After January’s
Charlie Hebdo’s shootings
and February’s Denmark shootings at a café during a free speech event,
we are told that freedom of expression is threatened, and the old 9/11
War against Terror concept has resurfaced; as a response, governments
take even further steps towards censorship and surveillance. For a
couple of months, all the “I am Charlie” tags only kept fostering the
reading of the world in black and white, Eastern Terror against the
Right and Free West, whereas it is far from being so dichotomous.
It is hard not to fall for the obvious and easiest view when dreadful
events happen: we want an explanation right away and settle for the
easy one, to soothe our confused minds. But now that passions have died
down a little, it would be more constructive to try and not amalgamate
the effects for the causes. It should also be reminded that trying to
find the cause, and putting ourselves under a critical light is not
about
excusing what the attackers did, but
explaining it and thereby trying to effectively prevent it in the future.
These attacks and 9/11 do have common points: we blamed Islamist
terrorism without trying to understand the problems that were raised,
and in both democratic America and Europe, governments have taken the
opportunity to pass legislations widely affecting their citizens’ right
to privacy.
First of all, on a foreign policy perspective, it is no longer
possible to ignore our governments’ implication and hypocrisy, when we
know that Iran and the Hezbollah are no longer considered as threatening
terrorist entities, and that the Iraqi Kurds who helped the American
air force to take back Kobane from ISIS earlier this year are part of an
organization that has been listed as terrorist for a decade both by the
US and Europe. Making friends with former enemies and vice versa does
not ease tensions in the Middle East.
No wonder then that people constantly living in a warzone, with
foreign powers adding to – and empowering – some scattered fanatic
tribes, can grow a hatred for the said foreign powers, or take refuge in
extreme views and ideologies giving them the illusion that they truly
matter. As underlined in an
excellent article from the French Monde Diplomatique
of April by Alain Gresh, “besides its blurry and doubtful feature, the
use of the concept of terrorism tends to depoliticize analyses and
thereby to make it impossible to understand the problems that are
raised”. What is more, it needs me reminded that we focus much more on
the fact that we (the West) have been targeted, than the fact that
Muslim countries are the ones mostly stricken by terrorist attacks.
Let us move on to a more national basis, as in the case of
Charlie Hebdo’s
attack where the lost assailants were coming directly from within the
nation-state – a fact the French government tries not to say out loud,
by emphasizing more their link to ISIS, so as not to admit they created
their own monsters. That is the stance of
another article from the French independent news website Mediapart on April 1st,
by Reginald Blanchet, psychoanalyst in Athens since 1998, ex-president
of the Hellenic Society of the New Lacanian School and member of the
World Association of Psychoanalysis. He wrote about the important
psycho-social factors of such radicalizations, far from religious
pseudo-explanations as is always brandished. The issue is one of lack of
identity, which DAESH seems to provide, contrary to their countries of
origin rejecting them from the day they were born.
Indeed the major common point to all of the assailants in Paris,
Blanchet writes, is their seclusion: often being second-generation
immigrants, they do not share the same affinities (language, religion,
culture) as their parents with their countries of origin, and on the
other hand they are also at the margins of mainstream society, mostly
because of their spatial segregation in the “banlieues” – the fringes of
cities, with the highest rate of unemployment and thus of delinquency.
In France,
15,7% of the country’s families live in HLM(low-rent
and often deplorable social accommodations, the direct equivalent of
the “housing projects” created in North America after WWII); in Paris’s
banlieues, this proportion rises to 22,6%.
On the educational level, these areas are also often
ZEPs (Educational
Priority Zone) where teaching means as much being a teacher and a
social worker for the kids. One of those teachers, following the
Charlie Hebdo shootings,
was desperate: “I want to tell them they’re going to make it, that
they’ll have a good job and a nice life”, she said in between sobs, “but
it’s hard when you know it’s not going to happen for them.”
Ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy used to claim “France: you love it, or you
leave it”. What if you love it, but France does not love you back?
Therefore we keep blaming religion, because the attackers claim to
act in behalf of the Islamic State; but this has nothing to do with
Islamism. Any war whatsoever will claim to act in behalf of something
anyway – like the American war against Terror, for “democracy”: two
antithetic terms in the same clause that oddly hasn’t much shocked
people. A proof of that obvious apparent link, but which holds no ground
once we dig into it, is that these “new generation” jihadists were
almost all atheists, and
then converted to radical Islam only
once they became acquainted with extremist Islamist websites or gurus –
often in jail – that provided them with a sense of belonging somewhere,
of self-importance. Radicalization precedes Islamization. What is more,
the 16 000 foreigners part of DAESH’s 30 000 fighters, placed in regards
of the 1.6 billion of Muslims in the world (
according to Pew Research Center’s numbers), shows the irrelevance of it all: it is a personal background issue, stemming from poor social conditions.
The other common point between the European attacks and the American
9/11 is the propensity of the States to use the confusion of people
following such events to pass legislation which would never have gone
ignored by the public otherwise. Under cover of preventing other
terrorist attacks – which could have been avoided in the first place
with the existing laws and procedures, had they been applied
appropriately – the French States and the US have modified established
civil privacy protections to broaden surveillance powers. As explained
in an
article on escalating US police surveillance after 9/11
by William Bloss from the military school of South Carolina “The
Citadel”, the 2001 USA Patriot Act gave law enforcement officials the
power to conduct searches without warrants, to monitor financial
transactions and eavesdrop, and detain and deport – in secret –
individuals
suspected of committing terrorist acts. It was also originally set to expire in 2005, but was renewed in 2006.
Thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, we also now know that the NSA
has conducted the wiretapping of domestic phone calls and emails
without any warrant, following a secret authorization by ex-President
Bush, dating from 2002 – although the 1978 Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) already permitted such wiretapping on an
emergency basis and apply for warrants retroactively. As reminded by the
release of the 2014 documentary Citizenfour on Snowden, there is
a price to pay for wanting to expose the truth in a democratic country.
While the defense of the country is, of course, fundamental, the
concern about the escalating trade-off of privacy rights for the past
years remains.
Recently the French government followed the lead by presenting the
third anti-terrorism legislation under President Hollande, whereas the
past two have not yet been fully applied. Having been reviewed until
April 16
th, it is to be officially adopted on May 5
th,
this law is aimed at broadening the French intelligence’s mass
surveillance; the bill will also enable intelligence services to get a
retroactive warrant, as is said on page 10 of the bill (
published in full length on Mediapart).
But more worryingly, the government will also be able to censor
websites on the Internet, and detect threats on the basis of “suspect
series of connection data”. Besides terrorist tracking, this could have a
great deterring effect for anyone who would like to inform themselves
on subversive topics – this is yet another means to make the population
believe that the official version is the true version.
The legislation will also allow the instantaneous collection of data,
directly on networks. Once again, the concern is about the opaque way
these operations will take place; even the French National Commission on
Informatics and Liberties (CNIL) is worried about the new widely
intrusive extent of this legislation, with no clearly defined perimeter.
Anti-terrorist judge Marc Trévidic,
interviewed by the Express,
also voiced his concern and the fact that this legislation extends much
further than that anti-terrorism only. At the hour when the States
themselves increasingly and incrementally violate their citizens’ right
to privacy and deter them to speak freely on the Internet, there are no
“I am Charlie” signs to be seen.
