09 January 2015

By Khalid Amayreh

To begin with, I unhesitatingly condemn the attack on the Charlie Hebdo Satirical weekly magazine in Paris. I believe it is always wrong and unforgivable to kill innocent people. Moreover, this sort of actions, besides being morally wrong, also harms French and other Western Muslims enormously

True, the act of mocking the Prophet of Islam is not a cause worth defending. It did hurt the feelings of hundreds of millions around the world.

However, murdering people is not exactly the right response to the French magazine's blasphemy. In the final analysis, one can't fight a crime by committing a greater crime. It is also never sufficient to have a rightful cause to respond in an uncalculated manner. It is never enough to be right; one has to be wise as well, especially in this complex world.

I realize that many writers are under an immense pressure to go with the flow, namely denounce "the evil terrorists" while expressing empathy and solidarity with France. I do sympathize with the families of the victims, but I admit I have no sympathy with the French government. In the final analysis, one must be faithful to one's conscience and intellectual honesty and France is never innocent especially in its approach to Muslims, past and present.

In fact, I dare claim that French behavior has made this terrorist act inevitable, however outrageous it may be.

France, after all, has been murdering Muslims in droves since time immemorial.

France killed at least two million Muslims in North Africa and a third million in Sub-Saharan Africa. France, which is now complaining about beheadings by IS, beheaded thousands of Moroccans between 1920-and WWII.

In recent months, France effectively enabled barbarian Christians to carry out a shocking ethnic cleansing genocide in Central Africa.

About two decades ago, France collaborated with the Algerian military to decapitate the country's nascent democracy, triggering a protracted reign of terror that claimed hundreds of thousands of innocent Algerians. Unfortunately, this reign of terror is yet to come to an end.

In the mid-1950s, France gave Israel the Dimona atomic reactor which enable the Nazi-like Zionist entity to manufacture numerous nuclear bombs and warheads and therefore hold the entire Middle East hostage as well as pursue a policy based on lebensraum vis-à-vis the Palestinians and other peoples of the Middle East.

Indeed, it was mainly French weapons that enabled Israel to occupy the rest of Palestine as well as the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula in 1967.

Now, as I write these words, French warplanes are raining death on Muslims in Syria and Iraq, while allowing murderous Iran-backed militias to annihilate Muslims villages.

Despite all this evil legacy, the vast majority (99%) of Muslims are still against terror in the name of Islam or in any other name.

Today, Muslims are more or less the premier victims of terror and mass murder. They are being murdered every hour, every day, every week and all year long because they want to be free.

They are being murdered in Palestine, Myanmar, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. And when some stray Muslims carry out a terrorist act here or there out of desperation, the entire west loses its composure, ignores its own mega terror against Muslims, and starts making its usual hypocritical outcries, very much like Binyamin Netanyahu does, when he calls Palestinian freedom-fighters "terrorists and murderers", while forgetting what his own shitty country did and is doing to them.

Do not get me wrong. I am against all acts of violence and terror, especially those targeting innocent people.

However, it is an expression of utter hypocrisy and dishonesty for the French and other westerners to claim a higher moral-ground in comparison to al-Qaeda or IS, or indeed mainstream Muslims.

Nay, you have been far more evil and diabolical. You have destroyed nations and killed millions.

The Americans, who murdered 15 million native Americans in north America and called the genocide "Manifest Destiny" didn't content themselves with murdering two million Iraqis, they saturated the Iraqi environment with depleted uranium that will continue to kill Iraqis, young and old, and even the yet-to-be be born, for 50,000 years to come.

So, please! We have had enough of your hypocrisy and mendacity.

A final word; I must view with utter contempt the claim that the Paris incident was an attack against press freedom and freedom of expression. We all know that the attack was actually a revenge for France's military aggression against Muslims. Calling it an attack on press freedom and western liberalism is therefore childish and stupid.

Besides, since when did the West really care about human rights and civil liberties, including press freedom.

Doesn't the West, with all its strength, stand behind states that deny their people even the most elementary human rights and freedoms?

Even in the West itself, we are very familiar with the scandalous double standards related to this false mantra.

Thus, mocking the Prophet of Islam is considered part of the sacred traditions of press freedom.

However, questioning the authenticity of Holocaust narratives or criticizing Israel's Nazi-like crimes against the helpless Palestinians is an expression of virulent anti-Semitism, the practitioner of which must be hounded like pariahs, imprisoned or forced to resign from his job.

Well, there are always people on the Muslim side who would argue rather convincingly that if the West has the right to be enslaved by the Golem of Anti-Semitism, Muslims worldwide likewise have at least an equal right to defend their religious symbols.

Well, how about mutual respect?

Khalid Amayreh is an American-educated Palestinian journalist and political commentator living in the West Bank