My first thought on learning about the tragic events at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo was ‘wow France has a satirical magazine.’

My former colleague Will’s first thought was: ‘they did a really bad job of silencing the now world famous satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo.’

My second thought was ‘maybe they have the same PR people as The Interview’ swiftly followed by ‘you are probably a bad person and should certainly not post intrusive thoughts like that on social media.’

Followed by ‘well the victims used to work for a now world-famous French satirical magazine* so they presumably liked bad taste jokes.’

They liked jokes more than the people who murdered them, so we shouldn’t stop making bad jokes. For once, we can actually say, ‘it’s what they would have wanted’.

It’s just too depressing that somebody would want to kill you for a cartoon.

Any type of illustration. Any flag, symbol, colour, shape or thought. It’s, as people keep saying, barbaric.

So what is the civilised response?

Je Suis Charlie is a good start. Kind of. Solidarity. Not to be scared (although I wanted to be there in Paris with a placard saying ‘il y ne pas Charlie, il e’st un tres naughty boy’).

And there’s the binary us versus them thing. I don’t like cartoonists being murdered nor do I like endorsing the editorial values of a magazine I don’t know much about and I try to avoid wilfully insulting someone’s culture (even if it’s my right to do so). Does that make me a bit of a Charlie? You can’t be. It seems to be all or nothing. Us versus them.

Certainly the younger me would have changed my Facebook page to a picture of the prophet Mohamed, with ‘je suis the prophet Mohamed’.

Because how dare you tell me not to draw a picture of a deity whose existence I don’t even believe? How dare *you* censor *me*? In what way is your belief system so superior that you can prevent me from saying what I want about yours?

Except Facebook didn’t exist when I was young.

And is this about avenging the Prophet Mohamed? Really? Because some delusional murderers said so? How do they get to make that decision?

This is an insult to more than a billion muslims who – though they may not particularly like it when you insult their god – think sinful to murder someone for it. But who will get caught in the backlash anyway.

So I don’t believe the stated motive of the murders, however comforting it might be on the surface. It’s the equivalent of saying that ‘she was asking for it.’ You don’t let the perpetrators have the final word, nor control the debate. Which depressingly happens.

Because with the crushing inevitability of a Mac versus PC discussion, lots of atheists and Christians have decided that it’s a Muslim God and an inherently  barbaric violent religion at the core of the problem.

Which thankfully isn’t the problem: if all billion plus Muslims thought it was ok to attack non believers there wouldn’t be many non believers left.

As an atheist, I would get really annoyed if I got blamed for Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin.

It reminded me of the comment which briefly appeared on  Wikipedia after the London bombings: ‘Kill All Muslims’.

A chilling message: and it exactly what the suicide bombers ‘would have wanted.’  People that commit acts of terror thrive on this kind of thing.

It is a specific ideology which some Muslims adhere to;  it’s impossible to ignore. So where did it come from?

The disclaimer here is that nothing in the history of the French treatment of Algeria justifies murder; rather that it’s important to understand the backstory of how violent, nihilist strands of extremist Islam ideology come to be closely associated with resistance.

And the French treatment of Algeria, within living memory, was barbaric. Apart from invading and taking it over in the first place, they put in place a two tier system, an inverse caliphate if you will, where French people lived a pretty nice French life in pleasant boulevards (technically it was part of France), whilst indigenous – Muslim – people were illiterate, poor, and unemployed.

Muslim neighbourhoods were shanty towns, police harassment was rife, life expectancy was low, and educational opportunities were limited. It was the systematic repression of a people who were treated as inferior.

This was just after World War Two, yet without apparent irony the inevitable Algerian resistance was crushed in ‘peacekeeping’ missions by the French authorities.

This was characterised by systematic and covert torture and mutilation as well as the disappearance of several thousand resistance leaders.

They dropped people out of helicopters.

Paul Teitgen, secretary-general of the secret police in Algiers and a hero of the French resistance who had himself been tortured by Nazis compared detention centres to Gestapo cellars.

Those who survived are alive, and those who carried out these acts, largely unpunished. Atrocities were committed on all sides, as peacekeeping descended into full-scale war.

Obviously this does not justify anything whatsoever. But perhaps explains the context: how many Muslim Algerians got so angry. This was the generation of the parents of the people who we think are the killers.

It has as much to do with human rights abuse as faith.  Although faith and identity became tangled as in so many other places invaded by European powers, where people define themselves in opposition to the invaders and develop an anti-Western identity.

The current ideology of terror is a nihilistic and stupid interpretation of the Koran and one which is rejected by most Muslims.

But it is perhaps not surprising that some people who have been denied full access to education and opportunity should come up with a world view that is not  discursive, sophisticated and inclusive.

Obviously the instinct for revenge is strong and natural. But it needs to be targeted.

Harassing the wrong people, invading the wrong country, for example, has clearly created more terrorists. A lesson we could have learned from Algeria, where ‘peacekeeping’ ended up in full-scale war.

Or the ongoing War On Terror (sic) which has killed a number of people we can only round off to the nearest significant figure.

We don’t know, for example, how many people have been killed in covert drone strikes: 2, 400 according to the [admittedly-not always accurate] Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Je suis Asif Iqbal, anyone? Je suis Bibi Mamana? Plenty of names to choose from on the BIJ’s Naming The Dead website.

Innocent people caught in the crossfire. Victims of a misplaced revenge gone badly wrong.

I hope the death of the Parisian cartoonists creates no more… and that the ensuing debate is all about what counter terror measures actually work.

 

 

 

 

* called Charlie Hebdo: http://www.charliehebdo.fr/index.html