Yesterday was a "Black Friday" for Paris,
when some of the deadliest attacks ever in post-war Western Europe were committed, and all the
media are focusing on them right now, as they happened in one of the
centres of the Western hegemony, in "Fortress Europe". It is terrible what happened.
My prediction is that - as with Charlie Hebdo in January - this
attack was not perpetrated by recent refugees, but by "homegrown"
local young men.
This
is what ghettoization and failure to integrate leads to. A few years
ago, Sarkozy wanted to "clean" the banlieues in France and
called the youngsters there "scum", he did not even try to
reconcile them to French society, but estranged them more from
it. But it has also been a black autumn elsewhere (on the
"periphery") so far. Most terrorism is not happening, as the priorities of the media coverage suggests, "by Muslims against Westerns and in the West", but, not or scarcely covered by the same media, outside of the West and "Fortress Europe", by Islamists and others against (more secular) Muslims and others, or as state terror, such as the illegal U.S. drone strikes, condoned by Germany, or the bombing of Kurdish freedom fighters by Turkey. No one changed their profile picture to the Kenyan, Lebanese or Kurdish flag, though.
When refugee boats with 900 people aboard sank earlier this year, there was only a fraction of coverage of it, compared to the reports on Paris in the last 48 hours. The same was true for the attacks in Beirut just about 24 hours prior to Paris, the attacks in Istanbul last month and the Russian plane that was brought down by a bomb about two weeks ago, all of which had at least several dozens of victims.
To put Paris into a non-Western context, a short recap of just very recent attacks,i.e. of this autumn:
145 people were killed in Maiduguri in Nigeria in a suicide bombing on September 20th. Another 42 were killed on October 14th in the same town, as well as 11 there on October 23rd, and 27 on October 23rd in Yola, Nigeria...
When refugee boats with 900 people aboard sank earlier this year, there was only a fraction of coverage of it, compared to the reports on Paris in the last 48 hours. The same was true for the attacks in Beirut just about 24 hours prior to Paris, the attacks in Istanbul last month and the Russian plane that was brought down by a bomb about two weeks ago, all of which had at least several dozens of victims.
To put Paris into a non-Western context, a short recap of just very recent attacks,i.e. of this autumn:
145 people were killed in Maiduguri in Nigeria in a suicide bombing on September 20th. Another 42 were killed on October 14th in the same town, as well as 11 there on October 23rd, and 27 on October 23rd in Yola, Nigeria...
57 people killed in Baghdad, Iraq, in three attacks on October 5th, 19 people killed in three attacks in Iraq on November 13th...
Seven people killed in Sanaa, Yemen, in a suicide attack on October 7th...
102 people killed in Ankara on October 10th, the deadliest terrorist attack ever in Turkey...
The same day, 38 people were killed in Ndjamena, Chad, in a suicide bombing...
11 people died in a bombing of a bus in Quetta in Pakistan, on October 19th, another 22 in another Pakistani town, Jacobabad...
244 people were killed by a bomb blast aboard MetroJet flight 9268 from Sharm El Sheikh on the Sinai to St Petersburg, on October 31st...
12 people killed in an attack in Mogadishu, Somalia, by a car bomb, on November 1st...
43 people were killed in Beirut on November 12th, the deadliest since 1990...
So far, 128 people killed in Paris on the night of November 13th/14th, the deadliest terrorist attack in France since 1961...
Yet, the perpetrators of those attacks (and in the case of Turkey it is the least clear who was behind them) should not be equated with the refugees. Anyone trying to draw political capital from these attacks, especially by trying to curb the freedoms and rights of any human being, regardless if native of migrant, and regardless of his or her ethnicity, nationality, political affiliation, or religion, should be confronted. To suggest or impose such limitations and to use a militaristic rhetoric, "war on terror" (Bush) or "total war " (Sarkozy today), instead of treating terrorism as a crime, is wrong. Terrorism will never go away, it will always be there as long as there are fascist, fundamentalist, or nationalist ideologies.
