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9656. arkymalarky - 10/31/2014 10:26:25 PM whether they're good or evil is not pertinent to who should control politicians in a democracy. 9657. alistairconnor - 1/7/2015 8:26:26 PM I have completely lost my shit today. You can probably guess why.
Cabu, Wolinski, Tignous, Charb, these guys were cultural icons, France's best political cartoonists. I feel I have lost close friends (I have at least one friend in common with Charb, who was the specific target of the attack).
And the worst part is that they will be ignorantly portrayed as racists and Muslim-haters who were asking for it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Welcome to global jihad. All this goes back to 9/11, or more specifically to the US reaction to it... 9/11 could have been a horrible historical aberration, but instead it has become the defining event of a new era. 9658. judithathome - 1/7/2015 9:54:35 PM My sympathies go out to you, Alistair...clearly, freedom of expression is what has been attacked today.
This action was/is deplorable... 9659. judithathome - 1/7/2015 9:56:12 PM And the worst part is that they will be ignorantly portrayed as racists and Muslim-haters who were asking for it
This thought never entered my mind...I see it as an attack on the truth... 9660. robertjayb - 1/8/2015 1:05:42 AM Sorry,Alistair. Any press anywhere that attempts to make a difference is to be treasured everywhere. And I certainly agree regarding 9/11. Much shame should attach to Bush and the crew who promoted this apparently never-ending horror. Just this afternoon I repeated to spouse as I do too frequently, that that crowd should be in prison, including, sadly, Colin Powell. And here we are likely to elect BushIII. He probably is the smart Bush but he would be accompanied, inevitably, I fear, by the same sort of hangers-on who schooled George. 9661. alistairconnor - 1/8/2015 10:00:47 AM This morning they have released the identities of the suspects, two brothers. One of them has already done prison in 2008/2009 for belonging to a terrorist organisation. At his trial, he claimed he was motivated by outrage about Abou Ghraib. 9662. bhelpuri - 1/8/2015 3:15:50 PM In my opinion, it is wrong to frame this Paris massacre in the context of free speech, or indeed as a response to the specific (egregiously crass) Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
Instead this is an episode in a "war", an attack that took place in the context of what many people (including state actors, including much of the US military, including Al Qaeda) seem to believe is an ongoing war between some countries in the West and Muslims. The attackers - certainly in their own minds - were "soldiers", and Charlie Hebdo no more than a convenient soft target. The main reason the cartoonists were attacked is because it was relatively easy to do so...
Of course my sympathies lie very close to Connor's, but it still remains that the Hebdo cartoonists are a tiny, fractional sideshow to the main "war" that increasing numbers of people believe they are engaged in. 9663. Ms. No - 1/9/2015 1:35:09 AM I wonder if it might not serve everyone much better to quit identifying whackadoo murderers by their beliefs.
In the end it doesn't matter that any of these terrorists is Muslim. They aren't mass murderers because they're Muslim. They're murderers because they are sociopathic nutjobs. Referring to them as "radical islamists" legitimizes them to some degree by putting them on a spectrum with other Muslims.
If we quit framing each of these attacks as part of something bigger --- some global war on "terror" or a rejection of American Imperialism --- then much of the "terror" goes away. I don't mean the horror of any single event, but the constant, grinding stress of being on alert all the damn time. That's the whole point of terrorism to begin with --- strike five or six times a year, but touch all 365 with fear of your name.
The only way to combat terror is to not be afraid. We don't leave our homes every day terrified that we're going to die in a car accident, but that is some 'leventy-thousand times more likely than dying in a terrorist attack.
9664. robertjayb - 1/9/2015 5:51:01 AM So smart it deserves a far greater audience than we few web geezers. Thanks...
9665. arkymalarky - 1/9/2015 3:41:00 PM I'm with no. These acts are far more Columbine than al Qaeda. 9666. judithathome - 1/9/2015 7:57:59 PM Well, it's a shame then that the people DOING these things identify with Islam. They shout out that fact before they shoot... 9667. arkymalarky - 1/10/2015 5:33:34 PM recruitment, funding, and planning support may come from what's left of al Qaeda infrastructure in Yemen, but it comes to vulnerable young ethnic male citizens through the prison systems who karaoke hip hop, smoke pot and take selfies with weapons (not unlike methheads here and other groupings in cities) and I wonder if any even picked up the Koran, much less read or studied it. it seems now to reflect more a personality type (albeit a dangerous one, no matter the ideology it attaches itself to) than a disciplined, purposeful group. but that also makes it harder to target, monitor, and address.
Alistair, Chris Hayes last night published a stat saying 60% of prisoners in France are Muslim and a Muslim guest said they are far less assimilated there than in the US. I know France doesn't allow the hijab or other religious dress in schools? what's your view of the French Muslim situation in France? How much comes from people of Algerian descent? the context of this seems to be more than radicalization of those specific terrorists. if so, this becomes more than a horrible isolated incident for France. 9668. robertjayb - 1/10/2015 7:49:34 PM Can this be true?
YOLA, Nigeria (AP) — Hundreds of bodies — too many to count — remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International suggested Friday is the "deadliest massacre" in the history of Boko Haram
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An Amnesty International statement said there are reports the town was razed and as many as 2,000 people killed.
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This is madness. Beyond evil.
(USA Today)
9669. wabbit - 1/10/2015 8:09:57 PM Amnesty International - Nigeria: Massacre Possibly Deadliest in Boko Haram’s history 9670. wabbit - 1/12/2015 12:31:50 AM Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: ...When the Ku Klux Klan burn a cross in a black family’s yard, prominent Christians aren’t required to explain how these aren’t really Christian acts. Most people already realize that the KKK doesn’t represent Christian teachings. That’s what I and other Muslims long for—the day when these terrorists praising Mohammed or Allah’s name as they debase their actual teachings are instantly recognized as thugs disguising themselves as Muslims... 9671. bhelpuri - 1/13/2015 12:51:02 PM This by Teju Cole is on-point.
Excerpt:
This week’s events took place against the backdrop of France’s ugly colonial history, its sizable Muslim population, and the suppression, in the name of secularism, of some Islamic cultural expressions, such as the hijab. Blacks have hardly had it easier in Charlie Hebdo: one of the magazine’s cartoons depicts the Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira, who is of Guianese origin, as a monkey (naturally, the defense is that a violently racist image was being used to satirize racism); another portrays Obama with the black-Sambo imagery familiar from Jim Crow-era illustrations.
On Thursday morning, the day after the massacre, I happened to be in Paris. The headline of Le Figaro was “LA LIBERTÉ ASSASSINÉE.” Le Parisien and L’Humanité also used the word liberté in their headlines. Liberty was indeed under attack—as a writer, I cherish the right to offend, and I support that right in other writers—but what was being excluded in this framing? A tone of genuine puzzlement always seems to accompany terrorist attacks in the centers of Western power. Why have they visited violent horror on our peaceful societies? Why do they kill when we don’t? A widely shared illustration, by Lucille Clerc, of a broken pencil regenerating itself as two sharpened pencils, was typical. The message was clear, as it was with the hashtag #jesuischarlie: that what is at stake is not merely the right of people to draw what they wish but that, in the wake of the murders, what they drew should be celebrated and disseminated. Accordingly, not only have many of Charlie Hebdo’s images been published and shared, but the magazine itself has received large sums of money in the wake of the attacks—a hundred thousand pounds from the Guardian Media Group and three hundred thousand dollars from Google.
But it is possible to defend the right to obscene and racist speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech. It is possible to approve of sacrilege without endorsing racism. And it is possible to consider Islamophobia immoral without wishing it illegal. Moments of grief neither rob us of our complexity nor absolve us of the responsibility of making distinctions.
9672. judithathome - 1/13/2015 8:52:18 PM Here's an great perspective:
Questions to ask myself before I publicly wonder whether Muslims condemn terrorism:
1) Do I know any Muslims in real life that I can ask?
2) Am I actually following any Muslim activists, scholars or leaders on social media outlets?
3) Am I assuming that if Muslims are not condemning violence done by other Muslims 24/7 in the medium that I personally follow, so that I can see it when I check into FB or Twitter at a time convenient for me, then that means Muslims support terrorism and are inherently violent people
because of their religion?
4) When I meet a person of a different faith is my immediate assumption, "This person is Catholic, he must be a child molester" or "This Jewish woman hates all Muslim children and wants them to be bombed" or "This person is a Christian, he must want to steal the money of gullible old white ladies who think the Rapture is imminent?" Or is my assumption when I meet people is that they believe all these things are abhorrent and that we share these basic values?
5) If some people of a faith tradition have committed criminal acts, even if they claim it's done in God's name, does it automatically mean that every person of that faith tradition supports crime?
6) This Hindtrospectives blogger sure sounds mad. She claims that Muslims have been condemning all kinds of Muslim terrorism for over at least over a decade on every medium available to them. Is it up to me to find these condemnations, or is it up to them to make sure I see the thousands of condemnations they've issued in the past?
7) Do I know what a search engine is? If so, I wonder what will come up when I type "Muslims condemning terrorism?"
Source 9673. alistairconnor - 1/14/2015 6:52:47 PM Here's something I wrote for a NZ blog :
A few thoughts from a French citizen, of NZ origin, irregular reader of Charlie Hebdo these last 10 years or so, occasional reader of Danyl…
I brought up my children in France. My life partner of these past 8 years is Muslim.
I came here to read thoughtful responses from New Zealanders, and I came to the right place. Here are mine.
* Geopolitics: This is not original, but the current “global jihad” state of affairs all dates from 2001. Not from the destruction of the Twin Towers — that could have been an oddity, instead of the defining event of the new century, but for the US response to it : the invasion of two sovereign nations of Muslim culture. Based on unstated geopolitical motives (the Cheney crew), but domestically enabled by ordinary Americans’ thirst for Muslim blood. I am not exaggerating, anyone who followed the US blogosphere at the time will tell you this. It’s hardly surprising that this felt like a war on Islam to a very large number of Muslims, because that’s what it felt like to a very large number of Americans too.
* Added to this blowback from Afghanistan/Iraq is the French post-colonial situation. Millions of mostly illiterate north Africans came to France in the 60s to work in factories, with lots of resentment on both sides (France “lost” the Algerian war…). Their French-born children are “second-generation immigrants”, like my own. Coming from a cultural background where religious principles are at least as important as the law of the land — think France or NZ as little as a century ago — they often tend to disapprove of the values of the French republic, or even reject them outright. The Republic is deliberately blind to the race or religion of its citizens, and has done a very poor job of integrating both the original immigrants and their offspring. The collective values of their source culture are in conflict with French individualism; endogamy is the rule, and a Muslim woman who marries a non-Muslim is typically an outcast from her community. 9674. alistairconnor - 1/14/2015 6:53:23 PM [continued]
* Charlie Hebdo is a leftist feminist anti-racist anti-militarist satirical paper, which pulls no punches with respect to its targets. It never ridicules immigrants, women, Muslims, Blacks etc as such, but, as with all good satire, you can easily understand the opposite of the intended meaning if you don’t get the context. It is my experience that most Muslims are uncomfortable with what they do, because blasphemy is a big no-no. A certain proportion of French Muslims will conclude that the paper is anti-Muslim, because the blasphemy thing is too big a wall for them to climb; they’re not going to get the joke, even though it isn’t against them. This is not a problem for the great majority, because if you don’t like a paper you don’t read it; and they understand that religious freedom means freedom to criticise religion too. Freedom of speech is by no means absolute in France; you can go to jail for denying the Holocaust, for incitement to murder, for racist statements etc. CH has frequently been taken to court, and has won every time. It is not a racist paper.
* Those who are militantly against CH’s blasphemous cartoons etc, and would like to shut them down, whether by legal process, firebomb or whatever, are those who are trying to legitimize the place of religion in the public sphere. This has included conservative Catholics in the past, but now it’s generally Muslims. Typically their wives will wear headscarves in the street (which is fine, of course), and they will want Muslim girls to wear headscarves to school (this is forbidden, and rightly so in my view, but is controversial). Religion in the public sphere is a no-no in France; it is considered a private matter, for individual choice.
Oh that’s enough rambling. Hope you find some useful insights. Cheers.
Breaking : Charlie Hebdo will be at newsagents tomorrow as usual on a Wednesday. However, they’re printing 3 million instead of the usual 60 000 or so.
Cover features Mahomet (obviously). It’s brilliant. Made me lose my shit. But that’s been frequent over this past week.
 9675. alistairconnor - 1/14/2015 6:54:47 PM Oh OK, another thing :
It’s pretty damn hard to judge how “offensive” CH is, when you don’t have the language and cultural references to understand for yourself. This hasn’t stopped the world’s journalists and commentators from having a go, and getting it badly wrong in 95% of cases.
Among people I respect who, in my view, have got it wrong, are Glenn Greenwald and danylmc. No big deal.
I am a big fan of Jesus and Mo. CH is more vulgar and sexualised, but on strictly religious matters, it’s on about the same level. What do you reckon? Should the author refrain from being so mean?
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