2089. Organizers of the Cancelled Paris Climate March Urge Global Show of Support

By Emma Howard, The Guardian, November 29, 2015

Protesters in 2014 Paris climate march

A march expected to attract 200,000 people onto the streets of Paris ahead of crunch UN climate change talks was forbidden by the French government on Wednesday in light of last Friday’s terror attacks.

But organisers have said it is now even more important for people around the world to come out onto the streets for “the biggest global climate march in history” to protest “on behalf of those who can’t”.

There are 2,173 events organised in more than 150 countries around the world on 28 and 29 November. You can find your nearest event here:

Global Climate March

The events are designed to put pressure on the leaders from almost 200 countries who will meet in Paris to thrash out a new deal on limiting greenhouse gas emissions post-2020. The conference is considered the most significant since the talks in Copenhagen in 2009, which were widely considered a failure by environmentalists.

Emma Ruby-Sachs, deputy director of Avaaz , which has organised the march said: “The tragic attacks in Paris have made the march there impossible. Now it’s even more important for people everywhere to march on the weekend of 29 November on behalf of those who can’t, and show that we are more determined than ever to meet the challenges facing humanity with hope, not fear.”

From Kazakhstan to Chile, people are expected to gather across six continents with organisers hoping the numbers will still top the People’s Climate March last year when nearly 700,000 people took to the streets around the world, although they say that numbers will be weather dependent.

The largest march is expected to take place in London, where designer Vivienne Westwood, actor Vanessa Redgrave and musicians Charlotte Church, Peter Gabriel and Kate Tempest have pledged to turn out. Demonstrations are expected across Europe, including a colourful parade in Amsterdam and marches in Madrid and Berlin where protesters will call for the end of coal.

In Alaska in the US, protesters will hike up to a wind turbine on a local mountain while in Melbourne, Australia, people will gather outside the state library, joined by a choir. In Tanzania, 1,000 Maasai are expected to gather and march in Loliondo on the border of the Serengeti national park.

The focus of activity in India will be in New Delhi, but other events featuring yoga, bicycles and walking will take place in seven other cities. Demonstrations led by celebrities and local leaders will end with a concert in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, while in Brazil people will march down Paulista Avenue in central São Paulo.

The world’s scientists have warned that rising emissions created by humans are causing temperatures to rise around the globe. World leaders have agreed it is essential to limit warming to a 2C rise above pre-industrial levels to avoid triggering potentially catastrophic and irreversible impacts, but on current trends the world is likely to warm by twice that amount by the end of the century.

Leaders have expressed hope for progress at Paris after the majority of countries around the world submitted voluntary pledges and measures to reduce their own emissions ahead of this year’s talks, as opposed to the UN imposing top-down targets. But many others have signalled that the fate of the talks will rest on the relationship between developed and developing countries, which have been promised a $100bn-a-year package by 2020 to support them to make the transition to a clean economy.

1810. Obama Announces Intent to Remove Cuba from List of Terrorist States: Cuban Response

By Granma, April 15, 2015

As a result of 681 different terrorist acts 3,478 Cubans have lost their lives and another 2,099 persons have been disabled.  Above is partial view of a display of Cuban victims of terrorism. 

Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Relations General Director for the United States, Josefina Vidal Ferreiro

In the afternoon of Tuesday, April 14, 2015, it was learned that the President of the United States, Barack Obama, had submitted the “Certification of Rescission of Cuba’s Designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism”.

Through this measure, President Obama has decided to exclude Cuba from the list of state sponsors of international terrorism and report to this effect to the United States Congress, which will have 45 days to make known its decision.

The Cuban government recognizes the just decision taken by the President of the United States to eliminate Cuba from a list on which it never should have been included, especially considering that our country has been the victim of hundreds of acts of terrorism that have cost 3,478 lives and disabled 2,099 Cuban citizens.

As the Cuban government has reiterated on multiple occasions, Cuba rejects and condemns all acts of terrorism in all their forms and manifestations, as well as any action that is intended to instigate, support, finance or conceal terrorist acts.

1776. Film Review: The Battle of Algiers

By Kamran Nayeri, March 24, 2015

A scene from the film.

The Battle of Algiers (Italy, 1966) is a must-see classic if you have not seen it yet or have not seen it in light of the post 9/11 events.  In a cinematic sense, it is artfully done in a Rossellini-inspired newsreel style—in black and white with documentary-type editing—is often associated with Italian neorealism cinema.  The film was banned in France for five years until it was shown in 1971. 

French Algeria—as it was called from 1830 to 1962—was a colony that from 1848 to independence in 1962 was administrated as part of France much like much like Corsica and Réunion are to this day.

One of France's longest-held overseas territories, Algeria became a destination for hundreds of thousands of European immigrants, known as colons and later, as pieds-noirs. However, indigenous Muslims remained a majority of the territory's population throughout its history. Gradually, dissatisfaction among the Muslim population with its lack of political and economic status fueled calls for greater political autonomy, and eventually independence, from France. Tensions between the two population groups came to a head in 1954, when the first violent events of what was later called the Algerian War began. The war concluded in 1962, when Algeria gained complete independence following the March 1962 Evian agreements and the July 1962 self-determination referendum.

The Battle of Algiers reconstructs the events that occurred in the capital city of French Algeria between November 1954 and December 1957, during the Algerian War of Independence. The narrative begins with the organization of revolutionary cells in the Casbah. 

The film depicts rising levels of violence between the colonizing army and the Algerian resistance fighters.  The National Liberation Front of Algeria issues summary execution of criminals and collaborators and bombs French population centers while the French occupation forces routinely torture Algerian suspects and commit murder.  The French colonizers are seen as racists—they live in separate quarters of the town and refer to the natives as “dirty Arabs.”  

When under the increasing international public pressure, Lieutenant-Colonel Mathieu, the paratroop commander, the principal French character in the film, is asked whether he employs torture, he responds with a question: do the French want to maintain Algeria as a colony or not?  He adds that almost all French, including the pro-Moscow Communist Party, support colonization. He then adds: to maintain the colony the occupying army has to torture suspected “terrorists” in order to destroy their underground organization.  As he puts it: “To kill a tapeworm you need to cut off its head!”  

The film also depicts how popular resistance to the French was. A boy who is a street-peddler turns into a resistance fighter and a growing layer of women join the resistance using traditional Islamic Hijab or wearing French clothing and make-up to carry out armed assignments. 

Although the movie is about events of some 70 years ago the viewer cannot help to notice similarities with today’s Western colonial and imperialist campaigns in the Middle East and North Africa.  Just as the French were losing their colony in Algeria the Zionists with help from American and European imperialisms were carving slices of Palestine as a “Jewish State.” The viewer is bound to ask: The French colony in Algeria lasted 132 years.  How long will the Zionist colony last?  The viewer also learns that even the types of torture used by the Bush administration in its “war on terror” had been already used by the French in Algeria; the French imperialists lost that war.  There is a growing consensus even in the ruling circles in the U.S. that America had already lost its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and in its broader  “war on terror.” 

The Battle of Algiers depicts a piece of history that resonates with our world today although it seems it belongs to the age of human savagery perpetrated by those who claim the mantle of Western civilization.  Alas, the imperialist nations are slow to learn. 

1735. Terrorism: The Ultimate Weapon of the World Elite

By Robert Burrowes, oximity.com, February 13, 2015

An anti-terrorism unit

The usual definition of a ‘terrorist’ is simple: a person who uses violence in the pursuit of a political objective.

By this definition, the two major categories of terrorist are those political leaders who perpetrate state terror by attacking other countries (ranging from launching a war, perhaps following a false flag operation, to conducting a drone strike) – see the classic book The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda – and those political leaders who use military violence in defense of a political objective. For insight into the damaged psychology of violent political leaders, see ‘Understanding Obama and other People Who Kill’. For much greater detail, see ‘Why Violence?’.

However, the narrower Western public perception of a ‘terrorist’ is someone who attacks civilian targets usually, but not always, in the West (that is, far away from any war zone). This is why US drone strikes on civilians in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, for example, do not attract similar condemnation. Nor is there any condemnation of the Western use of terrorist groups as proxies in the war against the Syrian government. Consequently, groups like al Qaeda, Islamic State, al-Shabab and Boko Haram are labelled ‘terrorist’, essentially because they are presented as targeting and attacking ‘our’ civilians (or, as in the case of the girls kidnapped in Nigeria in 2014, ones with whom we are allowed to identify).

In his extensive research in the discipline of critical terrorism studies, Professor Richard Jackson recently concluded that ‘every major terrorist attack on Western targets since 2001, including the attacks in Bali, Madrid, London and Boston, has been claimed by the perpetrators to be revenge for Western military intervention in the Middle East. Even the beheadings of Western hostages were justified by Islamic State captors as a response to US bombing. In fact, every major academic study of the past ten years has confirmed that Western military intervention and its policies in the Middle East, including support for the state of Israel, is the primary motivation for anti-Western terrorist attacks. In 1996, a major study by the CATO Institute concluded that U.S. military intervention overseas was the primary driver of anti-American terrorism. The Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism has drawn the same fundamental conclusion.’ See ‘How not to tackle Islamic State’.

Professor Jackson goes on to say ‘There is plenty of good research and information which could help to make reasonable and effective policies’. But, as Professor Jackson also knows, we would be naïve to believe that Western elites have any interest in such policies. And here’s why.

Terrorism is the global elite’s ultimate weapon and a primary instrument for achieving its policies. That is, terrorism enables the elite to manipulate geostrategic events in order to extend and consolidate its political, economic and social control over national societies and their resources. Here’s how it works.

Western elites and their allies wage war, in one form or another, on countries in other parts of the world (the Middle East and Africa being the preferred targets at the moment) specifically in order to induce a violent retaliation, including by groups which are secretly supported, materially and militarily, by these elites. See, for example, ‘A Shameless Movement: Boko Haram and the Politics of Terror’. Elites also conduct false flag operations, such as 9/11 – see, for example, ‘The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account of 911 Cannot Be True’ – and the attack on Charlie Hebdo – see, for example, ‘Charlie Hebdo Massacre: Another Staged Event to Incite War and Destroy Freedom?’ – to provoke public outrage. They then use the public outrage generated by these retaliations and the false flag operations to justify the continuation of their military attacks. This enables them to expand elite control both in the regions under attack and also domestically.

By harping on the ‘threat of terrorism’ to scare domestic populations, Western elites and their allies are able to maintain their perpetual war in pursuit of control of essential diminishing natural resources – particularly fossil fuels, strategic minerals and water – while increasing their social control of domestic populations through increasingly repressive domestic legislation that guts human rights and civil liberties, including those in relation to dissent, while increasing the powers of ‘intelligence’ services and the police as they consolidate the surveillance state. See, for example, ‘How Australia just became a “national security state”’.

Needless to say, the elite makes good use of its paid agents in academia, think tanks, the corporate media and elsewhere to make sure that you are kept carefully misinformed and told what to think and how to react.

If you are inclined to resist the elite use of terror against the rest of us, you are welcome to sign the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Terrorism is intended to frighten and kill fellow human beings. Those who conduct terrorism and those who endorse it are badly psychologically damaged.

1721. Why Most of French Muslims Did Not Observe a Minute of Silence for Charlie Hebdo

By Steven Erlanger, The New York Times, February 2, 2015

Public housing in Clichy-sous-Bois, a largely immigrant suburb of Paris was the scene of weeks of riots 10 years

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France — In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, France has begun a defensive but potentially decisive debate over what it means to be French — and whether that definition can make room for its vibrant, growing Muslim population.

At its core, the debate is about whether the French sense of identity has become so intertwined with secularism that the country is failing to honor its ideals as it becomes a multicultural society in which Islam is taking a more prominent place.

By law and tradition, citizens are meant to be judged as individuals without reference to race, religion or gender in the service of the republic’s ideals and its motto: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. That aspiration, dating to the French Revolution and deeply embedded in French life, was given a powerful voice in the large demonstrations of national unity following the January killings of cartoonists, police officers and Jews by homegrown Islamist radicals.

But these ideals, and the French Republic itself, can feel distant and empty to disaffected Muslims, who traditionally see little distinction between religion and public life. They often view the state’s values as foreign, even blasphemous, imposed on them like a form of cultural colonialism, and sometimes used as a pretext for racial and religious discrimination.

“What is really under challenge here is the notion of France as a totalitarian democracy,” said Andrew Hussey, a Paris-based professor who wrote “The French Intifada: The Long War between France and Its Arabs.” Republicanism here is “a totality, like Communism was, and also sacred,” he said.

France is a country, he said, of “enlightenment fundamentalists” demanding “the imposition of a whole identity.”

It is in places like Clichy-sous-Bois, a tough and heavily immigrant Paris suburb, where the gap is most visible between the French Republic of civics lessons and daily life for the mostly Muslim population.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls was criticized for describing the situation in ghettos like Clichy as “territorial, social, ethnic apartheid.” But in the 10 years since rioting against the police and the state started here, and then spread nationwide, prompting promises of reform, life has worsened: more crime, more unemployment, more poverty, more alienation and now, more radicalization among Muslim youth.

The young people here scoff at the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, calling them “du pipeau,” or hot air. They do not feel equal or fully free, and they have little sense of national solidarity.

As M’hammed Henniche, the head of the Union of Muslim Associations of Seine-Saint-Denis, which encompasses Clichy, said, “France is the country of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But that’s all it is, a declaration.” Muslims, he said, feel freer to pray, eat, dress and live as they please in Britain, a monarchy, than in the French Republic.

As in other banlieues, as the heavily immigrant working-class suburbs are known, many young people here refused to comply with a state-mandated minute of silence for the journalists at Charlie Hebdo, whom they regard as having offended Islam.

A 14-year-old who would give his name only as Louins said angrily: “They don’t respect us, and then during a minute of silence we’re supposed to honor them? How can someone render homage to someone who doesn’t respect us? We can’t.” He told his professor: “I’m going to make a minute of silence for Palestine.” His friend Burak agreed, then added: “Stop the hypocrisy.”

Mr. Valls and President François Hollande have announced new civics lessons in the public schools to reinforce republican values, including “laïcité,” which translates roughly as secularism.

But if you are a Franco-Algerian stuck in the banlieues, Mr. Hussey said, with a fractured identity that is neither French nor Algerian, and you speak a bit of Arabic but not much, Islam can become “the only part of your identity that seems real.”

He added, “It’s great to feel you’re a soldier in this larger battle, and what you’re fighting is the big republic that imposes all these things on you” — unemployment, non-halal school menus, a ban on the full veil and minarets, a paucity of mosques and a pervasive sense of being “écarté,” or rejected.

Mariam Cissé is deputy mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois. Ten years ago, her cousin, Bouna Traoré, then 15, was one of the teenagers who were electrocuted while hiding from the police in a power substation, and whose deaths set off three weeks of rioting nationwide, with more than 9,000 cars burned, nearly 3,000 arrests and 56 police officers wounded.
Since the riots, “there are some new buildings and parks,” said Ms. Cissé, 29. “But after that, what? What?”

The unemployment rate is 40 percent in Clichy, one of the poorest towns in France, with half the population under 20; there is a housing shortage, and there was no unemployment office here until last year, she said. It is only about 10 miles from central Paris, but there is no major road and still no mass transit station, despite a decade of promises.

“In no other developed country one sees towns so close but at the same time so far away,” she said. “One can’t continue to be 15 kilometers from Paris as the bird flies and yet need at least an hour and a half to reach the capital.”

The separation and alienation of youth is inevitable, she suggested. Some French lawmakers said “these youngsters no longer deserve to be French because they no longer adopt the values of the republic,” she said.

“But France must assume its cosmopolitanism,” she continued. “One can’t welcome all sorts of people in the country without accepting their differences.”

Gilles Kepel is the great political scientist of the banlieues, having written three books about them, most recently “Passion Française — The Voice of the Ghettos,” as well as a report for the government. For him, the target of Islamic radicals is not France, per se, but Europe and its growing Muslim minorities. France, with the largest number of Muslims in Europe and the largest number of those traveling to Syria and Iraq for jihad, is an obvious focus.

But the effort to radicalize “nonetheless builds on things that are French,” Mr. Kepel said. Not just poverty and exclusion, he said, but the offense taken “even by Muslims who drink wine” over the cartoons of Muhammed, and then the French Republic’s full support for the cartoonists. As important, he said, is the unhealed wound of the French-Algerian war of independence and then of the Algerian war against Islamists.

Dominique Moïsi, a political scientist, said that the country needed a new clarity about its values. “We need a new enlightenment, to reinvent the republic,” he said, to better “correspond to the diversity of France.”

The fundamental question is “to accept and practice the values of the republic,” Mr. Moïsi said. “But what does that mean? Respect for the other, giving reality to liberty, equality, fraternity. Freedom yes, but within limits. Equality, yes, but with limits to inequality in France. And fraternity is really missing.”

Ms. Cissé, the deputy mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, put the problem simply: “France has trouble changing,” she said.

“Integration, immigration — these are taboo, and at the heart of the program of the National Front and the republican right. Now they must become national issues,” she said. “We have to confront these so-called problems so that one can travel as one wishes, practice our religion when and as we want, just like the others. And have a job, truly, because work is important.”

Otherwise, she said, “France will be engulfed, in the years to come, in these same problems of 2005 and 2015.”

1710. Charlie Hebdo: Imperialism’s New 9/11?

By Jeff Mackler, Socialist Action, January 20, 2015

Protests agains new Charlie Hebdo cartoon mocking prophet Mohammad erupted in Muslim regions of the world. Iranian demonstrators burn representations of Israeli and U.S. flags during a rally against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s latest publication of a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad, which some Muslims deem an insult to Islam, in front of the French Embassy, Tehran, Iran, Monday, Jan. 19, 2015. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

The Jan. 7 Paris bombings and shootings afforded French and allied capitalist heads of state—some 50 presidents and prime ministers plus top U.S. officials, all complicit with mass murder—the opportunity for an unprecedented show of unity under the call of “I am Charlie Hebdo.” We note the hypocrisy of the perpetrators of war and systematic violence coming together to pose as defenders of “free speech, liberty, fraternity, and democratic rights.” Virtually all have led in suppressing, if not murdering, opposition currents in their own nations and everywhere on earth where their troops engage in the ruthless murder of oppressed people.

A recent article by Parisian journalist George Kazolias, subtitled, “The Wages of Intolerance,” captured the grotesque hypocrisy of those who led the Sunday, Jan. 11 government-sponsored and media-promoted Paris spectacle of 1.6 million people. “Then there were the world leaders,” Kazolias writes, “Ukrainian Prime Minister, Arsenily Yatseyuk, who has neo-Nazis in his government and has done nothing to bring to justice the fascists and their police accomplices who murdered 48 ethnic Russians in Odessa last May.

“There was Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, who has taken numerous measures to muzzle the opposition press, earning the scorn of Reporters without Borders, which ranks his country 64th in press freedom.” Orban has also earned international criticism for encouraging persecution of the Roma people and for his party’s anti-Jewish stance.

Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, whose government slaughtered over 2000 Palestinians last year in its invasion of Gaza, also marched in Paris. While in France, Netanyahu called on French Jews to migrate to Zionist Israel for their “protection.” What hypocrisy! Kazolias, in his article, recalls that noted Israeli historian Shlomo Sand has written, “I am aware of living in one of the most racist societies in the Western world.”

Beating the war drums loudly, the president of the Council of Jewish Institutions in France, Roger Cukierman, declared the attacks in Paris to be the beginning of “World War Three” and likened them to what is happening in “Syria and Gaza.” Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy went further, proclaiming,  “War has been declared on France.” Le Figaro’s editorial writer, Ivan Rioufol, joined the chorus with “France is at war. Perhaps at civil war tomorrow. Its enemy is radical Islam, political Islam, Jihadi Islam.”

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu joined in the arm-in-arm display of ruling-class solidarity. There was no mention of his government’s decades of trampling on freedom of expression, not to mention its ongoing subjugation and war against Turkey’s oppressed Kurdish masses, including during recent months when the Turkish government gleefully stood aside watching the Islamic State try to wipe the canton of Kobanê and its Kurdish workers off the face of the earth.

While President Obama did not attend the rally, Jane Hartley, U.S. ambassador to France, was present, while a day earlier, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder attended a “security summit meeting” bringing together top intelligence and law enforcement officials from Europe and North America to discuss how to implement measures to stop terrorism. Holder announced that the White house would convene a Feb. 18 international forum “to prevent violent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting, or inspiring individuals or groups in the United States and abroad to commit acts of violence.”

But voices of dissent spoke loud and clear in the U.S. and around the world. “We are NOT Charlie Hebdo!” read the Dec. 15 statement adopted by the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC).”

“Neither do we condone the bombings and murder of journalists at their headquarters, however much we are repulsed by their racist, chauvinist and hateful Islamophobic caricatures of oppressed people. Neither do we condone the subsequent murders at the Paris Kosher supermarket,” the UNAC’s statement continues.

“Yes,” the UNAC statement continued “…we are for free speech, freedom of expression and democratic rights for all, including the Muslim and antiwar activists who were banned by the French government from street protests in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, or the Muslim women who are banned from wearing the veil. We are for freedom of expression and the right to exist of Muslim Americans, 700,000 of whom have been investigated or interrogated in the U.S. for being Muslim, or the 1.5 million Latino immigrants in the U.S. who are imprisoned, detained and deported, or the entire world’s people who are victims of the all-pervasive high-tech surveillance of everyone’s personal means of communication by the U.S., France and all other so-called democratic nations.” (See complete UNAC statement below.)

Using as a pretext for deepening the concerted and worldwide assault on civil liberties and democratic rights and to justify new wars of conquest, the Jan. 7 bombing of the offices of the racist, Islamophobic satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo—where a terrorist attack killed 17 journalists—world imperialism has declared yet another “war on terror.” This one includes openly sending U.S. and allied troops to areas of the world, such as Africa, where they have generally operated in a covert manner in the past. The world’s real terrorists believe that Charlie Hebdo can be used to legitimize, in the name of fighting terrorism, their plans for theft and conquest.

The French aircraft carrier Charles De Gaulle was assigned a week later to head for Iraq to join U.S. fighter planes in bombing that nation to smithereens. The French National Assembly is all but certain to renew its previously “limited” commitment to join the U.S. bombing in Iraq and Syria.

Three thousand French troops have been deployed in Africa to “counter extremist groups in Chad and Mauritania.” Thousands more are stationed in other former French colonies like Mali, where in the name of fighting terrorism they organize to install dictators posing as democrats to protect their “interests,” and murder all who oppose the essential re-colonization of the African continent now in progress. The now thundered rationalizations to combat terrorism are dutifully employed to demonize all who resist—the same rationales, minus that of the “white man’s burden to civilize savages,” used in previous centuries to justify colonization, plunder and enslavement.

A massive mobilization of French police was ordered by President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Marcel Valls. Ten thousand French troops are deployed across the country to “guard vulnerable sites deemed at risk.” Jewish schools and synagogues were placed high on the list. The objective is to manufacture a terrifying atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and recrimination. Electronic surveillance has been ramped up to “curb jihadist recruitment in prisons and other crucibles of radicalization.”

“The French response,” according to The New York Times, “played into an emerging debate across Europe that pits support for civil liberties against the demands of security officials, who site the attack as evidence of an urgent need to introduce stronger powers to monitor suspects.”

A month earlier, France witnessed a wave of criticism of U.S. mass surveillance of its citizens and of the all-pervasive horrors that were revealed in Diane Feinstein’s $40 million, 6000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report documenting widespread CIA “illegal” detention and torture. France was among the several nations who condemned as “draconian” the post-9/11 U.S. reactionary measures like the Patriot Act that included deep incursions into basic civil liberties. Today, that rhetoric has vanished. The near instant transformation was achieved using the combined powers of the French state.

 Attacks on French Muslims

We have heard of no measures taken to protect the beleaguered Muslim communities—the “banlieues” that surround Paris, largely populated by impoverished African and Middle Eastern immigrants—where unemployment ranks highest in the nation and social services rank lowest. Unemployment among Muslim youth approaches 40 percent. Close to half of the residents of Muslim communities lack a high school diploma. As in the U.S., police harassment and profiling—stop and frisk, French style—are taken for granted.

There has been little mention of the 50 recorded post-Charlie Hebdo fire bombings or of the racist graffiti-tagged and bullet-ridden mosques; such atrocities meant to terrorize the Muslim population are ongoing and proceed with impunity. France’s Central Council of Muslims reported 21 shootings that targeted Muslim buildings.

There is little mention of the fact that 60 percent of French prisons are crammed with Muslims or that Muslim women are repeatedly attacked by Islamophobic bigots who tear off their veils (nijab) or even their hijab (traditional clothing). The report of an Islamophobic monster tearing off the veil of a pregnant 21-year-old Muslim woman went largely unnoticed, including the fact that she was thrown to the ground and repeatedly kicked in the stomach, only to lose her unborn child a few hours later in a local hospital. The French police report noted in the diminutive that she was “kicked in the side”! No one has been arrested for this murder! There are no nationwide searches for the racist gunmen and bombers!

There have been some voices of sanity and compassion in the midst of this government-promoted warmongering, hate, and hysteria, as when a French association representing 120 mayors issued a statement warning that Muslim communities were “on edge” in the face of the terror launched against them. The statement pointed to the need to address “economic, social and educational shortfalls” with regard to France’s most impoverished, segregated, and oppressed communities.

French revolutionary socialists, like those in the Anti-capitalist and Revolution current of the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), have strongly condemned the racist hysteria. Yet under present conditions a massive and united counter-mobilization has proved impossible to organize.

The “liberal-minded” New York Times opines that “nearly everyone agreed the fallout from the Charlie Hebdo attack in France—including a heightened security response by its allies—is a distraction from a larger problem: a sense of increasing economic and social marginalization that many cited as a root cause of young people drifting toward extremism.” The Times neglected to add that the endless imperialist slaughter and wars against Muslim nations around the world are bound to produce not only massive opposition among the oppressed but also rare acts of terror by desperate individuals who envision no other means to avenge imperialism’s systematic slaughtering of millions and its reduction of whole nations to starvation.

Long ago, Leon Trotsky sharply counterposed individual acts of terrorism by tiny groups and individuals outraged by imperialism’s never-ending wars, torture, and racist rationalizations to the necessity of collective and united struggles against the capitalist system itself. He wrote, “To learn to see all the crimes against humanity, all the indignities to which the human body and spirit are subjected, as the twisted outgrowths and expressions of the existing social system, in order to direct all our energies into a collective struggle against this system—that is the direction in which the burning desire for revenge can find its highest moral satisfaction.”

Tragically, in the absence of collective struggles against the system led by conscious mass revolutionary parties deeply rooted in all the struggles of the oppressed and aimed at challenging capitalist rule, the imperialist war makers will continue to prevail—through conquest and occupation or through the ruination of entire peoples. Under these circumstances, isolated and individual acts of terror will inevitably continue and be used to further fan the flames of hate. As in France, imperialist usurpers will use them to justify their mass terror—that is, unending wars as well the imposition of blanket restrictions on civil liberties for all those who dare to speak out.

We need not search for evidence of the latter. “French Rein in Speech Backing Terror: Recent Law Allows For Rapid Trials and Stiff Prison Sentences,” reads a Jan. 16 New York Times headline. Some 100 people are already under investigation for “making or posting comments that support or try to justify terrorism.” Two examples were cited by The Times; in one, a 28-year-old man of Tunisian background was sentenced to six months in prison for shouting support for the gunmen involved in the Charlie Hebdo shootings while passing a police station. Another, a drunk driver who hit another car and injured the driver, was sentenced to four years when, under police detention, he praised the same gunmen.

French prosecutors were urged by Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira to fully utilize a November 2015 law to fight and prosecute “words or acts of hatred with utmost vigor.” The zeal with which law enforcement has undertaken this mission was shown in Nantes, when a 14-year-old girl was jailed on charges of “apology for terrorism” for uttering the words “bring out the Kalashnikovs” when a bus conductor asked her for her ticket.

One can only wonder whether the words of Charlie Hebdo journalists, or the words of the multitude of journalists from publications throughout France, not to mention the words of the neo-fascist supporters of Marine Le Pen’s National Front, will be subjected to the same scrutiny. Bigots, including those of the liberal or libertarian Charlie Hebdo type as well as their right-wing counterparts, rarely mobilize to defend “free speech” other than their own.

Here we note that there was far less than unanimity in Francois Holland’s “Socialist Party” with regard to inviting Marine Le Pen to participate in the Paris demonstration. Le Pen’s vitriolic hate-mongering Islamophobic tirades against immigrants were largely indistinguishable from Holland’s. She used the rebuff to complain that her “mainstream” views were being purposefully excluded. More than a handful agreed, including the New York Times reporter covering the issue, who speculated that her exclusion was perhaps a “political” move aimed at not boosting Le Pen’s poll ratings as a future presidential candidate.

The flagging presidential poll numbers of Hollande’s Socialist Party were undoubtedly a factor. Le Pen’s National Front, which received the largest vote of all parties in the last French general elections to the European Parliament, 27 percent, today ranks first at 30 percent with regard to a future presidential candidacy.

In Germany, where neo-fascist groups are similarly on the rise, thousands mobilized in anti-immigrant rallies in the city of Dresden in the eastern state of Saxony following the Paris mobilization. But they were effectively countered in Dresden by 35,000 who demonstrated soon afterward in solidarity with Germany’s immigrant communities, the largest in Europe. They sought to block the racist protest route of Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the West), Germany’s neo-fascist political grouping.

In Munich 20,000 protesters mobilized to block a Pegida rally. Similarly, 30,000 mobilized in Leipzig in a pro-immigrant demonstration to counter an Islamophobic call to the streets. A few hundred participated in the latter.

 Civil-liberties crackdowns in the U.S.

The history of capitalist government bans on free speech—not to mention its restrictions of freedom of association, free press and the right to assemble to redress grievances—is pitiful. In the U.S. in recent years a wave of reprisals has been meted out against college professors, including termination, for their public statements opposing Israel’s persecution of Palestinians. Students who assemble to protest the massacre of Palestinians and who organize on campus to support BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against apartheid Israel see their organizations disbanded across the country.

During the McCarthy era witch hunt of the 1950s, and long afterward, government-invoked “national security” was employed to persecute and imprison radicals of every kind, especially members of the Communist Party (CP) and Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In 1941, the central leadership of the SWP was jailed for 18 months under the notorious Smith Act for their socialist ideas alone. A few years later, the Smith Act and other reactionary laws were used against the CP, with wholesale arrests and imprisonment—again for ideas alone. The “evidence” against the prisoners cited activities such as displaying the works of Karl Marx in their public bookstores.

The witch hunt included legally sanctioned and government-enforced mass expulsion of socialists from trade unions and jobs. Loyalty oaths were mandatory in several cities for everyone teaching in public schools. Travel restrictions, blacklisting in the entertainment and media industries, and a multitude of other fundamental infringements of democratic rights were the rule and remained so for decades.

Almost all of these horrors were codified in law and/or decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, including the infamous decision handed down by Felix Frankfurter, wherein the individual liberty “guaranteed” by the U.S. Constitution, was “balanced” against the “national security” interests of the U.S., with disastrous results for the former. The most heinous of all these laws were subsequently ruled unconstitutional, but only with the rise of a massive civil rights and antiwar Vietnam movement, which rendered them impossible to enforce lest they further enrage mass sentiment opposing any government bans on free speech, free association, and freedom to assemble.

Today, the invocation of “national security” is once again used for deep incursions into democratic and human rights. The wholesale surveillance of the entire citizenry—as revealed by Edward Snowden—as well as torture and detention, and even selected murder of American citizens through drone attacks in other countries, are routinely justified by government officials while the courts grant their rubber stamp of approval.

Socialist have always been ardent defenders of free speech and all other democratic rights won in struggle against government efforts to restrict them. We know full well that so-called hate-crime legislation will inevitably be employed to restrict the rights of radicals and socialists to freely organize and protest. We have no illusions that the bigots organized across the country in groups like the Ku Klux Klan, not to mention racist Tea Party fanatics or racist police and elected officials, will be punished. Indeed, capitalism intentionally keeps these rabid organizations in reserve—albeit on a short leash and on the margins of society—until they are needed to stoke the flames of murder, hate, and repression.

When that time arrives, the hate groups will be joined by the full force of capitalism’s increasingly militarized police and other repressive forces. Armed with the “legal” weapons that are today being systematically put into place, U.S. capitalism must resort to repression of a magnitude never before seen in this country as its only “solution” to the rise of mass working-class resistance. We expect that such resistance will arise since U.S. capitalism, which is enveloped by crisis, has no alternative to its present course of steadily imposing austerity measures against workers and all oppressed people.

Only the united and conscious mobilization of the hundreds of millions of capitalism’s victims, in the U.S. and worldwide, can pose a serious alternative—an alternative aimed at ending the system’s inherent need to oppress and exploit in the interests of the ruling-class “one percent.” The rule of the 99 percent—in which the working class in all its manifestations, in all its nationalities and racial groupings, rules democratically and through its own institutions—can open the door to a bright new society, a socialist USA.

1707. Noam Chomsky: Paris Attacks Show Hypocrisy of West's Outrage

By Noam Chomsky, CNN, January 20, 2015

Hundreds of Palestinian children were killed in Israeli assault on Gaza Strip in summer of 2014. Western governments stood silent or offered active support.

After the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, which killed 12 people including the editor and four other cartoonists, and the murder of four Jews at a kosher supermarket shortly after, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared "a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity.”

Millions of people demonstrated in condemnation of the atrocities, amplified by a chorus of horror under the banner "I am Charlie." There were eloquent pronouncements of outrage, captured well by the head of Israel's Labor Party and the main challenger for the upcoming elections, Isaac Herzog, who declared that "Terrorism is terrorism. There's no two ways about it," and that "All the nations that seek peace and freedom [face] an enormous challenge" from brutal violence.

The crimes also elicited a flood of commentary, inquiring into the roots of these shocking assaults in Islamic culture and exploring ways to counter the murderous wave of Islamic terrorism without sacrificing our values. The New York Times described the assault as a "clash of civilizations," but was corrected by Times columnist Anand Giridharadas, who tweeted that it was "Not & never a war of civilizations or between them. But a war FOR civilization against groups on the other side of that line. #CharlieHebdo.”

The scene in Paris was described vividly in the New York Times by veteran Europe correspondent Steven Erlanger: "a day of sirens, helicopters in the air, frantic news bulletins; of police cordons and anxious crowds; of young children led away from schools to safety. It was a day, like the previous two, of blood and horror in and around Paris.”

Erlanger also quoted a surviving journalist who said that "Everything crashed. There was no way out. There was smoke everywhere. It was terrible. People were screaming. It was like a nightmare." Another reported a "huge detonation, and everything went completely dark." The scene, Erlanger reported, "was an increasingly familiar one of smashed glass, broken walls, twisted timbers, scorched paint and emotional devastation."

These last quotes, however -- as independent journalist David Peterson reminds us -- are not from January 2015. Rather, they are from a report by Erlanger on April 24 1999, which received far less attention. Erlanger was reporting on the NATO "missile attack on Serbian state television headquarters" that "knocked Radio Television Serbia off the air," killing 16 journalists.

"NATO and American officials defended the attack," Erlanger reported, "as an effort to undermine the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia." Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon told a briefing in Washington that "Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic's murder machine as his military is," hence a legitimate target of attack.

There were no demonstrations or cries of outrage, no chants of "We are RTV," no inquiries into the roots of the attack in Christian culture and history. On the contrary, the attack on the press was lauded. The highly regarded U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, then envoy to Yugoslavia, described the successful attack on RTV as "an enormously important and, I think, positive development," a sentiment echoed by others.

There are many other events that call for no inquiry into western culture and history -- for example, the worst single terrorist atrocity in Europe in recent years, in July 2011, when Anders Breivik, a Christian ultra-Zionist extremist and Islamophobe, slaughtered 77 people, mostly teenagers.

Also ignored in the "war against terrorism" is the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times -- Barack Obama's global assassination campaign targeting people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby. Other unfortunates are also not lacking, such as the 50 civilians reportedly killed in a U.S.-led bombing raid in Syria in December, which was barely reported.

One person was indeed punished in connection with the NATO attack on RTV -- Dragoljub Milanović, the general manager of the station, who was sentenced by the European Court of Human Rights to 10 years in prison for failing to evacuate the building, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia considered the NATO attack, concluding that it was not a crime, and although civilian casualties were "unfortunately high, they do not appear to be clearly disproportionate.”

The comparison between these cases helps us understand the condemnation of the New York Times by civil rights lawyer Floyd Abrams, famous for his forceful defense of freedom of expression. "There are times for self-restraint," Abrams wrote, "but in the immediate wake of the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory, [the Times editors] would have served the cause of free expression best by engaging in it" by publishing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons ridiculing Mohammed that elicited the assault.

Abrams is right in describing the Charlie Hebdo attack as "the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory." The reason has to do with the concept "living memory," a category carefully constructed to include Their crimes against us while scrupulously excluding Our crimes against them -- the latter not crimes but noble defense of the highest values, sometimes inadvertently flawed.

This is not the place to inquire into just what was being "defended" when RTV was attacked, but such an inquiry is quite informative (see my A New Generation Draws the Line).

There are many other illustrations of the interesting category "living memory." One is provided by the Marine assault against Fallujah in November 2004, one of the worst crimes of the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq.

The assault opened with occupation of Fallujah General Hospital, a major war crime quite apart from how it was carried out. The crime was reported prominently on the front page of the New York Times, accompanied with a photograph depicting how "Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs." The occupation of the hospital was considered meritorious and justified: it "shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Fallujah General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.”

Evidently, this is no assault on free expression, and does not qualify for entry into "living memory.”

There are other questions. One would naturally ask how France upholds freedom of expression and the sacred principles of "fraternity, freedom, solidarity." For example, is it through the Gayssot Law, repeatedly implemented, which effectively grants the state the right to determine Historical Truth and punish deviation from its edicts? By expelling miserable descendants of Holocaust survivors (Roma) to bitter persecution in Eastern Europe? By the deplorable treatment of North African immigrants in the banlieues of Paris where the Charlie Hebdo terrorists became jihadis? When the courageous journal Charlie Hebdo fired the cartoonist Siné on grounds that a comment of his was deemed to have anti-Semitic connotations? Many more questions quickly arise.

Anyone with eyes open will quickly notice other rather striking omissions. Thus, prominent among those who face an "enormous challenge" from brutal violence are Palestinians, once again during Israel's vicious assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, in which many journalists were murdered, sometimes in well-marked press cars, along with thousands of others, while the Israeli-run outdoor prison was again reduced to rubble on pretexts that collapse instantly on examination.

Also ignored was the assassination of three more journalists in Latin America in December, bringing the number for the year to 31. There have been more than a dozen journalists killed in Honduras alone since the military coup of 2009 that was effectively recognized by the U.S. (but few others), probably according post-coup Honduras the per capita championship for murder of journalists. But again, not an assault on freedom of press within living memory.

It is not difficult to elaborate. These few examples illustrate a very general principle that is observed with impressive dedication and consistency: The more we can blame some crimes on enemies, the greater the outrage; the greater our responsibility for crimes -- and hence the more we can do to end them -- the less the concern, tending to oblivion or even denial.

Contrary to the eloquent pronouncements, it is not the case that "Terrorism is terrorism. There's no two ways about it." There definitely are two ways about it: theirs versus ours. And not just terrorism.