First, we must not blame Muslims for the recent Al-Qaeda massacres in Paris, as many European politicians and much of the right-wing media have been doing. True to form, Rupert Murdoch, for example, tweeted that Muslims 'must be held responsible' for the attacks. Marching under the facile slogan 'Je suis Charlie', politicians, supported by mainstream media, are shamelessly exploiting the tragedy in order to promote the ideologies of democracy and 'national unity' in France through 'solidarity marches', photo-opportunism, patriotic declamations and lofty rhetoric about freedom of expression. Given that these politicians are themselves routinely involved in suppressing free speech through the bombing and torture of journalists and the suppression of critical journalism, this is nothing other than a 'circus of hypocrisy', as Jeremy Scahill has put it. The Hebdo massacres, like all terrorist actions, have been a gift from heaven for the French, and indeed European ruling classes, who have been milking the tragedy for all it is worth and stoking Islamophobic sentiment (following a depressingly familiar pattern, Hebdo has been followed by a wave of Islamophobic incidents in France).
Nevertheless, we mustn't flip over this position and imply that a bunch of liberal French cartoonists - puerile Muslim-baiters as they no doubt were - somehow brought the tragedy upon themselves. Focusing on the racist imagery of many of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, many leftists see the massacres purely in terms of ‘blowback’, as though they were merely a reflex response to Western Islamophobia. Such simplistic 'anti-imperialist' explanations will not do, even when the Western victims of terrorism are themselves responsible for terrible atrocities. In his interesting essay 'History and Helplessness', Moishe Postone argues that those leftists who saw the 9/11 attacks in New York only as an 'understandable response' to US imperialism were in effect positing 9/11 as a 'reaction of the insulted, injured and downtrodden, not as an action'. This perspective, Postone argues, fetishises the US as the world's only geopolitical actor. Not only is this tantamount to excusing terrorism; it is also de-agentifying and racist, as it implies that 'they' are mandated to act only by 'our' oppression. And in common with the right-wing response to terrorism, the leftist blowback theory rests upon a binaristic 'them and us' framing of terrorism, which overlooks evidence of active collusion between 'our' security services and 'their' terrorists.
A principled communist approach must involve condemning both the actions (not simply reactions) of Wahhabist terrorists and the hypocrisy of the mainstream media and the world leaders, who are the principal purveyors of chaos and destruction around the planet.
Nevertheless, we mustn't flip over this position and imply that a bunch of liberal French cartoonists - puerile Muslim-baiters as they no doubt were - somehow brought the tragedy upon themselves. Focusing on the racist imagery of many of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, many leftists see the massacres purely in terms of ‘blowback’, as though they were merely a reflex response to Western Islamophobia. Such simplistic 'anti-imperialist' explanations will not do, even when the Western victims of terrorism are themselves responsible for terrible atrocities. In his interesting essay 'History and Helplessness', Moishe Postone argues that those leftists who saw the 9/11 attacks in New York only as an 'understandable response' to US imperialism were in effect positing 9/11 as a 'reaction of the insulted, injured and downtrodden, not as an action'. This perspective, Postone argues, fetishises the US as the world's only geopolitical actor. Not only is this tantamount to excusing terrorism; it is also de-agentifying and racist, as it implies that 'they' are mandated to act only by 'our' oppression. And in common with the right-wing response to terrorism, the leftist blowback theory rests upon a binaristic 'them and us' framing of terrorism, which overlooks evidence of active collusion between 'our' security services and 'their' terrorists.
A principled communist approach must involve condemning both the actions (not simply reactions) of Wahhabist terrorists and the hypocrisy of the mainstream media and the world leaders, who are the principal purveyors of chaos and destruction around the planet.
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