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<h1>A Message From the Dispossessed</h1>
<h6><a
href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_message_from_the_dispossessed_20150111/">http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_message_from_the_dispossessed_20150111/</a></h6>
<h4 class="date">Posted on Jan 11, 2015</h4>
<font face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">
<p>By Chris Hedges</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>banlieues</i> 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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/494142/Red-Brigades">Red
Brigades</a> 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 <a
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/01/09/a-tweet-from-far-right-icon-le-pen-causes-anger-in-france/">Marine
Le Pen</a>, the leader of the anti-immigrant Front National,
has so much in common with the jihadists whom Le Pen says she
wants to annihilate.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_War">Algerian war
for independence</a> against colonial France. French law bans
the public wearing of the <i>burqa</i>, a body covering for
women that includes a mesh over the face, as well as the <i>niqab</i>,
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
<a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/jan/09/joe-sacco-on-satire-a-response-to-the-attacks">in
panels he drew</a> for the Guardian newspaper. And as Sacco
pointed out, if we cannot hear these stories we will endlessly
trade state terror for terror.
</p>
<p>“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 <a
href="http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/New-Yorkers-Rally-Proclaim-Je-Suis-Charlie-Washington-Square-Park-288156131.html">‘I’m
Charlie’</a> 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.”</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>Shortly after the attacks of 9/11, while living in Paris and
working as a reporter for The New York Times, I went to <a
href="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">La
Cité des 4,000</a>, 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.</p>
<p>In the <i>banlieues</i> 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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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: <i>We have
everything and if you try to take anything away from us we
will kill you.</i> The message the dispossessed send back is
also stark and unequivocal. It was delivered in Paris.
</p>
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