January 17, 2015

  • charlie hebdo dialog continues

     
    The massacre in Paris will be debated for a long time.  My friend D e-mailed me a response to my previous post.  She is a writer and reporter.

      7:30 PM 1-13-2015
      Ah, but John Oliver is missing an important ingredient in the culture and ontology of these extreme Arabs.  He’s using western values and logic, wherein a cartoon and a cold pizza fall under an equally low bar.  Cartoons per se are not the issue.  Cartoons are a western invention.  The light laughter they provoke in the west does not translate for these fanatics. For them, the issue is that Islam is being taken to the cleaners, and it’s being done publicly.  Remember that the crime of theft in Saudi Arabia is punishable by having your hand cut off.  Their culture follows a totally different set of values.  Innocent till proven guilty doesn’t exist.  Life is cheap. Defending Islam from detractors is probably a high calling.  I’m not defending the killers, but a fact for John Oliver and the civilized world is not the same fact in their belief system.  Just sayin’.

      - D

    Jan 14 at 9:19 AM

    Dear D,
    The terrorist attack in France was not about radical Islam, says Chris Hedges, but the dispossessed.

      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. [ HEDGES LINK ]
    D replies:

      Jan 14 at 1:31 PM
      Thanks for this.  I’m glad Hedges dug into it further, and has the credentials to support his POV.  When I was in college we studied Algeria and South Africa.  One thing I got out of it was admiration for France for accepting so many immigrants.  Their doors were open earlier than most in Europe.  But in the end accepting and integrating were not the same thing.

      - D

    Jan 15 2015

    Dear D,
    I went to the French TV site France24 within hours of hearing about the massacre.  I've learned it is necessary to have links like this available whenever the mainstream media seems to have its head up its ass.  Which is frequently.  Other good resources are www.dw.de (Germany), telegraph.co.uk, www.abc.net.au (Australia), america.aljazeera.com and democracynow.org.

    I've come to value Rachel Maddow on msnbc.com.  Yes she is predictably left-leaning, but she always manages to place an event in historical context.  She is even remarkable.  After Charlie Hebdo, she listed these recent events:

    1989 fatwa on Salman Rushdie results in the stabbing or death of 40 translators, publishers, bystanders
    2004 madrid train bombing
    2005 Jyllands-Posten (Danish newspaper) firebombed
    2005 london subway bombing
    2012 a motorscooter guy kills 7 in france
    2013 boston marathon bombing
    2013 may, 2 guys kill soldier in uk
    2013 kenya mall attack
    2014 may, guy kills 4 at jewish museum in brussels
    2014 boko haram kidnapping
    2014 a guy stabs 2 cops in melbourne
    2014 cop killed in quebec, cop killed in ottawa
    2014 sydney hostage scene, 2 dead 4 wounded
    2014 145 dead in Peshawar school massacre
    2015 12 dead in paris

    Her list gives us a context, placing Hebdo in perspective.  It is not so much the body count that shocks us here, but the assault on press freedom.  And note that the list is glaringly incomplete:

    1) Boko Haram attacked a town named Baga two days later, killing approximately 2,000.
    2) The Algerian War of Independence was not mentioned, where as many as a million were killed.