‘Not Afraid’
by Ghassan Hage • 11 January 2015

‘Ils sont tous Charlie,’ in all its colonial narcissistic splendour.

Image by Marine des Mazery
Image by Marine des Mazery. Source
There is a close relation between satire and secularism as the latter came to emerge in Europe. Secularism, as is well-​known, gained strength historically as a reaction to an era of European inter-​religious violence and massacres. It was not only a desire for the separation of Church and State as the classical formula has it. It was also an attempt to keep religious affect out of politics. This was in the belief that religion, because it was faith rather than reasoned thinking, produced too much of a narcissistic affect: a belief unable to ‘keep its distance’ from what it is believing. It was thought that this narcissism was behind the murderous intensity of religiously driven conflicts. Being able to laugh at yourself literally means being able to not take yourself overly seriously, which in turn was crucial for both: a) the de-​intensification of the affects generated by the defense of what one believes in and b) the relativisation of one’s personal beliefs, which as Claude Levi-​Strauss argued, is crucial for thinking oneself comparatively and in relation to others (the opposite of narcissism).

There is no doubt that the Islamic fundamentalists of today represent the worst of modernity’s narcissistic tendencies. They look at the history of colonialism and the relation between the Christian colonial west and the colonised Muslim world and think, quite rightly, that the colonial world has offered them a rough deal, victimised them and treated them as shit. And, as they see it, this is so despite the greatness of their civilisation. So, they think they owe the non-​Islamic world nothing. They are totally immersed in their Islam, take it overly seriously, and defending it in precisely the religious narcissistic murderous way that secularism has aimed to distance us Westerners from.

So, on the face of it, it appears as if Charlie Hebdo, and the ‘je suis Charlie’ people identifying with it are involved in exactly this kind of struggle against the Islamic fundamentalists. Unfortunately, this is not the case. And when I say, unfortunately, I really mean it. Like many French-​schooled people, I grew up with bandes dessinées and the humour of Cabu and Wolinski was part of the abc of my socially acquired sense of humour. So, affectively, part of me wants to say ‘je suis Charlie’. Like some of my close family members who are infuriatingly Islamophobic, pro-​Israeli and to the Right. They are part of my history and I still love them and love re-​uniting with them. I am seriously devastated by the murders. So part of me wants to believe that to say ‘je suis Charlie’ is not to agree with them but to defend the space from where they have written. But, and once again, unfortunately, I don’t believe that space is what it appears to be.

It is worth remembering that if the secularists/​satirists were right about the nature of religious political identification and emotions at the time of Europe’s religious wars, they were wrong in thinking that those irrational and murderous emotions were either essential or specific to religion. As the histories of western nationalism and colonialism, and particularly the histories of fascism, show ‘over the top, murderous, let’s take ourselves very seriously’ beliefs could easily be generated by all forms of communal identification. This is even true when ‘secular democracy’ and ‘satire’ become themselves a ‘serious’ form of phallic communal identification.

The fact is, as I argue in Alter-​Politics—yes I am plugging my new book, here — ‘democracy’, ‘tolerance’ and ‘freedom of speech’ all can become and are increasingly becoming in the Western world a kind of fin d’empire colonial racialised strategies of phallic distinction. They are what westerners ‘flash’ to the racialised Muslims to tell them: look what we have and you haven’t got one or at best yours is very small compared to ours. And this is at the very same time where Western societies are becoming less democratic, tolerant and committed to freedom of speech.

The same can be said of ‘satire’. Here, paradoxically, ‘satire’ which was precisely, as I have argued above, the means of taking one’s distances from oneself in order to relativise and think relationally about oneself becomes the very means of producing a western narcissism aimed at making of oneself an object of one’s own desire in a period of decline. Charlie Hebdo’s humour with its total obliviousness to the colonial histories and relations of power in which they were dispensing their satire is a prime example of this phallic narcissism: we’re so funny that being ‘satirical’ and ‘funny’ is our identity. And you morons who can’t even take a joke don’t even know what being satirical and funny means. Unfortunately, it is more so in this sense that all those valiant defenders of free speech assembling around the western world holding their ‘je suis Charlie’ sign are totally correct. Indeed, ils sont tous Charlie, in all its colonial narcissistic splendour. So oblivious of the reality in which the Muslim other exists today that they even make a point of valiantly declaring that, unlike the Muslim people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Palestine who are being murdered at varieties of speeds with varieties of techniques by the thousands, they, the ones attacked by three armed militants are heroically looking the murderers in the eyes and telling it to them straight: they are ‘not afraid’.

Ghassan Hage is Future Gen­er­a­tion Pro­fessor of Anthro­polgy and Social The­ory at the Uni­ver­sity of Melbourne.

http://criticallegalthinking.com/2015/01/11/not-afraid/

JK Rowling attacks Murdoch for tweet blaming all Muslims for Charlie Hebdo deaths
Peaceful Muslims are no more responsible for terror than I am for Murdoch, says Harry Potter author
JK Rowling
JK Rowling responded to Rupert Murdoch’s tweet following the Charlie Hebdo killings. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP
Maev Kennedy
Sunday 11 January 2015 13.44 GMT

JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has condemned and mocked the tweet from Rupert Murdoch which insisted that even peaceful Muslims must bear responsibilities for jihadi attacks.

“I was born Christian. If that makes Rupert Murdoch my responsibility, I’ll auto-excommunicate,” she tweeted on Sunday.

The News Corp boss’s tweet on Saturday morning said that “maybe most Moslems” were peaceful but all must be held responsible “until they recognise and destroy their growing jihadist cancer”.

It was promptly retweeted more than 4,000 times, and marked as a “favourite” by more than 2,000 people. It also attracted much criticism on Twitter, which increased when Murdoch followed it up with a tweet attacking political correctness.

He tweeted: “Big jihadist danger looming everywhere from Philippines to Africa to Europe to US. Political correctness makes for denial and hypocrisy.”

In response, Rowling sarcastically offered to take responsibility for the atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition: “The Spanish Inquisition was my fault, as is all Christian fundamentalist violence.” She added: “Oh, and Jim Bakker” – a reference to the American televangelist, whose New Year message included bitter attacks on “these people” (Muslims) and claims that God had revealed to him that the US military will never win another war, as a result of the US backing abortion, secularisation, and breaking the Ten Commandments.

In follow-up tweets, Rowling cited a recent study suggesting that eight times as many Muslims as non-Muslims had died in terrorist attacks. She also praised “the courage and compassionate actions” of Lassana Bathily, the Muslim employee of the kosher supermarket that was the target of the second siege in Paris, who hid Jewish customers from the gunman by leading them to a basement chiller room.

His actions, she wrote, “remind us of what ‘humanity’ ought to mean”.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/11/jk-rowling-condemns-murdoch-tweet-charlie-hebdo-harry-potter-news-corp-muslims-christian?CMP=share_btn_fb

Viva free speech

Will Paris stop the media doing its duty?
Much of the post-massacre debate in Paris and elsewhere in Europe has revolved around the preparedness – or otherwise – of newspapers to print anti-Islam cartoons or articles sure to infuriate Muslims. Will a new climate of fear prevent the media from its duties?

I hate to bend the argument, but over the decades, I’ve found that journos and editors across Europe are far more fearful of important and rich people with expensive lawyers who might sue them for slander than any gunmen storming into their front office.

Paris may change all this. But a lot of true stories have been spiked because of Britain’s absurdly costly libel laws rather than any threat of violence

Robert Fisk
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/robert-fisk-the-only-point-of-terror-lists-is-to-get-those-named-a-palace-invitation-9971088.html

Blowback in Paris: how should we respond to the Charlie Hebdo terror attack?
Nafeez Ahmed 08 January 2015. Posted in News
The only way forward, says Nafeez Ahmed, is for people of all faith and none to stand together in rejecting violence perpetrated in our name, whether by state or insurgent.

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Je suis Charlie
At least 12 people were killed in the shocking terrorist murders in Paris, among them 10 staff at Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French magazine whose offices were targeted, and two police officers.

The Kalashnikov-wielding gunmen, who were also armed with pump-action shotguns, shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they entered the magazine’s office to embark on their killing spree, proclaiming “The Prophet is avenged” after the massacre.

These are the worst attacks France has endured in decades – perhaps the worst in Europe since the 2005 London bombings. In 1995, a Paris commuter train was bombed by Algerian terrorists, killing eight and wounding 119.

Eyewitness Corrine Rey, a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist, said the attackers “spoke French perfectly” and claimed to be affiliated with al-Qaeda. According to another eyewitness, one of the hooded black-garbed gunmen told a passerby that they were from “Al-Qaeda in Yemen”.

Terrorists and their motives

This may not seem much to go on, but if accurate, these reports could be important indicators as to the perpetrators and their motives.

If the attackers spoke French perfectly, then the probability is that they are longtime French residents. That sort of ability to speak a language with undetectable flaws can only come from the familiarity of time. That means the gunmen, whatever their ethnicity, were most likely French.

In that case, what about their reported claim to be al-Qaeda in Yemen – a claim which, if it occurred, the terrorists clearly hoped would be broadcast widely? The claim is a reference to “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP), also known as Ansar al-Shari’ah, which was first formed in 2009 by the merger of al-Qaeda factions in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Just one month after US-led airstrikes on Islamic State (IS) targets across Iraq and Syria, and a week after President Barack Obama’s announcement of an extended military campaign, AQAP issued an extraordinary joint declaration of unity with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) – the al-Qaeda network in North Africa. The joint AQAP and AQIM statement called for support of ISIS, and for Islamist factions in Iraq and Syria to unite against the West. Whatever the intentions behind the statement, it proved that the US-led military intervention was already provoking elements of the fractured global jihadist movement to coalesce around the IS insurgency.

The stated aim of the intervention, of course, was to reduce the threat of terrorism posed by IS which, if “left unchecked” would pose “a growing threat” to the US homeland and countries in Europe. The latter, Obama said justifying the need for military action, could be subjected to “deadly attacks” from American and European nationals returning home after having traveled to Iraq and Syria to join ISIS.

Yet, Obama’s own intelligence assessments were adamant that IS posed “no imminent threat” to homeland security beyond the region. The joint AQAP-AQIM statement in support of IS that emerged a week after the decision to launch an extended intervention showed that the main factor motivating Islamist fighters to begin attacking targets in the US and Europe was the new military campaign.

Escalating risk

Sure enough, in the weeks and months after the first airstrikes against IS in August 2014, western intelligence agencies issued alert after alert on the mounting threat of terrorist attacks that, previously, officials had discounted as a likely danger. Rather than ameliorating the danger, the US-led military campaign had accelerated it to the point of making an impending terrorist attack virtually inevitable.

By late September, senior EU officials portended that a major terrorist attack on Europe linked to IS “is pre-programmed”, and that the risk of an atrocity could “already be out of control” as domestic authorities struggle to cope with the influx of returning European IS fighters. Then IS issued a statement circulated widely on social media, urging its followers worldwide to target the France and French people due to their involvement in the military intervention against IS.

The next month, the British Foreign Office warned that ongoing threats to Paris from Islamist groups meant there was a “high threat” of terrorism, particularly in the form of “indiscriminate attacks”.

That warning was prescient. The last weekend of December 2014 saw three separate ‘lone-wolf’ attacks on police and civilians by French nationals supportive of IS, underscoring that the threat to France was fast escalating. Other attacks that had been foiled by French intelligence in the preceding weeks and months were all attempted by “individuals who had returned to France or had never left the country.”

Military training

Unlike other attacks, though, the perpetrators of the 7 January Paris massacre were most likely professionals. They executed their operation calmly and with ruthless efficiency, including the murders of two armed French police officers, and the evasion of a comprehensive manhunt by police and intelligence units. The considered use of single and double shots, and the careful timing to coincide with the magazine’s editorial meeting, demonstrated a degree of tactical expertise hinting at people who had received military training, rather than self-radicalised lone-wolf attackers inspired solely by social media.

But eyewitnesses also said that the terrorists had trouble finding the location of the target, accessed the building by chance and then entered via the wrong staircase – indicating that they had not completed thorough reconnaissance, or fully rehearsed the operation.

All these facts are most consistent with the conclusion that the attackers were amateurs who had, however, been groomed and recruited by extremists affiliated with a nexus of Islamists connected to AQIM, AQAP and IS – or even all three, and had in that capacity been able to receive ad hoc terrorist training.

Intelligence failure?

According to French publications, police sources had by the evening already fully identified the perpetrators as “French-Algerian”, and knew their names and birthdates, before reportedly arresting them in a terror raid in Reims, eastern France, where the suspects lived. Two of the men had according to these reports returned to France from Syria last summer. If true, the French sources show that the gunmen had been on the radar of French intelligence for years. Police officials told Le Point that in 2008, one of the gunmen was tied to an Iraqi network in Paris that had been encouraging young men to join militants in Iraq and Syria. A court trial that year indicated that the network – seemingly linked to Islamist extremists who planted the seeds of what became ISIS – had been extensively monitored by French intelligence. The same man had also previously been arrested in 2005 when he attempted to travel to Damascus.

At that time, there had been no intelligence suggesting this network linked to “al-Qaeda in Iraq” had any plans to attack French targets, especially as France’s position at that time was opposition to the Iraq War. This, however, changed dramatically last year in the wake of France’s decision to join the coalition against IS. In the wake of the intensifying terror alerts, the internal danger to Paris from the same domestic network linked to al-Qaeda in Iraq should have been an obvious focus for French intelligence.

The question that will soon be asked as further facts emerge, is how was this network of Islamists – linked to the very group that went on to spawn IS – able to expand on French soil with impunity over the last decade?

Islamic State is desperate

But is France’s involvement in the war on IS the only motive for the terrorists? Why not Britain, or the US, which are leading the military campaign?

The targeting of Charlie Hebdo signifies, along with the trend of recent Islamist terrorist attacks, that the strategy is shifting from symbolic spectacular high casualty attacks, to more frequent and less complex strikes that are easier to organise and execute. But the targeting of Charlie Hebdo is revealing in another way.

In 2006, the magazine published the notorious Muhammad cartoons that had previously run in Denmark, provoking worldwide protests across the Muslim world. Charlie Hebdo had also run several of its own original cartoons of the Prophet of Islam. The terrorists’ decision to target Charlie Hebdo is thus more than just an attack on France; it is an effort to rally populist support from across the Muslim world for the Islamist cause.

Successive global public opinion polls across Muslim countries up to 2013 show that overwhelming majorities have increasingly expressed “negative views” about al-Qaeda terrorism, to the point that support for the Islamist terrorist network had waned to an all-time low.

Given IS’ fantastical messianic ambitions to establish a global ‘caliphate,’ the latest massacre in the name of ‘avenging the Prophet’ can be seen as a sign that Islamist extremists are now recognising the increasing unpopularity of Islamist violence amongst Muslim publics – illustrated once again with the unprecedented mass mobilization of Pakistanis in response to the Taliban’s recent massacre of school children. This is an attempt to turn the tide, and rally Muslims to their support.

Muslims hate terrorists, too

Yet it won’t work, and illustrates how out of touch the terrorists are with Muslim public opinion. It is a little-known fact that most victims of Islamist terrorism worldwide are not westerners, but Muslims – which no doubt partly explains why Muslims increasingly hate Islamist terrorists. In the bitter aftermath of the Paris attack, Muslims worldwide have already responded with disgusted outrage, including countless posts on social media. Rather than, enfranchising already overwhelmingly disgusted Muslims to the Islamist insurgency in Iraq and Syria, the latest atrocity will further reinforce its utter religious illegitimacy and moral bankruptcy.

The danger is that the more reactionary elements of the French and European political establishment see an opportunity to vindicate their anti-Muslim ideologies, while pushing the mainstream further to the far right. But this would only compound the risks.

Quagmire

France’s failed policies towards its Muslim minority communities have played a critical role in establishing a groundswell of social exclusion and alienation, that makes some French Muslims vulnerable to recruitment by Islamist extremists.

This was even acknowledged by Bernard Squarcini, the head of France’s Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (DCRI), who recently admitted that the reasons France has faced an increasingly high risk of terrorist attack include the country’s history as a colonial power, its military involvement in Afghanistan, and the widening restrictions on Muslim women’s dress including the banning of headscarves in public service jobs.

Yet in some ways, Squarcini also misses the point, even noted by private US intelligence firm Stratfor, which is closely linked to the American military intelligence community:

“France has a significant Muslim minority largely segregated in slums known in French as ‘banlieues’ outside France’s major cities. A significant proportion of the young Muslim men who live in these areas are unemployed and disaffected. This disaffection has been displayed periodically in the form of large-scale riots … which resulted in massive property destruction and produced the worst civil unrest in France since the late 1960s. While not all those involved in the riots were Muslims, Muslims did play a significant and visible role in them… Moves by the French government such as the burqa ban have stoked these tensions and feelings of anger and alienation. The ban, like the 2004 ban against headscarves in French schools, angered not only jihadists but also some mainstream Muslims in France and beyond.”

In this context, characterising the Charlie Hebdo killings as a despicable “attack on freedom of speech” may well be true, but also obscures the fact that many unemployed, alienated French Muslims justifiably feel that this is a case of double-standards.

Why should freedom of speech not apply to their freedom to merely practice and express their religious faith? It is here, in the powerlessness to challenge the encroachment on religious freedoms under the French brand of secularism, fuelled by the grievances about ongoing wars in the Muslim world, that vulnerability to radicalisation begins. If we uphold the freedom of speech of Charlie Hebdo to mock religion, and we must, should we not question the withdrawal of this elementary right to France’s Muslims?

Not in my name

A kneejerk response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre would be familiar: crackdowns, monitoring and curbs on Muslim communities, including racial profiling; wild promises of “punishing” the attackers and taking decisive action to root out terrorists once and for all; ramping up military intervention in Iraq, Syria, Yemen or elsewhere to increase the heat on the terrorists at source, and teach them a lesson.

The problem is that these are tried, tested, and failed strategies that serve largely as useful recruiting sergeants for terrorist networks like IS and al-Qaeda. We are so obsessed with these strategies, despite their abject failure, that while getting rightly worked up at the horrifying atrocities against the West like that just committed in Paris, we are incapable of mustering a similar emotional response to the reports of dozens of civilian casualties due to US-led airstrikes.

Such so-called collateral damage, which includes the “mass destruction of civilian homes” by western bombs according to rebel eyewitnesses on the ground, is not even an accident, but a result of Obama’s deliberate loosening of “near certainty” standards previously adopted to minimise civilian deaths: and is already driving locals into the arms of IS.

We must not fall into the trap of the terrorists themselves – the inability to recognize the suffering of the Other, their wholesale demonization, the acceptance of their indiscriminate destruction as a necessary means to a “greater good.” The only way forward is for people of all faith and none to stand together in rejecting the violence perpetrated in our name, whether by state or insurgent.

Recognising that the Paris atrocity is predictable blowback which is likely to worsen as we insist on narrow, reactionary militarised solutions, does not absolve the perpetrators of responsibility for their terrible crimes; but it might help us find a path to safety based on co-existence, renunciation of violence, and unity in adversity.

Source: Middle East Eye

http://stopwar.org.uk/news/blowback-in-paris-how-should-we-respond-to-the-charlie-hebdo-terror-attack

Blowback: Paris Terror Suspects Recently Returned from Syria and Demonstrated Military Training
Dan Sanchez, January 07, 2015
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Briefly noted in the third paragraph of a USA Today report about the suspects in today’s Paris terror attack: “Both brothers returned from Syria this summer.”

What would French radical Islamists be doing in Syria around that time? Quite possibly getting training from the US and its allies to fight Assad. And as Ben Swann reports: “Analysts have said that this attack was carried out by men who had formal military training and was carried out by men who acted like a ‘special forces unit’.”

However, such training is by no means certain, for as Mitchell Prothero reports:

“Other evidence suggests they could be linked to a top French al Qaida operative, David Drugeon, who’s been the target at least twice of U.S. airstrikes in Syria over the last four months.”

Yet, even if they didn’t manage to get past U.S. “vetting,” and instead received training from al Qaida alone, the fact that the war they earned their spurs in was persisting at all was due to U.S. aid to the rebels.

This is the kind of blowback that is so quick to follow intervention that Scott Horton incisively terms it “backdraft.”

And once again, just as with Sony and North Korea, the implications concerning empire are getting lost in the hullabaloo over rogue groups allegedly seriously threatening freedom of speech.

http://antiwar.com/blog/2015/01/07/blowback-paris-terror-suspects-recently-returned-from-syria-and-demonstrated-military-training/

the suspects were known not just to French but also to other European and American authorities; one had travelled to Yemen over a three-year period and another had been convicted of earlier seeking to travel to Iraq; and they were plugged into long-established European jihadist networks.

, the suspects weren’t unknown quantities. Cherif and Said Kouachi, who committed the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Amedy Coulibaly, who took hostages in a kosher shop, and Hayat Boumeddiene, Coulibaly’s girlfriend, were connected both to each other, and to a large network of extremist organisers in Europe.

The younger Kouachi, Cherif, had been jailed for seeking to join Iraqi jihadists nearly a decade ago. In prison, he was mentored by the al-Qaeda-linked Djamel Beghal, who himself had spent time at Finsbury Park mosque in London, where he was an associate of the radical cleric Abu Hamza.

The older Kouachi undertook military training in Yemen in 2011, where he met the influential preacher Anwar al-Awlaki.

Awlaki was a senior figure in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the branch of al-Qaeda that has proven most effective at placing bombs on Western-bound aircraft, and which claimed responsibility for the French attacks.

On top of this, more than 1,000 French nationals – a large proportion of whom would be previously unknown – have travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight with Islamic State in the last few years. About 200 have returned.

The Kouachi brothers had succeeded in building up a cache of arms in their apartment. Neighbours discovered that cache, but they were then intimidated into silence. This, however, might represent more a failure of local policing – and poor relations between the local Muslim community and the authorities – than national intelligence.

Nevertheless, assault rifles and rocket launchers are not easily available in Western Europe, and the French authorities could reasonably be expected to have had a tighter grip on the supply networks.

We might also ask whether French authorities and their foreign counterparts, especially those in Yemen and the US, shared intelligence that might, taken together, have thrown up insight that the individual portions could not.

One report suggests that France de-prioritised the Kouachi brothers because Yemen was a US priority, whereas American officials left it to the French. France, it should be remembered, is not a member of the US-led Five Eyes intelligence alliance.

Did international terror groups play a role?
We increasingly, but simplistically, seek to place terrorist attacks into one of two categories: low-tech, independent operations by individuals (“lone wolf”) or small groups (“wolf packs”), or complex and large operations resourced and commanded by organisations.

The last six months has seen a profusion of low-level attacks across Europe and North America, giving the impression that even slightly larger attacks – involving higher-calibre weaponry or better preparation – must represent formal plots by established terrorist groups.

In this case, the attackers themselves claimed to have been sent by AQAP, which itself claimed to have “directed” the plot.

But we should treat this claim sceptically.

As the Australian counterterrorism analyst Leah Farrall reminds us, the al-Qaeda operatives who attacked US embassies in 1998 were given only general instructions to strike Americans. Al-Qaeda’s leadership learned of the targets while the attack was under way.

This is closer to inspiration or encouragement than direction or command. This may be the model in the Paris attacks, particularly as AQAP’s past plots have been built around advanced bombs rather than the use of gunmen.

The Paris attacks are not a new kind of terrorism. The use of gunmen, the seizure of hostages, the focus on screen-time rather than death toll, and the role played by complex networks of individuals cutting across different countries and groups have been features of attacks over the past 50 years.

Charlie Hebdo attack: A French intelligence failure?

By Shashank Joshi
Senior research fellow, Royal United Services Institute
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30760656

маяковский @moscow_ghost · 6h 6 hours ago
#Turkey’s al Qaeda, #IS safehouses on #Syria border are no secret – yet no reaction
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10415935/Al-Qaeda-recruits-entering-Syria-from-Turkey-safehouses.html …

Militancy draws extreme reactions and not sympathy, especially if there is an understanding that blasphemy was used perhaps, as an excuse to attack the West, which is a dominant pattern in al Qaeda-driven violence. The two Algerian boys were recruited by al Qaeda in Yemen to strike inside the heart of the perceived enemy as it did before. We know that if the intent was to stop the publication of sacrilegious cartoons, then al Qaeda has failed. The cartoons will increase, not stop.
Unfortunately, these attacks will result in strengthening of the political right across Europe and the Muslim population will be subjected to greater scrutiny, perhaps at times unfairly. The pressure on Muslims in Europe to prove themselves better citizens will increase mostly by demonstrating commitment to Western secularism that they are not prepared for. Indeed, this is a test for both free speech and multiculturalism in Europe.

Ayesha Siddiqa
Express Tribune
15 Jan 2015

from facebook

Abdul Nishapuri said:

Those “liberals” who think that Paris shooting were an isolated reaction to blasphemy only want to hide the systematic pattern of transnational Salafi Wahhabi and Deobandi terrorism that spreads from Pakistan to Europe and from Middle East to North America. The West-Saudi alliance is the biggest enabler of Deobandi-Wahhabi terrorism in the world today which doesn’t need an alleged act of blasphemy to justify its terror.
I agree with the following analysis.

Jahanzeb Hussain
You really need to see the Jihadis from near to know their ugliness. Today these clowns are protesting against France in Pakistan. Our office was closed after 11AM in Islamabad. In my dad’s office in Karachi, they managed to reach the outer fence before the police used teargas to disperse them. Just spoke to my dad and he said that he and the other staff can’t leave before everything clears out. The police presence is heavy in Karachi. When you see these Jihadis, you know that their issue isn’t the so-called disrespect of the Prophet. They themselves are the biggest disrespect to the Prophet. Their goal is to use any window of opportunity to occupy space in society and spread their hideous agenda.