From one terror to another: A view from France on the aftermath of the ISIS attacks in Paris

Movement of Young Communists of France poster:
"The problem is not the refugees, it's the war in Iraq, Syria, etc..."

Louis Souchière

2015 will, without any doubt, be a year French children will be learning about in history classes for decades to come. From the assault on Charlie Hebdo in January, to the aftermath of the attack that took 129 lives in Paris in November, the international media and social networks have been flooded with controversies and messages of support focused on the French people. The so called “war on terror” was once again revitalized as one of the biggest concerns in the West with more and more countries dedicating resources to the bombing of Iraq and Syria. The French government, which quickly passed a bill to conduct more air strikes in Syria, was itself making loud declarations about how France would now be “in a state of war” as “retaliation strikes” on Raqqa were launched no more than two weeks after the attack.

The reinforcement of imperialist policies, with the French military being once again a part of the tip of the spear in efforts that have already destabilised many countries, from Libya to Syria, is not the only effect the attacks of 2015 had on the country. What is less known to the international community is the effect the aftermath of these attacks had for French people themselves, especially racialized minorities and Muslim communities, the latter accounting for around 8% of the country’s population.

Terror attacks in Paris: Western Imperialism is to blame

TJ Petrowski

In the aftermath of the latest attacks on Paris that left more than 130 dead, the corporate, Eurocentric media of the West is in overdrive to scare working people into sacrificing their civil liberties and convince us of the need to launch more aggressive bombing raids, with the possibility of deploying troops, in Iraq and Syria to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS). The attacks are the inevitable response to Western imperialism's exploitation of the Middle East and North Africa and worldwide military interventions.

Each conflict in the Middle East and North Africa can be attributed to the policies of Western imperialism. The conflict in Syria is not a civil war; it is a regional proxy war being waged by Western imperialism through air strikes, sanctions, and support for regional proxies (i.e., so-called "moderate" rebels, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Israel, etc.), all with their own agendas, to weaken movements and states opposed to their interests. Likewise, the war in neighboring Iraq can be directly attributed to the illegal occupation of the country by Western imperialism in 2003; al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor of ISIS, was not formed until after the U.S.-led occupation.

Reaction from the Communist Youth of Paris' 15th district on attacks in Paris

The following is a statement from the Communist Youth of the 15th district of Paris, republished by RY. You can find the original statement in French here.

After the shock, more than ever, we must fight back against imperialism and its nightmares.

Paris, 14th of November

Young communists from the 15th district, whom gathered with comrades from the province and the public sector unions discussed the events that occurred the night before.

The terrorist attacks claimed by the fascist and Islamist group "Daesh" caused more than 120 casualties with more than 200 injured, and the numbers are still increasing. Our first reaction was shock and a great deal of emotion. Everybody was concerned and affected by these events and many of us were near the actions as they occurred. Others worked close to these areas, as bus drivers and nurses, and lived close to the places where the disturbances occurred throughout the Paris region. Some of us, finally, knew some of the victims of these terrible acts of violence.

Lebanese, Turkish and French youth united in the struggle for peace

The following is a joint statement from young Communist organizations from Lebanon, France and Turkey on the recent attacks on civilians in each of their countries and their united struggle against imperialist war.

Ankara, Beirut, and Paris: Same pain, same responsibilities, same struggle

We, communist and progressive youth organization from Turkey, Lebanon and France declare the following:

We are all deeply affected and saddened by the bombing that struck our peoples and our youths. Our first thoughts are with the victims and their families. Terrorism is a deadly ideology that we shall fight against. The acts perpetrated in Ankara, Beirut and Paris has been committed by fascists.

Harper creates refugees and spreads racism

A rally outside Immigration minister Chris Alexander's
office in Ajax, Ontario.

Here Rebel Youth publishes an interview with Drew Garvie, the Communist candidate in Toronto's University-Rosedale riding and General Secretary of the YCL. The raw interview was with a UofT student publication.

What initiatives do you think U of T students and administration should be taking on the Syrian Refugee Crisis?

Students and the University of Toronto should raise their voices and demand Canada welcome refugees, that we end Canada’s participation in the wars that create these crises, and that we dump the Harper government as a first step towards a country with a democratic immigration policy and a foreign policy of peace and disarmament.

The Attack on Muslim Women

Mariam Ahmad

As we have witnessed, Islamophobia is on the rise. Following the events of Charlie Hebdo, we’ve seen that attacks on Muslims, and especially Muslim women, have gotten worse. In Canada we have seen bills like C-51 (the “Anti-Terrorism Act”), and Bill S-7 (“Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices”) tabled with shockingly large support from the Canadian population, even though they clearly target minorities, specifically Muslims. This is after an intense campaign of Islamophobia by the corporate media and pro-war politicians that goes back decades. This ideological offensive has gotten hotter in the last six months as Canada joined the latest invasion of Iraq. More and more, Muslim women are put in danger just because they choose to observe their religious rites.

In Quebec, a Muslim woman named Hanady Saad was walking along René-Lévesque Boulevard in Montreal with her friends, when a stranger yelled at her. “...Terrorist, go back home, we don’t want to see your hijab. You have to take it off,’” Afterwards Saad said. “I’m a human, you know? I have the right to wear the veil. I have the right, like everybody, to be who I am”.  Why aren’t governments taking steps to address such a hostile environment for its citizens? Why are there no proactive steps taken to curb hate crimes against Muslim people?

Afghanistan war is far from over

By T.J. Petrowski

 After 13 years, the U.S. and NATO are announcing the end to combat missions in Afghanistan and the withdrawal of troops. But despite the symbolic flag lowering ceremony, the U.S. led war is in fact not ending, and the brutal war is set to continue through 2015. NATO is set to "transition" to a non combat, "Resolute Support" mission to assist the Afghan National Army in its operations, with 4,000 NATO troops to remain in Afghanistan into 2015.

 President Obama has authorized 10,800 U.S. troops to remain in Afghanistan in 2015 (an increase of 1,000 from his May 2014 pledge to reduce troop levels), to resume combat operations against Afghan militants (including night raids by Special Operation soldiers, previously banned by former Afghan President Hamid Karzai), and aerial strikes. A senior American military officer was quoted saying that "the Air Force expects to use F 16 fighters, B 1B bombers and Predator and Reaper drones to go after the Taliban in 2015."

After Charlie Hebdo: Real unity against violence means unity against imperialism

Photo from the January 11th National Unity march in Paris

By Adrien Welsh

Adrien Welsh is a member of the Young Communist League of Canada and chair of the YCL-LJC International Commission. He is currently living in Paris, France.

On Wednesday, January 8th, 12 people were killed - among them, two police officers - and 11 others were wounded after the offices of the weekly satirical Parisian newspaper Charlie Hebdo was the target of an armed attack at around 11 AM. The famous satirical cartoonists Jean Cabut, “Cabu”; Georges Wolinsky and Stéphane Charbonnier, who collaborated with the newspaper L’Humanité (historically linked to the French Communist Party) were also victims.

The assailants managed to leave the headquarters of the newspaper and struck again by murdering a police officer in the south-west suburb of Montrouge the next morning. Three days later, members of the Jewish community were held hostage in a Kosher supermarket in Vincennes near Paris  as well as in Dammartin-en-Goëlle. After a three-day man-hunt, the three suspected murderers, Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly, were killed. In a video, the latter claimed to have been working together with the Kourachi brother but separated for a “greater impact”. He also claimed the original attack was meant to be a revenge for the people France had killed in the Islamic State of Syria.

This is the deadliest attack in France since 1961, when a bomb placed by the Secret Army Organization (OAS) - an ultra-right and colonialist paramilitary group fighting to maintain French colonialism in Algeria - exploded under a train, killing 28 people.

Book review: So many reds, so many beds...

The Fruit Machine, used by the RCMP until 1969

Reprinted from Geist magazine
By Daneil Francis

During the 1950s the RCMP security service employed a machine to root out homosexuals working for the federal government. Individuals suspected of being gay were hooked up to this bogus device, the so-called “fruit machine,” and exposed to pornographic images. Their physiological responses were assessed and a sexual identity conferred. Once identified, homosexuals were purged from the public service.

Ostensibly it was the Mounties’ job to look for Communist spies, but since homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail because of their illicit lifestyle, they too represented a risk to the security of the state, or so the argument went. More than one hundred civil servants lost their jobs because of the “gay squad,” which expanded its efforts beyond the civil service by opening files on thousands of gays across the country.

Clearly it was homosexuality that was being policed, not subversion.

In their new book Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America (University of Toronto Press), the historians Reg Whitaker, Gregory Kealey and Andrew Parnaby describe the fruit machine as “the single looniest venture” in the history of the security service. But they had a lot to choose from. What their book reveals is that any Canadian who has ever held unorthodox political views or even led what might be considered an unorthodox lifestyle could take it for granted that the government was watching.

(Link to a CBC story about the Fruit Machine - RY eds)

The origins of this intrusive surveillance go all the way back to Confederation, when John A. Macdonald placed Gilbert McMicken in charge of a force of special agents to keep a watchful eye on the activities of Fenian sympathizers along the Canada–US border. But the surveillance state really got organized at the end of World War I, when the Royal North West Mounted Police was remodelled as an internal security force—the modern RCMP—and deployed to spy on labour leaders and left-wing agitators who the government believed were plotting a Bolshevik revolution in Canada.

In the 1930s the security service was asked to fulfill Prime Minister R.B. Bennett’s promise that he would grind Communism under “the heel of ruthlessness.” It was “open season on Communists and suspected Communists,” write Whitaker et al., as the political police rounded up hundreds of radicals and even deported a number who were recent immigrants. “They simply came and took him away,” said the wife of one of the men. “They had no right to do such a thing.”

Picking up the story two decades later, our authors call the 1950s “the deepest Ice Age of the Cold War.” It was not just homosexuals that the RCMP singled out for persecution; they also encouraged purges of the National Film Board, the foreign service, labour unions and universities. In a variety of ways, write Whitaker et al., public policy was made hostage to “Cold War fantasies.” Worse, they present a portrait of a country “honeycombed with secret informers,” people who were not attached to the secret service but gladly helped spy on their friends and associates on its behalf.

“What is quite extraordinary about the vast collection of dossiers on Canadians and Canadian organizations… is the amount of complicity shown by large numbers of people in police surveillance of their own associations and activities.” To a disturbing extent, we had become a nation of spies, and by the early 1980s the security service had compiled files on ten thousand suspected subversives and had made plans to round up and incarcerate them in the event of an unspecified “national emergency.” The authors do not go so far, but the picture of Cold War Canada that emerges from the pages of their book seems every bit as sinister as East Germany under the Stasi.

This is the hidden history of the RCMP, which until 1984 had responsibility for secret policing. Much of the story is already known, though Secret Service brings it together in a convenient and compelling synthesis. But it is hidden in the sense that it contradicts so much of what the public is asked to believe about the Mounties: that they are the stalwart defenders of law and justice; that they are respecting our rights, not undermining them; that they make the country a safer place. This version of the Mountie has been purveyed for years in movies, histories, tourist brochures, comic books and novels.

Famously, the force even hired out its image-making to the Disney Corporation. The result of all this massaging and spin-doctoring has left Canadians thinking that our souvenir police force was on our side. Yet behind the scenes, which is where Secret Service takes its readers, the RCMP’s agents have been violating the rights of Canadians from the very beginning of the force.

It was in Quebec where the RCMP security service finally came a cropper. During the 1960s and ’70s, agents engaged in a series of “dirty tricks” aimed at sovereigntists in that province. They broke into journalists’ offices to steal documents; they opened mail; they stockpiled dynamite to use in furtive operations to discredit separatists; they stole records from the Parti Québécois, a perfectly legitimate political party [sic]; they fabricated communiqués from the Front de Libération du Québec; and so on.

All this illegal, clandestine activity eventually led to a Royal Commission, which in turn persuaded the federal government to transfer responsibility for national security policing from a discredited RCMP to a new agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in 1984. Which didn’t end the RCMP’s problematic involvement in terrorism matters. In 2002, when the Americans kidnapped Maher Arar, a Canadian computer engineer, and sent him to Syria to be tortured, it turned out to have been the RCMP that provided the dubious “evidence” on which the Americans had acted. (Arar was later exonerated and received an apology from the Canadian government, along with $10.5 million.)

CSIS has had its own problems, of course. Whitaker et al. call the cock-up over the 1985 Air India bombing “the worst intelligence failure in Canadian history.” But Secret Service is not simply a chronicle of police scandals and mistakes. As befits academics, the authors are extremely judicious in their treatment of individual incidents, and the result is a thorough, even-handed catalogue of most of the major security-related cases in Canada down to the present post-9/11 world. Few would argue—certainly Whitaker and his colleagues do not—that there is no role for security policing to protect Canadians from foreign espionage and terrorist violence. However, what the history shows is that as often as not, it is the police who have been the subversives, violating the rights of innocent individuals and legitimate organizations whose only “crime” was to challenge the status quo.