Living in Iraqi Kurdistan, 50 km from Mosul, is safer than living in Paris. My sister, who lives in Paris, spent all night last week hearing sirens after gunmen killed 19 people one street away from her home. She is now wondering what went wrong, how this could all happen. Like many others in France, she is also going back to the typical response to an act of terrorism, thinking that we have to fight back with violence. But there is one catch: what do you do when the terrorists come from your own society? Last January, my sister was also “Charlie” on social media after the French journalists were gunned down in their offices at the time of the Charlie Hebdo killings. French society and the rest of the civilised world lamented the killing of these journalists who had fought for freedom of expression. Violence is never the answer and acts of terrorism are unacceptable, yet in France, freedom of expression is also an à la carte menu. Islamophobia is seldom punished in courts of law in France and hate speech laws are perceived by many to be implemented only when other religions are being targeted. The double standards that the “Je suis Charlie” movement represented last January have been interpreted by many as an outright rejection of one crucial part of French society —its disenfranchised Muslim population, which was made to apologise not for what they are but what they represent. Do the French have to keep apologising for the Crusades? Instead of taking the Charlie Hebdo shootings as an opportunity to re-build collective social cohesion in French society, the “Je suis Charlie” movement has alienated its disenfranchised Muslim youth further. It played into the hands of the radical movements that exploit feelings of marginalisation, while selling the so-called Islamic State (IS) group's caliphate as a utopian society where everyone is equal. While Islamophobia is rampant in French society, the French government has also been meddling in Middle East affairs for some time. Under the Chirac presidency, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the then-French minister of foreign affairs, Dominique de Villepin, made a speech at the UN rejecting France's involvement in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. For many years, this afforded France an aura of neutrality in the region. This was shattered when the subsequent Sarkozy and Hollande administrations became even more gung-ho than the US administration under then president George W Bush. You cannot wage a war without threatening the lives of your own civilian population. This is a simple equation that cannot be overlooked when privileging war over political solutions in the Middle East. Russia recently, the United States in 2001, Spain in 2003, and Britain in 2005 have all been targeted. While the French media fakes expertise on Middle East politics by referring to IS as Daesh, it fails to ask the right questions in relation to the sociopolitical origins of the group, the perceived marginalisation of one side of the population from another and the Sunni-Shia conflict. The French failure to address this marginalisation, a consequence of the US-led invasion of Iraq, is not just an oversight. It reflects society's inability to engage in its own soul-searching. The marginalised French young people who are being seduced by IS reject a system that does not offer them anything but second-class citizenship, which they are confined to due to their skin colour and the fact they are not Christian. Only recently, a mainstream French politician, Nadine Morano, argued that France was a “Judeo-Christian” country of the “white race.” Her own political party, Sarkozy's Les Républicains, then abandoned her, not for her words, but for saying out loud what many others think quietly. France is no longer white and Christian. Past immigration policies have changed the country's demographics. It is now time to become more aware of the rampant racism in the country and to start to fully integrate everyone into French society. Regarding the current debate over migrants, it is important to understand that these migrants are not part of this problem: in their countries, they are victims of terrorism just as Paris residents are today. They are desperate to live in Europe in order to flee from acts of terrorism, and they must not be our scapegoat. For those who assert that closing the borders and engaging in racial profiling will work to secure France, this is certainly what is keeping my home in Kurdistan safe today, though the question is for how long. Hollande's knee-jerk reaction to the attacks, delivered in an emotional speech, has been to close France's borders, but how feasible is this? In France, the so-called enemy is already within, as we have been our own worst enemy. More security, more characterisation of the disenfranchised as “others,” and more “Je suis Charlie” movements are only going to pave the way for further attacks. It is time for French society to realise its own shortcomings. If it chooses to remain at war in the Middle East and if it keeps treating its Muslim population as second-class citizens, it cannot shed crocodile tears when innocent civilians suffer the consequences of its disastrous policies. Air strikes and more social alienation will not work this time around. The writer is director of the Centre for Peace and Human Security at the American University of Kurdistan.
