The French government has ordered a mobilization of police. The objective is to create an atmosphere of

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There was no mention of his government’s decades of trampling on freedom of expression, not to men­ tion its ongoing subjugation and war against Turkey’s oppressed Kurdish masses, including during recent months when the Turkish government gleefully stood aside watching the Islamic State try to wipe the can­ ton of Kobanê and its Kurdish workers off the face of the earth.

Although President Obama did not attend the rally, Jane Hartley, U.S. ambassador to France, was pres­ ent. A day earlier, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder attended a “security summit meeting” that brought together top intelligence and law enforcement offi­ cials from Europe and North America to discuss how to implement measures to stop terrorism. Holder an­ nounced that the White house would convene a Feb. 18 international forum “to prevent violent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting, or inspiring individuals or groups in the United States and abroad to commit acts of violence.”

But voices of dissent spoke loud and clear in the U.S. and around the world. “We are NOT Charlie Hebdo!” read the Jan. 15 statement adopted by the United Na­ tional Antiwar Coalition (UNAC).”

“Neither do we condone the bombings and murder of journalists at their headquarters, however much we are repulsed by their racist, chauvinist and hate­ ful Islamophobic caricatures of oppressed people. Neither do we condone the subsequent murders at the Paris Kosher supermarket,” the UNAC statement continued.

“Yes,” the UNAC statement stressed, “…we are for free speech, freedom of expression and democratic rights for all, including the Muslim and antiwar activ­ ists who were banned by the French government from street protests in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, or the Muslim women who are banned from wear­ ing the veil. We are for freedom of expression and the right to exist of Muslim Americans, 700,000 of whom have been investigated or interrogated in the U.S. for being Muslim, or the 1.5 million Latino immigrants in the U.S. who are imprisoned, detained and deported,

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(continued from page 6: “Charlie Hebdo: Imperialism’s new 9/11?”) school diploma. As in the U.S., police harassment and profiling—stop and frisk, French style—are taken for granted.

There has been little mention of the 50 recorded post-Charlie Hebdo fire bombings or of the racist graf­ fiti-tagged and bullet-ridden mosques; such atrocities meant to terrorize the Muslim population are ongoing and proceed with impunity. France’s Central Council of Muslims reported 21 shootings that targeted Mus­ lim buildings.

There is little mention of the fact that 60 percent of French prisons are crammed with Muslims or that Muslim women are repeatedly attacked by Islamo­ phobic bigots who tear off their veils (nijab) or even their hijab (traditional clothing). The report of an Is­ lamophobic monster tearing off the veil of a pregnant 21-year-old Muslim woman went largely unnoticed, including the fact that she was thrown to the ground and repeatedly kicked in the stomach, only to lose her unborn child a few hours later in a local hospital. The French police report noted in the diminutive that she was “kicked in the side”! No one has been arrested for this murder! There are no nationwide searches for the racist gunmen and bombers!

There have been some voices of sanity and com­ passion in the midst of this government-promoted warmongering, hate, and hysteria, as when a French association representing 120 mayors issued a state­ ment warning that Muslim communities were “on edge” in the face of the terror launched against them. The statement pointed to the need to address “eco­ nomic, social, and educational shortfalls” with regard to France’s most impoverished, segregated, and op­ pressed communities.

French revolutionary socialists, like those who are in the Anti-Capitalist and Revolution current of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), have strongly condemned the racist hysteria. Yet under present conditions a massive and united counter-mobilization has proved impossible to organize.

The “liberal-minded” New York Times opines that “nearly everyone agreed the fallout from the Charlie Hebdo attack in France—including a heightened se­ curity response by its allies—is a distraction from a larger problem: a sense of increasing economic and social marginalization that many cited as a root cause of young people drifting toward extremism.”

The Times neglected to add that the endless impe­ rialist slaughter and wars against Muslim nations around the world are bound to produce not only mas­ sive opposition among the oppressed but also rare acts of terror by desperate individuals who envision no other means to avenge imperialism’s systematic slaughtering of millions and its reduction of whole nations to starvation.

Long ago, Leon Trotsky sharply counterposed indi­ vidual acts of terrorism by tiny groups and individu­ als outraged by imperialism’s never-ending wars, torture, and racist rationalizations to the necessity of collective and united struggles against the capitalist system itself.

He wrote, “To learn to see all the crimes against hu­ manity, all the indignities to which the human body and spirit are subjected, as the twisted outgrowths and expressions of the existing social system, in or­ der to direct all our energies into a collective struggle against this system—that is the direction in which the burning desire for revenge can find its highest moral satisfaction.”

Tragically, in the absence of collective struggles against the system led by conscious mass revolution­ ary parties deeply rooted in all the struggles of the oppressed and aimed at challenging capitalist rule, the imperialist war makers will continue to prevail— through conquest and occupation or through the ru­ ination of entire peoples. Under these circumstances, isolated and individual acts of terror will inevitably continue and be used to further fan the flames of hate. As in France, imperialist usurpers will use them to justify their mass terror—that is, unending wars as well the imposition of blanket restrictions on civil lib­ erties for all those who dare to speak out.

We need not search for evidence of the latter. “French Rein in Speech Backing Terror: Recent Law Allows For Rapid Trials and Stiff Prison Sentences,” reads a Jan. 16 New York Times headline. Some 100 people are already under investigation for “making or post­ ing comments that support or try to justify terror­ ism.” Two examples were cited by The Times; in one, a 28-year-old man of Tunisian background was sen­ tenced to six months in prison for shouting support for the gunmen involved in the Charlie Hebdo shoot­ ings while passing a police station. Another, a drunk driver who hit another car and injured the driver, was sentenced to four years when, under police detention, he praised the same gunmen.

French prosecutors were urged by Minister of Jus­ tice Christiane Taubira to fully utilize a November 2015 law to fight and prosecute “words or acts of ha­ tred with utmost vigor.” The zeal with which law en­ forcement has undertaken this mission was shown in Nantes, when a 14-year-old girl was jailed on charg­ es of “apology for terrorism” for uttering the words “bring out the Kalashnikovs” when a bus conductor asked her for her ticket.

One can only wonder whether the words of Charlie Hebdo journalists, or the words of the multitude of journalists from publications throughout France, not to mention the words of the neo-fascist supporters of Marine Le Pen’s National Front, will be subjected to the same scrutiny. Bigots, including those of the lib­ eral or libertarian Charlie Hebdo type as well as their right-wing counterparts, rarely mobilize to defend “free speech” other than their own.

Here we note that there was far less than unanim­ ity in Francois Holland’s “Socialist Party” with regard to inviting Marine Le Pen to participate in the Paris demonstration. Le Pen’s vitriolic hate-mongering Is­ lamophobic tirades against immigrants were largely indistinguishable from Holland’s. She used the rebuff to complain that her “mainstream” views were being purposefully excluded. More than a handful agreed, including The New York Times reporter covering the issue, who speculated that her exclusion was perhaps (Above) Imperialist heads of state and their allies lead Jan. 11 march in Paris.

La “political” move aimed at not boosting Le Pen’s poll ratings as a future presidential candidate. The flagging presidential poll numbers of Hollande’s Socialist Party were undoubtedly a factor. Le Pen’s National Front, which received the largest vote of all parties in the last French general elections to the European Parliament, 27 percent, today ranks first at 30 percent with regard to a future presidential candidacy.

In Germany, where neo-fascist groups are similarly on the rise, thousands mobilized in anti-immigrant rallies in the city of Dresden in the eastern state of Saxony following the Paris mobilization. But they were effectively countered in Dresden by 35,000 who demonstrated soon afterward in solidarity with Ger­ many’s immigrant communities, the largest in Eu­ rope. They sought to block the racist protest route of Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the West), Germany’s neo-fascist political grouping.

In Munich 20,000 protesters mobilized to block a Pegida rally. Similarly, 30,000 mobilized in Leipzig in a pro-immigrant demonstration to counter an Islamo­ phobic call to the streets. A few hundred participated in the latter.

Civil-liberties crackdowns in the U.S.

The history of capitalist government bans on free speech—not to mention its restrictions of freedom of association, free press, and the right to assemble to redress grievances—is pitiful. In the U.S. in recent years a wave of reprisals has been meted out against college professors, including termination, for their public statements opposing Israel’s persecution of Palestinians.

Students who assemble to protest the massacre of Palestinians and who organize on campus to support BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against apartheid Israel see their organizations disbanded across the country.

During the McCarthy era witch hunt of the 1950s, and long afterward, government-invoked “national security” was employed to persecute and imprison radicals of every kind, especially members of the Com­ munist Party (CP) and Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In 1941, the central leadership of the SWP was jailed for 18 months under the notorious Smith Act for their socialist ideas alone. A few years later, the Smith Act and other reactionary laws were used against the CP, with wholesale arrests and imprisonment—again for ideas alone. The “evidence” against the prisoners cit­ ed activities such as displaying the works of Karl Marx in their public bookstores.

The witch hunt included legally sanctioned and gov­ ernment-enforced mass expulsion of socialists from trade unions and jobs. Loyalty oaths were manda­ tory in several cities for everyone teaching in public schools. Travel restrictions, blacklisting in the en­ tertainment and media industries, and a multitude of other fundamental infringements of democratic rights were the rule and remained so for decades.

Almost all of these horrors were codified in law or decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, including the in­ famous decision handed down by Felix Frankfurter, wherein the individual liberty “guaranteed” by the (continued on page 8, in “Judges question NYPD spying on N.J. Muslims”)

SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 2015 7

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At the Movies However, social pressures regarding a single woman working so closely with a man decide that Turing and Clarke must get engaged. Joan has no problem with his homosexuality; he will neither be the perfect hus­ band nor she the perfect wife. Regardless, the engage­ ment soon ends.

It’s believed that breaking the code saved millions of lives. But it couldn’t save Turing’s. After the war, he continued to work in crystographic consultancy for the Government Communications Headquarters until his conviction for “gross indecency”—the same law that brought down Oscar Wilde—and his security clearance was revoked. After almost a year of proba­ tion and public humiliation, and undergoing “chemi­ cal castration,” which affected him physically and mentally, Turing allegedly committed suicide in 1954 (some suspected he was murdered). He was forty-one.

The British government, ever alert to treason, ulti­ mately committed its own act of betrayal. When Alan Turing was arrested for the then crime of homosexual­ ity (“He’s a pouf!” one detective exclaims to another), senior government officials might have intervened on

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Voices of dissent spoke loud and clear. ‘We are NOT Charlie Hebdo,’ read the statement adopted by the United National