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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsParis is a warning: there is no insulation from our wars
from the Guardian UK:
Paris is a warning: there is no insulation from our wars
Seumas Milne
The attacks in France are a blowback from intervention in the Arab and Muslim world. What happens there happens here too
The official response to every jihadist-inspired terrorist attack in the west since 2001 has been to pour petrol on the flames. That was true after 9/11 when George Bush launched his war on terror, laying waste to countries and spreading terror on a global scale. It was true in Britain after the 2005 London bombings, when Tony Blair ripped up civil liberties and sent thousands of British troops on a disastrous mission to Afghanistan. And its been true in the aftermath of last weeks horrific killings at Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris.
In an echo of Bushs rhetoric, the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy declared a war of civilisations in response to attacks on our freedoms. Instead of simply standing with the victims and, say, the vastly larger numbers killed by Boko Haram in Nigeria the satirical magazine and its depictions of the prophet Muhammad have been elevated into a sacred principle of western liberty. The production on Wednesday of a state-sponsored edition of Charlie Hebdo became the latest test of a with us or against us commitment to our values, as French MPs voted by 488 votes to one to press on with the military campaign in Iraq. To judge by the record of the past 13 years, it will prove a poisonous combination, and not just for France.
Nothing remotely justifies the murderous assault on Charlie Hebdos journalists, still less on the Jewish victims singled out only for their religious and ethnic identity. What has become brutally obvious in the past week, however, is the gulf that separates the official view of French state policy at home and abroad and how it is seen by many of the countrys Muslim citizens. Thats true in Britain too, of course. But what is hailed by white France as a colour-blind secularism that ensures equality for all is experienced by many Muslims as discrimination and denial of basic liberties.
In a country where women are bundled into police vans because of the way they dress, freedom of speech can also look like a one-way street. Charlie Hebdo claims to be an equal opportunities offender, abusing all religions alike. The reality, as one of its former journalists put it, has been an Islamophobic neurosis that focused its racialised baiting on the most marginalised section of the population. This wasnt just depictions of the prophet, but repeated pornographic humiliation. ..............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/15/paris-warning-no-insulation-wars-arab-muslim-world
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Paris is a warning: there is no insulation from our wars (Original Post)
marmar
Jan 2015
OP
The key, for me, is in a phrase in the last paragraph "in a globalized world".
Waiting For Everyman
Jan 2015
#1
Waiting For Everyman
(9,385 posts)1. The key, for me, is in a phrase in the last paragraph "in a globalized world".
A globalized world is a twisted and vulnerable world, in my view. No attitude change, of ANY variety will correct that. Only undoing it, will.