The terrorist attacks in Paris civil areas pointed out the inconsistencies in French Middle East diplomacy. In September 2007, President Nicolas Sarkozy received Muammar Gaddafi lavishly for a five-day visit, graciously allowing the Libyan leader to set up his tent in the gardens of the official residence in Marigny when he visited Paris and signed major military agreements worth some 4.5 billion euros. In 2008, he extended a personal invitation to the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, to watch the military parade celebrating Bastille Day on July 14. This contrasts with the feverish activism in favor of military interventions to overthrow their regimes. Under Gaddafi, Islamic terrorism was virtually non-existent. Michel Aflaq, one of the spiritual guides of Ba’athism in the 1940s—which extended into Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, and that counted among its devotees Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Hassad—was a Syrian Christian, educated at the University of Paris, He served as Minister of Education in Syria in 1950. His mausoleum in Baghdad was desecrated by American troops and converted into a supermarket.
In 2011, France spent over 450 million euros bombing Libya and killing thousands of civilians. Prior to the French and U.S.-led bombing campaign in 2011, Libya had the highest Human Development Index, the lowest infant mortality and the highest life expectancy in all Africa. It was clearly the most advanced of all Arab countries in terms of the legal status of women and families in Libyan society (half of the students at the University of Tripoli were women). It is now a wrecked country.
It was after an official visit to Paris in November 2014 by the new Egyptian president, the strongman behind the putsch, General Abdul Fattah al-Sissi, installed after President-elected Mohammed Morsi’s ouster and a sham election, that France announced, in February 2015, its premier trade agreement, worth 5 billion euros, involving the sale of Dassault Rafale fighter aircraft. In September 2015, French President François Hollande announced the sale to Egypt of the two Mistral-class landing ships originally built for the Russian navy, but their sale was canceled in September 2014 because of Russia´s involvement in Ukraine and the mounting pressure from NATO to call off the sale.
Abdul Fattah al-Sissi got his education at the Army War College in Pennsylvania. Each year, 500 Egyptian officers received training in the United States. Despite American aid estimated at $50 billion since 1979, one fourth of the Egyptian population is illiterate. Of greater concern are the lessons that will be drawn from the Egyptian impasse by the Islamist groups which were ready to accept democratic rule and those that are dedicated to armed struggle. The car bomb that killed the Prosecutor General of Egypt, Hisham Barakat, who issued the death sentence against President Morsi and the main leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in sham trials, and the resurgence of attacks in the northern Sinai illustrate the perils to Egypt of the repression wrought by Abdul Fatta al-Sissi, who declared his willingness in June 2015, given the absence of a Parliament since 2012, to rework the legal code by means of decree-laws in order to “accelerate the pace of executions.” The supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood who do not choose exile and manage to avoid incarceration will become radicalized and presented to us in the Egyptian mainstream press as “terrorists.”
No country has done more to fund Islamist extremism in the Muslim world than Saudi Arabia. It has launched a war of aggression in neighboring Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, now facing a humanitarian tragedy. But President François Hollande was in Rhyad in May 2015, invited by Gulf Arab leaders to address their summit, and France and Saudi Arabia are planning to sign $12 billion of arms deals, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters during a Paris visit by Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in June 2015.
Military intervention in Iraq, initially ruled out by President Jacques Chirac, is now implemented by President Hollande (deployment of 600 ground troops and the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle with 2,500 marines as part of the “Chammal” operation, involving more than 200 air raids between September 2014 and August 2015). According to the NGO Airwars, the “coalition” conducted more bombing raids in Iraq from January 1 to August 20, 2015 than it had in the previous 8 years combined (3,945 as of August 24, 2015). And now the intervention in Syria, which violates international law, has not been authorized by the Security Council, and was not requested by the Syrian government. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls legitimized the action by invoking the concept of pre-emptive defense introduced by U.S. President George W. Bush, with the disastrous consequences we are all familiar with: a pernicious system promoting nepotism and sectarian divisions that eventually led to full blown civil war between the Shi’ites, Sunnis, and Kurds—all to the advantage of extremist elements close to Al-Qaeda—the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), whose leaders were once interned in the U.S. military prison at Camp Bucca, Iraq, subjected to degrading and humiliating treatments as illustrated in troubling photographs in mass circulation newspapers.
The use of military action as the core of a security strategy has led to radicalization in Muslim countries (Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Mali, Pakistan). The Livre Blanc sur la Défense et la Sécurité de la France, published in 2013, openly sanctions this policy: “the many military operations in which France has taken part in recent years (Afghanistan, Ivory Coast, Libya, Mali) prove that military action remains an important component of our [national] security.” But security derives first and foremost from negotiation, mediation, and cooperation. A military response is not appropriate because it ultimately only generates more violence. Three hundred and fifteen suicide attacks were recorded in the Middle East from 1980 to 2003. Since 2003 they number in the thousands.
Young Muslims (from Belgium, France, Denmark, Germany, Canada…) join the jihad in Somalia, Algeria, and Syria. They metamorphose into terrorists in the name of a cause that will continue to motivate followers as long as it continues to appear legitimate and without alternative in their eyes. This cause is amplified by a growing Islamo-phobia, discrimination and margin- alization of the Muslim community, specially the youth, and the persistence of the Palestinian drama. It is fueled by repeated military operations on Islamic soil, particularly drone strikes, the indiscriminate deaths of innocents raining down from the sky, leaving a seething wake of injustice and humiliation. The former head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Michael Klynn (2012-2014), now admits that drones generate more terrorists than they kill.
Revealing Data
The extreme violence by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) may seem less incomprehensible if we put it in the context of some revealing data: an estimated 600,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed following the invasion and occupation of Iraq; 500,000 children died between 1991 and 1998 as a result of sanctions imposed against the regime of Saddam Hussein. In Afghanistan since 2003, more than 250,000 civilians have been killed and more than 130,000 people disabled, mainly because of landmines, including 40,000 amputees among the civilian population according to Afghan government sources. These figures are considered to be significantly underestimated. According to the United Nations, the number of Afghan children and Afghan women killed in the first half of 2015 increased by 13 percent and 23 percent, respectively, with respect to the same period in 2014. There are an estimated 5 million orphans in Iraq; 2 million in Afghanistan where 20 percent of the children will not live to see their 5th birthday, according to a report by the World Bank.
On April 30, 2015, in the Syrian village of Bir Mahli in the Aleppo Governorate, on the east bank of the Euphrates—a village I found peaceful and hospitable in 1972 when I participated in an archaeological dig at the Citadel of Aleppo—more than 50 civilians were killed by “coalition” bombs, including 31 children and 19 women. The NGOs Airwars and McClatchy have challenged the Pentagon about these blunders. And we must also add the deaths of 18 civilians in Harem on November 5 and 50 in Al-Bab on December 28, 2014; of 70 civilians in Hawija on June 2, 13 in Kafr Hind on July 28, and 11 in Atmeh on August 11, 2015. With 2,449 air attacks in Syria between September 2014 and August 20, 2015, the only civilian deaths publicly acknowledged by the Pentagon on May 21, 2015 were those of two 5-year-old girls. France didn´t even care to communicate on this issue.
What can we expect when children, the most precious part of our lives, are killed or abused, except more grief, hatred and violence? What can we hope to reap from fields sown with so much sorrow and despair? What alternative means of redress is offered to Gaza resident Tawfik Abu Jama, the only survivor of an Israeli bombing raid on July 20, 2014 that killed 26 members of his family, including his wife and 8 children?
Refugee Status
In 2014 alone, more than 1.2 million people were forced into refugee status; and the appalling figures continue in 2015 (more than 4 million Syrian refugees). The 71 decomposing Syrian bodies found in a smuggler´s abandoned truck in Austria and the drowned body of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach have shocked the West and should weigh heavily on its conscience, given its fund- amental role in their misfortune. But the media consistently cloak the responsibility of the West and its proxies for initiating and expanding wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa. The recent brutal violence exhibited in Paris, Beyrouth, Aleppo, and elsewhere by combatants in the jihadi movement has grown from this heritage. Terrorism feeds off this violence. ISIL is a phenomenon that has its parallels with the emergence of the Khmer Rouge, originally a minority Maoist rebellion, led by Pol Pot. After the violation of national sovereignty in 1973 and U.S. bombing raids causing some 500,000 deaths, the Khmer Rouge transformed into an extremely violent movement, responsible for the deaths of an estimated 2 million people between 1975 and 1979, a quarter of the country’s population.
The American explanation for terrorism, a multi-purpose term covering armed insurrections, rebellions, and resistance movements against occupational forces, is not convincing. Investigations of the issue, such as that by Michael Bond, who studied 500 suicide attacks between 1980 and 2003 and published his findings in the British journal New Scientist, underscore the absence of fanaticism, religious extremism, or poverty in the great majority of cases. What is highlighted instead are motives driven by dramas in the perpetrators’ personal lives or by the injustice and humiliation they have suffered, engendering a desire for vengeance and an openness to indoctrination within the tight-knit community of a brotherhood.
In a February 2015 New York Times article, the new Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, commented on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism: “As a Muslim, I can tell you that the problem isn’t Islam: it’s hopelessness. It’s the kind of hopelessness that abounds in the Syrian and Palestinian refugee camps, and in war-weary towns and villages in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Gaza. It’s the hopelessness we see in the poorer neighborhoods of Europe’s great cities, and, yes, even in the United States. And it is this hopelessness, which knows no state or religion, that we need to address if we are to stem the tide of terrorism.”
Islamophobia will arouse increasingly violent reactions in the Muslim world. Beyond the issues that have nourished the debate on Islam (the 2004 banning of the Muslim veil in French public schools, the recent row about the wearing of the burqa or niquab, caricatures of the Prophet, plans for a mosque at Ground Zero, burning of the Qur’an, the campaign against sharia, the ad campaign on buses in Washington DC with a photograph of Adolf Hitler with the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and the words “Islamic Jew-Hatred: it’s in the Quran,” the expulsion of Muslim girls from a school in the French town of Charleville-Mézières because of their unusually long dresses etc). There is a real increase in anti-Muslim discrimination and Islamophobic acts that fueled extreme reactions from the “beurs,” young Muslims with a French passport. For a large number of them, hatred of France has become a badge of honor.
As the killings in Charlie Hebdo had been a chronicle foretold, given the insults and obscenities circulated by this satirical magazine against a religion that constitutes, in many countries and in the disinherited suburbs of the major French cities, the only moral support, the only source of dignity, for marginalized and humiliated communities. The terrorist attacks in Paris are, too, a chronicle foretold, an expected blowback of French militarism and adventurism in the Middle East and France’s too long inability to integrate its Islamic young population, the largest one in Europe.
Since it is illegal in France to collect statistics on ethnicity or religion, official statistics are impossible to come by, but estimates suggest that 15 percent of France’s population are Muslim, 2/3rd of those in prisons are Muslim,and unemployment among young French from Algerian origin runs well over 5 times the national average.
According to Prime Minister Manuel Valls, 1,573 young French Muslims were fighting in Syria up to April. With such appalling figures, not to mention the dramatic inheritance of the colonial war conducted by France in Algeria, we have expected a very cautious French foreign policy after the fiasco of the Lybian adventure. But President Hollande decided to bombard Iraq and Syria in August 2014, and now, expressing the same hatred and vengeance that brings French beurs back to France to wage jihad on their native soil, he decided to bombard ISIL’s capital, Raqqa, along with American forces. U.S. military intervention in the Middle East has done more to provoke extremism than to stanch it. Looking at France’s Bush-inspired response to the horrific attacks in Paris, one must be forgiven for wondering what such a response seeks to accomplish. The worst may be yet to come.
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