Hypocrites Shine on Paris Catwalk
Seen from Asia, this political hijacking seemed even more grotesque. And no wonder a mixage went viral across Southwest Asia – home of Arab social networks; the “march for unity” in Paris coupled with Hitler and the nazis strutting their stuff with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Here’s the whole “freedom of expression” debate in a nutshell. Would that ever be allowed in the front page of a Western newspaper, satirical or otherwise?
So to vilify Islam as a whole, as well as 1.6 billion Muslims en masse, is acceptable, or at least tolerated. But to denounce Zionism is “anti-semitism”. “Freedom of the press”? Iran’s Press TV is banned all across Atlanticist domains. RT is routinely derided as the mouthpiece of an “evil” dictatorship. Will these “leaders” parade in Donbas or Damascus defending “freedom of speech”? Forget it.
Arguably the icing on the lethal cake was the “support” to France offered by the House of Saud, which has just conducted the first round (50 out of 1,000 lashes) of public flogging of jailed blogger Raif Badawi. His crime: running a liberal website in favor of that oh so precious “freedom of speech”, but in Saudi Arabia.
Oh – the enlightened hordes cry in unison — but they are a “conservative kingdom”! They are certainly one of the West’s key strategic allies – as much for all that oil as for being a fabulous market for our weaponizing tools. They are “our” bastards. So yes, they can get away with anything.
The root of all jihadi hell, fundamentally, is medieval Wahhabism – and its primitive, intolerant interpretation of Islam. Yet this phenomenon cannot even begin to be discussed by Western corporate media. No “freedom of speech” there. The House of Saud and assorted Persian Gulf plutocrats are “our” bastards. They are even helping the Empire of Chaos-led coalition to fight Daesh!
Even French intellectuals who used to make some sense of jihadism, like Olivier Roy, are asking themselves about the “link between Islam and violence”. Wrong question; it’s not about Islam but about Saudi-exported religious ideology/proselytism. Internally, French society is not “threatened” by a Muslim presence – although it is indeed threatened by exacerbated Islamophobia. The key problem is that France does not know how to integrate its Muslim population, something that allows what sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar describes as “terroristes maison”. These made in France terrorists start as petty thieves, are de-Islamicized and then re-Islamicized by neighborhood imams and most of all by the devastation wreaked by the Empire of Chaos and NATO over the lands of Islam. NATO, which includes France, has been doing everything from bombing civilians (Libya) to financing/weaponizing/”supporting” the so-called “moderate rebels” in Syria. And it doesn’t get much better in the freedom of speech front. According to the BRussells tribunal, at least 404 journalists have been killed since the 2003 US invasion/occupation of Iraq; 374 of them were Iraqis. They were not exactly mourned by the freedom-loving Atlanticist gang. Neither were over 1,000,000 Iraqi civilians decimated by the Empire of Chaos in over three decades of imperial rage. Not to mention the 200,000 Syrians victims of the “Assad must go” war.
[The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official position of Sputnik.]
