March of the Hypocrites
In Paris they march for "free speech" – and
they’ll soon be marching off to war
By Justin Raimondo
January 12, 2015 "ICH"
- "Antiwar"
- It was only natural that "world
leaders" would place themselves at the
head of the Paris "unity" demonstration held
to express outrage at the
vicious Charlie Hebdo murders.
Daniel Wickham, a student at the London
School of Economics,
compiled a list of the enemies of free
speech who elbowed their way to the head of
the march.
Most hypocritical of all are the French
themselves, who have laws against "hate
speech" which are only selectively enforced
and which have been used against the editors
of Charlie Hebdo in the past. This
cognitive dissonance was eloquently
expressed by
one Frenchman who carried a sign saying:
"I’m marching but I’m conscious of the
confusion and hypocrisy of the situation."
That politicians would steal
the spotlight and turn the sincere outrage
of millions into an opportunity for
self-advertisement is hardly surprising.
Sincerity has its uses, however, and these
will become apparent in the days and weeks
to come. Those marchers will soon be
cheering their soldiers as they go marching
off to war, with "Je suis Charlie" inscribed
on their banners.
The target? Syria, where
"links" have been found between the Paris
attacks and the self-proclaimed "Caliphate"of
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The New York Times
reports:
"Amedy Coulibaly, one
of the three gunman responsible for the
terrorist attacks in France last
week, produced a video that appeared online
on Sunday, two days after his death, showing
him sitting below the flag of the Islamic
State militant group and pledging allegiance
to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the organization’s
leader."
If you read the
transcript of the video it reads almost
like a script prepared by our biggest
warmongers. It takes the form of an
interview, with the invisible interviewer
represented by words on a screen and
Coulibaly answering:
"Which group are you
linked to and do you have an Emir?
Coulibaly: ‘I am pledging
my allegiance to the Caliph of the Muslims,
Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. I have made a
declaration of allegiance to the Caliph and
the declaration of a Caliphate.’"
The Islamic State has been
trying to provoke a major military
response from the Western powers for months
now, executing American journalists and aid
workers and posting videos of the executions
on the Internet, but so far the US has
reacted with
caution. So they resorted to attacking
the West on its own soil, and now the chorus
of voices calling for an all-out invasion of
Syria will become deafening, drowning out
all reason. And Coulibaly dots all the i’s
and crosses the t’s:
“Are you linked to the
brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo?”
"Coulibaly: ‘We are a
team, in league together. I am with the team
who did Charlie Hebdo. I went out a little
against the police too. So that’s that. We
did some things together, some things
separately to have most impact. [Sound of TV
news in the background in which newsreader
can be clearly heard talking about the
attacks].
‘We have managed to be
synchronized together, to come out at the
same time, because we are close in the same
business.’"
It’s all so pat, an
engraved invitation: Come and get us!
From his permanent pulpit
on the Sunday morning TV talk-fest, Senator
John McCain declared his intention to oblige
them. Railing against the failure of the
United States to defeat ISIS, McCain is
asked by journalist Gloria Borger what
exactly he has in mind, and
his response is a preview of things to
come:
"ISIS right now is
winning. And we need to go after them, and
we need to have more boots on the ground. We
need to understand that Syria and Iraq are
the same. We need to arm the Free Syrian
Army. We need a no-fly zone, which many of
us have been calling for, for years, and a
coherent strategy that can be presented to
the Congress, because they’re going to be
wanting an authorization for the use
of military force."
There’s something more
than a little counterintuitive about
McCain’s call for a no-fly zone: after all,
ISIS
doesn’t have an air force, while the
most effective counterweight to them – the
Syrian government – does indeed. If
McCain’s concern is ISIS, then why go
after Bashar al-Assad? And as for arming the
Syrian Free Army: those arms are more than
likely to show up in the hands of ISIS. As
Debka File
reports:
"The Syrian rebel militia
Al Yarmouk Shuhada Brigades, backed and
trained for two years by US officers, mostly
CIA experts, in Jordan, and supported by the
Israeli army, has abruptly dumped these
sponsors and joined up with the Islamic
State in Iraq."
If McCain has his way, the
next terrorist attackers who show up in the
streets of a Western city are more than
likely to have been trained by our very own
CIA. A purer form of "blowback"
could hardly be imagined.
In a more general sense,
the principle of "blowback" operates in the
terrorists’ favor as the US and its allies
get
more deeply involved in Syria and Iraq:
if the Western powers follow McCain’s
advice, jihadists will stream from Europe to
the region in even greater numbers and the
legitimacy of the "Caliphate"
in the eyes of Muslims everywhere is
increased. McCain and his fellow
interventionists have a symbiotic
relationship with the terrorists: both are
legitimized on the home front by the actions
of the other.
ISIS was itself
birthed in the chaos that accompanied
our invasion and conquest of Iraq, and
McCain and the War Party are intent on
duplicating that
Orc factory in the territory of Syria.
So how does this policy of
creating and succoring the very threats they
rail against benefit the leaders of the
West?
Without the threat of
terrorism, our foreign policy of perpetual
war would have zero public support. Without
the
excuse of having to monitor the
ever-escalating activities of the Coulibalys
of this world, the very idea that the
government has the "right" to
scoop up our communications and store
them in a giant facility out in the Utah
desert would be dismissed as a dystopian
fantasy.
But then again, that’s the
world we live in, in the year 2015: a
dystopia so absurd that no writer, prior to
September 11, 2001, would have dared put it
into print, either as fiction or speculative
nonfiction.
And so the hypocrites
march on, right over a cliff and into an
abyss of their own making.
Justin Raimondo is the
editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a
senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne
Institute. He is a contributing editor at
The American
Conservative, and writes a monthly
column for Chronicles. He is
the author of Reclaiming the
American Right: The Lost Legacy of the
Conservative Movement [Center for
Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate
Studies Institute, 2000], and An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N.
Rothbard
[Prometheus Books, 2000].
