Through law, not terrorism

The terrorist attack on the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo created diametrically opposite reactions among Jordanians.

The two assailants constitute the same phenomenon of salafist jihadists that Maan and Zarqa accommodate: lone wolves on the loose.

It was not surprising that the Muslim Brotherhood, the strongest political party in Jordan, strongly condemned, through its political arm, the Islamic Action Front, the short-sighted policy of such violence.

The Lebanese Hizbollah issued an equally strong condemnation.

Many observers point to the failure of the French educational system that allowed a Muslim born in Paris, educated in schools there and thus had his formative years impacted by an entirely French ethos, to become an Al Qaeda member.

A thorough study might reveal the accumulated burden of alienation, deprivation and marginalisation that six million Muslims there suffer from.

The true assailants are not only the two Kouachian brothers, but another accomplice, which is the negative stereotyping of Arabs, with all its components of savagery, sub-humanity and degradation that preclude total integration into the civil society and public French life, unlike Muslims in other countries.

The impact of Islamophobia might be one contributing factor to the persecution and distrust of those six million Muslims. At the same time, the last two decades witnessed many political resolutions that Paris adopted and that angered many members of the Muslim community there.

Though the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo had indulged in what is considered “freedom of provocation” and spared no efforts to humiliate Muslims and their prophet, nothing justifies the murder.

During his shooting spree, one of the assailants shouted: “This is in revenge for the prophet.”

But actually it turned out to be “a revenge against the prophet”, since the European Muslims will be subjected to all forms of discrimination by racists and rightists, including the French National Front, the German anti-Islamic PEGIDA extreme rightist coalition (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West), and the British racist movements.

The Charlie Hebdo massacre might have appealed to those who saw their identity and prophet humiliated by that paper, but the answer to that is not atrocities that distort the image of all Arabs and Muslims, but legal means that the freedom of the press stipulate.

Stereotyping the Arabs and Muslims as killers and murderers is the direct result of such a heinous crime. 

Paris has had pro-Arab stands during the last two decades. The French support for Arabs and Palestinians at the United Nations Security Council two weeks ago deserves acts of gratitude not bloodshed.