I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking. How can I know they were terrorists? I think it’s now clear that they were well trained by AQAP specifically for this military-style mission. How can I know that this would still have happened if Muslims were well integrated into French society? Obviously I can’t, but one can make a reasonable inference from the fact that terrorist plots have been disrupted or events have actually occurred in nations that do make a concerted effort at inclusion, including the US and Canada.
That may indeed be a factor. I’m not an expert in French politics. But many expert observers believe that the several major riots that have occurred in recent years are the result of ghettoficaction of many immigrant populations, notably Muslims. And as** Kobal2** just said, "So we ban headscarves and burqas, and talk about ‘the Muslim problem’ – i..e- it seems that the French have been notably hostile to this particular group. Oddly enough, and perhaps not coincidentally, one sees the same attitude in parts of Quebec, in very distinct contrast to the cultural inclusiveness in the rest of Canada.
Precisely - that ain’t absolutism. Virginia v Black, for instance: the statute was struck down because it required defendants to prove that they weren’t intending to intimidate by burning crosses. Is that the sort of law you’d support?
That may not have been your intent, but re-read this passage:
That is a rant, and a poisoning of the well. Right from the off, you’ve declared that nations with rules that you approve of arrived at that decision though reasoned judgment, and those that didn’t are blind ideologues, paranoid to boot, and their concerns are baseless, in the bargain. No room for honest disagreement or nuance, just a flat declaration of who’s right and who’s a fool, applied to something as subjective and complex as national free speech standards.
Naturally, I defend your right to propagandize in this fashion, gallant figure that I am.
After mentioning the various limitations on free speech in the US, you then turn around and declare “absolutism”, because those limitations don’t count for some reason. If you meant that the US is absolutist on the very narrow subset of free-speech law that is hate speech, that’s one thing…but that’s not what you wrote.
It has **everything **to do with it. Don’t you think that, had the Kouachi brothers or the Coulibaly kid been happy, equal, productive members of an equal-opportunity society ; rather than having to decide what they wanted to do with their lives, a hard choice between scrubbing toilets or dealing coke ; that they would have turned to fundamentalism in the first place ? Would they have felt such hatred towards the institutions of their country ?
“They were lunatics” doesn’t explain shit. What, they were born terrorists ? Please.
From where I stand, the religious angle really is a red herring. They didn’t want to know about Islam, and they didn’t even care about the prophet that they purportedly avenged (their own “garage imam”, whom Cherif Kouachi had met in prison, said as much - that Cherif was only interested in and always talking about “the struggle”, but wasn’t interested in hearing about the religion itself). They attacked symbols of a country that told them, every day and in a myriad little ways : “Fuck you. Fuck you hard. Fuck you long. Fuck you raw. No but seriously, fuck you.”
Islam isn’t what made them do it. Islam was their flagpole, the thing they turned to to feel like they were part of something bigger than themselves, like others felt what they felt, and had the power to do something about it. The thing that scares and angers Frenchmen, too.
Your characterization of Islam as an enabler rather than a root cause is interesting and probably quite valid. It’s also true, as I acknowledged earlier, that France has been particularly hostile to its Muslim immigrant population. Yet I think you are still missing the point.
My counterexample is the Toronto 18, a terrorism plot of similar if not even greater potential that was broken up in Ontario, Canada, perhaps the most liberal province in one of the most liberal countries in the world, in the city that has been called the most culturally diverse and inclusive in the world. That didn’t stop this organized threat, and later on their wives were quoted in interviews spewing hateful venom against the entire country which had done nothing but try to accommodate them, and all of western society which had never harmed them. Some years later a lone lunatic attacked the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, as you undoubtedly know. Others have gone off to Syria and elsewhere to fight for ISIS.
I think it’s just naive to think that the French attacks were caused simply by disaffection with the social status of Muslims, as opposed to a fundamental and fundamentalist opposition to all of western society on the part of an extremist fringe that is hell-bent on its total destruction.
It is certainly possible. The Fort Hood guy, the 9-11 guys, a bunch of the London bombers, and many ISIS recruits all have come from more privileged situations.
Lot’s of groups are told “fuck you.” Many far louder. I don’t see any American Indians attacking Family Guy cartoonists for caricaturing them. They also don’t nurture an ideology that condones wiping out their enemies either. This is not a coincidence. What about the non-Muslims in Muslim countries? What about the Hindus, Ahmadiyya, and Christians of Pakistan?
Wasn’t the Fort Hood guy legit mentally unbalanced ? Like, from a medical standpoint ?
And look, I’m not saying this particular set of circumstances or rationales apply to every last jihadi (nor do I believe that being relatively more privileged insulates one from the “fuck you” - as another poster said, the movers and shakers behind Indian independence, both violent and peaceful, were by and large middle-class, educated people who’d realized that no matter how “respectable” they got the British still othered them) - I’m just saying that in *this *particular case, for *these *specific people, social circumstances and the French zeitgeist are probably more on point than any talk of religious fanaticism or the simplistic, reductive notion that they killed people just for publishing silly cartoons.