[News] A Message From the Dispossessed

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  A Message From the Dispossessed


            http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_message_from_the_dispossessed_20150111/


        Posted on Jan 11, 2015

By Chris Hedges

The terrorist attack in France that took place at the satirical 
newspaper Charlie Hebdo was not about free speech. It was not about 
radical Islam. It did not illustrate the fictitious clash of 
civilizations. It was a harbinger of an emerging dystopia where the 
wretched of the earth, deprived of resources to survive, devoid of hope, 
brutally controlled, belittled and mocked by the privileged who live in 
the splendor and indolence of the industrial West, lash out in 
nihilistic fury.

We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory 
global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism. And 
rather than understand the roots of that rage and attempt to ameliorate 
it, we have built sophisticated mechanisms of security and surveillance, 
passed laws that permit the targeted assassinations and torture of the 
weak, and amassed modern armies and the machines of industrial warfare 
to dominate the world by force. This is not about justice. It is not 
about the war on terror. It is not about liberty or democracy. It is not 
about the freedom of expression. It is about the mad scramble by the 
privileged to survive at the expense of the poor. And the poor know it.

If you spend time as I have in Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and 
Sudan, as well as the depressing, segregated housing projects known as 
/banlieues/ that ring French cities such as Paris and Lyon, warehousing 
impoverished North African immigrants, you begin to understand the 
brothers Cherif Kouachi and Said Kouachi, who were killed Friday in a 
gun battle with French police. There is little employment in these 
pockets of squalor. Racism is overt. Despair is rampant, especially for 
the men, who feel they have no purpose. Harassment of immigrants, 
usually done by police during identity checks, is almost constant. 
Police once pulled a North African immigrant, for no apparent reason, 
off a Paris Metro subway car I was riding in and mercilessly beat him on 
the platform. French Muslims make up 60 to 70 percent of the prison 
population in France. Drugs and alcohol beckon like sirens to blunt the 
pain of poor Muslim communities.

The 5 million North Africans in France are not considered French by the 
French. And when they go back to Algiers, Tangier or Tunis, where 
perhaps they were born and briefly lived, they are treated as alien 
outcasts. Caught between two worlds, they drift, as the two brothers 
did, into aimlessness, petty crime and drugs.

Becoming a holy warrior, a jihadist, a champion of an absolute and pure 
ideal, is an intoxicating conversion, a kind of rebirth that brings a 
sense of power and importance. It is as familiar to an Islamic jihadist 
as it was to a member of the Red Brigades 
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/494142/Red-Brigades> or the 
old fascist and communist parties. Converts to any absolute ideal that 
promises to usher in a utopia adopt a Manichaean view of history rife 
with bizarre conspiracy theories. Opposing and even benign forces are 
endowed with hidden malevolence. The converts believe they live in a 
binary universe divided between good and evil, the pure and the impure. 
As champions of the good and the pure they sanctify their own victimhood 
and demonize all nonbelievers. They believe they are anointed to change 
history. And they embrace a hypermasculine violence that is viewed as a 
cleansing agent for the world’s contaminants, including those people who 
belong to other belief systems, races and cultures. This is why France’s 
far right, organized around Marine Le Pen 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/01/09/a-tweet-from-far-right-icon-le-pen-causes-anger-in-france/>, 
the leader of the anti-immigrant Front National, has so much in common 
with the jihadists whom Le Pen says she wants to annihilate.

When you sink to despair, when you live trapped in Gaza, Israel’s vast 
open-air prison, sleeping 10 to a floor in a concrete hovel, walking 
every morning through the muddy streets of your refugee camp to get a 
bottle of water because the water that flows from your tap is toxic, 
lining up at a U.N. office to get a little food because there is no work 
and your family is hungry, suffering the periodic aerial bombardments by 
Israel that leaves hundreds of dead, your religion is all you have left. 
Muslim prayer, held five times a day, gives you your only sense of 
structure and meaning, and, most importantly, self-worth. And when the 
privileged of the world ridicule the one thing that provides you with 
dignity, you react with inchoate fury. This fury is exacerbated when you 
and nearly everyone around you feel powerless to respond.

The cartoons of the Prophet in the Paris-based satirical weekly Charlie 
Hebdo are offensive and juvenile. None of them are funny. And they 
expose a grotesque double standard when it comes to Muslims. In France a 
Holocaust denier, or someone who denies the Armenian genocide, can be 
imprisoned for a year and forced to pay a $60,000 fine. It is a criminal 
act in France to mock the Holocaust the way Charlie Hebdo mocked Islam. 
French high school students must be taught about the Nazi persecution of 
the Jews, but these same students read almost nothing in their textbooks 
about the widespread French atrocities, including a death toll among 
Algerians that some sources set at more than 1 million, in the Algerian 
war for independence <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_War> against 
colonial France. French law bans the public wearing of the /burqa/, a 
body covering for women that includes a mesh over the face, as well as 
the /niqab/, a full veil that has a small slit for the eyes. Women who 
wear these in public can be arrested, fined the equivalent of about $200 
and forced to carry out community service. France banned rallies in 
support of the Palestinians last summer when Israel was carrying out 
daily airstrikes in Gaza that resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths. 
The message to Muslims is clear: Your traditions, history and suffering 
do not matter. Your story will not be heard. Joe Sacco had the courage 
to make this point in panels he drew 
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/jan/09/joe-sacco-on-satire-a-response-to-the-attacks> 
for the Guardian newspaper. And as Sacco pointed out, if we cannot hear 
these stories we will endlessly trade state terror for terror.

“It is a sad state of affairs when Liberty means the freedom to insult, 
demean and mock people’s most sacred concepts,” the Islamic scholar 
Hamza Yusuf, an American who lives in California, told me in an email. 
“In some Latin countries people are acquitted for murders where the 
defendant’s mother was slandered by the one he murdered. I saw this in 
Spain many years ago. It’s no excuse for murder, but it explains things 
in terms of honor, which no longer means anything in the West. Ireland 
is a western country that still retains some of that, and it was the 
Irish dueling laws that were used in Kentucky, the last State in the 
Union to make dueling outlawed. Dueling was once very prominent in the 
West when honor meant something deep in the soul of men. Now we are not 
allowed to feel insulted by anything other than a racial slur, which 
means less to a deeply religious person than an attack on his or her 
religion. Muslim countries are still governed, as you well know, by 
shame and honor codes. Religion is the big one. I was saddened by the 
‘I’m Charlie’ 
<http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/New-Yorkers-Rally-Proclaim-Je-Suis-Charlie-Washington-Square-Park-288156131.html> 
tweets and posters, because while I’m definitely not in sympathy with 
those misguided fools [the gunmen who invaded the newspaper], I have no 
feeling of solidarity with mockers.”

Charlie Hebdo, despite its insistence that it targets all equally, fired 
an artist and writer in 2008 for an article it deemed to be anti-Semitic.

Shortly after the attacks of 9/11, while living in Paris and working as 
a reporter for The New York Times, I went to La Cité des 4,000 
<https://www.google.com/search?q=La+Cit%C3%A9+des+4,000&biw=1031&bih=659&tbm=isch&imgil=OmQGGpcS-mVQCM%253A%253BTtN3m-FB1ewM5M%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.polkamagazine.com%25252F4%25252Fle-mur%25252Fjean-gabriel-barthelemy%25252F304&source=iu&pf=m&fir=OmQGGpcS-mVQCM%253A%252CTtN3m-FB1ewM5M%252C_&usg=__icWOrdiqjWwtSNnHKMGCgzp3e1U%3D&dpr=1.1&ved=0CCcQyjc&ei=6LixVN6qEpCDoQT53YFA#imgdii=_&imgrc=OmQGGpcS-mVQCM%253A%3BTtN3m-FB1ewM5M%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.polkamagazine.com%252Fuploads%252Ffixture%252Fphoto%252Fthumbnails%252F988x688_c2016cb2f82b5065240df9d4bb754ce2b5e20a8a.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.polkamagazine.com%252F4%252Fle-mur%252Fjean-gabriel-barthelemy%252F304%3B988%3B684>, 
a gray housing project where North African immigrants lived in 
apartments with bricked-up windows. Trash littered the stairwells. 
Spray-painted slogans denounced the French government as fascist. 
Members of the three major gangs sold cocaine and hashish in the parking 
lots amid the burned-out hulks of several cars. A few young men threw 
stones at me. They chanted “Fuck the United States! Fuck the United 
States! Fuck the United States!” and “Osama bin Laden! Osama bin Laden! 
Osama bin Laden!” By the door of an elderly Jewish woman’s apartment 
someone had spray-painted “Death to the Jews,” which she had whitewashed 
out.

In the /banlieues/ Osama bin Laden was a hero. When news of the 9/11 
attacks reached La Cité des 4,000—so named because it had 4,000 public 
housing apartments at the time of its construction—young men poured out 
of their apartments to cheer and chant in Arabic, “God is great!” France 
a couple of weeks earlier had held the first soccer match between a 
French and an Algerian team since Algeria’s war of independence ended in 
1962. The North Africans in the stadium hooted and whistled during the 
French national anthem. They chanted, “Bin Laden! Bin Laden! Bin Laden!” 
Two French ministers, both women, were pelted with bottles. As the 
French team neared victory, the Algerian fans, to stop the game, flooded 
onto the field.

“You want us to weep for the Americans when they bomb and kill 
Palestinians and Iraqis every day?” Mohaam Abak, a Moroccan immigrant 
sitting with two friends on a bench told me during my 2001 visit to La 
Cité des 4,000. “We want more Americans to die so they can begin to see 
what it feels like.”

“America declared war on Muslims a long time ago,” said Laala Teula, an 
Algerian immigrant who worked for many years as a railroad mechanic. 
“This is just the response.”

It is dangerous to ignore this rage. But it is even more dangerous to 
refuse to examine and understand its origins. It did not arise from the 
Quran or Islam. It arose from mass despair, from palpable conditions of 
poverty, along with the West’s imperial violence, capitalist 
exploitation and hubris. As the resources of the world diminish, 
especially with the onslaught of climate change, the message we send to 
the unfortunate of the earth is stark and unequivocal: /We have 
everything and if you try to take anything away from us we will kill 
you./ The message the dispossessed send back is also stark and 
unequivocal. It was delivered in Paris.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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