While Hollande's reactionary declaration of war is understandable, it falls into the ideological trap laid by ISIS. France's new state of emergency grants the government extraordinary powers that effectively put an end to democratic accountability, and give law-enforcement and security agencies unaccountable authority to run amok.
Hollande's reactionary declaration of war falls into the ideological trap laid by ISIS.
This includes being able to enforce curfews, close public spaces, and even exert control of media. Authorities can now "prohibit passage of vehicles or people," establish "protection or security zones, where people's presence is regulated," exclude from a public space "any person seeking to obstruct, in any way, the actions of the public authorities," and detain anyone in their homes "whose activity appears dangerous for public security and order."
The problem is in the open-ended way such vague precepts can be interpreted and executed. Obstructing "in any way" the actions of the state, or activity that "appears dangerous" for "security and order" could, crucially, be used to shut down public criticisms of the French government's response to the Paris attacks.
Dissent against past or present French foreign and counter-terror policies can easily be construed as "dangerous" or obstructive to those policies. The language also perpetuates the Bush-era 'with us or against us' mantra, which ISIS sees as central to its agenda of fracturing what it calls the "grey zone."
Such a sweeping approach to countering 'extremism' -- interpreted essentially as any ideological threat to the state -- has already fuelled social polarization in Britain, where the 'Prevent' duty, for instance, is being used to police the thoughts of children as young as three years old.
Leaked government training documents reveal that the British government's Prevent programme views political activism in general as a potential 'extremist' threat to the state's hegemonic construct of 'British values', including environmental, animal rights and anti-nuclear campaigning. These measures are already going some way to fulfil ISIS's objective of eroding the "grey zone" in the west.
According to Yahya Birt, an academic at the University of Leeds who is part of #EducationNotSurveillance -- a national network of parents, teachers, educationalists, activists and academics -- cases of unwarranted targeting of Muslim students under the Prevent duty are becoming legion.
"Muslim students are being profiled disproportionately under the government's mandatory programme simply for displaying an interest in their own faith, or for holding political opinions critical of government foreign policy," Birt told me. "Far from upholding democratic values, the programme is eroding them, and making perfectly normal, decent British Muslim citizens feel that they are under siege."
Documented cases include a fifteen-year-old Muslim boy being questioned by police officers on his views about ISIS simply for wearing a 'Free Palestine' badge to school and handing out leaflets calling for sanctions on Israel. The officers told him that he had "terrorist-like beliefs", and warned him against speaking about his views in school. Another Muslim child was questioned after a classroom lesson about ISIS in which he aired his support for environmental activism.
In the US and France, similar programmes are also underway.
Neoconservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, however, want more.
David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter turned senior editor at the Atlantic, took to Twitter to demand the forcible mass deportation of Arabs who had migrated to Europe over the past two years.
In Britain, Douglas Murray, a director at the Henry Jackson Society in London, told his fellow guests on BBC Sunday Morning Live that "any percentage of Muslims you like" in Britain are ISIS sympathisers.
In a blog in the Spectator the day before, he had claimed: "Islam is not a peaceful religion. No religion is, but Islam is especially not." Though acknowledging that there are "many peaceful verses in the Quran which -- luckily for us -- the majority of Muslims live by," Islam, he went on, is "by no means, only a religion of peace" and "this is the verifiable truth based on the texts."
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