By Carlos Aznárez on November 14, 2015
Once again, Paris has become a battle field. Dozens dead, hundreds injured along with the same type of response coming from the French Government that they had on the jihadist attacks that took place in the United States and Spain when similar actions generated identical massacres. Facing the horror they are responding with even more horror, with big headlines in the mainstream media, “Now the war has started!” They are acting shocked at the idea that the Arab and Muslim world would target the sacrosanct French democracy, knowing full well that the majority of them repudiate ISIS and their protectors.
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad is right when, after expressing his condolences for the victims of the attacks, reminded everyone that “France knew yesterday what we been living in Syria for five years”. And he is precisely the person who on numerous occasions tried – as did Libyan leader Gadaffi before him—to convince the French rulers not to arm, logistically equip and fund with millions of dollars the mercenary armies that have sown terror, death and spawned the desperate exile of hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis. In each occasion that this message was delivered in international forums, the French position was always the same; ratifying their belief that exporting war, aligning itself with NATO and subordinating itself to the imperial mandate emanating from Washington, that is to solve “the Syrian problem”, the overthrow of Al-Assad had to take place.
It is clear that it is the same thing that happened to the right-wing government of Spain in 2004 with the train bombing – it backfired on them. On that occasion the jihadists, whom Spain and its alliance with NATO had wanted to fight through its presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, decided to respond with the same medicine that was just administered in Paris. Unfortunately those who pay for the mistakes of the powerful are always the common citizens whose only guilt perhaps was to vote and catapult to the office of presidency one those serial killers who now condemned them to death.
This terrible incident was a repeat of the scenario of the massacre of Charlie Hebdo. Once again the repeated pronouncements of hypocritical revenge can be heard. All of the European leaders are at this time promising more repressive measures while manufacturing more armaments to feed the military interventions that are at the very root cause of what just took place in Paris. Those leaders are now censoring any ideas of departing NATO by proclaiming, “Today we are all France”.
Those leaders are being exposed for having similar attitudes with jihadism – which does not represent Islam in any way – Hollande, Rajoy, Sarkozy, Merkel and those who sponsor them from the Pentagon, are the main cause of these barbaric actions. They have fed them endlessly chasing Muslims from the periphery of Paris and several French cities, denying them the use of places to pray generating raids at mosques where it was common for them to peacefully practice their right to their religion. Since 2011 France has instituted laws that prohibit the use of the veil, Islamic skirt and the burka in public spaces. These types of discriminating laws have not been forced onto French citizens who commune with Judaism. They have segregated the Islamic world by exposing it to the French society as “the enemy”, in the same way that Israel has portrayed the Palestinians for more than six decades.
It is no mystery to anyone, especially to the devalued French Intelligence Services, that many of the humiliated, unemployed suffering under the draconian and racist laws in the poverty stricken “Banlieue” area of Paris were recruited there by the Nusra Front and ISIS. How ironic that those who joined into the experience of sowing terror in Syria and Iraq came from French territory and in many occasions were approved and viewed by the government as being their front soldiers. At that time the massacres produced by these mercenaries in Mossul, Raqqa, Aleppo, Homs and Palmyra did not worry Sarkozy or Hollande. They were considered “collateral damage” far away from the Parisian comfort that seemed immune and inviolable to mass violence. Little was said about the bloody bombing that took place last week in the Lebanon and was actually probably celebrated in Tel Aviv and in the White House, since that massacre occurred in a neighborhood controlled by Hezbollah. In this case, the dead were Arab as are the Palestinians being killed these days in the West Bank or in Gaza, whose names do not count enough to make it into the corporate media, neither does the pain of relatives and the horrific images from their devastated homes.
What has just happened in Paris also has another no less important explanation. In the past months there has been a shift in the balance of power in the war in Syria. Russia decided to intervene, coming to the rescue of a government and a people besieged by terror, and did it on its own terms, and achieving immediate success in the fight against ISIS. This development proved to all that all previous actions, propagandized by NATO and the United States, had been a gigantic farce. The jihadists were beaten in their main bases, many of their stores of weapons were destroyed and a feeling of betrayal set in amongst them against their benefactors who supported them from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Western countries. Many of these mercenaries fled the wars and chose to return to their places of origin, including the Europeans. So much so, that this “return” was anticipated by some French commentators, who claimed that “now the danger can erupt at our own feet.”
That is precisely what this condemnable jihadist revenge is all about. Beyond the false cries of those who govern them, this should be an urgent wake up call for French society, and others in Europe, to question their governments and to demand an end to their expansionist and authoritarian ideas. To cease their xenophobic behavior that provoked the massive fire in the immigrant camp in Calais just hours after the attack in Paris. It is important to look at those who flee wars, provoked by NATO, as brothers and not as enemies. They cannot be looked at as scapegoats and should be treated with humanitarian understanding and not treated as dangerous second class citizens.
Perhaps these circumstances marked by such pain can serve as the turning point to search for a different starting point. If this does not occur no one should be entitled to ask with horror, “why us?”