Marieme Helie Lucas on the coordinated sexual attacks against women in Europe: Euro-centrism as a fig-leaf, and the art of conjuring in politics
A
worldwide phenomenon – the rise of a new brand of extreme right: i.e. Muslim
fundamentalism - is not only sought
to be justified but has quite literally been rendered
invisible
"How to ignore the steps forward that fundamentalists have
made in Europe? The recent brutal challenging of women’s presence in public
space on December 31st is only one more illustration of it… the Left abandons to the sole political forces of the
traditional Far Right the monopoly of discourse on the other Extreme Right,
that of Muslim fundamentalism… this
denial may lead to indiscriminate popular punitive actions.. (which) will
satisfy both the desire for revenge of the traditional xenophobic extreme
right, and the attempt by the fundamentalist extreme right to recruit in
Europe. We already witnessed attempts by extreme right mayors to legitimize the
setting up of armed popular militia in order to ‘protect’ French citizens… the
Left and the social democracy… regularly object to it, however, insofar as they
refuse to confront Muslim fundamentalism and remain in denial, they de facto
abandon the ideological terrain to the racist extreme right..."
Facts:
On New Year’s Eve 2015, simultaneous coordinated sexual
attacks took place against women in public space in about 10 cities, mostly in
Germany, but also in Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, and Finland… Several hundred
women, to this day, filed a case for sexual attack, robbery, and rape. These
attacks were perpetrated by young men of migrant descent (be they immigrants,
asylum seekers, refugees, or other) from North Africa and the Middle East.
Unsurprisingly, reactions were: Dissimulation of facts, of
their international coordination, of their magnitude for as long as could
possibly be done, by governments, their police, and media, who sacrificed
women’s rights for social peace – as they mostly do. Preventive hullabaloo on the
Left and among quite a number of feminists, in order to defend foreigners
presumed to be ‘Muslims’ as potential victims of racism (please note the
semantic shift from ‘Arabs’ or ‘North Africans’, as they were described in
geographical terms by the attacked women and by the police, to ‘Muslims’).
Clamoring for more security measures on the Far Right and acting it out in
Germany where took place a first indiscriminate pogrom against non-whites.
Denial and racism: the usual responses, since the eighties, to the rise of far
right Muslim fundamentalism in Europe.
Memories:
At the heart of Tunis, a protest by secular feminists
against Ben Ali: groups of young fundamentalists (there is evidence of their
affiliation) surround the mostly women demonstrators, isolate them, attack them
sexually, touch their sex and breasts, hit them violently, despite efforts to
rescue them by male supporters who joined the meeting in solidarity. Police is
watching.
Tahrir square, Cairo, the place where anti-government
opposition meet: for the first time women in numbers take this opportunity to
seize and exercise their citizenship rights; groups of young men (where they
part of the Muslim Brotherhood or manipulated by them?) sexually molest
hundreds of women demonstrators (and foreign journalists), press photos show
some of them partly undressed, there are attempts to register cases of rape.
The police too get at women demonstrators, beating them up, forcing ‘virginity
tests’ upon them, etc. This policy of sexual terror will go on for months in
Cairo, to the point that women’s organizations develop an electronic emergency
map of Cairo where attacks on women are registered in real time so that teams
of male rescuers can get there in time.
An even older memory: Algiers, summer 1969, First
Pan-African Cultural Festival: hundreds of women sit on the ground on the Main
Post Office square which has been cleared of cars; they attend one of the many
free public concerts that take place everyday from 5 pm to 4am, cultural dates
that women follow in masses; most of them wear the traditional white ‘haïk’
typical of Algiers region and they have brought many children too. At dusk
around 8.30 pm, a rallying cry: ‘en- nsa, l-ed-dar’, ‘women go home’,
chanted by hundreds of men who also came to attend the concert. Little group by
little group, with much regret, women and children leave the square. Men, -
triumphant, despising, - laugh at them. Nazis so defined women’s place:
‘church, kitchen and cradle’. Seven years after independence, the place assigned
in public space to the celebrated revolutionary heroines of the glorious
Algerian liberation struggle is now clearly defined. Patriarchy and
fundamentalism, culture and religion, fly high together.
How strange that such links are not being made with the present
attack, not even by feminists who supported women of Tahrir Square when they
were attacked there?
It seems Europe cannot learn anything from us and that
nothing that happens or happened in our countries can be of any relevance to
what goes on in Europe. By definition. An underlying racism, never exposed in
the radical Left, implicitly admits to an unbridgeable difference between
civilized and under developed people, their behaviors, their cultures, their
political situations. Under this essentialized otherness lies a hierarchy too
shameful to mention: the radical Left’s blind defense of ‘Muslim’
reactionaries, implicitly condones the belief that, for non-Europeans, a far
right response is a normal one to a situation of oppression; clearly, we are not
seen as capable of a revolutionary response. (I will not develop here how this
belief is exported even to Left elites in Asia and Africa).
Cassandras that no one listens too, we have been yelling,
screaming and howling for three decades, pointing at similarities that could
have led to political enlightening. Algerian women especially, who fled
fundamentalist terror in the nineties, pointed relentlessly to the similar
steps taken in Algeria from the 70ies to the 90ies and in Europe and North
America: attacks against legal rights of women (demanding specific ‘Muslim’ law
in family matters, sex segregations in hospitals, swimming pools and
elsewhere), together with communalist demands in education (a different cursus,
non- secular), then targeted attacks on individuals who do not bend to these
demands ( girls being stoned, burnt to death) and on any secularist branded as
kofr (journalists, actresses, Charlie), and finally indiscriminate attacks on
anyone whose behavior does not fit with fundamentalist norms (Bataclan, café
terraces. Football match, etc.)
All of it developed along the same lines from
the seventies till the nineties in Algeria, starting identically with targeting
women’s rights and their very existence in the public space: we know and they
know as well that governments do not hesitate in trading women’s rights for a
form of social rest with fundamentalists. However, the European Left seems incapable of distancing
itself from its own situation where people of migrant descent, among whom
presumed ‘Muslims’, do face discrimination. It extrapolates and exports its
understanding of fundamentalists’ rising to our own countries where ‘Muslims’
are neither a minority, no discriminated against – except by their own folks. Even worse is the fact that the Left abandons to the sole political forces of
the traditional Far Right the monopoly of the discourse on the other Extreme
Right, that of Muslim fundamentalism; abandoning them in the same go the
monopoly of the legitimate denunciation of the so-called religious right
originating from our countries.
I fear, many of us fear, more and more, that this denial may lead to
indiscriminate popular punitive actions: this indeed will satisfy both the
desire for revenge of the traditional xenophobic extreme right, and the attempt
by the fundamentalist extreme right to more largely recruit in Europe. We
already witnessed attempts by extreme right mayors to legitimize the setting up
of armed popular militia in order to ‘protect’ French citizens. Granted - the
Left and the social democracy as well, regularly object to it, however, insofar
as they refuse to confront Muslim fundamentalism and remain in denial, they de
facto abandon the ideological terrain to the racist extreme right.
How to ignore the steps forward that fundamentalists have
made in Europe? The recent brutal challenging of women’s presence in public
space on December 31st is only one more illustration of it… The distorting
Eurocentric vision prevents from seeing similarities with what took place, for
instance, in North Africa and the Middle East. In Europe, ‘Muslims’ are seen as
victims, oppressed minorities – this apparently justifying any aggressive and
reactionary behavior from them -, while just crossing a few borders would
allow to appreciate the nature of their political program regarding democracy,
secularists, believers in other religions, and women, when they are in a
majority or when they come to power. Absence of political analysis is what
allows their growth in Europe. Thanks to capitalist and xenophobic oppression
in Europe, the fundamentalist extreme right is being white washed of its ultra
reactionary policies, not just in Europe, but also in our countries of origin.
Such a Eurocentric approach!
The fact that the Left and far too many feminists stick to
the theory of priorities (the exclusive defense of people of migrant origin –
re furbished as ‘Muslims’ – against the capitalist western right) is a deadly
error that history will judge, and an abandonment of the progressive forces in
and from our countries which absurd inhumanity will forever stain the banner of
internationalism.
Another theory of priorities comes in and adds to the conceptual millstone that
the Left carries about (the main enemy vs the secondary enemy), this one from
human rights organizations: an implicit hierarchy of fundamental rights in
which women’s rights rank far behind minority rights, religious rights,
cultural rights, just to name a few of those most often opposed to women’s
rights, including at the UN.
Since 9.11 in the USA and the security measures that
followed, one witnesses a sleight of hand performed by human rights
organizations and by the radical Left: conjuring away the cause to the benefit
of the consequences. The main theme of analysis and debates is ‘the war against
terror’, the undeniable and notorious abuses it engendered, the limitation of
civil liberties, the fear for the future of democracy. (I will not debate here
of the ground for these accusations, but I am only pointing at the methodology
in use). All these themes are now prevalent in France, to combat the state of
emergency that was adopted after the November attacks in Paris, and the fear
that a Patriot Act of sorts could be developed in Europe.
Simultaneously, ‘terror’ itself is being ‘disappeared’ from
the discourse, it loses reality, and it becomes just an illusion and a bogeyman
for government’s freedom-killing actions. Judging by the discourse, there is –
indeed! - a ‘war on terror’, but there is no ‘terror’: it is only a fantasy of
the xenophobic extreme right; there are indeed human bombs that explode in
Paris, but there is no war in France… Endless elaborations take place on what
government/s should not do, its intentions are denounced as perverse,
manipulatory, detrimental to liberties. It is said that none of it is necessary
for ensuring people’s security. It is said that this constitutes a provocation
to ‘Muslims’.
A cause and a consequence system does now re- emerge, but in
a reverse image. A traditional illusionist would bring the rabbit out of the
hat in which it was made to disappear; but here we dig the hat out of the
rabbit… A worldwide phenomenon – the rise of a new brand of extreme
right: i.e. Muslim fundamentalism - is not only justified but quite literally
disappeared behind the critic of the reactions it engenders. Whatever our
position may be regarding the nature and the actual deviation in these
reactions, one should not allow for the phenomenon itself to be conjured away:
in the real world, denial will not make it disappear, as it does in the
discourse of the radical left and the human rights organizations.
To believe for one second that a worldwide political phenomenon could be
determined by western capitalism and that only (whatever the regimes and forms
of governments in which it emerges, the stage of economic and cultural
development in these countries, the classes and political forces in presence,
etc…) is just being megalomaniac.
Throughout the past thirty years, burying one’s head into
the sand has not led to any halting in the growing demands made by the
fundamentalist extreme right, neither in Europe nor anywhere else – far from
that, fundamentalism surfed on the occultation of its political nature and on
its cynical exploitation of democratic freedoms and of human rights.
What is at stake here goes far beyond women’s rights; it is
a project to establish a theocratic society in which, among many other rights,
women’s rights will be severely curtailed. The concerted action on 31.12, at
European level, and its challenging of women’s place in public space plays
exactly the same role as the sudden invention of the so-called ‘Islamic veil’:
it is a show of force and visibility.
This show of force may meet with success, as was to a large
extent the enforcement on women of the ‘Islamic veil’. The kind of advice given
by some German authorities to the attacked women in Cologne attest to it:
adjust to the new situation, stay away from men (‘at arms length’), don’t go
out on your own, etc… In short, submit or pay the price for it. If anything happens
to you, it will be your fault, you have been warned…
An advice that brings back to memory what used to be said in court, not so long ago, to women who were raped: why were you in such a place? At such a time? in such a dress? An advice that Muslim fundamentalist preachers will definitely not disavow… That the primary concern was to protect perpetrators and not to defend the victims is a variation on the usual defense of men’s violence against women. To what extent is it a defense of patriarchy, or a defense of migrants, of ethnic or religious minorities? When the interests of patriarchy (that the Left does not dare defend officially anymore) merge with the noble defense of the ‘oppressed’ (their prestige, even on the Left, was somewhat damaged after the November attacks in Paris), it suits many people.
That questions could still be asked regarding the concerted nature of
simultaneous attacks in at least 5 different countries and nearly a dozen
cities in Europe, this leaves one speechless in wake of so much dishonesty, so
much blindness or so much political perversity.
Source URL: http://www.siawi.org/article10593.html
