LA PORTE DE L'ENFER

What are the factors and origins of the violence shaking France?

By Sidney Hey

Before the new century and years before the events of 9/11 in 2001, Arabophobia and Islamophobia were a reality in the Anglo-Saxon world and even more so in Western Europe. The mistrust and aversion to Muslims that had prevailed since the late 1970s and 1980s because of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation (framed by pro-Israeli sympathy), and with the emergence in the 1990s of alleged terrorist organisations such as “Al Qaeda” (created by the CIA in 1979), that aversion shifted to a degree of hatred institutionalised by governments and fuelled by the media.

Immigration to Europe (including the British Isles) from Arab countries such as Morocco, Algeria and Islamic countries such as Turkey, Pakistan and Bangladesh began to be perceived as dangerous by the early 1980s. Centred on racial hatred, this mistrust was exploited by “private” organisations linked to Zionist (pro-Israel) political interests to generate more anger and mistrust by creating stereotypes in the media that dehumanise Muslims.

We saw the result of this with the brutal invasions of Iraq and Libya and the opaque positions of the European Union in situations such as Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen.

Muslims have long been considered second-class citizens and marginalised in France. Long before the suspicious and unclear attacks on “Charlie-Hebdo” in 2015 and even before 2001, “Turks”, “blacks” and “Moors” had been the target of all kinds of arbitrariness and discrimination in all areas of French Catholic but secular life. In this context of a society with no values or little rootedness in religious tradition, the influence of Islam was gaining ground, fuelling even more mistrust.  This led to several violent uprisings in the suburbs of Paris, the one in November 2005 being one of the most resounding in France's contemporary history, which has undoubtedly been surpassed by the one that took place a few days ago.

 The events that unfolded after the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015 suspiciously and conveniently gave government intelligence agencies more arguments and powers to cast a veil of suspicion and stigmatisation over the entire French Islamic community.

The murder a week ago of Nahel, a 17-year-old of Algerian Arab origin, only reaffirms the state of arbitrariness and racial violence that exists and underlies one of the European countries of proclaimed democratic value and whose political elite (not coincidentally) has excellent and symbiotic relations with the state of Israel, where such cases are a daily occurrence.

It is in this context that the political farce represented by the “socialist” Macron, more occupied with his musical hobbies and posturing over the situation in Ukraine than with reforming the vices of the republic, stands out. The current government is a continuation of the administrations of two of the most reactionary administrations, those of Sarkozy and Hollande, partly responsible for the interventions in Arab and North African countries that have created the wave of migration that the public detests.

Within this Status Quo and from governmental bodies such as the “Sureté Nationale” and the DGSE (intelligence) Muslims were made the centre of imputation for all the evils afflicting a society in decadence and that contrary to this, Islam represents a hope for a spiritual path marked by its own precepts.

The push for the so-called “fight against terrorism” and the governmental hoaxes created in Washington to justify this farce gave free rein to unbridled and irrational hatred against Muslims in Europe and especially in France.

Although the term “anti-Semitic” has been arbitrarily and discretionary capitalised to qualify only hatred against Jews, it also includes Arabs because of their Semitic status, Islamophobia being a more encompassing term for hatred against a Semitic ethnic group of Islamic confession. It is for this reason -and beyond its political use- that the diatribes, the instigations formulated over the years in the Western media and the crimes against Muslims imply a further variant of this anti-Semitism.

Muslim refugees did not come to Europe as tourists or as the intellectual taresayers point out in order to “Islamise” Europe. Their arrival was largely a consequence of the interventionism and war adventures of their own governments (following the US) in the regions they come from.

What has happened in France in the last week is neither new nor alien to the rest of Europe. Killing an Arab or those who profess Islam is something that has been going on for a long time and the European media have treated it with little interest. The phenomenon of Islamophobia is something that has developed strongly throughout the EU and has branched out to the American continent with the constant attacks and prejudice against the growth and insertion of Islamic traits into Western culture. Thus the growth of institutions such as mosques, dress, the role of women and Islamic practices in public places are the signs most abhorred by those who fervently hate Muslims.

Will the riots over the death of this young Arab be enough of a lesson for the French political establishment? I certainly don't think so.