With Love, To Paris

‘France’ fries

‘Tragic’ is the least we can say about the violence in France on the last Friday the 13th. Considering the patterns of coordinated attacks, arising from Mumbai 2008 and the Friday’s mayhem, in which extremists are choosing public places for their plans, it is a real cause for concern.

A news report in a day before yesterday’s New York Times screamed: After Paris Attacks, a Darker Mood Toward Islam Emerges in France. A civilisational contest is going on between the adherents of Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ. Even the gods must be fed up of religions. While the Western Christians who draws their ideas from imperial thoughts are active in exploiting the resources, which are found abundantly in the Muslim stronghold areas, the Muslim radicals are proactive in unleashing terror in resistance and the whole vicious cycle of violence continues.

The New York Times report elaborated: ‘Unlike the response in January after attacks at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and elsewhere left 17 dead, there were no grand public appeals for solidarity with Muslims after the Friday attacks that left 129 dead in Paris. There were no marches, few pleas not to confuse practitioners of Islam with those who preach jihad.’

The western countries under the supreme leadership of the United States are messing around with the Muslim nations especially those in West Asia and the Arab countries. Oil has become a cliché in today’s world and the vocabulary has been transformed with fancy expressions like the War on Terror, the Rise of Caliphate, invisible Weapons of Mass Destruction, Jihad and Mujahedeen, the Authorisation for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists and the likes.        

However, we have an entirely different problem. In the wake of the Paris attack last weekend, support for the French people is pouring in from all the four directions, thanks to the advent of social media and 24×7 news.

A majority of the Americans are stupid so we can ignore them but there have been a sea of sensible people though with a one-track mind that they would support the French government and the military. Briefly, why would nobody see that the attack was a response to the French neocolonial policy on some sovereign nations? It is as well an open secret how the US has been responsible for the rise of some of the most radical Muslim organisations. But many of us seem to have lost our mind in the barbarity of a group of political extremists, which in this context refers to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or simply the Islamic State.

The Islamic State is an outlawed organisation in the eyes of various countries. Still we have another cliché in contemporary history: one man’s terrorist is another man's revolutionary. The US, for instance, has been making the complex situation even more complicated. During Ronald Reagan’s regime (1981–1989), the American establishment termed the Afghanistan’s Mujahedeen as freedom fighters. In those days, they were in a war with the erstwhile Soviet Union (1979–1989), the US’ main opponent. However, two decades later when the same Mujahedeen started challenging the neocolonial western powers, especially that of the US, George Bush (2001–2009) lost no time in calling the group a terrorist organisation.

Today, the Paris attack has claimed 129 lives and more than 400 people were wounded. In a highly emotional listicle, recently The Atlantic featured ‘Crimes’ Jihadists Will Sentence You to Death For, in which the writer made a list of 32 activities that people can be killed by the Muslim extremists and the first ten of them includes: Vacationing in Egypt, Shopping in Nairobi, Going to work in New York, Flying in an airplane in the US, Riding a train in Madrid, Riding a bus in London, Attending a wedding in Amman, Guarding a Canadian memorial, Praying in an unapproved mosque and Being Jewish. Quite understandable; the wound is deep as much as the issues are complicated.

Western shenanigans

One of the worst problems the West is facing is in allowing only the politicians in tackling the issues and challenges. Their so-called military and democratic interventions in other sovereign countries are the foundation of all the 21st century problems occurring at a large scale. No wonder, many of these countries are built under the foundation of wars and massacres; take France for example. In the wake of the Paris attack the French President François Hollande assured a merciless response and in less than 24 hours, fighter planes started bombing several areas in Syria which are allegedly training areas of the IS.

However, if we take a step back, we can see the glaring errors. All along France endorses military occupation of West Asia and surrounding areas. Its patriotic soldiers are deployed in every strategic areas of the region besides pursuing violent operations against the IS and other Islamic radical groups. If these are not errors per se then these are definitely absurd. In a way this is also quite a lesson for the Indian military establishment, which works with the magic wands of democracy to run parallel governments in the conflict areas of Kashmir and the Northeast.

The farce of the western powers is not going to end soon. Instead of pulling off their troops, it is more likely that they will be intensifying their military onslaught and as always be coming up with fancier terms to rationalise their action or rather deception. While world leaders are apprehensive about the extremists getting a hand on nuclear weapons, the consensus tells a different story. In the name of geopolitics and economics, these hegemonic western powers are having a free run in underdeveloped or developing countries that are rich in resources.

Add to the injuries the insult of the US to others by supporting Israel, which is one of the worst states in the world. There is nothing anti-Semitism about this view. In fact, Israel is no different from the Nazis, considering itself the die Herrenrasse/das Herrenvolk or the master race, converting the Gaza Strip and Ramallah as concentration camps and pissing on Palestinian territories in a manner that resembles the Nazi’s concept of Lebensraum and what not.

As mentioned earlier, the US poked its nose into Afghanistan in 1978. That was directly responsible for the 9/11 attack. How can it sleep peacefully after killing so many people? In the pre-9/11, it was in deep shit during and following the Vietnam War and the Gulf War; and in the post-9/11 decade, Afghanistan and Iraq became its political and economical labs, but it seems to have forgotten that people—real people whose lives are more important than oil—reside in these places. Extremism is condemnable but countries such as the US and France are the real sponsors of terrorism and genocides. In direct ways too, they are, as we can see from how the US funded the Afghan Mujahedeen and redefined the modern state terrorism.

According to the Stop the War campaign, terrorist attacks have been growing since the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. However, in a conflict, the civilians are always affected the worst. The figures of casualty shows that the American war on terror has killed more people than terrorism has done and the majority of them are civilians. Now all these monkey businesses, attacks and retaliations only bring out the worst in people. Nothing good is inherent in the Taliban, the rule of Caliphate as espoused by the IS, the promise of 72 virgins, shitty concepts of believers and Islamic intolerance yet the disagreement is about the western shenanigans.

I’ll conclude with the remark by Bertrand Russell: ‘War does not determine who is right—but only who is left.’