juancole | The horrific murder of the editor, cartoonists and other staff of the irreverent satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo,
along with two policemen, by terrorists in Paris was in my view a
strategic strike, aiming at polarizing the French and European public.
The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its
recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in
terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less
political Islam. France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5
million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2
million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may
be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world (ex-Soviet
ethnic Muslims often also have low rates of belief and observance).
Many Muslim immigrants in the post-war period to France came as laborers
and were not literate people, and their grandchildren are rather
distant from Middle Eastern fundamentalism, pursuing urban cosmopolitan
culture such as rap and rai. In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better
educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France.
Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall
of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to
ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start
creating a common political identity around grievance against
discrimination.
This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early
20th century. Decades ago I read an account by the philosopher Karl
Popper of how he flirted with Marxism for about 6 months in 1919 when he
was auditing classes at the University of Vienna. He left the group in
disgust when he discovered that they were attempting to use false flag
operations to provoke militant confrontations. In one of them police
killed 8 socialist youth at Hörlgasse on 15 June 1919. For the
unscrupulous among Bolsheviks–who would later be Stalinists– the fact
that most students and workers don’t want to overthrow the business
class is inconvenient, and so it seemed desirable to some of them to
“sharpen the contradictions” between labor and capital.
