The Ides of November: The Black Friday in Paris as the culmination of a Black Autumn of terrorism and war

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...

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. 

The Paris attacks are terrible and our thoughts and solidarity should be with the victims and the French people. They have been victims of a cowardly attack by criminals. It was the deadliest terrorist act on French soil since October 17, 1961, when the Parisian police killed 200 Algerian protesters. Their leaders are already banging the war drum again. Sarkozy wants a "total war". It was him who, a few years ago, called the non-"white" youths in the banlieues "scum" ("racaille") to be "vacuum cleaned" away ("nettoyer la cité au Kärcher"). Thus, domestically, integration has failed and the banlieues have been estranged from mainstream society. Internationally, despite resisting to support the US in the war in Iraq in 2003, France has, in most of post-WWII history, been at the helm of many military aggressions, both in a prolonged, brutal war in North Africa (with tens of thousands killed in Algeria) as well as, more recently, in shorter ones and together with other Western allies (such as the US and the UK) in Syria, Libya, Mali and elsewhere. And all of the Western countries, directly by war and indirectly by selling weapons for proxy war, have left the Middle East in the mess that it is in right now. It is a breeding ground for fundamentalist ideologues and ideologies and the source of the millions of refugees who, if they are not washed up dead on the shores of the Mediterranean, are now scapegoated across Europe for the precarious situation millions of Europeans are in due to the failed post-democratic policies of lethal austerity and financialized capitalism, bereft of political checks and creating a lack of solidarity.

Last not least, the so-called "war on terror" of the last decade and a half has not decreased terrorism, but increased it. The intelligence agencies of all countries haven't been able to prevent major attacks and the mass surveillance by the "Five Eyes" has made the problem worse, not better, as mass surveillance is the wrong strategy. Even if you leave morality aside, it is also a useless strategy, as it is not feasible to surveil all of the world. Therefore it is time to rethink this strategy and rather concentrate on the focal points, i.e. to fight the roots, not the symptoms: the ignorance, inequality, poverty, and war, that has made it possible for fascist, fundamentalist, nationalist, and religious ideologies to soar in many regions of the world.