LONDON—On January 7, it was alleged that two armed men, brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, who walked into the office of “Charlie Hebdo”, a satirical magazine in Paris at 11:30am where an editorial meeting was taking place and killed 12 people.
Those murdered included eight journalists, including chief editor Stephane Charbonnier, as well as a police officer.
The Kouachi brothers knew the exact time of the editorial meeting and the names of most of the journalists (Le Monde, 11/01/2015).
As the brothers escaped, one of them gunned down a cop who happened to be a Muslim man, Ahmed Merabet.
Before getting in their getaway car, their shout out was that they had avenged the prophet and declared “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic).
According to the newspaper “Le Monde”, from the time they fled Charlie Hebdo to the time they hit a lamp post, forcing them to abandon their car, they shot at the police 25 times.
They seized another vehicle, a Renault Clio, and continued their escape.
The police claimed they found the identification of Said Kouachi, which allowed them to raid his relatives’ houses and detain many of them.
On January 8, the police announced that a petrol station employee at Villers Cotterets was forced to fill the tank of the Kouachi brothers’ car.
On the same day, January 8, an African policewoman, Clarissa Jean-Philippe, was shot in Montrouge, south of Paris. For a while, the press said there was no link between the two incidents.
We learned later that the shooter was an African by the name of Amedy Coulibaly, who had links with the Kouachi brothers since 1995.
Coulibaly’s relatives’ houses were also raided.
This second shooting increased the level of hysteria in the white press in France and throughout the world.
The French government mobilized 88,000 state agents, 100 civil servants, 23 magistrates, the GIGN and RAID to hunt down the Islamist fighters.
Coulibaly resurfaced a day later when he walked into a Jewish grocery store at Porte de Vincennes and held people shopping there as hostages.
On January 9, the Kouachi brothers, after seizing another car, had another shoot-out with French Gendarmes.
French armed men under the ministry of defense took cover in a printing plant in Dammartin-en-Goele, in Northeast Paris.
The all-white world press came to witness and report on the vast police siege which surrounded the compound.
The brothers were then gunned down by the police. One thousand five hundred armed forces took part in this operation.
The police were not interested in capturing them alive! There was no intention of bringing them to court.
Simultaneously, on the evening of the same January 9, the grocery store too was attacked by French armed police, killing Amedy Coulibaly.
The press claimed that Amedy Coulibaly shot dead four people before the police stormed the place.
There were no traces of his girlfriend, Hayat Boumedienne, a North African woman from Algeria.
The Turkish authorities declared someone with that name had arrived in Turkey on January 2 and probably travelled to Syria.
At the outset, the white imperialist world press, led by one of the most unpopular French president's in history, François Hollande, was in motion condemning the killings with the most acrimonious language imaginable.
The language used includes “France attacked in its heart,” “war on freedom of speech,” “barbaric act” and “attack on civilization.”
These descriptions were endorsed and repeated throughout the whole white imperialist world.
François Hollande moved on to initiate a European-wide solidarity day on Sunday, January 11, in defense of French “values” at the Place de la Republique in Paris and throughout France.
He asked French people to defend and maintain the status quo. They want to keep the colonized of the world living on $2 a day.
Most of the white power leaders and their neocolonial lackeys showed up in Paris. Ben Netanyahu, the genocidal prime minister of Israel was there as well.
The bourgeoisie is claiming that at least 2 million people responded to François Hollande’s call. The actual number seems to be around 700,000.
To understand the white hysteria and the hypocrisy of the unity of the white world around the killing in France, we need to understand how this system of capitalism was born.
Imperialist freedom of speech is a weapon against Muslims
Defending white colonialists’ freedom of speech is the highest form of hypocrisy!
Their “free speech” is in the context of the imperialist attack on Muslims and the Middle East. England and France drew the borders and forcibly denied them their free speech.
What about Algeria, where France murdered and tortured the people who wanted to be free?
In 1961, over 200 Algerian protesters marching for the independence and freedom of Algeria were killed and thrown into the Seine River by the French police.
To understand the hypocrisy of white French rulers, just look at what they have been doing in the colonized African country of Tunisia:
The native population was deprived of all rights. The French filled all the more or less important posts in the state apparatus. Colonial bureaucratic tyranny, racial discrimination and national oppression prevailed throughout the country. The Constitution of 1861 had lost all meaning and was not renewed. What political and civil rights the Tunisians had once possessed were flagrantly violated by the colonial administration. The Decree on the Press issued on October 14, 1884 forbade newspapers on pain of strict punishment to criticize “His Highness the Bey, the princes of his dynasty and the religious cults.” It also forbade them to criticize “the French Republic’s rights and authority in Tunisia.” The Decree of September 15, 1888, stipulated that “no association could be formed other than with the government’s permission.” According to the Decree of March 13, 1905, meetings could be held “freely” only on the condition that they were not for the purpose of discussing political or religious questions.
Why is it acceptable for citizens of the oppressor countries to mock Mohammed the Islamic prophet, but if you question or deny the Jewish holocaust you would be jailed as you would in Germany and in most of the European countries?
White people here can put images of victims of white power on their jackets and that is “free speech.”
This is the same France that won’t let Muslim women wear head scarves. To talk of “free speech” is nonsensical. It’s a lie.
When the U.S., UK and French governments are spying on masses of innocent peoples in every way possible, the freedom of speech is a lie!
Members of the oppressed black and Muslim community are shamelessly accused of anti-Semitism and taken to court when history has unmistakably recorded that it was the Germans who gassed Jewish people and burned them in ovens.
Last year, the French authority has been curtailing the freedom of expression of Dieudonne Mbala, an African humorist, by cancelling its shows throughout France because he was accused of anti-Semitism for developing a gesture or salute known as the “quenelle.”
What happened to the freedom of expression for people of the Middle East when France and England drew borders in the Middle East at the expense of Arabs, Kurds, and other colonized peoples?
We still remember how the U.S .government bombed the Al-Jazeera television office during the aggression against Iraq by the U.S. in 2003.
What happened to the freedom of speech of Africans when the European powers at the Berlin Conference parceled out Africa like a piece of cake amongst themselves, splitting entire communities apart?
What about the freedom of speech of the indigenous people of North America when the white invaders stole the land and put them into concentration camps disguised as reservations?
Just in the last four years, with the blessing of the UN and the collaboration of the U.S., UK and other powers, France has bombed Laurent Gbagbo and Mu’ummar Qaddafi out of power in Ivory Coast and Libya respectively!
France is occupying Mali under the pretext of fighting Islamist insurgents. France has engineered a civil war between Muslims and Christians in order to justify the occupation of the Central Africa Republic.
Whenever we exercise our freedom of expression, the oppressors cry foul or proclaim that we do not have white values!
The Kouachi brothers were exercising their right to freedom too; this is what imperialism can not admit.
The oppressed people are never the aggressors; it was Mao who said that every act of the oppressed people against the oppressor is an act of self-defense.
It is time for the Final Offensive.
Build the African Socialist International.
