From Dan Sanchez at antiwar.com:
What were the Islamist terrorists trying to accomplish by attacking Paris on Friday, killing over 300 French civilians? An increasing number of analysts now agree with Juan Cole’s theory, which he raised after the last such attack (the Charlie Hebdo murders), writing:
“The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam. France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world… In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France.
Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.”
Cole likened this strategy to the early 20th century communist revolutionaries in Austria who would launch attacks for the express purpose of provoking a police crackdown on left-leaning citizens in order to radicalize them. From the perspective of the vanguard of the proletariat:
“…the fact that most students and workers don’t want to overthrow the business class is inconvenient, and so it seemed desirable to some of them to “sharpen the contradictions” between labor and capital.”
This is the strategy explicitly professed by ISIS (aka Daesh), the group that almost surely perpetrated the Friday attacks. Also shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, in its official magazine Dabiq, ISIS ran an article titled, “The Extinction of the Grayzone.”
The “grayzone” is the “gray area” between black and white. According to the authors, the grayzone is the middle ground between extremist, Salafi, terrorist theocrats (i.e., themselves, whom they exclusively regard as the “camp of Islam”) on one side and an imperialist, war-waging, western “crusader camp” on the other.
In other words, the grayzone is the realm of coexistence, communication, cooperation, and commerce among people of different creeds. The grayzone is where civilization resides.
To continue reading: From Paris to Polarization
