France sowed seeds of terror

TO SEE the current events in France in perspective, it is appropriate to sketch bits and pieces of colonial history.

Greed drove France, Britain, Russia and the Ottoman Turks to fight wars and battles for control over each other’s colonial possessions in Africa, the Middle East, the near East, India and the Far East from 1600 until World War II.

After that, the US took over and became the new colonial and imperial czar of the world.

For reasons of brevity, I will mention only a few events and have left out the events that led up to the 1918 Balfour Declaration and the creation of the state of Israel in Palestine (which had been a province of the Ottoman Empire and which Britain grabbed after World War I), including when Britain turned a blind eye to boatloads of illegal Jewish migrants escaping Nazi Europe and landing on the coast of Palestine from 1932 to 1948, and the treachery of the British who promised the Arabs freedom from colonial rule if they sided with them against the Turks during World War I.

In 1799, Napoleon executed 3 000 Turkish prisoners of war at Al-Arish in Egypt, something Islamic State (IS) is known to do.

I’m skipping a large part of colonial history before and after 1799 and fast forwarding to World War II. After decolonisation in Syria in 1946, the French colonialists left all the heavy military weapons with the Alawites on purpose, which allowed them to grab power.

To remain in power, the Alawites have been oppressing, murdering and torturing the majority Syrian Sunnis for the past 60 years.

Thanks to France, this laid the foundation for the current civil war and violence in Syria and the mass migrations to Europe.

After decolonisation in Algeria in 1962, the death toll there was nearly a million civilians.

At least 90 000 Harkis (Algerian Arab collaborators who assisted the French in persecuting their fellow Algerians) were allowed to settle in France, but in an apartheid-like second class existence.

Now their progeny have come home to roost and are killing innocent Frenchmen due to dissatisfaction over the West’s imperialist policy in the Middle East.

In 1956, France, Great Britain and Israel invaded Egypt to stop president Gamal Abdel Nasser from nationalising the Suez Canal, but the mission backfired.

In 1992 and 2003, France joined the “coalition of the willing” to bomb Iraq into the stone age over non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

They dismantled Saddam Hussein’s security forces which caused a power vacuum. Into this power vacuum flowed IS.

Guess who is responsible for the mess? Take full responsibility France! Take full responsibility and don’t lump it on the Muslim world!

And neither is Islam or religion responsible for the mess – greed and imperial ambition is.

In fact, an apology is required in the opposite direction.

Both France and Britain should apologise for 400 years of colonial domination, persecution and oppression and the deaths of millions of civilians (not 129).

It is not for Muslims to apologise for what IS is doing, which is clearly a symptom of French, British and US machinations.

I dream of the day when the Muslim world will be completely free of Western imperial domination, but unfortunately, our lack of democratic values and systems, our disunity, our penchant for conspiracy theories, and our general level of backwardness militates against this.

The new imperialist domination will not be boots on the ground, but will be naval blockades, cruise missiles, hellfire missiles, daisy cutters, drone strikes and, in the meantime, 90 percent of casualties will be civilian.

Collateral damage is a euphemism for Western terrorism.

Any Muslim nation who dares to oppose this imperial domination will be cut down to size. Ask Muammar Gaddafi. That is why there are sanctions against Iran because the mullahs dare to backchat the Western czars.

By condemning IS, we are inadvertently promoting our own servitude.