Thursday, January 08, 2015

I am certainly not Charlie Hebdo

If a Western publication specialized in insulting Jews and Judaism and in mocking the Holocaust, and if its cartoonists suffered a vicious attack (like the one in Paris yesterday), not a single Western writer or journalist would have dared to stand in solidarity with the publication. Not one person.  I am not Charlie Hebdo, and can't be.  And please don't give me the notion that the magazine satirized all religions. It did not. It specialized in mocking and insulting Muslims and Islam (all Muslims and not only radical Muslims).  And no, this stance does not mean that I don't condemn the attack. But the terrorists who attacked the publication, are your terrorists and not mine: these are the children of  Western policies in Syria where the West romantacized for more than three years what they dubbed as "moderate rebels" when in reality they were training and arming and nurturing vicious terrorists and Arab leftists like me were warning of the follies of Western policies and that those policies would produce vicious terrorists, and that the Afghanistan film from the 1980s will be repeated yet again.  As Amer Mohsen wrote today, this was your version of Islam: the one you arm in Saudi Arabia.