Blaming the Muslim victims in France

FRANCE'S INTERIOR Minister Manuel Valls, a leading member of the Socialist Party, has announced a blanket ban on all street protests against racist anti-Muslim cartoons published last week by the magazineCharlie Hebdo.

Speaking at a September 21 news conference in the Mediterranean port of Marseille--France's second largest city, known for its large immigrant population and proximity to bases of support for the fascist National Front, a leading source of vile Islamophobic rhetoric--Valls made it clear that attempts to violate the ban would be met with force: "Demonstrations will be banned and broken up," he told reporters.

To intimidate any would-be violators, riot police were deployed over the weekend in big cities like Paris, where they detained several dozen people over two days, according to reports. Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada cited French news reports reporting that some of the detained were Muslim women who were "guilty" of nothing more than wearing headscarves.

French officials justified the ban as necessary to prevent unrest in the aftermath of worldwide demonstrations against the U.S.-made, anti-Islam propaganda film The Innocence of Muslims. Those demonstrations mainly targeted U.S. embassy buildings and other symbols of Western power in countries with large Muslim populations.

In Paris, officials refused to grant a legal permit for any such protests--nevertheless, 150 people were arrested on September 15 when they gathered for a small nonviolent protest near the U.S. embassy. The next day, Valls denounced the unauthorized protest as an "incitement to hatred," and the public prosecutor's office said it was launching an investigation.

In response to these events, Charlie Hebdo--a self-described "left-wing" satirical magazine--published an issue with a cover that mocked the Prophet Mohammed. The magazine's publishers framed their action as a statement challenging what they consider to be religious irrationality and assaults on free speech.

Thus, contrary to Valls' claims, it is Charlie Hebdo, and not the Muslims the magazine sought to provoke, that is guilty of "incitement to hatred." Emphasizing the racism that underlay the decision to print the cartoons, one editor declared: "We're a newspaper that respects French law. Now, if there's a law that is different in Kabul or Riyadh, we're not going to bother ourselves with respecting it."

This isn't the first time that Charlie Hebdo has tried to antagonize Muslims by publishing racist material. In 2006, it reprinted a series of bigoted cartoons that had appeared the previous year in a Danish newspaper, including such artful assertions of liberal values as a depiction of the Prophet Mohammed wearing a bomb in his turban.

Last fall, the magazine faced a furious backlash, including an attack on its offices, when it published an issue that had cover art mocking the Prophet and a subtitle reading "Sharia Hebdo," in reference to Islamic legal principles.

Source : socialistworker