Version imprimableDivide and Conquer
ISIS seeks to drive wedges between believers and non-believers, between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Sunnis and Shias, etc. Its strategy is to create an atmosphere of terror in order to encourage the hatred of the other, which fuels its growth. Its recruitment efforts in Europe are based on the deliberate stoking of virulent racism and islamophobia.
Criminal, reactionary, fundamentalism is not unique to Islam. There are many other political tendencies that engage in and justify the murder of civilians in the name of ideologies with varying degrees of religious content: the massacres of Muslims in Myanmar, of Palestinians in Israel, of African-Americans in the US, of Christians in India, of young Socialists in Norway, etc.
The Bombs and torture
It is a contemporary phenomenon, the result of the extreme brutalization of the peoples under capitalist globalization: the dispossession of the masses of small farmers, the growth of slums, the deepening of inequalities, including between men and women, the growing flow of refugees and the internally displaced, the tyrannical regimes supported by the different imperialist powers, the indiscriminate aerial bombardments, the remote killing with drones, the widespread rise in racism and religious sectarianism, etc. The mythical past to which these terrorist groups appeal serves only to conceal their origins in the present.
Like Al-Qa’ida before it, ISIS is the outcome of decades of blood-soaked dictatorships, pillage, and foreign military interventions in the Middle East. Their spectacular savagery emerged from underneath US, British, French, and Russian bombs, from the prison cells of Tunisia, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and from the torture chambers of Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Assad.
We must resist together!
As happened earlier in the US, the French government is preparing to restrict our freedoms in the name of the war against terrorism. Switzerland is on the same path. We call for the very opposite. We must reject the growing physical and administrative walls that are being erected against refugees. We oppose the populist and racist discourse and the violence it encourages.
Finally, we demand the end of foreign military interventions in the countries of the Middle East, and likewise the end to the arms sales to and military collaboration with the bellicose regimes of the Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Israel, and the petro-monarchies.
