"Charlie Hebdo"

The fear that is gripping France today stands in ghastly contrast with the positive national mood during the days immediately following the horrific Nov. 13 attacks in Paris.1

Kevin Barrett has become known in the US as a fearless journalist who cuts to the quick, his political and analytic skills leading to provocative, truthful explanations of our mostly inexplicable reality. He has written several books dealing with 9/11, and is currently an editor at Veterans Today, and pundit at Press TV, Russia Today, al-Etejah and other international channels. His website is TruthJihad.com. He builds on a well-established American journalistic tradition of brave exposers of government misdoings.

In 2010, Saïd Bouamama co-writed the book Fuck France with Saidou from the ZEP group. After its release, an extreme right-wing association pressed charges for incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence. In January 2015, shortly after the freedom of speech defense “march,” Saïd Bouamama and Saidou appeared before the Court of First Instance. Saïd Bouamama, a sociologist specializing in discrimination towards the popular class’ immigrants, analyzes the context of the post Charlie French society.

In the early months of 2015, there have been two separate mass murders inside France that have generated headlines worldwide for their brutality and disregard for human life. In early January, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi entered the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and gunned down 11 employees, and shot dead one police officer on their way out.

It’s those immeasurably powerful moments when we stand still and stay close to ourselves that make us see things more clearly, and that give us a better understanding of ourselves and our connectedness with each other.

The “civilized” have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their “vital interests” are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death; these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the “sanctity” of human life, or the conscience of civilized world.
— James Baldwin

In a searing and cogent piece entitled “Thousands of Black Lives Mattered in Nigeria, but the World Didn’t Pay Attention,” the Root‘s Kirsten West Savali compares and contrasts the West’s response to the terror killings of almost 20 mostly white folks (including the gunmen) in Paris to the contemporaneous wholesale slaughter of ten times that number of blacks in Africa’s most populous nation-state, Nigeria.

It is still not about Islam, even if the media and militants attacking western targets say so. Actually, it never was. But it was important for many to conflate politics with religion; partly because it is convenient and self-validating.
First, let’s be clear on some points. Islam has set in motion a system to abolish slavery over 1,200 years before the slave trade reached its peak in the western world.

I am well aware that I’m stepping into a hornet’s nest by posting this video, which is going viral. Those who wish to silence all debate have an easy card to play here, accusing me of buying into a conspiracy theory. There’s only one problem: unlike the video-maker, I have few conclusions to draw about what the significance of this video is in relation to the official story. That is not why I am posting it.

The news has been dominated recently by events in France. Reports say that about ten people who worked in Paris for a satirical magazine, “Charlie Hebdo”, were gunned down in their offices by a group of Muslim extremists. Apparently the magazine is well-known for satirising Mohammed (and other religious figures) and its staff have received numerous death threats in the past. Thousands of French took to the streets in support of free speech, many with placards saying “Je suis Charlie”.