"Wicked and Tragic Events" Do Not a War Make

The first instinct of the chickenhawk is to proclaim the existence of a state of war where none actually exists.  By "chickenhawk" I mean Canada's very own prime ministerial closet croucher, Stephen Harper, who exploited the Paris massacre as proof that radical Muslims are waging war against Canada.

A Canadian who knows a few things about war, Gwynne Dyer, says the Charlie Hebdo attacks were tragic, to be sure, but war?  Not hardly.

This is not a “war of civilizations”. Seventeen innocent people killed in Paris is not the equivalent of the Crusades. For that matter, neither was 9/11. These are wicked and tragic events, but they are not a war.

There is a war going on, but it is a civil war within the “House of Islam” that occasionally spills over into non-Muslim countries. As foot-soldiers in that war, the three killers in Paris probably did not fully understand the role they were playing, but they were serving a quite sophisticated strategy.

Two of these Muslim civil wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, were ignited by U.S.-led invasions in 2001 and 2003. Four others, in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and the northern, mostly Muslim half of Nigeria, have begun since 2011. Others go back even further, like the war in Somalia, or have flared up and then become dormant again, like Mali and Algeria.

In every one of these wars the victims are overwhelmingly Muslims killed by other Muslims. From time to time non-Muslims in other countries are killed too, as in New York in 2001, in London in 2007, in Bombay in 2008 and last week in Paris, and these killings do have a strategic purpose, but it’s not to “terrify non-Muslims into submission.” Quite the contrary.

The great Muslim civil war is about the political, social, and cultural modernization of the Muslim world. Should it continue down much the same track that other major global cultures have followed, or should those changes be stopped and indeed reversed? The Islamists take the latter position.

Some aspects of modernization are very attractive to many Muslims, so stopping the changes would require a lot of violence, including the overthrow of most existing governments in Muslim countries. But that is the task that the Islamists in general, and the jihadi activists in particular, have undertaken.

As they are minorities even in their own countries, the Islamists’ hardest job is to mobilize popular support for their struggle. The best way to do this is to convince Muslims that modernization—democracy, equality, the whole cultural package—is part of a Western plot to undermine Islam.

This will be a more credible claim if Western countries are actually attacking Muslim countries, so one of the main jihadi strategies is to carry out terrorist atrocities that will trigger Western military attacks on Muslim countries. That was the real goal of 9/11, and it was spectacularly successful: it tricked the United States into invading not one but two Muslim countries.

...There is a sub-theme in some of the Middle Eastern wars that muddies the waters a bit: in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, the general radicalization has also revived and militarized the age-old conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims. But even in these countries most of the killings are of Sunni Muslims by other Sunni Muslims.

There will be more attacks like the ones in Paris, because lost young men seeking a cause abound in every community, including the Muslim communities of the West. We can't arrest them all, so we will go on having to live with a certain amount of terrorism from both Muslim and non-Muslim extremist groups and trying not to over-react—just as we have been doing for many decades already.

Now They've Done It

The rise of the Islamic State, ISIS, has demonstrated how effectively Islamic extremists use social media such as Twitter and Facebook.  Well, they did - past tense.  Now the Charlie Hebdo massacre has earned them an enemy, one they should fear - Anonymous.

Free Speech Isn't Always Free

Twelve dead, as many again wounded, after a terror attack on the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo.  Paris police have launched a manhunt for the gunmen who escaped after attacking the magazine's offices.

Nobody has come right out and said Muslim terrorists were behind the attack but Charlie Hebdo has been intensely needling Islam for some time.

Moments before Charlie Hebdo’s offices were attacked, the magazine’s Twitter handle published a cartoon wishing a happy new year “and particularly good health” to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State (Isis).

Its cover this week features Michel Houellebecq’s provocative new novel, Submission, which satirises France under a Muslim president. These are just the latest examples of a publication that responds to efforts at intimidation by being even more irreverent or outrageous, defying the constraints of religious sensitivity or political correctness.

In November 2011, the magazine’s offices were fire-bombed after it published a special edition, supposedly guest-edited by the prophet Muhammad and temporarily renamed “Charia Hebdo”. The cover was a cartoon of Muhammad threatening the readers with “a hundred lashes if you don’t die laughing”.

The petrol bomb attack completely destroyed the Paris offices, the magazine’s website was hacked and staff were subjected to death threats. But that did not deter the magazine, whose editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, has received death threats and lives under police protection.

Six days later, the magazine published a front page depicting a male Charlie Hebdo cartoonist passionately kissing a bearded Muslim man in front of the charred aftermath of the bombing. The headline was: L’Amour plus fort que la haine (Love is stronger than hate).

Less than a year later, the magazine published more cartoons of Muhammad, including images of him naked and a cover showing him being pushed along in a wheelchair by an Orthodox Jew. The French government had appealed to the editors not to go ahead with publication, and shut down embassies, cultural centres and schools in 20 countries out of fear of reprisals when they went ahead anyway.

Riot police were also deployed to the Charlie Hebdo offices to protect it from direct attacks. The foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, publicly criticised the magazine’s actions, asking: “Is it really sensible or intelligent to pour fuel on the fire?”

This tragedy illustrates the fine line that can exist between free speech and gratuitous satirical provocation that can trigger a predictable outcome.  Canada has a blathering loudmouth who will undoubtedly jump all over this, praising the Charlie Hebdo publisher, Stephane Charbonnier, for his courage in standing up to radical Islam.  Yet it wasn't Charbonnier who forfeited his life but those of his employees for whom he has a clear responsibility for the entirely foreseeable result.

It's a dangerous world full of very dangerous and fanatical people and it was those very fanatics that Charbonnier relentlessly needled.  And for what?

Update - a report from Slate.com cites witnesses as stating that the gunmen identified themselves as belonging to Yemeni al Qaeda.

Update - The New York Times reports that the attackers also killed publisher Charbonnier.  The paper also reports that another of the victims was a police officer assigned to protect Hebdo.  The Guardian reports that among the dead were three of Hebdo cartoonists - Cabu, Wolinski and Tignous.