Editor: I. Mallikarjuna Sharma Volume 11: 15-31 March 2015 No. 5-6

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32 Charlie Hebdo : Thinking New, Rethinking the Old (Rousset Pierre) (2015) 1 LAW anti-egalitarian and discriminatory policies, against Islamophobia and racism, and against the far-Right and religious fundamentalisms that, in France, have become or are once again dangerous political forces (including in their Christian variants). We’re not prepared for this complex fight. We’re aware of some of the causes, but only some of them. To move forward, we can’t be satisfied with truisms (however valid they continue to be). We have to closely examine things we’re not used to talking about, including things that are unexpected and surprising. Here are two examples. We never tire of repeating the fact that imperialist wars (such as the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003) have created the fertile ground on which the Islamic State has prospered. Quite right, and we have to keep repeating this so that no one believes that imperialist war is the answer. But another cause are the policies pursued by ruling classes in the Muslim world. A recent issue of the NPA’s French-language weekly l’Anticapitaliste takes up this question, but only with great trepidation. 6 After all, fundamentalist movements aren’t just reacting to the behaviour of imperialist powers. They have become players in their own right, with their own plans, their own histories and their own roots. It isn’t their barbaric acts that should prompt us to address the question of religious fascism. When Farooq Tariq, for example, characterizes some of these movements as representing a new form of religious fascism, he does so on the basis of an assessment of the way their social base has evolved in Pakistan. 7 Is such an assessment open to debate? Of course, but it should at least be taken 6 ESSF (article 34242), “Du Moyen-Orient à l’Afrique: le djihadisme, enfant monstrueux des politiques impérialistes et libérales”: http://www.europe-solidaire. org/spip.php?article34242 7 See in particular ESSF (article 33874), “Pakistan: “It was an attack on Muslim children by Muslim fanatics” – Religious fanatics groups or the fascists in the making”: http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article33874 and (article 34192), “After Peshawar (Pakistan) and Paris (France) attacks: Challenge and response”: http://www. europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article34192. seriously, coming as it does from a country torn asunder by sectarian conflict. The backdrop for religious fundamentalisms is evolving rapidly and past analyses, however relevant they may be, have to be brought up to date. The Islamic State, for example, is a recent development and may itself be undergoing rapid change. To be sure, none of the affected countries resemble the Europe of the inter-war period. Still, these movements fulfill functions (against the Arab revolutions, for example) comparable to those of European fascisms (against the workers movement). Some of these movements, in Pakistan at any rate, have built a real mass base within extremely reactionary segments of the educated middle classes 8 , and also within “plebeian” layers through Koranic schools. Perhaps we should speak of fundamentalist political-religious movements of a fascist type. It’s not that I want to come up with a one-size-fits-all term, but I feel there is a need to update our analysis of fundamentalisms (in the plural). Which brings me to my second example. We (rightly) stress that it’s not religion that lies at the origin of the radicalization of young French nationals going to Syria, but social despair, the daily experience of discrimination, injustice, and the well-known double standard. Religion is only a “vector” and not a “factor”, to use Julien Salingue’s terminology. 9 But once the “vector” has led to sectarian involvement in a fundamentalist current, the latter becomes a “factor” driving forward a social vision (which includes power over women and the dehumanization of the “other”) and cloaking barbaric acts with religious justification, whatever the personal motivations may be. We have to hone in on socioeconomic questions to deal with root causes, but 8 Among other things, the financial crises of 1997-1998 severely affected middle classes in a number of countries, creating a wave of social panic which radicalized urban middle classes to the right, going as far as an explicit rejection of democracy and the right of the poor to vote (in Thailand, for example). 9 See ESSF (article 34154), “Don’t let mob rule prevail”: http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php? article34154. Law Animated World, 15-31 March 2015 32
(2015) 1 LAW Charlie Hebdo : Thinking New, Rethinking the Old (Rousset Pierre) 33 this settles neither the political question (new far- Right formations) nor the uses to which religion is put. And then there are facts that don’t fit in to our traditional analytical approach – and that too, whether or not one believes this approach is valid. For example, what to make of the significant numbers of converts to Islam one finds among the French nationals joining fundamentalist movements? Or the involvement of teenagers from stable families and backgrounds, including from quiet towns in the countryside? There are also highly-skilled young people who would have no difficulty finding employment and yet have chosen to contribute their know-how to the Islamic State (hackers, for example), not to mention those who are taken in by calls for humanitarian assistance in Syria. Indeed, how is it that the usual methods of sects and cults of all sorts – which cut off the targeted individual from their usual environment – work so effectively? I think we would do well to study these questions further to enrich and broaden our understanding. In France, the bulk of our writing is aimed at countering our leaders’ hypocritical claims and the lies of the dominant ideology. This is correct and necessary. The problem, though, is that with such an approach we risk repeating what we already knew and going no further. We have unambiguously condemned the murders, but often without drawing explicit conclusions in terms of tasks. And yet we have to create much stronger ties than before between solidarity with progressive currents facing fundamentalists (and dictatorial regimes) from Syria to Pakistan, on the one hand, and resistance in Europe to the powerful upsurge of these new far-Right political-religious forces. This is something we have to do in our program and in our methods, with Muslims and in their defense. Otherwise, we won’t be providing convincing alternatives to the security agenda and will be yielding this terrain to our adversaries, the state and the “Western” far-Right. Is Charlie Hebdo the problem? In some activist circles in France and, especially, in the international blogosphere (particularly in the English language), the “problem” appears to be none other than Charlie Hebdo itself. So much so that some even neglect to condemn the murderers, or support the victims in the way a noose supports a hanged man. I have learned to despise the phrase “of course, murder can never be justified,” invariably followed by a lethal “but…”. I’ve had a few e-mail exchanges with an Indian correspondent who, having tried to find what in recent issues of Charlie Hebdo had “provoked” the attack, was surprised not to find anything. There’s a reason for this: there was no controversy surrounding Charlie at the time of the attack. The magazine had fallen back into relative obscurity and was struggling to make ends meet. If Charlie Hebdo hadn’t existed, the January attacks would have taken place nonetheless, because they were a response to the role played by the French state in the Middle East and Africa. This is why France was chosen rather than Denmark, country of origin of the notorious Muhammad caricatures. 10 The political targets were the press, the police and Jews. There is no wanting for physical and symbolic targets. Demonized as it was, Charlie Hebdo was useful, but in no way indispensable. So it was in no way indispensable to in turn “judge” Charlie in order to analyze the nature and scope of the attacks, the nature of the organizations that ordered them and the ways in which the international context has changed. But just as much as there has been a profusion of writing about Charlie Hebdo, there has been a paucity of commentary on these questions. The organizations that ordered or inspired the January attacks spend a great deal of their time massacring Muslims. They manipulate religious 10 Since these words were written, an attack has indeed taken place in Copenhagen following the pattern in Paris: against freedom of expression (cartoonists) and Jews, causing two deaths. According to available information, it was an “aftershock”, an unplanned “copycat” attack in response to the Paris events and not a complex and minutely prepared operation such as what we saw in the French case. The case of Denmark is no less important, though, for understanding what is going on in European societies. 33 Law Animated World, 15-31 March 2015
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Editor: I. Mallikarjuna Sharma Volume 11: 15-31 March 2015 No. 5-6

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