Pope Francis on Paris Attack - "one who throws insults can expect a 'punch'"

[anvi]

What I understood Pope Francis to be saying, in a nutshell, is that free speech and prudent speech are not alway the same thing.  I understood him to be saying that the murders of the Charlie Hebdo satirists was indefensible, both on the level of the murders themselves and on the basis of the fact that they were incited by mere speech, and speech is everyone's right.  But I also understood him to be saying that, when anyone says something that openly ridicules the most deeply held beliefs of others, then angry responses, and sometimes responses that go way beyond anger, are probably inevitable sooner or later.  I don't think the latter qualification is controversial at all.  The way people respond to one another, including the ways I sometimes respond to others, on this very forum every day proves that, doesn't it?

But ultimately, in a broader sense, I don't think Francis' diagnosis of the whole situation was correct.  To me, I think one unfortunate thing about this whole incident is that the murderers of the Charlie Hebdo satirists didn't themselves care about the contents of the cartoons.  If they did care, then it was just an add-on to a laundry-list of grievances that they either nursed themselves or were persuaded by others were worth dying for.  I don't think the people in the organizations that directed and supported the murderers' activities really cared about the content of the cartoons at any rate.  Killing the satirists was bound to provoke precisely the social, political and quasi-religious polarization that it has.  Creating that polarization makes it easier to depict westerners as anti-Muslim to the core, and in turn makes it easier for these organizations to recruit disaffected immigrants that they couldn't recruit otherwise.  I myself wish that westerners would stop jumping as fast as they can at the bait--and demonizing one another in the process--and treat a monstrous crime as just that, a monstrous crime.

[anvi]

Anvi, I disagree with the last bit about not caring about the content.  Within the so called Islamic state people are getting their heads lopped off for all sorts of blasphemy, sorcery and assorted haram activities on a daily basis.  I dont think they are very sophisticated or rational in their tactics and strategy. Al Qaeda 1.0 seems to have been a more rational actor and that was  due to their more centralized command and control.  I think the France attacks are more in line with the new diffuse nature of things.

My sense of ISIS and current versions of al-Qaeda is that they are just killing everyone who gets in the way of their rebellion against the likes of Maliki and Assad.  Sure ISIS fighters kill Yazidis and Kurds for their supposed "apostasy" and demand that Shias either convert or die--they would all be hard to keep from rebellion in an ISIS-controlled state.  But they also went after Sunni-populous Mosul as a first steep, and killed Suni security officers in Tikrit without much compunction.  Even Sunnis in the region who sympathize with them do so not because they're on board with their quasi-religious interpretation of Islam, but because their is no one else who even feigns to come to their aid.  And al Qaeda in Yemen, which may will have financed and directed the Paris attacks, is not at war with the Yemen government over sectarian issues, but because the government, at the behest of the U.S., has been going after the organization there since 2001.  If one looks through al Qaeda's strategy documents, they are pretty overt about how to ferment political conflict in both Muslim counties and in the west.  They wanted to provoke the American invasion of Afghanistan and other countries with the 9/11 attacks, to make them overstretch and to widen the theater of hostilities.  Now, before the attack on Charlie Hebdo, there were probably a number of Muslims in France who may have been mildly offended by its satire, but they had bigger problems to solve in their day-to-day lives.  Now, after the killings, whole crowds march through the streets, and posters around the world join them, with the message "Je suis Charlie."  That might represent a great mantra in defense of freedom of speech and progressive values to many on this forum and many more off of it, but it's probably pretty irksome to believers who consider Muhammad the consummation of prophecy, and it will make larger numbers of them amenable to radicalization than there were before the attacks.  

Lest anyone mistake any of the above as apologist rhetoric on behalf of whomever, it's not.  I believe in freedom of speech, wholeheartedly reject the notion that anyone should be killed or suppressed for saying whatever they want and however they want to, and on top of it all, I'm an atheist, and I don't have any sympathy for the way that people are ruled in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran or Yemen.  But, with regard to these kinds of events, I don't think any of that is exactly the point.  We are not only getting attacked by terrorist groups, we're also getting played by them.  It may be time for us to learn why those groups are, in all honesty, fairly good at accomplishing the latter.