Those 17 dead are at least owed our understanding, our appreciation that the rise of Islamic extremist groups is an incredibly complex phenomenon and - like it or not - Western foreign policy is a part of that phenomenon. Western involvement in the Middle East and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a part of this story. As Robert Fisk was writing the other day,
the bloody history of French-Algerian relations are a part of this story. Pretending it isn't will get us nowhere. Claiming that its tantamount to victim blaming to try and analyse the context behind these attacks will get us nowhere.
To quote from that article by Fisk:
Quote:
Maybe all newspaper and television reports should carry a “history corner”, a little reminder that nothing – absolutely zilch – happens without a past. Massacres, bloodletting, fury, sorrow, police hunts (“widening” or “narrowing” as sub-editors wish) take the headlines. Always it’s the “who” and the “how” – but rarely the “why”. Take the crime against humanity in Paris this week – the words “atrocity” and “barbarity” somehow diminish the savagery of this act – and its immediate aftermath.
We know the victims: journalists, cartoonists, cops. And how they were killed. Masked gunmen, Kalashnikov automatic rifles, ruthless, almost professional nonchalance. And the answer to “why” was helpfully supplied by the murderers. They wanted to avenge “the Prophet” for Charlie Hebdo’s irreverent and (for Muslims) highly offensive cartoons. And of course, we must all repeat the rubric: nothing – nothing ever – could justify these cruel acts of mass murder. And no, the killers cannot call on history to justify their crimes.
But there’s an important context that somehow got left out of the story this week, the “history corner” that many Frenchmen as well as Algerians prefer to ignore: the bloody 1954-62 struggle of an entire people for freedom against a brutal imperial regime, a prolonged war which remains the foundational quarrel of Arabs and French to this day.
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So yes, nothing can justify these attacks. There is not a shred of responsibility that the cartoonists need to take for the way that they were gunned down in cold blood. ISIS and Al Qaeda are murdering scum who deserve no sympathy. No one has sought to deny any of that. But let us not allow it to wilfully blind ourselves to the wider picture, a picture that is far bigger than three gunmen and some offensive cartoons. Let us not allow it to prevent us from trying to comprehend the true extent of the threat, it's character, it's motivation and it's background. Otherwise we will never be able to confront it, otherwise we will just feed the perpetual cycle of violence.
Edit - was posting the same time as TS above - I share his sentiments