forefront of a battle over freedom of expression with certain sections of Islamist groups.

AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Ali, you’re in London right now. I mean, this is all unfolding as we speak. Can you talk about the significance of what has happened so far? Again, 12 people shot dead in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine in Paris.

TARIQ ALI: Amy, I’ve just been in touch with friends in France, and basically they say that one of the journalists killed is the long-standing cartoonist of Charlie Hebdo, Cabu, the name he signed under. And he is someone who has been active in this magazine for many, many years, and there is no doubt that he was deliberately targeted by the assassins who went to hit him.

The other thing that has been pointed out is that yesterday the magazine had a tweet which mocked the pretensions of the so-called caliph, the leader of the Islamic State, ISIS, and that that could be another reason.

Now, there are two things that are worth pointing out. A, that the attacks on the prophet, Muhammad, which they—when they mimicked the Danish magazine, as been pointed out, did cause a lot of offense to Muslim believers all over the world, and when asked, the Danish magazine effectively had said that, no, they would not have published similar attacks against Moses, regardless of what Israel was doing in Palestine. This angered people even further. And the question was then posed: Well, why target the prophet of Islam, when you do not and could not target or do not wish to target Moses for all the mayhem that is going on in Palestine? To which there was no reply. So there is a feeling, effectively, that there is—

AMY GOODMAN: I’m sure you’re going to be getting a lot of calls, Tariq, but just keep going.

TARIQ ALI: OK. So, there were a lot of—there was some anger at this targeting that is taking place. And, of course, I emphasize that nothing justifies attacks of this sort on either these or any other journalists. They can be combated verbally. They can be combated with counter-cartoons, etc. But this sort of killing, which started with the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, is unacceptable and doesn’t do the Islamic religion as a whole any favors.

But at the same time, Amy, there is quite an ugly atmosphere of Islamophobia in parts of Europe. We had big demonstrations in Germany by Islamophobes saying that Germany was getting Islamized. The well-known French right-wing novelist Houellebecq has just published a new novel in which the central fact is that by 2020 France will have a Muslim president. From the other side, Edwy Plenel, the publisher of the French investigative online magazine Mediapart, has written a book attacking and announcing Islamophobia very strongly. So, it’s an ugly atmosphere in parts of Europe, and this will play into it, and it just creates a vicious cycle.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Tariq, what has been the response of government leaders in France, Germany and Britain to this rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment across the continent?

TARIQ ALI: Well, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to her credit, two days ago, denounced these demonstrations and said that targeting ethnic minorities is unacceptable. She meant, of course, in Germany. But to this, then, a newspaper one normally regards as a very right-wing newspaper, the largest newspaper in Germany, Bild-Zeitung, a tabloid newspaper, has also published a public attack on the right and far right for carrying out these demonstrations targeting Muslims and published a letter signed by 50 top politicians and intellectuals, including former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, saying that this sort of behavior is unacceptable. So the German government has come out relatively well on this.

In France, it is not exactly the same. You have a lot of Islamophobia encouraged by politicians of the far right. You have mainstream politicians then pandering to this and saying, “Yes, there is a problem.” In Britain, there’s a big debate now going on on immigration—not on Islam, it has to be said, but on immigration—targeting migrants and saying there are too many migrants here, again started by the far right, and again those pandering to it are people from the mainstream political parties.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you give us, Robert, a history of the kind of attacks on outlets, newspapers, magazines, that have published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad?

ROBERT MAHONEY: Well, if you go back to 2006, where the first attacks and death threats were against—

AMY GOODMAN: Can you come directly onto the telephone? We’re having a problem hearing you.

ROBERT MAHONEY: I said the first attacks were against Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper that published a cartoon—

AMY GOODMAN: Let me go back to Tariq, because we’re having a problem hearing you. Tariq, let me put that question to you: If you can give people a sense of the history of these kind of attacks?

TARIQ ALI: [inaudible] first big attacks came in the Danish paper, a right-wing conservative paper which, as many of my Danish friends pointed out at the time, during the Second World War had been closely allied to the Third Reich and the Nazis, and that this newspaper was leading this particular form of struggle, supposedly for free speech, but effectively targeting Islam, the Islamic religion and its prophet. This then became a big free speech issue and was mimicked elsewhere, including by Charlie Hebdo in France. Now, the more cynical people in France said the Charlie Hebdo circulation was failing, going down, and they needed to revive it, and the best way to revive it was of course by becoming campaigners for free speech and publishing provocative attacks on Islam as such. So, they, of course, denied it. It became a big free speech issue. And many people said that it was two forms of fundamentalism fighting each other—A, a tiny group of Islamic fundamentalists targeting these magazines, and B, secular fundamentalists trying to provoke and anger people, in general—and that neither was doing anyone a favor.

AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Ali and Robert Mahoney, we want to thank you for being with us. We’ll continue to bring people the latest as we learn it. At this point what we know is 12 people have been killed, shot dead in the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo’s offices—they have recently published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad—10 journalists and two police, we believe. Reuters is reporting that others have been critically injured. This is in Paris, France. Tariq Ali is the British-Pakistani political commentator, historian, filmmaker, novelist, editor of the New Left Review. And Robert Mahoney is deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’ll talk about the Ferguson grand jury and a grand juror who wants to speak out. If a grand juror in Missouri speaks out, the person could face up to a year in prison. Stay with us.

Originally appeared on Democracy Now

We Can’t Breathe

We live in a post-racial society,’ Obama enthused, referring to his own victory, soon after entering the White House. It sounded hollow at the time, though many wanted to believe it. Nobody does today. Not even Toni Morrison. But the response of tens of thousands of young US citizens to the recent outrages in Ferguson, Cleveland and New York is much more important and interesting than the vapours being emitted in DC.

There is a vital energy to these protests. The scale, speed and intelligence of the protesters took the country by surprise. In New York they emerged unannounced at different locations avoiding the pitched battle scenario in Berkeley, created by the Bay Area cops whose penchant for rioting at the first possible opportunity is well known. Two miles outside Ferguson, white supremacists torched a black church while cops maintained order in the city. There is police-state talk of making the use of phone cameras illegal in these situations. In other words, mass arrests.

In Chicago, medicine and law students came out and lay down on the ground. It’s hardly a secret that they tend to be among the more conservative students on campus, eclipsed only by the engineering faculty and lavishly funded business studies departments. Their solidarity with the victims of state brutality against African-Americans is an impressive sight. Might it be more than a one-off?

Radical politics in the US was badly derailed by the destroyed hopes and betrayed illusions of the early Obama years (not a few of those who occupied squares in the 99 per cent movement voted to give him a second term, despite the wars and drones and a refusal to hold Bush, Cheney and gang responsible for manufactured lies and torture). Has the worm finally turned or will we see a similar outpouring of joy for Hillary Clinton, led this time by deluded feminists? If a mixed-race president could not move towards a post-racial society, what chance is there of another warmongering Clinton (with dodgy positions on almost everything including abortion rights) paving the way towards post-patriarchy? We need a break and perhaps this generation will provide one. Perhaps.

Dozens of black Americans have been killed by cops in recent years without exciting similar outrage. Most of the traditional black leaders capitulated without shame to the Obama White House. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are two of the better known names, the latter now trying to hustle a quick march on DC to regain at least one credential. The black caucus in Congress is loyal to White House and Wall Street alike. A similar situation exists for the rest of the country. People feel unrepresented. The anger over the recent deaths reflects, I think, a growing disgust with a system in which nothing changes regardless of who is elected.

The torture revelations, too, are bound to have an effect. The worst aspects are still hidden from public view, but it’s been going on for a long time. In 1975 the former CIA operative Philip Agee broke with his employers and published Inside the Company, an account of unremitting torture in South America. In Vietnam, US marines would disembowel one prisoner to scare another into revealing locations. We still do not have a full account of the way women prisoners were humiliated and tortured in Iraq. And everything since 9/11 happened with the collusion of the EU. Tony Blair, Jack Straw, David Miliband were all aware of what they had sanctioned. As were their French, German and Italian counterparts. The East Europeans, too, were more than happy to serve their new masters.

Perhaps the students and others protesting in America now will spark off something new and permanent to challenge the system on many levels. I hope.

This article originally appeared on the London Review of Books blog

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/12/11/tariq-ali/we-cant-breathe/

We Can’t Breath

We live in a post-racial society,’ Obama enthused, referring to his own victory, soon after entering the White House. It sounded hollow at the time, though many wanted to believe it. Nobody does today. Not even Toni Morrison. But the response of tens of thousands of young US citizens to the recent outrages in Ferguson, Cleveland and New York is much more important and interesting than the vapours being emitted in DC.

There is a vital energy to these protests. The scale, speed and intelligence of the protesters took the country by surprise. In New York they emerged unannounced at different locations avoiding the pitched battle scenario in Berkeley, created by the Bay Area cops whose penchant for rioting at the first possible opportunity is well known. Two miles outside Ferguson, white supremacists torched a black church while cops maintained order in the city. There is police-state talk of making the use of phone cameras illegal in these situations. In other words, mass arrests.

In Chicago, medicine and law students came out and lay down on the ground. It’s hardly a secret that they tend to be among the more conservative students on campus, eclipsed only by the engineering faculty and lavishly funded business studies departments. Their solidarity with the victims of state brutality against African-Americans is an impressive sight. Might it be more than a one-off?

Radical politics in the US was badly derailed by the destroyed hopes and betrayed illusions of the early Obama years (not a few of those who occupied squares in the 99 per cent movement voted to give him a second term, despite the wars and drones and a refusal to hold Bush, Cheney and gang responsible for manufactured lies and torture). Has the worm finally turned or will we see a similar outpouring of joy for Hillary Clinton, led this time by deluded feminists? If a mixed-race president could not move towards a post-racial society, what chance is there of another warmongering Clinton (with dodgy positions on almost everything including abortion rights) paving the way towards post-patriarchy? We need a break and perhaps this generation will provide one. Perhaps.

Dozens of black Americans have been killed by cops in recent years without exciting similar outrage. Most of the traditional black leaders capitulated without shame to the Obama White House. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are two of the better known names, the latter now trying to hustle a quick march on DC to regain at least one credential. The black caucus in Congress is loyal to White House and Wall Street alike. A similar situation exists for the rest of the country. People feel unrepresented. The anger over the recent deaths reflects, I think, a growing disgust with a system in which nothing changes regardless of who is elected.

The torture revelations, too, are bound to have an effect. The worst aspects are still hidden from public view, but it’s been going on for a long time. In 1975 the former CIA operative Philip Agee broke with his employers and published Inside the Company, an account of unremitting torture in South America. In Vietnam, US marines would disembowel one prisoner to scare another into revealing locations. We still do not have a full account of the way women prisoners were humiliated and tortured in Iraq. And everything since 9/11 happened with the collusion of the EU. Tony Blair, Jack Straw, David Miliband were all aware of what they had sanctioned. As were their French, German and Italian counterparts. The East Europeans, too, were more than happy to serve their new masters.

Perhaps the students and others protesting in America now will spark off something new and permanent to challenge the system on many levels. I hope.

This article originally appeared on the London Review of Books blog

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/12/11/tariq-ali/we-cant-breathe/

The World Today – The State of France

A weekly review of world politics by one of the world’s sharpest and most outspoken political analysts. Tariq Ali is the author of numerous books, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as a filmmaker. In today’s program, “The State of France-Where is France Going”, Ali ponders the sad state of French politics, with a weak left and a growing far-right, and rampant Islamophobia, interviewing French journalist and political analyst Edwy Plenel.

An evening of film and discussion: Conflicts in the 21st century and the Case of Palestine