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5 Facts That Explain the Charlie Hebdo Attack. Except the Important 1.
Time magazine, at 9:09 p.m. Eastern, posted an article entitled: “5 Facts that Explain the Charlie Hebdo Attack.”
No peeking. Can you guess the nasty five?
Unemployment? Check.
Youth unemployment in France is over 24%. As high as that figure may be, another troubling statistic surpasses it. The average person in France believes that 31% of the population is Muslim; in reality, the figure is 7.7%.
Notice that last sentence? According to Time, anti-Muslim sentiment counts as three of the five “facts” that “explain” Wednesday’s massacre. There’s migration:
Rising anti-immigration sentiment in France comes at a time of historic levels of human movement….Frontex, the EU’s border agency, estimates that 270,000 people tried to enter Europe illegally last year, shattering the previous high of 141,000 in 2011, the year of the Arab Spring. In 2014, more than 3,000 migrants died in their attempts to reach Europe.
And of course the all-time most popular go-to, racism:
Approval for Marine Le Pen’s Front National, an anti-EU, anti-immigration party, has steadily risen. In 2010, 18% in France said they agree with the party’s ideas. That number has grown each year since, reaching an all-time high of 34% in the most recent TNS Sofres poll.
I’m not kidding about this one — waiting for a passport:
As of August 2013, France had the third-longest wait time in Europe for immigrants seeking naturalization: an average of 14 years. According to U.S. counterterrorism officials, there are more than 3,000 ISIS recruits believed to hold Western passports.
It’s as if Time thinks that 3,000 ISIS recruits with western passports is too few.
Lastly — and bizarrely — there’s this “fact” that “explains” the attack:
President Francois Hollande’s approval ratings have dipped as low as 12%, the lowest tally ever for a French president. (According to more recent figures, they’ve ‘rebounded’ to 15%). The President has pledged to step down and not seek reelection in 2017 if he can’t curb unemployment. Currently at 11%, the unemployment rate is almost higher than his approval ratings.
Read that one again. Decipher, if you can, how a politician’s approval ratings can explain the murder of 12 people.
And while you’re at it, decipher, if you can, how Time magazine manages to “explain” a terrorist attack by radical Muslims belonging to a worldwide death cult without using the words “terrorist” or “fanatic” or “fundamentalist” or “Wahhabi” or “radical Islamist” or even “Al Qaeda” — despite this, according to the Telegraph:
The terrorists shouted that they were from al Qaeda in Yemen before they launched the brutal attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, according to one witness…
So let me add another “fact” that might “explain” the murderous attack in Paris: the absolute certainty — the justified certainty — by the attackers that the response to their actions by the western media would be, mostly, weasel-worded, terrified, politically correct, cowardly, lickspittle claptrap. That they can go on killing and bombing and shouting whatever they want, and the western media — exemplified by the eunuchs at Time magazine — simply won’t connect the dots.
Published in General
Reading Time’s article does make me feel better.
I was upset at first that a hit had been carried out against a newspaper that takes potshots at religious beliefs. Twelve people being gunned down for publishing some silly cartoons? A bit excessive don’t you think?
But I simply didn’t understand.
I lacked an explanation.
Now I have five!
Thank you Time
magazinewebsite!lol, billy
I had similar thoughts. It’s a very click-baity title. It was a list (5 things). It also had the “explanation” (“Blah blah happened, here’s why”) trope. Time has really jumped the shark. I think ceasing to exist would be a better option for it than trying to be a Buzz Feed competitor.
So, the headline should be “Muslims commit terror attack – Muslims hardest hit”?
Maybe if things are going to be “made worse” for Muslims in Europe because of terror attacks, muslims could stop committing terror attacks…
There is a huge difference. Germany was a country. Much easier to deal with than a type of person scattered throughout the world everywhere.
Reagan/Bush 41 did not end communism. They brought about the end of the Communist Party USSR government.
They were dealing with a country, not an ideology.
Then why, in Yer post, must You use the modifier “radical” to describe Muslims only after They have killed?
My guess is that:
Why can’t we call a terrorist a “terrorist?”
Because we in the West have become conditioned to worry about what it says about us instead of what it says about them.
“The average person in France believes that 31% of the population is Muslim; in reality, the figure is 7.7%.”
How is this evidence for anti-Muslim sentiment?
In New York City, especially back in the bad, old days when crime was rampant, I expect that the average New Yorker would overestimate the relative size of the city’s black population. When one turns on the news and sees mostly black faces in connection with crime after crime after crime, that affects one’s perceptions. However, it does not follow that such perceptions regarding population translate into feelings of bigotry or hatred.
The Time analysis–pointing out the “flaws” in French society and policies etc.– amounts to blaming the victim.
Can you imagine the reaction of Europeans in the 1920s or 30s if Jews committed these kind of terror attacks in European cities? Back then, Jews were already being targeted and scapegoated even when they weren’t bothering anyone. Today, any kind of anti-Muslim rhetoric is denounced even when Muslims carry out terror attacks. The pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other, from true hate filled racism to paralysis in the face of a real threat. And yet even in the context of that paralysis, Time acts as if the pendulum has swung in only a little bit from where it was before World War 2.
No. The reason being that high unemployment isn’t a problem which affects only the Arab/Muslim minorities in France. It affects everyone in France.
I don’t see Chinese immigrants in France shooting up people on the street, or Frenchmen for that reason.
I do see Arab youth doing it, and explicitly saying they are doing it for religious reasons.
I do see African youth doing it (most of them are Muslims), in their daily ritual burning of cars in France.
So if unemployment is the problem, you’d expect to see similar outbursts from other groups too. But you don’t.
Yes, you’re making the argument here that unemployment is a…moderator.
Perfectly fine argument to make, except that if it doesn’t fully moderate Islamic terrorism, i.e. in the presence of low unemployment, Islamic terrorism is 0…then it can’t be a major reason for what we see.
The main effect is still Islamist ideology. It may be, or may not be, aggravated by the level of unemployment.
That’s an empirical question, as to the degree of moderation. But it’s not an empirical question that the main effect here is Islamist ideology, since unemployment doesn’t produce terrorism among other groups of people.
So, wait, the NYT is claiming that terror is the result of government overregulation of the labour market?
Who knew!
I told you don’t.
Well, the good news is the problem is still manageable…
Have we heard the usual call to be wary of anti-Muslim backlash?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/08/mosque-attacks-charlie-hebdo_n_6436224.html
Although the facts make me suspect it might be an inside job for sympathy, like so many of the events in the fever swamp on the left. The prayer room shot up was empty. The restaurant as well. the “grenade” was a training device ( not going to kill anyone) and only one of 4 went off. So some damage to property, no one injured. Pretty poor showing for someone looking for revenge….
A Timely reminder on why that magazine is now a pamphlet.
Spin, I’m with you and in my view they crossed it long ago….but the question is what specific action can we take? I’d guess we are dealing with 100’s of thousands of lunatics if not more, scattered throughout the world.
We aren’t the sort to go in and torch Yemen and then leave. We’d want to torch the dirtbags in Yemen and then fix what we broke for the good people of Yemen. It’s what makes us better, but it also makes dealing with this very difficult. (See Iraq and Afghanistan)