truthdig | 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
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,
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 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
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’
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. Fist tap Vic.
