By Prof. Jose Maria Sison

Chairperson

International League of Peoples’ Struggle

January 9, 2015

 

We, the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, condemn the murder of the twelve Charlie Hebdo editors, cartoonists, staff and security offices in Paris and we express condolences to their families, colleagues and friends. The victims deserve the sympathy and indignation of the people. No one ever deserves to be murdered.

 

The Charlie Hebdo personnel had the status of journalists and were entitled to the freedom of the press as well as the right of everyone to the right of free expression, subject to respect to the inviolability of the just rights of others, be they individuals, groups or communities. Whether the Charlie Hebdo personnel performed their calling responsibly or not, their murder is unjustifiable because they carried on their trade with pen and ink and were entitled to the fundamental right to life and of due process.

 

But we cannot go so far as to proclaim ourselves as Charlie Hebdo because we know that this publication has sought to earn money by trading on extreme religious and racial biases, insults and taunts to entire communities and to the Islamic world of more than 1.6 billion people. It is necessary to qualify our sympathy, which is focused on the aspect of murder, in order to prevent the use of the murderous incident to further inflame religious and racial hatred against the people of color, favor the rise of repression and fascism and approve the big scale terrorism of French imperialism abroad.

 

We object to and oppose the competition among political factions of French imperialists (like those parties headed by Hollande, Sarkozy and Le Pen) to use the murderous Charlie Hebdo incident to whip up state terrorism and make a wide boulevard or express way for fascism. Islamophobic attacks have begun to break out in several French cities. We must understand that the various political factions of the French big bourgeoisie created the domestic crisis situation and pushed the aggressions abroad which have led to the Charlie Hebdo incident.

 

We must recall that one after the other the Sarkozy and Hollande regimes have taken a major role in US-NATO aggressions against countries in North Africa and Middle East or West Asia, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Libya and Syria. They have participated in mega-terrorism involving the massacre and displacement of millions of people and the massive destruction of states, economies and social infrastructure.

 

Aside from using economic sanctions and weapons of mass destruction, the US and other Western imperialist powers (including UK and France) have shown a knack for creating their own Islamist terrorist groups in order to push imperialist objectives. They promoted Islamic fundamentalism for anti-communist purposes and this eventually led to the formation of Al Qaida of Osama bin Laden. They also financed, organized, armed and trained the Al Qaida types of terrorist groups to cause the downfall of Qaddafi in Libya and to carry out the current depredations in Syria and Iraq.###

 

The two major suspects in the Charlie Hebdo incident are supposed to be French citizens of Middle East origin who have been trained as operatives of Daash or the Islamic state (ISIS or ISIL) and who have just come from combat duty in Syria or thereabouts. The theories about them is that either on their own they were driven by the anti-Islamic satire of Charlie Hebdo to commit the murders or they are merely fictive agents or actual puppets in a 9-11 type of false flag operation carried out by French intelligence to divert attention from the worsening economic and social situation and justify the escalation of state terrorism in France as well as the aggressive actions of France abroad.###