Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

A.J. Caschetta

Today I found myself embroiled in an ongoing confrontation between a pro-Palestinian professor named Jonathan Judaken at Rhodes College in Tennessee and an Islamophobe named A.J. Caschetta who teaches English at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It all started with an article that Caschetta wrote on Daniel Pipes “Middle East Forum” on behalf of JihadWatch, a blog associated with David Horowitz’s Freedom Center. So right off the bat you can figure out that Caschetta is bad news.

Titled “Are Muslims the New Jews?”,Caschetta’s article denounced a Judaken lecture at the University of Rochester as being soft on Islam. He described Judaken’s lecture as exaggerating the Islamic contribution to Western civilization and crediting Islam with having “preserved, elaborated on and indeed expanded upon Western thought” in Judaken’s words. He also took exception to Judaken’s claim that Jews were ”treated much better” in the Muslim world after expulsion from Christendom. Now this is a topic that I have devoted a fair amount of research to, culminating in an article titled “Jews in the Maghreb”. The whole question of how Jews got treated in the Muslim world is highly politicized with people like David Horowitz and A.J. Caschetta likening it to Nazi Germany and others moored to the planet Earth agreeing with famed Jewish historian Shelomo Dov Goitein that Jewish life “flourished” there.

As might be expected, Caschetta refers his readers to passages in the Quran that supposedly demonize Jews. Frankly, as someone who attended Hebrew school and had drummed into his head for 3 years that the Jews were the “chosen people”, something that gave them the right to occupy Palestine and ethnically cleanse the people who had been living there for millennia, this sort of scripture-quoting struck me as a sick joke.

After Judaken read Caschetta’s article, he wrote a commentary in Inside Higher Education titled “The New McCarthyism” that quite rightly places Caschetta’s article in the context of a well-funded and vicious organized attempt to silence critics of Israel:

I had a sense something had happened in the blogosphere when I began to receive anti-Islamic hate mail in my inbox, and requests for the lecture from as far away as Sydney, Australia. This happened because Campus Watch flies its flag under the auspices of the Middle East Forum, a well-financed initiative under the leadership of Daniel Pipes that monitors Middle East studies in the academy.

Campus Watch is part of a network of networks, including StandWithUs, AMCHAInitiative, the David Horowitz Freedom Center and most recently Canary Mission, linked to groups like Jihad Watch. Jihad Watch and these other fora send daily blasts to all those who sign up to receive them on their websites and use email and social media to share their message. Within this self-referential set of bubbles, each consumes the propaganda of their fellow warriors in what they describe as a war for hearts and minds. College campuses are thus key strategic territory in the battle since this is where young minds are shaped.

On June 16th I crossposted Judaken’s article on Marxmail, a mailing list that has a definite political orientation and one that is obviously sympathetic to intellectuals like Judaken, Steven Salaita et al. For some reason totally unfathomable to me, this character A.J. Caschetta emailed Les Schaffer requesting that we post his latest article on this matter that appears in todays Inside Higher Education. So this complies with his request and allows me to put in my own two cents.

Caschetta’s article is titled “The Hollow Cry of ‘McCarthyism’” and is filled with dodgy obfuscations such as the claim that his Middle East Forum article had nothing to do with Israel since the word Israel does not occur once. Maybe that’s because it didn’t have to. If you spend a thousand words arguing that Muslims have hated Jews from the time of Mohammad, isn’t it obvious that this is just another attempt to persuade people that Israel had an excuse for bombing UN schools in Gaza? If we didn’t kill women and children there, the next thing you know they would be swarming into Israel like locusts in order to carry out a genocide against the Jews because of words written in the Quran.

You have to wonder, I should add, how an RIT professor can bond with the likes of David Horowitz who is given to statements such as “We already have a lot of infiltration of Islamic jihadist doctrines into our K-12 school systems.” I can easily imagine Pipes, Horowitz and Pam Geller lining up at Sheldon Adelson’s trough to get their pay-off, but doesn’t Caschetta feel a bit soiled when he does? Aah, maybe I am giving him too much credit.

Finally, a word about Caschetta’s dismissal of Judaken’s worries that he and other pro-Palestinian professors can encounter the same sort of witch hunt that took place during the Red Scare. Since he is part of Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz’s Islamophobic brigades, this is tantamount to Walter Winchell scoffing at the idea that Communists had anything to worry about in 1953.

For my newer readers, I would recommend a look at the dossier I collected on victims of this well-organized,  well-funded and utterly reactionary crusade a while back. The first couple of pages should suffice:

NY Times October 2, 1983
THE STONY BROOK RIFT: RACISM AND ZIONISM
By MICHAEL WINERIP

ON Aug. 17, five faculty members at the State University of New York at Stony Brook met to review the evidence against Prof. Ernest Dube.

It was skimpy evidence, those five executive committee members agreed – certainly nothing they ever dreamed would attract the attention of the Governor.

In a two-page letter, a visiting professor from Israel had charged Professor Dube with using the classroom for ”the kind of sloganeering that is practiced by the anti-Semite,” including teaching that Zionism is racist.

The Israeli professor, Selwyn K. Troen, had never been to Professor Dube’s class nor made an attempt to talk with Professor Dube. He based his letter on conversations with a single student and a copy of the course syllabus and shortly afterward flew back to Israel.

”Frankly, I thought what Professor Troen said was bull,” said Joel Rosenthal, a Stony Brook history professor and head of the committee. That same day, after reviewing the evidence available, the committee decided that Professor Dube was within the bounds of academic freedom abnd had not acted improperly.

* * * *

NY Times, October 19, 2000
Columbia Debates a Professor’s ‘Gesture’
By KAREN W. ARENSON

When Edward W. Said, a celebrated literary scholar, Columbia University professor and outspoken Palestinian advocate, hurled a rock toward an Israeli guardhouse from the Lebanese border in July, a photographer caught the action. The photo, which captured Mr. Said with his arm reached far behind him, ready to throw, appeared in newspapers and magazines in the Middle East and the United States.

Mr. Said’s rock-throwing occurred during a visit to Lebanon with his family last summer. He has given several explanations for it. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, he said it was merely a competition with his son to see who could throw farther.

But his explanations did not satisfy critics like Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Mr. Foxman wrote to Columbia’s president, George Rupp, calling Mr. Said’s behavior ”a crude, disgraceful and dangerous act of incitement” and saying that it warranted ”clear repudiation and censure from the Columbia University community.”

* * * *

Jewish Ledger, June 26, 2002
CCSU, Tunxis institutes for teachers lack balance, Jewish leaders say
by Adam N. Schupack

Two professional development institutes to educate Connecticut public school teachers about the Middle East and Islamic world have drawn criticism from members of the Jewish community and a Connecticut congressman for their lack of balance.

At least three professors teaching at the programs at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) in New Britain and Tunxis Community College in Farmington are anti-Israel activists, according to Jewish leaders.

“We feel that it is important that middle and high school teachers receive a balanced presentation of the issues, and we’re not convinced these faculty will be able to accomplish that,” said Cathrine Fischer Schwartz, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford.

* * * *

NY Times, November 21, 2002
Poet Who Spoke Against Israel Is Reinvited to Talk at Harvard
By ROBERT F. WORTH

Citing concerns about freedom of speech, Harvard University’s English department has renewed an invitation to the Irish poet Tom Paulin to give a lecture, just a week after he was disinvited for expressing strongly anti-Israeli views.

The new invitation, approved in a vote on Tuesday night, drew sharply differing responses from faculty members and students at Harvard, which has been troubled by heated debates and demonstrations about Israel in the past year. Some expressed relief, saying the university had crossed the line by disinviting a poet because of his political views. Others were outraged and said the decision would lead to renewed protests.

* * * *

New York Sun, January 27, 2004
Hamas in Florida Classroom
by Daniel Pipes and Asaf Romirowsky

A visiting Palestinian professor at Florida Atlantic University, Mustafa Abu Sway, is “known as an activist” in Hamas, a group on the American government’s terrorism list, we reported in October of 2003. We also disclosed that his salary is being paid by the American taxpayer, via the Fulbright exchange program.

Our little scoop met with yawns or with disbelief. Mr. Abu Sway himself, in an interview with the Palm Beach Post, denounced our article as a “witch hunt.” Florida Atlantic University ignored the disclosure: “We have no reason to take any action,” the university’s president told the Post, a paper that published four skeptical responses, including an editorial insisting that “there is no known evidence” against Mr. Abu Sway.

Actually, being named as “a known activist” in Hamas by the Israeli government — who knows terrorism better ? — qualifies in itself as “evidence,” but since October we have learned that Mr. Abu Sway also, according to Israeli sources.

* * * *

Berkeley Daily Planet Tuesday May 25, 2004
UC Lecturer’s ‘Intifada’ Comment Brings Death Threats
By JAKOB SCHILLER

A recent speech delivered by a UC Berkeley lecturer during an impromptu anti-war protest in San Francisco has set off a firestorm of criticism around the country, including death threats and calls for his removal from the university.

The speech, given by Hatem Bazian of UC’s Near Eastern Studies Department, at one point noted the intifada in Palestine and uprising in Iraq and then asked the crowd why the U.S. has not had its own political intifada to protest the lies U.S. government has used to lead this country to war.

Critics took offense with his use of the word “intifada” and are claiming Bazian could be calling for an armed uprising like the ones in Iraq and Palestine. In Arabic, Intifada comes from a root word which means “shaking off,” but the word has come to be associated with the armed Palestinian struggle against Israel.

* * * *

NY Sun, October 22, 2004
Rep. Weiner Asks Columbia to Fire Anti-Israel Prof
By JACOB GERSHMAN, Staff Reporter of the Sun

A congressman from New York City is calling for the dismissal of a Columbia University professor he accuses of “displays of anti-Semitism.”

Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat of Brooklyn and Queens, has written a letter to Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, urging him to “fire” Joseph Massad, an assistant professor of Arab politics and one of the harshest critics of Israel on campus.

* * * *

NY Sun, November 22, 2004
Professor Fearful of Attack
By JACOB GERSHMAN, Staff Reporter of the Sun

After receiving an e-mail from a Columbia University graduate student accusing him of anti-Semitism, the chairman of Columbia’s Department of Middle East and Asian languages and cultures told university officials he felt physically threatened by the student and urged them to alert school security.

Columbia’s provost, Alan Brinkley, told the professor, Hamid Dabashi, he was overreacting, and declined to notify security about the letter from the student, according to an e-mail obtained by The New York Sun.

Mr. Dabashi, whose department at Columbia has come under public scrutiny for its promotion of anti-Israel sentiment and its alleged harassment of Jewish students, was responding to an e-mail he received in late September from Victor Luria, a Ph.D. student who works in a Columbia genetics lab.

* * * *

NY Times, February 28, 2005
Some Limits on Speech in Classrooms
By JOYCE PURNICK

WHILE Columbia University struggles to find the line between academic freedom and unacceptable classroom behavior, the city’s Department of Education has found a facile but provocative solution: banish the guy.

Earlier this month, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein barred Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute, from again lecturing to city teachers enrolled in a professional development course because of “a number of things he’s said in the past,” said Michael Best, the department’s general counsel. Asked if the department had verified those purported remarks, Mr. Best did not answer directly: “He’s denied saying certain things; he has not denied saying others.”

Set against the backdrop of a simmering campus dispute over Jewish students’ charges of intimidation by pro-Palestinian teachers, the Khalidi affair has inevitably been linked to the larger controversy. “In this feeding frenzy for finding culprits, he sort of got lumped in with others, and it’s been unfair to him,” said Ari L. Goldman, dean of students at Columbia’s journalism school.

* * * *

Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
No 3, 1 September 2005, 27 Av 5765
Faculty Efforts to Combat Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Bias at the University of California, Santa Cruz
By Leila Beckwith, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, and Ilan Benjamin

The University of California-Santa Cruz (UCSC), founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, a public institution. The attractive campus is situated on two thousand acres of hills and redwood forests overlooking Monterey Bay. Fifteen thousand students attend, of whom about 20 percent are Jewish, the highest proportion of Jewish students among all the UC campuses.1

Nevertheless, UCSC is home to a great deal of virulent anti-Israeli rhetoric, which creates an intimidating environment for many Jews on campus. Although such hostility can be found at many other universities, what is unique at UCSC is that the animus is not directed by the usual sources, such as well-funded Muslim student groups2 or faculty in a Middle East studies program.3 In fact, the UCSC Muslim Student Alliance is not very active; nor are other pro-Palestinian/anti-Israeli student groups such as the Committee for Justice in Palestine. And while there is a Jewish studies program, there is none for Middle East studies, and no known Arab/Muslim funding of university faculty or activities. Instead, at UCSC the anti-Israeli sentiment is primarily generated by a leftist faculty scattered throughout the university’s academic units.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 13, 2015

Charlie Hebdo ‘not racist’? If you say so. posted by Richard Seymour

I’m going to publish a number of English language translations of French articles on the background to Charlie Hebdo controversies for those who wish to follow it.  The first few are from the publication Les Mots Sont Importants.  Thanks immensely to Daphne Lawless for the translations.

“Charlie Hebdo”, not racist? If you say so…

Thursday 5 December 2013

by Olivier Cyran

translated by Daphne Lawless

He worked there from 1992 to 2001, before walking out, angered by “the dictatorial behaviour and corrupt promotion practices” of a certain Philippe Val [former CH editor – trans.] Since then, Olivier Cyran has been an observer from a distance, outside the walls, of the evolution of Charlie Hebdo and its growing obsession with Islam. He went over this long-term drift on the occasion of an opinion piece in Le Monde, signed by Charb [Stéphane Charbonnier, one of the cartoonists murdered in January 2015 – trans.] and Fabrice Nicolino.

Postscript 11 January 2015: to all those who think that this article was validation in advance of the shameful terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo (that they were asking for it), the editorial team of Article 11 would like to give a hearty middle finger to such vultures. To make things absolutely clear, please see this text.

*

Dear Charb and Fabrice Nicolino,

“We hope that those who claim, and will claim tomorrow, that Charlie is racist, will at least have the courage to say it out loud and under their real name. We’ll know how to respond.” Reading this rant at the end of your opinion piece in Le Monde[1], as if to say “come say it to our face if you’re a real man”, I felt something rising within me, like a craving to go back to fighting in the school playground. Yet it wasn’t me being called out. Which upright citizens you hope to convince, moreover, is a mystery. For a good long while, many people have been saying “out loud” and “under their real name” what they think about your magazine and the effluent flowing out of it, without any one of you being bothered to answer them or to shake their little fists.

And so Le Monde has charitably opened their laundry service to you, for an express steam-cleaning of your rumpled honour. To hear you talk, it was urgent: you couldn’t even go out in Paris without a taxi driver treating you like racists and leaving you helpless on the footpath. I understand your annoyance, but why did you have to go give yourself another black eye in a different publication than your own? Don’t Charlie Hebdo, its website and its publishing house give you space to express yourself to your heart’s content? You invoke “Charlie’s” glorious heritage of the 60s and 70s, when it was political censorship and not haunting disrepute that gave your magazine something to worry about. But I doubt that, at the time, writers like Cavanna or Choron would have asked for help from the posh press to make themselves respectable.

If it also occurred to me, in the past, to scribble out some furious lines in reaction to some of your exploits, I never dwelled on the subject. Doubtless I would not have had the patience or the stoutness of heart to follow, week after week, the distressing transformation which took over your team after the events of September 11, 2001. I was no longer part of Charlie Hebdo when the suicide planes made their impact on your editorial line, but the Islamophobic neurosis which bit by bit took over your pages from that day on affected me personally, as it ruined the memory of the good moments I spent on the magazine during the 1990s. The devastating laughter of “Charlie” which I had loved to hear now sounded in my ears like the laugh of a happy idiot getting his cock out at the checkout counter, or of a pig rolling in its own shit. And yet, I never called your magazine racist. But since today you are proclaiming, high and loud, your stainless and irreproachable anti-racism, maybe it’s now the right moment to seriously consider the question.

Racist? Charlie Hebdo was certainly no such thing at the time when I worked there. In any case, the idea that the mag would expose itself to such an accusation would have never occurred to me. There had, of course been some Francocentrism, as well as the editorials of Philippe Val. These latter were subject to a disturbing fixation, which worsened over the years, on the “Arabic-Muslimworld”. This was depicted as an ocean of barbarism threatening, at any moment, to submerge the little island of high culture and democratic refinement that was, for him, Israel. But the boss’s obsessions remained confined to his column on page 3, and overflowed only rarely into the heart of the journal which, in those years, it seemed me, throbbed with reasonably well-oxygenated blood.

Scarcely had I walked out, wearied by the dictatorial behaviour and corrupt promotion practices of the employer, than the Twin Towers fell and Caroline Fourest arrived in your editorial team. This double catastrophe set off a process of ideological reformatting which would drive off your former readers and attract new ones – a cleaner readership, more interested in a light-hearted version of the “war on terror”  than the soft anarchy of [cartoonist] Gébé. Little by little, the wholesale denunciation of “beards”, veiled women and their imaginary accomplices became a central axis of your journalistic and satirical production. “Investigations” began to appear which accepted the wildest rumours as fact, like the so-called infiltration of the League of Human Rights (LDH) or European Social Forum (FSE) by a horde of bloodthirsty Salafists[2]. The new impulse underway required the magazine to renounce the unruly attitude which had been its backbone up to then, and to form alliances with the most corrupt figures of the intellectual jet-set, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy or Antoine Sfeir, cosignatories in Charlie Hebdo of a grotesque “Manifesto of the Twelve against the New Islamic Totalitarianism”[3]. Whoever could not see themselves in a worldview which opposed the civilized (Europeans) to obscurantists (Muslims) saw themselves quickly slapped with the label of “useful idiots” or “Islamo–leftists”.

read full article at Lenin’s Tomb

Mohammad in a painting from the Topkapi museum in Istanbul

Among the many articles on Charlie Hebdo defending Western Civilization and the Enlightenment, especially the Voltairean precept (that he never actually stated) “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, it was inevitable to find some that debunked the notion that Islam banned pictorial representation of Mohammad.

For example Newsweek published an article titled “The Koran Does Not Forbid Images of the Prophet” that states:

Over the past seven centuries, a variety of historical and poetic texts largely produced in Turkish and Persian spheres—both Sunni and Shiite—include beautiful depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. These many images were not only meant to praise and commemorate the Prophet; they also served as occasions and centerpieces for Muslim devotional practice, much like celebrations of the Prophet’s birthday (Mawlid) and visitations to his tomb in Medina.

Author Christiane Gruber has the credentials to back up her claims, as the accompanying note indicates. She is “associate professor and director of graduate studies at the University of Michigan. Her primary field of research is Islamic book arts, paintings of the Prophet Muhammad, and Islamic ascension texts and images, about which she has written two books and edited a volume of articles.”

Now there are those with more of an axe to grind who invoke the same arguments. Nick Gillespie, the execrable editor of the Koch brothers funded Reason magazine, alludes to the same history but makes sure to line up on the right side of the clash of civilizations question while he is at it:

Especially as the radical elements of Islam become violent and desperate in their attempts to engender Ummah, it’s important to stress that their interpretations are one among many and anything but universal. At least since the 9/11 attacks, an ongoing query in America and the West more broadly has been, “Where are the moderate Muslims?” They’re out there, for sure, and we’d all be better off creating a dialogue in which the anti-modernity Islamists are recognized as a common enemy.

Actually, for many of us the real question post-9/11 has been “Where are the moderate Westerners?” As is so often the case when individual terrorism is put under a magnifying glass, state terrorism goes by the wayside. By definition, state terrorism is pardoned since it is seen as a purely defensive measure. Without our Cruise missiles or drones, the jihadists would be an even greater danger. Like LBJ telling the American people in 1967 that we invaded Vietnam to stop the spread of Communism, we were “forced” to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq to protect the homeland. This was exactly the scenario that Orwell described in “1984”, making war to preserve the peace.

It was exactly in such a charged geopolitical environment that the question of representing Mohammad became one of war and peace, and life and death. The real struggle was not over artistic freedom but how to protect the right of artists to serve as ideological combatants in the “war on terror”.

On September 30, 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (The Jutland Post, the country’s largest circulation newspaper) published cartoons of Mohammad that were really at the root of the Charlie Hebdo killings. Unlike the respectful images alluded to in Gruber’s article, these were designed to draw blood. The most infamous of them depicted Mohammad with a bomb in his turban:

Protests across the Muslim world led to 200 deaths. For much of the Islamophobic right and their liberal allies such as Bill Maher, the cartoons were seen as courageous truth-telling exercises akin to Honoré Daumier or Thomas Nast. But for most Muslims, it would be hard to distinguish them from the overall propaganda machine operating on behalf of George W. Bush’s new crusade, especially if you looked hard at the Danish role in making it possible.

At the time Anders Fogh Rasmussen was Denmark’s Prime Minister. Rasmussen was one of the first European heads of state to go nativist, well in advance of Le Pen, Farage et al. To enact tough anti-immigration laws that were hostile to asylum seekers, he relied on the support of the Danish People’s Party, a white nationalist outfit with affinities to the French National Front, Golden Dawn and the rest of the neofascist parties that are determined to cleanse Europe of its darker-skinned Muslim immigrants, legal or illegal.

Rasmussen was also a strong supporter of Bush’s war in Iraq. In defending his decision to send Danish troops to Iraq, he stated: “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. This is not something we think. We know it.”

It was against a backdrop of nativist opposition to mostly Muslim peoples at home and imperialist aggression against their brothers and sisters abroad that the Jyllands-Posten cartoons must be seen.

Editor Flemming Rose was the mastermind of this project. He felt that self-censorship existed in Denmark and wanted to challenge it by publishing “daring” cartoons. On February 19, 2006 he wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post titled “Why I Published Those Cartoons” that makes him sound virtually Islamophilic:

We have a tradition of satire when dealing with the royal family and other public figures, and that was reflected in the cartoons. The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding, Muslims.

How nice. Making Muslims feel part of his society. Under Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the number of immigrants being accepted for political asylum declined by 84 percent. That sounds pretty exclusionary to me.

Eventually Rose toured the USA in order to interview people on his wavelength, including Francis Fukuyama, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, and Bernard Lewis. Birds of a feather, I guess. He also found time to sit down with Nick Gillespie’s Reason Magazine in 2007. Interviewed by Michael Moynihan, a creature as oleaginous as Gillespie, Rose charged the left with being soft on Islam, a charge being raised once again in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo killings:

Moynihan: Were you surprised by the reaction of those who argued not for unfettered free speech, but “responsible speech?”

Rose: Well, no. I think many people betrayed their own ideals. The history of the left, for instance, is a history of confronting authority—be it religious or political authority—and always challenging religious symbols and figures. In this case, they failed miserably. I think the left is in a deep crisis in Europe because of their lack of willingness to confront the racist ideology of Islamism. They somehow view the Koran as a new version of Das Kapital and are willing to ignore everything else, as long of they continue to see the Muslims of Europe as a new proletariat.

If you were paying close attention to the charges being leveled against the antiwar movement in 2007, this will ring a bell. Nick Cohen, Oliver Kamm, David Aaronovitch, and Johann Hari were all accusing the British SWP, which at the time was spearheading the Stop the War Coalition, of trying to fuse with radical Islamists.

In fact the entire world was polarized around the “clash of civilizations” in this period, so much so that nearly every jihadist would have been reacting to it even if frequently being unable to articulate it.

In 2005, the year prior to the Danish cartoons being published, the French police arrested Chérif Kouachi for trying to join the guerrillas fighting American occupation alongside his comrade Thamer Bouchnak, a Tunisian-Frenchman. The two were reportedly united by their hatred for the war in Iraq. The photos of torture from Abu Ghraib prison angered them particularly.

I would say it was those photos that are the real images that led to the Charlie Hebdo killings. If American imperialism had not decided to invade a nation, divide it along sectarian lines, kill hundreds of thousands of its citizens, torture its captives, mock its religious figures, and then once the war ended continued to make war against Sunni tribesmen all around the world through drones, maybe things wouldn’t have reached the state they did.

In any case, the only true path to peace is one in which Arabs and Muslim peoples are not dominated and exploited by imperialism and their own elites. Yes, I know. That is a Quixotic prospect but anything that falls short of that goal will only cost more innocent lives, even those as wretched as the smug, puerile and racially insensitive cartoonists who think that lampooning Mohammad has anything in common with Daumier or Jonathan Swift.