Blasphemy and critical evaluation of Mohammed’s character have always been forbidden, and have been a highly sensitive issue throughout the history of Islam.
Blasphemy and critical evaluation of Mohammed’s character have always been forbidden, and have been a highly sensitive issue throughout the history of Islam
It is quite appalling to see how some western media figures have responded to the Paris attacks.
Some have blamed the cartoonists for provoking Muslims and inciting religious hatred, while others like Robert Fisk have blamed historic western policies for the murders.
Fisk claimed that the disenfranchisement of youth, economic deprivation, and past atrocities experienced by Algerians led to the Paris events.
Others on the far left like the inveterate anti-American journalist Glenn Greenwald started with Soviet style whataboutism and connected the Paris events with Israel, while the annoying Assange, still languishing in the Ecuador embassy, tweeted some five-year-old Telegraph report to obfuscate the Paris shooting issue.
It’s beyond absurd to blame French occupation of Algeria for the shootings. This is the kind of apologism that facilitates radical Islam. This strategy only results in appeasement of puritanical radical Islamic ideology and only offers one solution: ‘the West is evil’.
If past grievances and atrocities are considered to be the reasons behind these attacks then by this logic all Indians living in the UK would be retaliating to avenge the suffering their ancestors faced during British Colonialism. Bangladeshis would carry out attacks against Pakistan since they once ruthlessly persecuted Bengalis, killing more than a million of them and raping 200,000 of their women.
If Fisk were right, Vietnam and Japan would not be some of the most pro-American countries in the world today.
However the most pathetic and dismal response that came from the western press was from those who castigated Charlie Hebdo and blamed the cartoonists for provoking Muslims.
If one follows this flawed narrative then all liberal Muslims struggling against radical Islam on a daily basis in their own Muslim majority countries should only have themselves to blame whenever they are brutally attacked by extremist clerics and their zealot followers.
The Saudi writer and activist Raif Badawi who is currently being publicly flogged by repressive Saudia Arabia should be denounced for criticising the rabid misogynist clerics of the Wahabbi sect. All Pakistani liberals fighting against draconian blasphemy laws should also be condemned for inciting the wrath of terrorists.
Even a cursory examination of blasphemy killings in Pakistan can tell us that the real reasons why the cartoonists were attacked were not because of Western foreign policy, the Iraq War, or colonialism, but because of an ideology that has always been fanatical and dogmatic in nature and that is responsible for the misery of thousands of people, particularly in Pakistan.
This ideology has the power of igniting vigilante justice and provoking mobs into indulging in violence and vandalism. It’s the same ideology which sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade, and that burnt 37 people to death after a mob set fire to a hotel building in Turkey.
It’s the same ideology that killed prominent Pakistani politician Salman Taseer after he questioned the concept of the country’s brutal blasphemy laws.
According to this ideology, any person who doubts the origins of Islam, draws caricatures of Prophet Mohammad or satirises revered Islamic figures is liable to be punished by death. The basis for this blasphemy belief is not the Quran but the Hadith, the second main source of Islam.
Many sects within Islam have varied views in relation to the blasphemy issue but almost all sects believe in the prohibition on images of Mohammed.
Apart from images, many sects of Islam also consider even questioning or doubting the origins of Mohammed as blasphemous. British Historian Tom Holland had his academic documentary on the origins of Islam cancelled by Channel 4 after he and his family received death threats and over 1200 complaints were received by Ofcom and Channel 4.
To blame this ideology on recent western policies is nothing short of the murder of history. Blasphemy and critical evaluation of Mohammed’s character has always been forbidden and a highly sensitive issue among Muslims in the history of Islam. It is not a new issue.
In 1929, Ilm-ud-din, a Muslim living in British India, took offence at a book published about Prophet Mohammed. He killed the publisher and was sentenced to death by the Indian Penal Code.
Consequently he was considered a martyr; 200,000 people attended his funeral and he was praised by the ideological founder of Pakistan Allama Iqbal. Even today in Pakistan, Ilm-ud-din is used as an inspiration for those who would kill in the name of Islam.
As Douglas Murray said on BBC Big Questions, the attack on 7 January was an attempt to introduce blasphemy laws in Paris.
In the aftermath of this attack, the western media has two options. The first is to reprint these cartoons and continue the unflinching quest of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, as a way of paying tribute to their legacy. The second option is to take a step back and not criticise Islam or Mohammed, to accord Islam different treatment to other religions.
If the media follows the latter option, it will be a victory for the attackers and their ideology of blasphemy, and will set a dangerous precedent. I hope that the steps we take and our future course of action will not defer to this ideology. But as the responses so far have shown, not everyone is ready to stand up to it.
Anas Abbas is an accountant and investigative Counter Terrorism analyst. Follow him on Twitter or read his blog
145 Responses to “Why it’s wrong to blame western policies for the Paris attacks”
HuwOS
For crying out loud, historic and ongoing, is different from purely historic. 2 days before the disgusting murder of 12 people in Paris, 9 people were murdered by a US drone strike in Pakistan. Another illegal act.
That people who imagine they relate or genuinely relate to the people being murdered in Yemen and Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere might commit acts of violence against the culture/nations that are committing these murders is hardly surprising. That they might in that context target people who they perceive as not only being part of that but actively mocking those same people is also not surprising.
Charlie Hebdo have the right to publish and print what they want whoever it offends and it is not right to target them or anyone else in a similar situation but that it might occasionally/ rarely happen, while what many might perceive as a culture war is playing out and hundreds and thousands of bodies of men women and children are piling up on the one side is hardly a shock. It’s not even debatable.
24 men were targeted in Pakistan, in the efforts to kill these 24 supposedly legitimate targets 874 people were killed, 173 of those were children and for that death toll, 6 of the actual targets were reported as having been killed in those drone strikes. Being incapable of acknowledging the actual context in which events happen is to also render oneself incapable of understanding anything that happens and will lead inevitably to thinking the Paris murders are either utterly inexplicable or a demonstration of some bizarre and unreasonable incapacity to take a joke on the part of entire cultures.
Everyone rightly condemns the murders in Paris, for some reason many of those who do so fail to recognise or condemn the murders in Pakistan and the middle east in the same way or to even notice that the other murders are being perpetrated in their name and by the governments they are responsible for.
HuwOS
Fisk condemns anyone who is deserving of condemnation regardless of who they are, he has a long record of condemning people on all sides of many different disputes but he also provides context, which seems to upset people.
He doesn’t in any sense imply that only “the west” are capable of doing things. Apparently you are one of those people who hates the idea of taking responsibility for things your culture, country or much more importantly, your democratically elected government does while insisting that other groups must take absolute and all responsibility for anything that is done by anyone they might be considered to have any connection with no matter how tangential.
You don’t have to be a slinky supporter to know that if a person starts it going down a stairs it will keep going until it reaches the bottom. Reporting on the inevitable reactions of people, groups, animals or things is not the same as justifying them
Evren De
bullshit, if it wasn’t for promoting extreme islamist againts secularist, liberals, and socialist around middle east, its also naive view to see japan or vietnam as being pro american, its blindness, have you done survey on japan or vietnamese, if their governments are pro american’which almost eery state in world is’ it doesn’t mean their citizens are, seconds, if west didn’t promote these feudals for their nasty game these islamic fashsit wouldn’t get no arms , how do they get the money the train to act , let me tell u when isis came up first in musul they came with brand new lets model jeeps , with money with 1000 cars and weapons, they raised so quickly, u can’t make ‘revolution’ without money,howdid they get it, even other extreme islamist suspicious of isis being west spy createn to divide and conquer, what about al quada if it wasn’t for CIA there wouldn’t be no taliban in afghanistan(which was one of the earliest secularist muslim state) or al quade, its funny people compare paris attacks to 9-11, in 9-.11 there was almiost 3000 dead, not to mention us use this to put its new agenda on taking over energy sources in afghanistan(yet osama was saudi arab) and now europe try to use this to justify their nasty upcoming agenda, by the way i don’t see no intervention on saudis arabia or qatar which are the most s radical sheria states, this article is bullshit, and u caller self intellectual, u don’t know shit mate
Louis_Cyphre
Um, anti-Semitic Islamofascist terrorists ready to murder over a depiction of their so-called “prophet” are not a “bullied minority group”.
Jon
well written piece mr abas. i think its a war between two worlds. http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/war-between-two-worlds?utm_medium=email&utm_content=stratfor_weekly&utm_campaign=nid-213633&utm_source=Facebook#axzz3OhESb7Cm