(To be published in Arabic for Arabi21 insha’Allah)
A few things should be said regarding Muslim condemnation of the attacks in Paris on November 13th.
Roughly 24 hours before the attacks in Paris, at least 41 people were slaughtered in Beirut. French President Francois Hollande condemned the attack as “despicable”, he did not, however, characterize the twin bombings in Lebanon as “an attack on all of humanity.”
Roughly a day after the Paris attacks, 140 students were massacred in Kenya. As of the writing of this article, Hollande, and most of the world has responded with deafening silence. The conspicuous contrast between the rhetorical responses to the three different attacks leaves very little ambiguity about France’s, and by extension, the West’s attitude towards violence, and about who is, and who is not, considered a part of the human race.
But let us leave that aside for the moment.
Since the end of September, France has carried out at least 1,300 airstrikes against non-military targets in Iraq, and roughly 400 in Syria. We do not know the death toll from these attacks; presumably for reasons that the first two paragraphs of this article suggest: these deaths do not merit attention.
In 2012-2013, France invaded Mali by air, land and sea to crush an indigenous independence movement which threatened to topple the French client regime. Thousands were killed.
Currently, France has over 3,000 troops spread across five countries in Africa — Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad — as part of Operation Burkhane. Based in Chad, the operation is essentially a pre-emptive counter-insurgency mission aimed at disrupting potential independence movements and stabilizing French client regimes throughout the continent.
The point here is not to suggest a tit-for-tat rationale to justify the attacks in Paris; that argument is both too easy to make, and too irresponsible. The point here is to point out that France is a nation that firmly and fundamentally believes in the principle that violence is a legitimate means to achieve political and economic objectives.
Our rejection of this concept is evident and observable.
If 1.6 billion Muslims, most of whom are victimized either through direct military violence, or through economic and political repression by Western powers, and who therefore have every reason to feel hostility towards the West; if those Muslims did not believe in the sanctity of innocent civilian lives, there would be no innocent civilians left alive in the West at all. Our actions demonstrate our belief in preserving the lives of the innocent, even as our innocent are savaged every day. We do not see any practical indication that the West shares our belief, however; rather, what we see is that the proponents of peace among them are approximately proportionate to the minuscule number of proponents of violence within our Ummah.
The obvious hypocrisy of obliging Muslims to condemn the attacks in France, while France is carrying out attacks against Muslims around the world by the day as a matter of policy, makes critical comment superfluous. What we need to realize is that we are being expected to affirm to France, and to the West, values and principles which they themselves do not, in fact, believe in. It is important for us to realize this, and even more important for the West to recognize it too.