Slain policeman’s family warns against confusing all Muslims with extremists

 

The family of one of the police officers murdered in Wednesday’s assault by Islamic extremists on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris has appealed to the public not to blame all Muslims for the attack.

Ahmed Merabet, himself a Muslim, was one of the 17 victims of a three-day Islamist killing spree that has shaken France to the core.

He was killed by Chérif and Saïd Kouachi as they escaped from the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo magazine after having mowed down 11 people inside.

Graphic amateur video of Merabet’s death circulated widely online following Wednesday’s attack, with many media showing edited versions.

"I am now telling all racists, Islamophobes and anti-Semites that one must not confuse extremists with Muslims," his brother, Malek Merabet, said at an emotional press conference Saturday in Livry-Gargan (Seine-Saint-Denis). "Stop mixing things up, starting wars, burning mosques and synagogues."

Responding to journalists' questions, he clearly stated that his "brother was Muslim, he was slaughtered by people who were not real Muslims, two terrorists."

Attacks on mosques

The week’s bloody attacks, which ended Friday in two dramatic hostage sieges, have raised fears of a backlash against Muslims in France.

Shots have already been fired and grenades thrown at several Muslim places of worship without causing injuries.

Four shots were fired at the front of a mosque in Albi in the south and racist slogans scrawled on another in the southwestern city of Bayonne. On Friday a pig's head and its entrails were found hanging from the door to a prayer hall in Corte on the island of Corsica.

"I am afraid that their acts will get worse in the coming days," said Abdallah Zekr, the president of the French Muslim Council (CFCM), which monitors Islamophobic attacks.

"Muslims are caught in a trap, between those who kill in the name of Islam and those who are using this to stigmatise Muslims," he said.

The attacks, including the hostage siege at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris condemned as an “appalling anti-Semitic act” by President François Hollande, could further fan flames of tension between France’s Jewish and Muslim communities.

Relations between the two groups were already strained following a series of recent inflammatory events, including the killing of four people at a Jewish school in 2012 by Mohamed Merah and last year’s often violent protests against Israel’s war on Gaza.

Numerous Muslim religious leaders in France have widely condemned this week’s terrorist attacks, while underlining the difference between extremists and ordinary Muslims.

"The people who carried out that attack in the name of Islam are not Muslims... The Prophet did not advocate violence against non-Muslims," Abdel Qader Achour, of the conservative Omar Ibn Al Khattab mosque not far from Charlie Hebdo's offices, insisted.

Dalil Boubakeur, rector at Paris Grand Mosque denounced the “odious crimes committed by the terrorists, whose criminal action endangers our willingness to live together".

He also appealed to "all the Muslims of France" to take part in demonstrations planned for Sunday to pay homage to the victims of this week’s attacks, the bloodiest in France in more than half a century.

‘A man of commitment’

Merabet, meanwhile, has been invoked by some as a symbol of religious tolerance and unity. The phrase “Je Suis Ahmed” – I Am Ahmed – has appeared on social media, echoing the campaign of support for Charlie Hebdo using the slogan “Je Suis Charlie”.

Some messages drew attention to what some Muslims had considered offensive in what was published by Charlie Hebdo, such as cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Lebanese writer Dyab Abou Jahjah tweeted: “I am not Charlie, I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to do so. #JesuisAhmed.” His tweet has been reposted more than 25,000 times.

Merabet also drew attention at the United Nations.

“He himself was a Muslim,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters. “This is yet another reminder of what we are facing together. It should never be seen as a war of religion, for religion, or on religion. It is an assault on our common humanity, designed to terrify and incite.”

On Saturday, Malek Merabet paid a moving tribute to his brother. "Ahmed, a man of commitment," he said, before breaking down in tears.

After a short moment, he continued: "(He) had the will to watch over his mum and his loved-ones since the death of his father 20 years ago.

He also chided media for broadcasting the video of his brother’s death.

The footage shows what appears to be a wounded Merabet on the pavement raising a hand as though appealing for mercy before he was fatally shot in the head.

"How dare you take this video and broadcast it? I heard his voice, I recognised him, I saw him being killed and I continue to hear him every day."

(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP, REUTERS)

Date created : 2015-01-10

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 I am against the Paris incident, but imperialist France is not innocent

By Khalid Amayreh

PIC, January 12, 2015

To begin with, I unhesitatingly condemn the attack on the Charlie Hebdo Satirical weekly magazine in Paris. I believe it is always wrong and unforgivable to kill innocent people. Moreover, this sort of actions, besides being morally wrong, also harms French and other Western Muslims enormously
 
True, the act of mocking the Prophet of Islam is not a cause worth defending. It did hurt the feelings of hundreds of millions around the world.
 
However, murdering people is not exactly the right response to the French magazine's blasphemy. In the final analysis, one can't fight a crime by committing a greater crime. It is also never sufficient to have a rightful cause to respond in an uncalculated manner. It is never enough to be right; one has to be wise as well, especially in this complex world.
 
I realize that many writers are under an immense pressure to go with the flow, namely denounce "the evil terrorists" while expressing empathy and solidarity with France. I do sympathize with the families of the victims, but I admit I have no sympathy with the French government. In the final analysis, one must be faithful to one's conscience and intellectual honesty and France is never innocent especially in its approach to Muslims, past and present.

In fact, I dare claim that French behavior has made this terrorist act inevitable, however outrageous it may be.
 
France, after all, has been murdering Muslims in droves since time immemorial.
 
France killed at least two million Muslims in North Africa and a third million in Sub-Saharan Africa. France, which is now complaining about beheadings by IS, beheaded thousands of Moroccans between 1920-and WWII.
 
In recent months, France effectively enabled barbarian Christians to carry out a shocking ethnic cleansing genocide in Central Africa.
 
About two decades ago, France collaborated with the Algerian military to decapitate the country's nascent democracy, triggering a protracted reign of terror that claimed hundreds of thousands of innocent Algerians. Unfortunately, this reign of terror is yet to come to an end.
 
In the mid-1950s, France gave Israel the Dimona atomic reactor which enable the Nazi-like Zionist entity to manufacture numerous nuclear bombs and warheads and therefore hold the entire Middle East hostage as well as pursue a policy based on lebensraum vis-à-vis the Palestinians and other peoples of the Middle East.
 
Indeed, it was mainly French weapons that enabled Israel to occupy the rest of Palestine as well as the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula in 1967.

Now, as I write these words, French warplanes are raining death on Muslims in Syria and Iraq, while allowing murderous Iran-backed militias to annihilate Muslims villages.
 
Despite all this evil legacy, the vast majority (99%) of   Muslims are still against terror in the name of Islam or in any other name.
 
Today, Muslims are more or less the premier victims of terror and mass murder. They are being murdered every hour, every day, every week and all year long because they want to be free.
 
They are being murdered in Palestine, Myanmar, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. And when some stray Muslims carry out a terrorist act here or there out of desperation, the entire west loses its composure, ignores its own mega terror against Muslims, and starts making its usual hypocritical outcries, very much like Binyamin Netanyahu does, when he calls Palestinian freedom-fighters "terrorists and murderers", while forgetting what his own shitty country did and is doing to them.
 
Do not get me wrong. I am against all acts of violence and terror, especially those targeting innocent people.
 
However, it is an expression of utter hypocrisy and dishonesty for the French and other westerners to claim a higher moral-ground in comparison to al-Qaeda or IS, or indeed mainstream Muslims.
 
Nay, you have been far more evil and diabolical. You have destroyed nations and killed millions.
 
The Americans, who murdered 15 million native Americans in north America and called the genocide "Manifest Destiny" didn't content themselves with murdering two million Iraqis, they saturated the Iraqi environment with depleted uranium that will continue to kill Iraqis, young and old, and even the yet-to-be be born, for 50,000 years to come.
 
So, please! We have had enough of your hypocrisy and mendacity.
 
A final word; I must view with utter contempt the claim that the Paris incident was an attack against press freedom and freedom of expression. We all know that the attack was actually a revenge for France's military aggression against Muslims. Calling it an attack on press freedom and western liberalism is therefore childish and stupid.
 
Besides, since when did the West really care about human rights and civil liberties, including press freedom.
 
Doesn't the West, with all its strength, stand behind states that deny their people even the most elementary human rights and freedoms?
 
Even in the West itself, we are very familiar with the scandalous double standards related to this false mantra.
 
Thus, mocking the Prophet of Islam is considered part of the sacred traditions of press freedom.
 
However, questioning the authenticity of Holocaust narratives or criticizing Israel's Nazi-like crimes against the helpless Palestinians is an expression of virulent anti-Semitism, the practitioner of which must be hounded like pariahs, imprisoned or forced to resign from his job.
 
Well, there are always people on the Muslim side who would argue rather convincingly that if the West has the right to be enslaved by the Golem of Anti-Semitism, Muslims worldwide likewise have at least an equal right to defend their religious symbols.
 
Well, how about mutual respect?



Khalid Amayreh is a veteran Palestinian journalist living in the West Bank