Attacks aimed to drive a wedge between Islam and the West

What the Arabic language media is saying about the Paris attackers

Paris became a global antiterror capital following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, with leaders of more than 50 countries joining the unity march.

Taoufik Bouachrine, writing in the Moroccan newspaper Akhbar Al Youm, said the perpetrators of the massacre were shot dead. All that is left now is a short video and two brief interviews a French television said it conducted with Cherif Kouachi, who was hiding in a printing plant in a Paris suburb, and Amedy Coulibaly, who took people hostage in a supermarket.

Kouachi allegedly told a French journalist that their actions were in defence of the Prophet Mohammed. They were sent by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and killed journalists who insulted Muslim sanctities, and not women and children, like the West does.

Coulibaly said he was seeking to defend Palestine and take revenge on the occupation by killing staff and customers at a Kosher supermarket.

Based on the two interviews, he said the operation seems like “an abridged edition” of the September 11 attacks on the US, perpetrated by an Al Qaeda offshoot to reverse the momentum Al Qaeda had lost to ISIL. The attacks were carefully planned by Al Qaeda to strike at the psyche of Arabs and Muslims. They sought to achieve three goals.

The first was to return to the global terror arena and reinvigorate its brand to win new recruits.

The second was to push western governments to take draconian measures to further isolate Europe’s Muslims. They knew that attacking journalists in a newsroom would push some Europeans to support right wing groups, with the overall goal being to exacerbate conflict between Islam and Christianity, pushing moderates on both sides to be more radical, the writer said.

The third goal was Al Qaeda pouring salt in the open wounds in the Arab and Muslim worlds, including Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and Palestine. The idea was to spark an uprising against the West in response to many tragedies and massacres.

Aware it does not represent most Muslims, Al Qaeda is trying to push the conflict in the direction it wants. The September 11 attacks, remember, led George Bush to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq, Bouachrine wrote. The result was that 10 years after the US invasion, ISIL was able to occupy large sections of it in only a few days.

Shafiq Al Ghabra, writing in the London-based Al Hayat, described the use of violence against civilians as an appalling act. He noted that extremists sought to stir up hatred and conflict between Europe and Muslims, and indeed right after the attack, many western media outlets unfortunately blamed Muslims for the attack.

In the Sharjah-based daily Al Khaleej, Ali Mohammed Fakhrou also described the magazine attack as a horrendous crime.

However, he said he was sure that rational people in France would, after the dust settles, start a debate on freedom of speech and whether offending millions of people and lampooning the prophet of Islam was a wise act that fell in the category of freedom of expression.

Millions of people marched in condemnation of the attack, he noted, and western media gave a great deal of attention to the death of 17 French people – an impressive expression of human solidarity.

Yet he said no similar reaction was seen when the Israeli army massacred more than 2,000 people, including many women and children, in besieged Gaza.

Nor does this kind of coverage happen when hundreds die at the hands of terrorist groups that are trained and armed by some western countries.

In the Cairo-based Al Shorouk, Emad Eddine Hussein wrote that while he condemned the terrorist attack on the magazine, he could not fathom why France let Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the world’s most brutal terrorists, be at the front of a march against terror.

He said this sent a message to the Muslim world that the “civilised world” condemns only ISIL and Al Qaeda’s terror, but it practically supports the Israeli terror against Arabs and Muslims.

Abdullah Al Damoun noted in the Moroccan newspaper Al Massae that after the magazine attack, US president Barack Obama wrote “Vive La France!” in a condolences book.

He described this as a nice show of solidarity but asked why no US president had ever written “Vive Palestine” or “Vive Afghanistan” or “Vive Iraq”? He argued that after the last Israeli attack on Gaza, the double-dealing world did not cry out “I am Palestinian”. Human blood, he said, should be treated equally and freedom must be guaranteed for all.

Translated by Abdelhafid Ezzouitni